99 [Startup] Problems

3. Airbnb

Founded: August 2008

Valuation: $100 Billion (source)

Customer: Conference attendees visiting San Francisco.

Problem: Being broke and needing to pay higher rent.

Quote: "A letter came in the mail, it's from our landlord who politely states that our rent is 25% higher than it was the month before. I ran to my online banking and I was like, oh my god can I make rent next month. We started to think about how we could design our way out of this. ... There's a design conference that's coming to San Francisco. On the conference website in big red letters, it said 'HOTELS SOLD OUT' and I'm thinking 'Awh man what a bummer. Designers who want to come last minute won't have a place to stay.' In that instant, I look up around the living room thinking 'Wait, we have so much extra space here and I have airbeds in the closet." — Airbnb Co-Founder Joe Gebbia, August 2017 (source).

4. Instagram

Founded: 2009

Valuation: Acquired by Facebook for $1 Billion in April 2012.

Customer: Amateur photographers already on social media (source)

Problem: Mobile photos looked crappy, they were time-consuming to upload and difficult to share with friends.

Quote: "You assume that you know exactly what you're going to tackle and the hard part is finding [and] scaling that solution. It turns out that the hard part is actually finding the problem to solve. Solutions actually come pretty easily for the majority of problems. So what we did was we listed out these five problems and the top three that we circled were (1) that mobile photos don't look so great ... (2) uploads on mobile phones take a really long time ... and the third problem was that we really wanted to allow you to share out to multiple services at once." — Instagram Co-Founder Kevin Systrom, Stanford lecture, May 2011 (source).

5. Intercom

Founded: 2011

Valuation: $1.275 Billion (source)

Customer: Other startup founders.

Problem: Customer relationship management was impersonal and disjointed.

Quote: "Facebook and many other tech companies were building their own messenger services [in 2011], but the customer-facing chat tools on websites still connected you to a faceless representative, often outsourced, conveniently named “John” or “Mary." More likely, you’d get referred to a nameless email account and become a ticket number. It felt a little gross.” — Co-Founder & CEO Eoghan McCabe, Forbes interview, 2016 (source).

6. Hubspot

Founded: 2006

Valuation: $24.56 Billion (source)

Customer: "Marketing Mary; a marketing manager who worked in a company of between 10 and 1000 employees." (source)

Problem: SMBs don't have the internal expertise to build their own marketing-tech stack.

Quote: "Their problem was not a dearth of tools. The issues SMBs had was like, 'I'm a 20-person consulting company, I don't know how to take wordpress and hook it up to Google Analytics and all this. I just can't do that." — Hubspot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah, SaaStr Annual Conference, July 2017 (source).

7. Klarna

Founded: 2005

Valuation: $45.6 Billion (source)

Customer: Swedish eCommerce companies that Co-Founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski had worked within a previous job.

Problem: eCommerce companies struggled to secure their online payments.

Quote: "There was really a void to fill. This was before e-commerce had really taken off and a lot of people still viewed [online shopping] as very insecure - so if only that could be solved e-commerce was set to take off. Klarna took care of billing for the e-commerce companies and also made sure that private customers were given the opportunity to pay by invoice. In a nutshell: safer and more effective internet shopping." — Klarna Co-Founder Niklas Adalberth, Business Insider Nordic interview, May 2016 (source).

8. Instacart

Founded: 2012

Valuation: $39 Billion (source)

Customer: Working professionals in San Francisco without a car (source).

Problem: Grocery shopping is a time-consuming and inefficient use of time every week.

Quote: "One thing that has been with me for as long as I can remember is the pain of grocery shopping. I have dreaded going to the grocery store. Once you get there, you have to circle through the aisles to find the items that you're looking for, then you have to wait in line to check out and then lug your groceries back to your apartment only to realize that you've forgotten something at the store. This was 2012 and we were buying everything online, but the one that all of us had to do every single week in the most inefficient means possible was [grocery shopping]." — Instacart Co-Founder at Y Combinator Startup School, June 2014 (source).

9. Telegram

Founded: 2013

Valuation: $40 Billion (source)

Customer: Security conscious smartphone users (tbh, pretty broad from the start).

Problem: Online messaging is dominated by companies with commercial and political ties that place sensitive end-user messages in potentially compromising and insecure situations.

Quote: "In 2012 my brother and I built an encrypted messaging app for our personal use – we wanted to be able to securely pass on information to each other, in an environment where WhatsApp and other tools were easily monitored by the authorities. After Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, we understood the problem was not unique to our situation and existed in other countries. So we released the encrypted messaging app for the general public." — Telegram Co-Founder Pavel Durov, Dazed Interview, April 2015 (source).

10. Databricks

Founded: 2013

Valuation: $28 Billion (source)

Customer: Data engineers and data analysts at large companies.

Problem: Big data processing engines like MapReduce were too inefficient for the rapidly growing data lakes of the late 2000s.

Quote: "I first began Spark in 2009 to tackle the machine learning use case, because machine learning researchers in our lab at UC Berkeley were trying to use MapReduce for their algorithms and finding it very inefficient. After starting with this use case, we quickly realized that Spark could be useful beyond machine learning, and focused on designing a general computing engine with great libraries for building complete data pipelines. Databricks offers a cloud service that makes it easy to deploy Spark applications and work on data collaboratively in a team." — Apache Spark creator and Databricks Co-Founder Matei Zaharia, May 2015 (source). (Matei created open-source platform Apache Spark as well as its commercialization vehicle Databricks.)

11. Canva

Founded: January 2012

Valuation: $15 Billion (source)

Customer: Non-designer professionals like business owners and marketers (source)

Problem: Digital design tools like photoshop were extremely complex and difficult to learn.

Quote: "The idea for Canva came about when I was at university. I was teaching design programs like Photoshop and InDesign. They were just so complicated and difficult; it would take a whole semester for people just to learn the basics. A lot of people cared about design and need to create great content but didn't have the tools." — Canva Co-Founder Melanie Perkins, May 2016 (source).

12. Plaid

Founded: May 2013

Valuation: $13.4 Billion (source)

Customer: Technical executives at companies building fintech solutions

Problem: Companies had to build unique integrations for every single banking provider that they needed to integrate with.

Quote: "When Perret and William Hockey started the company, the original focus was on building tools for consumers to manage and track their personal finances. But they soon realized that this was extremely difficult to pull off because of the archaic processes of connecting to bank accounts. So this sparked an inspiration: Why not build a system to make this easier?" — Forbes profile on Plaid acquisition attempt, January 2020 (source).

13. Chime

Founded: 2013

Valuation: $14.5 Billion (source)

Customer: Digital-Native American Millennials.

Problem: Traditional banks are full of hidden fees designed to get more money from consumers.

Quote: "We feel like being a good bank is low-hanging fruit because so many people are unhappy with Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Unlike traditional banks, which encourage users to sign up for overdraft protection and loans, Chime has no interest in pushing credit on its customers. [We have] no minimum balance requirement, monthly fees or overdraft fees. " — Chime Co-Founder Chris Britt, Fortune Magazine, January 2016 (source).

14. Robinhood

Founded: 2013

Valuation: $11.2 Billion (source)

Customer: Young professionals (28-41) interested in using leftover spending money to participate in amateur stock market trading.

