#15 — October Startup Tracker Update 📊

I just updated the ever-expanding Seattle Startup Tracker for October. If you would like the raw Excel file, just reply and I’ll send it your way. 🤓

Here’s my quick take…

Last month everything was up. It seemed like startups were releasing the breaks on hiring.

This month didn’t look as positive:

• 39% of the 367 companies increased headcount. Down from 51% last month.

• 74% of companies have open roles. Down from 84% last month.

• 0.6% net employee growth M/M across all companies. Down from 1.4% last month.

• 3,639 total open roles. Up 9% from 3,326 last month.

Overall, this looked more like August. Most companies are saying “we’re hiring” and keep adding open roles. But the actual headcount growth didn’t move as fast.

The distribution shows that for the most part, the growing companies keep growing at high rates. On the flip side, more companies contracted this month or stayed flat.

Once again, the biggest change was in the earlier stage. Last month About 44% of Seattle tech companies with less than 100 employees increased headcount. This month that number reverted back to what we saw in August at ~33%.

Here’s the comparison by stage:

Now that I’ve been tracking this for 4 months, I can start looking at slightly longer trends. There is probably a lot of variation month to month since a small startup losing or adding a couple of employees makes a real difference.

Another refresh coming your way around November 1st. In the meantime, I’ll keep poking around in the data and share anything that stands out in my weekly updates.

Anything I missed? Any questions you want to have answered from this data?

Replies always welcome 🙏