Startup Search 2021 Year In Review

This year, we featured over 1000 engineering, design, product, investing, and operational roles at 790 startups and venture funds through our Startup Search Newsletter. We analyzed which industries, companies, and roles most excited our readers — young builders, product-minds, and operationalists in tech. Here’s what the brightest in tech were excited about in 2021:

Top 5 Most Popular Roles

This year we saw excitement around roles at top venture funds, in crypto, founding teams, and product management.

1. Chief of Staff, Crypto @ Andreessen Horowitz
2. Associate Product Manager @ Knowde
3. Founding Growth and Business Operations @ Uprise
4. Product Manager @ OpenSea
5. Crypto Research Intern @ Polychain Capital

Top 10 Most Popular Companies

Across 650 full time roles and 350 internships (see our 2021 Startups for Engineering Interns List), we repeatedly found roles at these companies to be most exciting for our readers:

1. Andreessen Horowitz
2. OpenSea
3. Initialized Capital
4. Affinity
5. Atomic
6. Snorkel AI
7. Nuro
8. Polychain Capital
9. Uniswap
10. Lithic

Top 5 venture funds backing the most popular startup roles

We repeatedly saw readers excited about seed to Series B roles at companies backed by top venture funds:

• Sequoia
• Andreessen Horowitz
• Contrary
• Kleiner Perkins
• Greylock

Top 5 Most Popular Functions

We featured over 300 engineering, 200 investing, and 100 product roles, and saw the most engagement for these functions:

1. Investing (Venture)
2. Product Management
3. Chief of Staff
4. Software Engineering
5. Community

Top 5 Most Popular Industries

We showcased roles across a diverse set of industries, including biotech, direct-to-consumer wellness, no-code software, agriculture tech and more. Here were the top industries across this year’s newsletters:

1. Crypto and blockchain
2. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) driven video and audio processing
3. FinTech (see our 📈2021 FinTech Startups List)
4. SaaS Developer Tools
5. Direct-to-Consumer Brands

That’s a wrap on Startup Search 2021! Thank you to our readers and supporters. Cheers to another year of discovering, landing and excelling at high growth startups that recently raised from top venture funds and are hiring now.

Happy Holidays from the Startup Search team!

Looking for your next startup role? Checkout our weekly newsletter with 15+ top roles at venture-backed startups every week, one of our 2021 top fintech, creator economy, and intern engineering startup lists as well as resources to help you land your next startup job.

Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to hear about recently funded companies and top resources in venture and startups.