Problem: Trading commissions placed financial barriers to mass market participation in the stock market.

Quote: "We’re making investing accessible to young people. Most stock brokerages out there have been around for 30 years, their interfaces are clumsy, and they’re targeting older professionals and active traders. They’re no place for first time investors and that’s one of the things we focus on; making it accessible; having it be mobile friendly.” — Robinhood Co-Founder Vlad Tenev, Techcrunch interview, September 2014 (source).

15. OYO

Founded: 2013

Valuation: $9 Billion (source)

Customer: Small business travelers and budget tourists in India.

Problem: Budget hotels have wildly varying levels of quality, price and geographic availability.

Quote: "I could see why travelers would not trust reviews and listings on a website to book in some other part of the country," he says. The real problem was not discoverability, but the lack of predictability and standardization ... with these cheap hotels." — OYO Founder Ritesh Agarwal, June 2016 (source).

16. Uber

Founded: 2009

Valuation: $103.5 Billion (source)

Customer: Cold called black cab drivers to offer an hourly rate for supply-side, gave free rides at local tech events in San Francisco for the demand side.

Problem: The unreliability of hailing a taxi.

Quote: "I was just stranded on the curb in San Francisco so often that I just got sick of it. I tried TaxiMagic—it was ok—Cabulous wasn't very good. So I was like, alright, we just gotta make our own." — Uber Co-Founder Garrett Camp, Google Zeitgeist interview, September 2016 (source).

17. Brex

Founded: 2017

Valuation: $7.4 Billion (source)

Customer: International early-stage startup founders in the US.

Problem: Startups were unable to get a corporate credit card without taking a personal liability guarantee.

Quote: "We investigated [getting a corporate credit card] and figured out that we couldn’t get one. We went there and [the banks are] like, “Well you don’t have any financial history. We won’t give you [a credit card] unless you [can] personally guarantee.” But because we had just moved to the U.S. we couldn’t personally guarantee the card. We went to talk to a few of our batchmates and none of the international ones could get a card. A lot of the other ones chose not to get a card because they didn’t want to personally guarantee the card. There were all these people just using debit cards and like walking around with debit cards of $120,000 in the bank or just using their personal cards and all these things. We thought, “Okay, that has to be inefficient. There has to be a better way to do this.” Then that’s kind of how Brex came to be." — Brex Co-Founder Henrique Dubugras, June 2018 (source).

18. Reddit

Founded: 2005

Valuation: $6 Billion (source)

Customer: lol they had no initial target customer 🤷‍♂️

Problem: There was no way to discover and discuss the best content of the day online.

Quote: "Del.icio.us was a social bookmarking website and there was a page called Popular, where you could see things that day that were being bookmarked and were popular. The thing is, when you bookmark something, it's because you can't finish it in one sitting. So Del.icio.us Popular was essentially this really cool index of the most boring content on the internet on any given day. We also loved Slashdot, which had this incredible community. You go there for news every day but really the magic lived in the comments section. So the idea was can we take the mechanics of Del.icio.us — user submitted content — and combine it with good content and good community. That was the genesis of Reddit." — Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian, NPR's How I Built This with Guy Raz, August 2017 (source).

19. Square

Founded: 2009

Valuation: $104.74 Billion (source)

Customer: Small merchants selling in person.

Problem: Small merchants had no way of accepting credit card payments.

Quote: "Dorsey’s former boss and good friend (and eventual co-founder) Jim McKelvey lost a sale for his hand-blown glass because he had no way of accepting credit cards. The problem was one many people had—the barriers to setting yourself up through conventional processes to accept credit card payments were too high for many people. So Dorsey set about seeing if he could create a better system. The result was the Square reader." — FastCompany profile, May 2011 (source).

20. Spotify

Founded: 2006

Valuation: $72 Billion (source)

Customer: Music fans in the UK.

Problem: Torrenting sites made music cheaply accessible at scale but they were slow, restricted to desktop devices and riddled with potential viruses.

Quote: "I realized that you can never legislate away from piracy. Laws can definitely help, but it doesn’t take away the problem. The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry – that gave us Spotify." — Spotify Co-Founder Daniel Ek, The Telegraph interview, February 2010 (source).

21. Airtable

Founded: 2013

Valuation: $5.77 Billion (source)

Customer: Non-technical individuals or small teams working on CRMs, ERP and Project Management.

Problem: Using a spreadsheet as a makeshift database is very common but creates a bloated, messy, and frustrating experience for non-technical knowledge workers.

Quote: "90% of spreadsheets are not used for their intended purpose of numerical analysis but really they're used as a makeshift database. Things get really messy in this context, where you have long nodes fields, bloated rows, you can't attached files, you can't link different tables together of contacts and companies, that kind of thing. It's this really hack-ish makeshift solution that's filling in the gap today but is creating a lot of pain for many people." — Howie Liu, DataDrivenNYC Keynote, April 2015 (source).

22. Discord

Founded: 2015

Valuation: $7 Billion (source)

Customer: Online gamers playing social/multiplayer games.

Problem: Tools for communicating with friends while gaming were slow, unreliable and complex.

Quote: "Discord was started to solve a big problem: how to communicate with friends around the world while playing games online. Since childhood, founders Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy both shared a love of video games, cherishing the friendships and connections that formed while playing them. At the time, all the tools built for this job were slow, unreliable, and complex. Jason and Stan knew they could make a better service that encouraged talking, helped form memories, and recreated the feeling of togetherness all found through gaming." — About Discord, 2021 (source).

23. Hopin

Founded: June 2019

Valuation: $5.65 Billion (source)

Customer: Organizers of large events with up to 100,000 attendees like conferences, fairs, and expos.

Problem: The inability to connect with other people remotely.

Quote: "About four and a half years ago I returned home after traveling, I had food poisoning that led to an auto-immune disease after taking a lot of antibiotics. I spent two years literally trying to recover but in that time when I was sick at home, I wanted to connect with people and I build this product that allowed people to connect from the comfort of their own homes. That's literally how we got to Hopin." — Hopin Founder Johnny Boufarhat, Product School Fireside Chat, January 2021 (source).

24. Revolut

Founded: 2015

Valuation: $5.5 Billion (source)

Customer: Young professionals traveling in Europe.

Problem: Currency exchange while traveling or sending money abroad was very expensive.

Quote: "The big idea behind Revolut Personal Money Cloud came to me two years ago when I traveled abroad and I spent $12,000. Later, I found out it cost me $2,000 in hidden fees from my banking card. Just unbelievable. You know what happened when I sent money abroad? Simple; I got ripped off even more." — Revolut Co-Founder Nikolay Storonksy, Pitching at SWIFT Innotribe's Startup Challenge, April 2015 (source).

25. Snyk

Founded: 2015

Valuation: $4.7 Billion (source)

Customer: Software developers.

Problem: There was so much friction in building secure products that many developers would skip over the requirements.

Quote: "Security was just too hard for developers to do. The [security] products that were built were not built focusing on the challenges or the needs of that developer. And so it just resulted in something that required pretty heavy conviction or somebody to shove it down your throat and require you to adopt it. I think our primary accomplishment at Snyk was to make security as easy as it can be." — Snyk Founder Guy Podjarny, Dec 2020 (source).

26. N26

Founded: February 2013

Valuation: $3.5 Billion (source)

Customer: Young professional ex-pats in Europe.

Problem: Changing bank when you moved to a new country was a long and frustrating process.

Quote: "In 2012, two guys born and raised in Vienna studied in Switzerland and worked in Germany. They had one big problem; every single time they moved to another city, they had to change their bank account. Switching from one bank to another is probably the worst experience you could possibly imagine." — N26 GM Georg Hauer, Pioneers '18 Conference, March 2019 (source).

27. Better.com

Founded: January 2016

Valuation: $6 Billion (source)

Customer: First-time home buyers in the US.

Problem: Sourcing a mortgage is a long, stressful and uncertain process that destroys many would-be homeowner's chances of purchasing a property.

Quote: "I learned firsthand that the way people buy homes in America is riddled with inefficient processes, outdated technology, and general frustration. It began when I applied for my first mortgage in late 2012. We reached out to the broker, but the broker didn’t respond to multiple calls and emails. We loved the place so much that we tried to contact the owner directly, but without a broker, the owner was skeptical of our legitimacy as buyers. Like most sellers, he asked that we provide a mortgage pre-approval, so I went online and searched all the big comparison websites. Once I gave them my data, I didn’t get the pre-approval I was searching for. In the end, the homeowner got fed up and sold the place to the next-highest bidder." — "Why I Started Better Mortgage" by Co-Founder Vishal Garg, August 2016 (source).

28. Wealthsimple

Founded: September 2014

Valuation: $5 Billion (source)

Customer: Young professionals (under 45) that are first-time investors.

Problem: As retail investing became more accessible, nobody really had any plan for how to invest their money.

Quote: "About six years ago, the company I helped build was sold and we found ourselves with a problem. It was a good problem, of course, but we suddenly had a little bit of money for the first time and had to figure out how to make the most of it. Two of the company's founders started asking me about how they should invest. Even though I was only 25, I'd been interested in investing for a long time. So I tried to show them what I’d learned; I gave them a few books to read and made this spreadsheet for them that was designed to help them manage their own money. Everyone said the same thing: this is too boring, it takes too much time, it’s not what I’m good at, and it’s definitely not what I’m interested in. What they wanted was to have me do it for them. And I started thinking: OK, this could be interesting." — Michael Katchen, WealthSimple blog, July 2019 (source).

29. Freshworks

Founded: 2010 (originally named Freshdesk)

Valuation: $3.5 Billion (source)

Customer: US companies with multi-brand support requirements.

Problem: SaaS-based CRMs like Zendesk were overpriced and lacked broad functionality required for SMBs.

Quote: "I was just reading this news article about Zendesk raising their prices 60 – 300% and browsing through the comments on HN when a simple comment from user megamark caught my attention. We started engaging with our prospects on what they were currently using and what problems they were facing. We were surprised to see that a lot of what customers wanted were their core problems solved and not some fancy features like supporting customers from their Facebook wall or converting tweets into customer support tickets." — Freshdeck Founder Girish Mathrubootham, March 2011 (source).

30. Zenefits

Founded: February 2013

Valuation: Previously valued at $4.5 Billion (source)

Customer: HR Managers at small and medium-sized businesses (less than 1,000 employees).

Problem: Buying health insurance for employees was very complicated.

Quote: "Two years ago, after getting pushed out of his last job, Mr. Conrad realized that the new [Affordable Care Act] law was being derided as needlessly complex, inefficient, opaque and antiquated. This was creating an opportunity for a start-up to remake the way small businesses buy health insurance. “How do you deal with anything that is very complicated that you need to learn about to be in business? Are you really going to go learn about the Affordable Care Act? Probably not. Once you have Zenefits, that’s it. You’re compliant.” said Ben Horowitz, co-founder of a16z." — NYT profile on Zenefits Co-Founder Alex Conrad, September 2014 (source).

31. Rubrik

Founded: January 2014

Valuation: $3.3 Billion (source)

Customer: Enterprise and Fortune 500 companies.

Problem: Legacy data management tools lock data in disparate silos without quick access and mobility.

Quote: "When we started researching our idea and started looking at legacy solutions [for data backup and recovery], we realized how immense the pain and frustration was with current solutions in the market, how little value data protection added, and how much it cost to implement and maintain legacy solutions. [Rubrik] solves the problem of data being locked in disparate silos without instantaneous data access and mobility by delivering a single platform to manage all data throughout its lifecycle, regardless of location." — Rubrik Co-Founder Bipul Sinha, May 2017 (source).

32. Tinder

Founded: September 2012

Valuation: $40.26 Billion (Match Group, which includes Tinder) (source)

Customer: Student influencers in fraternities and sororities at elite US universities.

Problem: The new onslaught of 'shoot your shot' DMs during the rise of social media in the early 2010s (aka surfacing mutual attraction online without the embarrassment).

Quote: "It was a general problem that I had meeting new people. One thing we hear all the time, particularly from women on Tinder, is that in the real world when somebody approaches them - they could be the most interesting guy in the room - they feel like their personal space has been bombarded, and they feel overwhelmed. As a result, the people who are the pursuers sit back and decide to be introverted and not really pursue that relationship." — Tinder Co-Founder Sean Rad, BBC interview, November 2013 (source).

33. Bumble

Founded: December 2014

Valuation: $13 Billion (source)

Customer: Sororities at US universities.

Problem: Social media is full of negativity and bullying.

Quote: "I started working on this concept called Merci and what it was going to be was a female-only social network where women could only use compliments. They would no longer be able to comment on appearance or hurt each other's feelings or use social media to bully. It was the antidote to what I had experienced online." — Bumble Founder Whitney Wolfe, April 2019 (source).

34. Dropbox

Founded: 2007

Valuation: $12.2 Billion (source)

Customer: People working in tech.

Problem: The user experience and connectivity of online drives weren't good enough.

Quote: "Many people want something plug and play. and even if they were plug and play, the problem is that the user experience (on Windows at least) with online drives generally sucks, and you don't have disconnected access." — Dropbox Co-Founder Drew Houston, Show HackerNews, April 2007 (source).

35. Duolingo

Founded: 2011

Valuation: $2.4 Billion (source)

Customer: People who wanted to learn Spanish, German and English.

Problem: Teaching a language to large populations in a cheap and self-sustaining way was pretty much impossible.

Quote: "We ended up going towards languages because, in both of our cases, we're not native English speakers. In both of our cases, learning English completely changed our lives. I just knew when I was growing up, everybody in Guatamala wants to learn English, nobody could afford it and it turns out that in most countries in the world if you know English, you can double your income potential. So we thought, ok, can we figure out a way to teach people a language, in particular teach English, in a way that's free but also self-sustaining." — Luis von Ahn, NPR's How I Built This, May 2020 (source).

36. Zapier

Founded: 2011

Valuation: $7 Billion (source)

Customer: SaaS companies.

Problem: SaaS companies didn't have the resources to build native integrations for all the product integrations that customers wanted.

Quote: "Brian, Mike and I were doing a lot of freelancing. We started using tools like Mailchimp, Stripe, Quickbooks — seeing the emergence of these tools, playing around in their message boards and forums and noticed that there were a lot of recurring themes asking for integrations. A lot of these message board threads are pretty old, year or two years old, tens or hundreds of comments asking for these. For whatever reason, they're not getting built, so we felt 'Hey, there's an opportunity here to try and help connect all these emerging SaaS tools together and make these integrations a lot easier for the end customer to use.'" — Zapier Co-Founder Wade Foster, Traction Conf, September 2019 (source).

37. Flexport

Founded: 2013

Valuation: $3.2 Billion (source)

Customer: Large product manufacturers.

Problem: Freight shipping was a traditional pen-and-paper industry with multiple untrustworthy middlemen that was extremely opaque and lacking customer control.

Quote: "You've got supply and demand, if you solve those two problems you should have a good business. We found over and over again that we would still get hung up on the part in between, of how do I get those products from the supply to the demand. It was super hard. We had complicated compliance customs, like what documents do you need. It's very confusing. You need to trust your freight forwarder, your customs worker, these freight companies, and they're not the most trustworthy thing. It was a very frustrating experience as an entrepreneur." — Flexport Co-Founder Ryan Petersen, Stanford Lecture, January 2019 (source).

38. Gusto

Founded: 2011

Valuation: $3.8 Billion (source)

Customer: Small business owners in the US.

Problem: Running payroll as a small business owner is frustrating and time-consuming.

Quote: "We had all run prior startups, we had all been through that journey, we had sold prior companies too. We had all run payroll - that was one personal frustration. If any of you have run payroll using historical legacy systems, it's a pretty time-consuming process. Each of us had family that had run payroll too. Tomer, who runs our product team, his father runs a small clothing company in Israel and he had been helping his dad in the back office since he was a kid. Edward, who runs our engineering team, his mother runs payroll for the dictors office in LA. My mother-in-law runs payroll for companies down in Silicon Valley. Those were the two catalysts." — Gusto Co-Founder Joshua Reeves, Stanford lecture, February 2015 (source).

39. Faire

Founded: 2017

Valuation: $7 Billion (source)

Customer: Marketplace → (1) Small retailers with typically just 1 to 10 stores, (2) Independent and small team makers.

Problem: The risk of taking on new products deters small retailers from expanding their portfolios, so tradeshows are a significant derisking opportunity where retailers get a better sense of the risks associated with a new product and vendor.

Quote: "I had this experience of introducing this new product called Blunt Umbrella to the US market... I kept going to these tradeshows and thinking like, there really should be a better way to do this... If you ask a small shop owner what their favorite part of the job is, they'll say finding new products. Then if you ask them how many of the products that you carry are new it will be somewhere between 20-30%. That was where I started to dig into why and the answer always was because it's scary to bring on new products. If it doesn't sell, you're stuck. I realized they're going to trade shows to solve inventory risks, to get over that fear so that they can touch and feel the products and really feel good that this is something that's gonna do well in my store." — Faire Co-Founder Max Rhodes, edited quote from the Y Combinator Podcast. April 2017 (source).

40. Heap

Founded: 2012

Valuation: Between $100 Million to $500 Million (source)

Customer: Directors of Analytics at Digital-First Companies.

Problem: Answering very simple questions with product analytics tools required cross-functional support and months of waiting for enough data to inform an answer.

Quote: "At Facebook, I experienced just how difficult it was to use analytics in practice. One of the reasons I was excited about working at a place like Facebook was because it had this treasure-trove of data, really sophisticated analytics infrastructure, and all these fancy data scientists. What I found in practice, though, is that analytics is a big pain in the ass. If you have very simple questions about your product, those questions require literally months of time and me needing to loop-in three different people and engineer a set of implementations, a data analyst to make sense of the data once it’s been eventually collected in a single place. And if it takes three months to go from question to answer, guess what? You’re not going to use data to answer questions. So, the realization that we had with that experience was, if it’s this difficult to make good use of data at a place like Facebook, then what hope does the rest of the world have to use data effectively and to achieve this glorious data-informed future that everybody heads up?" — Heap Co-Founder Matin Movassate, April 2021 (source).

41. Scale AI

Founded: 2016

Valuation: $7.3 Billion (source)

Customer: Tech companies building AI products.

Problem: Companies couldn't build AI products because they had no standardization tools for collecting, annotating and managing data at scale.

Quote: "There was nobody building anything with AI, despite the fact that there were hundreds of students at MIT, all brilliant, very hardworking people. When I dug into it, I realized that the data was the big bottleneck for a lot of these people to build meaningful AI. It took a lot of time and resources to add intelligence to data, to make it usable for machine learning. There were no standardized tools or infrastructure, there was no AWS, or Stripe, or Twilio to solve this problem. I even discovered it firsthand, because I wanted to build a camera inside my fridge, so it could tell me when to refill my groceries and what I need to buy. Even for that I just didn't have any of the data to make it work. We saw at that point, there was this really big hole or problem that needed to be solved for AI to actually reach its full potential." — Interview with Scale AI Founder Alexandr Wang, March 2021 (source).

42. PagerDuty

Founded: January 2009

Valuation: $1.8 Billion (source)

Customer: DevOps teams at tech companies.

Problem: Configuring and routing product alerts required a great deal of complexity but is an essential aspect of devops.

Quote: "While the general problem of alerting ops teams to system failures sounds relatively basic, there is a great deal of complexity to it in that most enterprises and startups have dozens of systems that each can fail or exhibit performance issues in dozens of ways. Some issues are irrelevant, some are worthy of batched alerts that should be reviewed in bulk at the end of a shift, some require immediate notification, and some require immediate attention and action by a SWAT team of engineers and the attention of the CEO. Configuring and routing alerts according to the severity and type of problem to the right person based on their shift is hard to do at scale without a SaaS product in the middle to manage it." — Bessemer Venture Partners Series A investment memo, July 2014 (source).

43. Segment

Founded: September 2011

Valuation: Acquired by Twilio for $3.2 Billion (source)

Customer: Product manager or marketer at a tech company.

Problem: Inability to understand user segment differences with existing product analysis tools. **

Quote: "We realized that we should've been able to figure out some of this analysis by not just standing at the back of the classroom. Like, we should've been able to see some of this digitally. You couldn't see it in the analytics metrics at all. So we decided, hey, let's build a better analytics tool to compete with Mixpanel and Google Analytics. The idea was to give really advanced segmentation because we wanted to see how some computer science classes at MIT were using [our current product] differently than anthropology classes at BU and we couldn't do that analytics with the tools we had." — Segment Co-Founder Peter Reinhardt, September 2018 (source).

The problem they eventually found pull with: A product manager or marketer wants to use a new tool but building the data pipelines is too resource-intensive to justify adopting it.

44. Coinbase

Founded: June 2012

Valuation: $86 Billion (source)

Customer: Early adopters of Bitcoin.

Problem: The high cost of credit card fees and lack of cryptocurrency wallet.

Quote: "Credit card fees are too high. In the next five years, merchants are going to start moving away from paying 2.5% plus 30 cents per transaction when fast secure alternatives become available. They're going to (at first) offer them at checkout alongside traditional credit card options, and then eventually start incentivizing consumers to make the switch. If Amazon has a 5% margin on a $100 text book they aren't going to give $2.00 of their $5 to Visa/MC forever. The same thing is going to happen in mobile. Your phone is going to become your wallet, and I don't think 30 year old credit card technology is going to be powering this new ewallet when someone goes to buy a cup of coffee in 10 years. All solutions today are carrying along the legacy baggage of credit cards." — Coinbase's Brian Armstrong looking for a co-founder on HackerNews, March 2012 (source).

45. MessageBird

Founded: 2011

Valuation: $3.8 Billion

Customer: Their first customer was the initial market incumbent (story here).

Problem: Sending text messages to customers at scale via existing providers was unreliable.

Quote: "I was working at my previous company and we wanted to verify user's phone number with a text message. It was very crucial to our business that that message would arrive, otherwise, we couldn't verify the user and we couldn't process the payment. We used this vendor that was the market leader back then and basically messages wouldn't arrive, they would arrive late, we would lose conversions, and it was just one big mess. So we integrated with a Dutch carrier, built it ourselves and took the business away from our vendor." — MessageBird Founder Robert Vis, December 2017 (source).

46. Amplitude

Founded: 2012

Valuation: $4 Billion (source)

Customer: Early-stage startup founders.

Problem: There were no tools that could help Chris and Spenser to understand why their users were churning or what drove retention.

Quote: "After graduating college, he started a text-to-voice app called Sonalight with Curtis Liu. Skates said that Sonalight did well at first, but then users were not sticking with the app after they signed up. And Skates and Liu could not figure out why. While at Y Combinator, Skates and Liu met other early stage startups and discovered that they have the same problem that they had. 'They wanted to understand key metrics that made their product good — what actions led to sign-ups, engagement and long-term retention. Like us, they were very frustrated with the existing product analytics tools. So when we wrapped up Sonalight, we had a clear direction to pursue.'" — Amplitude Co-Founder Spenser Skates, February 2018 (source).

47. Doordash

Founded: January 2013

Valuation: $72 Billion (source)

Customer: Takeout consumers in Palo Alto.

Problem: Restaurants couldn't afford delivery drivers and delivery drivers were underutilized.

Quote: "After over a hundred interviews we came across a problem... Restaurants in Palo Alto don't deliver — even though they really want to, they can't afford it. Their consumers are craving for it, but the places that the consumers love just can't deliver. We also found out about these delivery drivers who had a tonne of spare time and they all wanted to earn spare cash during that down time." — Doordash Co-Founder Tony Xu, YC S13 Application Video 2013 (source).

48. Kissmetrics

Founded: 2008

Customer: Facebook Application Developers

Problem: Facebook app developers didn't have any purpose-built analytics solutions.

Quote: "All we knew was that we wanted to reinvent the analytics market. Our first attempt was an analytics platform for Facebook Application Developers because at the time they didn’t have any analytics solutions that worked for their needs. They were building their own analytics systems internally. The people we created the product for – Facebook Application developers – loved it! Except they couldn’t pay us." — Kissmetrics Co-Founder Hiten Shah, April 2019 (source).

49. Mixpanel

Founded: 2009

Valuation: $865 Million (source)

Customer: "Our idea is to target small under-served startups before they build out an internal system." (source)

Problem: Beyond page views and referral tracking, companies had to build their own expensive analytics solutions (particularly for conversion funnels).

Quote: "At Slide, Doshi wasn’t assigned to any specific project, working almost independently on different ideas. Although general analytics software like Google Analytics were available, Doshi noticed Slide was spending over $1 million on building its own customized, internal analytics software. 'At Slide, they would measure crazy things. It was like they were quantifying every part of what they did.'" — Business Insider profile on Suhail Doshi, March 2015 (source).

50. Checkr

Founded: 2014

Valuation: $2.2 Billion (source)

Customer: On-demand/gig economy companies.

Problem: Background checks were a time-consuming bottleneck process.

Quote: "My co-founder Jonathan Perichon and I were working as engineers at on-demand delivery startup Deliv and saw firsthand that the background check industry was antiquated. As the on-demand economy was exploding, the background check process was stuck in time - tedious and slow. It was slowing down the hiring process on both sides, especially among companies with a fast-moving, flexible workforce like the gig economy. I knew I could streamline the background check process to put people to work quickly without sacrificing accuracy." — Quora Session with Daniel Yanisse, July 2018 (source).

51. Rippling

Founded: 2016

Valuation: $1.35 Billion (source)

Customer: N/A → Parker Conrad doesn't believe in niche segmentation focus (source).

Problem: Managing permissions and data accuracy across an increasingly fragmented set of software products is the largest source of a company's administrative work.

Quote: "Most businesses have dozens of systems that maintain a list of their employees, and for the most part, none of these systems talk to each other or to any central system about who these employees are. Whenever something changes about an employee, many (and sometimes, all) of these systems need to be updated, and because they don't point to any central authority, they each need to be updated separately and by hand. We believe that the effort to maintain this fragmented employee data across all of a company's business systems is, secretly, the root cause of almost all the administrative work of running a company." — Rippling Founder Parker Conrad, Seed Round Investment Memo, April 2019 (source).

52. Front

Founded: 2013

Valuation: $800 Million (source)

Customer: Decision-makers in operations, client services or customer success.

Problem: Managing shared email inboxes for functions like customer support is a messy DIY solution using traditional individual email products. "Email wasn't made for businesses."

Quote: "My cofounder had been in two companies before where they had a lot of users, they were forced to implement helpdesk solutions like Zendesk, Helpdeck, Freshdesk; hated them. What he wanted to build was a lightweight support tool. Front started as this email tool, but email is impossible to start from scratch. No company has managed to build a business starting with an email product. So I was like, ok, what if the go-to-market is shared inboxes but then we expand into a full email client that can be used by individuals and teams. That's why Front is this combination of this very big vision but this very simple pain point that we address at the beginning." — Front Co-Founder Mathilde Collin, Oct 2018 (source).

53. Webflow

Founded: 2013 (Vlad previously tried and failed with the same idea in 2005, 2007 and 2008)

Valuation: $2.1 Billion (source)

Customer: Web designers.

Problem: Creating the backend for web design projects was a repetitive, time-consuming, and manual task.

Quote: "I got an internship at this web design agency and they were working with some amazing big brands. This was maybe late 2004. My job there was taking the design team's created layouts and translate that into their own internal CMS. I was doing the same repetitive translation work day-in, day-out and being paid like minimum wage plus one dollar. One time I saw an invoice for that work and it was like a huge amount of money for the couple hundred dollars I was spending on it. That was when I immediately had that thought of like, holy cow, a lot of the things I'm doing on the backend to create these database tables, to create all the management code and all the UIs, I can create a visual UI to automate all this stuff and put it into the hands of the designers and just essentially save all this time. Even if I was the one using it, it would save me a bunch of time." — Webflow Co-Founder Vlad Magdalin, May 2020 (source).

54. Fivetran

Founded: 2012

Valuation: $1.2 Billion (source)

Customer: Enterprise tech companies.

Problem: Connecting data from internal sources like Salesforce and Zendesk to Amazon Redshift's data warehouse product.

Quote: "In the spring of 2014, a year out of Y Combinator, Fivetran built its first data connector. The technology was incidental, an extension for the new company’s “real” product: a pivot table for big data built on Amazon Redshift. Redshift happened to be the fastest-growing product in Amazon’s history, and customers were looking to move data into Redshift from sources like Salesforce and Zendesk. So the Fivetran team built a few connectors to the pivot table’s Redshift backend. Then they got back to work. Word about the connectors spread, and an early customer contacted the Fivetran team and offered to pay for a Salesforce-Redshift data connector. Would they build it? “We already had a lot of customers saying, ‘Redshift’s working well for me, and my BI tool’s working well for me, but man, there are just no good data pipelines out there, and you guys say you have this data pipeline under the hood — I want to hear about that.’”" — George Fraser, April 2019 (source).

55. DocuSign

Founded: 2003

Valuation: $38.6 Billion (source)

Customer: Couldn't find this, sorry. 2003 is a long time ago :)

Problem: Businesses couldn't accept digital signatures for documents.

Quote: "Twelve years ago, the problem we were solving was trying to get an electronic signature to happen. But our customers came back pretty quickly and said we love how familiar this is, but we don’t just need to do signatures. We have a whole different problem. Our problem is that we have this business process that we didn’t automate because it needed a signature, so if all you do is give me a signature, you didn’t really help my business. You just managed a little piece of it. So, we realized at that point we had to manage the entire document lifecycle. So, as we’ve grown, we’ve started to continually learn new things about what we need to do about expanding our current service.” — DocuSign Founder Tom Gonser, February 2015 (source).

56. The Athletic

Founded: 2015

Valuation: $500 Million (source)

Customer: Digital-native sports super fans.

Problem: Consumers don't mentally bundle sports with news coverage since the internet democratized access to sports, and they don't want their sports coverage dominated by ads.

Quote: "One of the ideas behind The Athletic is that people don’t like ads and do like good writing and reporting. Another is that people will pay for deep coverage of topics they’re deeply interested in. A third is less obvious, but perhaps equally important: Sports fans would rather buy a product that bundles together sports coverage than one that bundles their local sports with local politics, weather, school news, and the rest of the traditional newspaper package." — Columbia Journalism Review profile on The Athletic, October 2017 (source).

57. Scribd

Founded: March 2007

Valuation: $160.7 Million (unreliable source)

Customer: Academics.

Problem: Distributing academic papers in industry journals or for peer review takes forever.

Quote: "The initial inspiration was [from] talking to my dad. We met a doctor here at Stanford and he was talking about how medical publishing was such a difficult process, where it takes 18 months just to take a paper and get it out distributed to your peers to be reviewed. So my co-founder and I had the idea that we would build a site that would let him take his paper, upload it to the web and distribute it really easily." — Scribd Co-Fonder Trip Adler, Draper University Lecture, May 2019 (source).

58. Braze

Founded: 2011

Valuation: $850 Million (source)

Customer: Mobile app developers.

Problem: Mobile app developers had no tools for understanding and personalizing their communications with customers.

Quote: "Once we decided we were going to do this, we got involved in the app community and figured out where the pain points were for developers and where the toolsets were missing. We found that while there was a slew of tools to help people understand their customers in brick and mortar, on the web and on TV, mobile was way behind." — Braze Co-Founder Bill Magnuson, March 2013 (source).

59. Nurx

Founded: 2015

Valuation: $300 Million (source)

Customer: The 20 million women living in "contraceptive deserts" in the US (areas of the country where there is limited access to birth control).

Problem: Reducing the stigma and increasing the availability of birth control in the US.

Quote: "Nurx offers [healthcare] products delivered straight to your door: birth control, STI testing, HPV screening, and an HIV prevention drug called Truvada for PrEP. There’s an immediate trend that stands out in that list, though: they’re wrongfully stigmatized areas of health that Nurx wants to make more widely available. But like many other companies trying to collapse the friction between a patient and the treatment they need, Nurx focused on one thing from the get-go—birth control. Nurx started in 2014 over a conversation between Engesaeth and his co-founder Hans Gangeskar. Engesaeth came to the U.S. from Norway— which has a single-payer system where there are neither major issues around accessing birth control nor any stigma associated with it." — Founding story of Nurx, 2019 (source).

60. Squarespace

Founded: 2003

Valuation: $2.4 Billion (source)

Customer: Friends and family.

Problem: Website builders at the time we're made for creating personal identity websites.

Quote: "In 2004, there were very few legitimate options for people who wanted to build their own websites without coding. And those that did exist deeply bothered Casalena with their negligence to detail, GeoCities and Blogger among them. 'None of the products out there took style or design into account — which doesn’t work when you’re trying to build your personal identity online,' he says. 'Your website is where your ideas live. It reflects who you are. And all there was out there was these geeky, bargain-bin sort of services charging $2.99 a month for clunky experiences. So when I started Squarespace, I just wanted to make a site for myself. I never thought it would be a business.'" — Squarespace Blog, 2014 (source).

61. Weebly

Founded: February 2006

Valuation: Acquired by Square for $365 Million in 2018 (source)

Customer: Individuals, solo merchants and hobby groups.

Problem: Individuals, solo merchants and hobby groups need websites but don't have the skills to build one themselves.

Quote: "People want to create a site, they want to create a blog, they want to sell things online, and they just want it to work. They don't want any of the frustrations around it." — David Rusenko, YC Startup School, October 2013 (source).

62. Optimizely

Founded: January 2010

Valuation: Acquired for ~$600 Million (source)

Customer: Digital-first SMBs.

Problem: A/B testing was very difficult to set up and manage.

Quote: "The original inspiration really came from [Co-Founder Dan Siroker's] experience on the Obama Campaign [as Director of Analytics]. He ran a lot of A/B tests that had a profound effect on the campaign; they raised tens of millions of dollars and left thinking that was really incredibly powerful but also really incredibly difficult to do." — Optimizely Co-Founder Pete Koomen, November 2013 (source).

63. Rent the Runway

Founded: 2009

Valuation: $1 Billion (source)

Customer: Professional women.

Problem: Designer clothes are too expensive for the average female consumer.

Quote: "I didn't wake up one day and want to become an entrepreneur. I had the idea for Rent the Runway and thought it would be fun to work on and also thought if it was successful, it would make women feel great about themselves." — Rent The Runway Founder Jennifer Hynman (source).

64. Hotjar

Founded: 2015

Valuation: Unknown (acquired in September 2021)

Customer: Product and UX teams.

Problem: It's difficult to know what users are doing on your website.

Quote: "My domain expertise in this area (I worked with and consulted startups and global brands for 10+ years) was a huge advantage, as it gave me a very clear vision of what Hotjar would do, how it would be different, and the value it would generate to specific personas (I am the typical Hotjar user!)." — Hotjar Co-Founder David Darmanin (source).

65. Sendbird

Founded: 2013

Valuation: $1 Billion (source)

Customer: Their entrepreneur friends.

Problem: Consumer messaging apps like Telegram, Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger were all the rage but there was a lack of messaging apps for companies to communicate with consumers.

Quote: "So, when we first started out our journey in 2013, we started out as a B2C company trying to build a community for moms to plan play dates, buy and sell used baby products, and whatnot. We wanted to add a chat, and we looked around, tried a couple of different open source solutions, they didn’t really work out the way we wanted. So we ended up building everything from the ground up ourselves. Well the truth is, we were running out of money. On the sideline, we had a lot of friends in the industry who were trying to build a chat themselves. We were one of the first ones who build a chat among all our friend groups. So they started asking questions like, “Can we use your technology?” We were like, “Of course not. It’s our stuff.” And they’re like, “We’ll pay you.”" — John Kim, December 2018 (source).

66. LinkedIn

Founded: 2002

Valuation: Acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 Billion (source)

Customer: Working professionals.

Problem: There was no space online for 'real name' professional identities.

Quote: "The mistake around SocialNet was targeting a dating business versus doing the new category, which was working networks and professional networks. And I said, look the way the world was going to change, is everyone is going to have a real name identity on the World Wide Web, where that real name identity is going to be in different categories; there's going to be a social identity, there's going to be a professional identity. Social at that time what that big ramp of Friendster, this was well before Facebook and even before MySpace, and I said look, maybe Friendster was going to be the social identity, [LinkedIn] would be the professional identity. And so obviously the first application will be job hunting, talent finding, but eventually it will go to everything from sales and business partnerships to starting companies to finding information and staying expert to learning skills — all of this would be built on this platform but this is the first application in a set of applications." — LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman, How I Built This podcast, January 2018 (source).

67. Twitter

Founded: 2004

Valuation: $35.5 Billion (source)

Customer: They never really got customers with their first product...

Problem: Podcasting in 2004/5 was like the web pre-blogging; distribution without democratization of production.

Note: "What we're seeing is really the 1.0 of podcasting, which is similar to the 1.0 of the web; an awesome new distribution vehicle but the paradigm is still very similar to radio... Everything on print that moved to the web potentially had a greater audience, was more immediately accessible, was cheaper, but then things like blogs came around and introduced was a form of publishing that didn't exist in print that took advantage of the intrinsic qualities of the web. For podcasting, we haven't seen that yet. With podcasting there's that same potential, where it's going to evolve to a much more common everyday use that's not seen as producing a radio program." — Odeo (which became Twitter) Co-Founder Evan Williams, Stanford Lecture, October 2005 (source)

68. Substack

Founded: 2017

Valuation: $650 Million (source)

Customer: Existing newsletter creators and writers.

Problem: Newsletters are the last channel that creators maintain full control of, but they're difficult to monetize outside of advertising/sponsorship.

Quote: "We had this golden age of blogging, where everyone had blogs, you had this profusion of weird, awesome, wonderful stuff. Big problems; there weren't really great ways to make money from it, but more importantly, now we've just transitioned to mobile, and now you don't go and surf the web. You go on your phone, you've got an array of icons that you go to, and if the content that someone is trying to get to you isn't in one of those icons, you're kinda screwed. If you're an individual content creator, it doesn't really make sense to make an app, that's kinda crazy. If you're trying to compete on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube - you're competing in this playing field by someone else's rules whose interest is not your interest. " — Chris Best, TWIST Podcast, Jan 2020 (source).

69. Snapchat

Founded: September 2011

Valuation: $50 Billion (source)

Customer: University students.

Problem: Stanford student Reggie Brown didn't want his nudes getting leaked.

Quote: "Reggie focused on the usefulness of this new idea. A way to send disappearing pictures. He wouldn’t have to worry about sending a hookup a picture of his junk! And girls would be way more likely to send him racy photos if they disappeared. The two friends excitedly discussed all of the celebrities whose nude photos had been leaked to the press. Their app would solve this problem." — Techcrunch article 'How Reggie Brown invented Snapchat', February 2018 (source).

70. Edmodo

Founded: September 2018

Valuation: Acquired in 2018 for $137.5 Million (source)

Customer: K-12 schools in the US.

Problem: Schools were restricting teacher's access to the internet but teachers needed online resources for their classes.

Quote: "We saw teachers trying to leverage social networks and social media to improve learning in their classrooms but struggling because those sites are blocked and not designed for classroom communications." — Edmodo Co-Founder Nic Borg, August 2010 (source).

71. Warby Parker

Founded: 2010

Valuation: $3 Billion (source)

Customer: Medium and low-budget glasses buyers.

Problem: Glasses are too expensive.

Quote: "Every idea starts with a problem. Ours was simple: glasses are too expensive. We were students when one of us lost his glasses on a backpacking trip. The cost of replacing them was so high that he spent the first semester of grad school without them, squinting and complaining. (We don’t recommend this.) The rest of us had similar experiences, and we were amazed at how hard it was to find a pair of great frames that didn’t leave our wallets bare. Where were the options? It turns out there was a simple explanation. The eyewear industry is dominated by a single company that has been able to keep prices artificially high while reaping huge profits from consumers who have no other options." — Warby Parker Website, 2014 (source).

72. Houzz

Founded: June 2008

Valuation: $4 Billion (source)

Customer: New and renovating homeowners.

Problem: An inability to matching a chosen home style to purchasable products.

Quote: "The idea for Houzz emerged sometime during the three years when Tatarko and Cohen were struggling to get their four-bedroom ranch house in Palo Alto renovated. Several months went by as they scanned through magazines and books looking for pictures that could match their vision. Once they found a design, they then had to search for the right products and professionals to turn their dream house into a reality. Each and every effort made reaped no results - Google was barely three years old. Facebook did not exist. While it was disappointing and frustrating, they were quick to spot the underlying opportunity." — Business Insider Profile, October 2017 (source).

73. Nextdoor

Founded: 2008

Valuation: $2.1 Billion (source)

Customer: US neighborhood groups.

Problem: Neighbors no longer knew or trusted each other.

Quote: "When I was an undergrad at Stanford, I saw how the Internet could render geography irrelevant. The Internet made it so I was able to connect with people like me, no matter where they lived. It was very simple and you could create your own community. When I got older and got married and bought my house and began to have children, and I started to realize the Internet is so effective in making place irrelevant that in some ways we’ve forgotten the importance of place. When you have a home that is your biggest financial asset and you have kids, those things are not virtual. You have to take kids to school, you have to take them to restaurants, you go to the grocery store. All these things have a reliance on where you live. That’s when this almost lucky coincidence happened where Nextdoor emerged as an idea." — Nextdoor Co-Founder Nirav Tolia, Interview with Startups.com May 2021 (source).

74. Superhuman

Founded: 2015

Valuation: $260 million (source)

Customer: "For those whose email is work and work is email. Our average user spends three hours a day doing email."

Problem: Clearing your Gmail inbox can be difficult.

Quote: "I could see Gmail getting worse every single year, becoming more cluttered, using more memory, consuming more CPU, slowing down your machine and still not working properly offline. So it was time for a change and we imagined an email experience that is blazingly fast where the search is instantaneous, where every interaction is a hundred milliseconds or less, an experience where you never have to touch the mouse, where you could do everything from the keyboard and fly through your inbox. And the experience of course that just worked offline so you could be productive anywhere and an experience that had the best Gmail plugins built-in natively and was yet somehow subtle, minimal and visually gorgeous. And so with that, we built Superhuman." — Superhuman Co-Founder Rahul Vohra, July 2020 (source).

75. Udemy

Founded: 2009

Valuation: $3.25 Billion (source)

Customer: Couldn't find this information...

Problem: People around the world lack access to quality education.

Quote: "I grew up in a small village in the southeast part of Turkey and I was very interested in chess and mathematics from very early ages but there was not really much I could do about it. Learning was not something accessible to you. For me, all of this changed when my parents bought a computer and internet access. All of a sudden I was able to find a lot of math resources. I started teaching myself mathematics on the internet. I have figured out that learning yourself through the internet was actually a good way of learning anything." — Eren Bali, November 2018 (source).

76. Figma

Founded: 2016

Valuation: $10 Billion (source)

Customer: Software designers at big companies

Problem: Design tools were not very intuitive, collaborative, easy to use, or find information on. (source)

Quote: "During my Flipboard internship, I was frustrated using Fireworks every day. Why couldn’t design tools be more like Google Docs? So Evan and I decided to use WebGL to build a cloud first design tool in the browser... While this story is technically true, it’s just one small part of a much longer saga." — Figma Co-Founder Dylan Field, May 2020 (source).

77. Basecamp

Founded: 1999

Valuation: $100 Billion (source)

Customer: Design Firms

Problem: As a company grows it's difficult to stay organized.

Quote: "We focused on a very specific bundle of integrated tools — a message board to post updates, work, and get feedback. To-do lists to keep track of all the work that had to get done. And milestones to keep track of big picture deadlines. This was all the first version of Basecamp did. It’s all we needed and nothing we didn’t. We started using it internally with our clients and they all kept asking “What is this thing? Can we use it to run our own projects?” Once you hear that enough, a lightbulb turns on and you say “Maybe we’ve got something here”. This idea, this thing we made for ourselves, perhaps it’s a product. If we need it, surely hundreds of thousands of businesses just like ours need it too." — Basecamp Founder and CEO Jason Fried, October 2015 (source).

78. Roblox

Founded: 2004

Valuation: $45.3 Billion (source)

Customer: Couldn't find this info... sorry!

Problem: An exception to the "Initial Problem" rule, Roblox was created based on a technological opportunity identified in a previous startup that Baszucki had founded and sold (not uncommon for gaming).

Quote: "Seeing how kids lit up when they were creating things using our physics software [in our previous startup called Knowledge Revolution] made me think of what would be the ultimate platform for our imagination. Also I like construction toys and I saw the direction 3-D rendering was going. It became clear to me that there was an opportunity to create an immersive, 3-D, multi-player platform in the cloud where people could imagine, create and share their experiences together." — Roblox Co-Founder David Baszucki, June 2016 (source).

79. Peloton

Founded: 2014

Valuation: $24.6 Billion (source)

Customer: Busy parents who want to stay fit and healthy.

Problem: It's difficult for parents to find time to go to the gym.

Quote: "My wife and I love fitness but like most ageing couples with kids it gets harder to get to the gym. As soon as we had kids our lives got busier and I said, I think I can build a technology platform that will allow you to consume these wonderful fitness classes from the convenience of your home and we could hire the best instructors and it could on your time, your schedule and overtime, at a better value." — Peloton Founder John Foley, August 2018 (Source).

80. Quora

Founded: 2009

Valuation: $2 Billion (source)

Customer: People using search engines to answer questions.

Problem: There was nowhere on the internet for really good questions and answers.

Quote: "When you look at Google, its job is to find you the perfect web page. There are a lot of cases when you want to know something and a list of websites isn’t ideal. For example, If you’re looking for an overview, Wikipedia usually has a good, edited aggregation of content. So one way of solving these cases is to pull all of this information out of people’s heads and get it into a useful format that can be shared." — Quora Co-founder Adam D’angelo, Date Unknown (source).

81. Snowflake

Founded: 2012

Valuation: $60 Billion (source)

Customer: Companies that collect lots of customer data.

Problem: Company data is siloed and difficult to govern.

Quote: "Our platform solves the decades-old problem of information silos and data governance. Leveraging the elasticity and performance of the general public cloud, our platform enables customers to unify and query data to support a good sort of use cases." — Snowflake S-1 filing, 2021 (source).

82. Zoom

Founded: 2011

Valuation: $57.5 Billion (source)

Customer: Forward-thinking companies in need of remote communication.

Problem: There was no way to easily do cheap video calls.

Quote: "I first envisioned Zoom when I was a freshman in college in China and regularly took a ten-hour train ride to visit my girlfriend (who is now my wife). I detested those rides and used to imagine other ways I could visit my girlfriend without traveling — those daydreams eventually became the basis for Zoom." — Interview with Eric S. Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zoom, October 2017 (source).

83. MongoDB

Founded: 2007

Valuation: $23 Billion (source)

Customer: Scaling tech companies.

Problem: Software companies struggled with scalability and agility.

Quote: "When Dwight and I started working on the project that would become MongoDB ten years ago, we definitely did not imagine that we would be where we are today. We only had our belief that we could make developers more productive. MongoDB was born out of our frustration using tabular databases in large, complex production deployments. We set out to build a database that we would want to use so that whenever developers wanted to build an application, they could focus on the application, not on working around the database." — MongoDB Co-founder Eliot Horowitz, October 2017 (source).

84. Slack

Founded: 2009

Valuation: $5.1 Billion (source)

Customer: They didn’t intentionally set out to create a SaaS product for the workplace. They built a tool for themselves (gaming devs). They only later realized their tool’s commercial potential.

Problem: There was good solution for centralizing internal company communication via messaging.

Internal message during the foundation of Slack: "We have developed some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products."

Quote: “We begged and cajoled our friends at other companies to try it out and give us feedback. We had maybe six to ten companies to start with that we found this way.” — Slack Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield, date unknown (source).

85. GitHub

Founded: 2008

Valuation: $7.5 Billion (source)

Customer: Software developers.

Problem: It's difficult for software developers to read and understand one another's code when not documented.

Quote: "Wanstrath resolved that he would not let himself be tied down to unfulfilling projects in his professional life. The chance to work on really great things and interact with smart people on the same level pushed him to make his career into something wholly gratifying. He even dumped his World of Warcraft account to eliminate any chance of distractions. He and GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner came together in 2007 to solve the online collaboration problem as a side project. They had both been developers working on the Ruby on Rails web development community. Their goal at first was to improve Git, a version control system, that allowed for online collaboration, but lacked easy of use." — From 'Former UC student establishes a celebrated website in GitHub that simplifies coding collaboration for millions of users,' April 2014 (Source).

86. Google

Founded: 1998

Valuation: $1.7 trillion (source)

Customer: Academics

Problem: There wasn't a good way to determine the importance of web pages.

Quote: "Initially known as BackRub, Google began as a research project of Larry Page, who enrolled in Stanford’s computer science graduate program in 1995. There, he met fellow CS student Sergey Brin. The two stayed in touch as Page began looking into the behavior of linking on the World Wide Web. Page conceived a system that would crawl the internet to determine which pages were linking to other pages, positing that it could lead to the creation of a new kind of search engine. Together with Brin’s math expertise, the duo created the PageRank algorithm, named after Larry, to rank the search results based on linking behavior. The two technologies formed the foundation for the world’s most powerful search engine of its time" — 'Google turns 20: How an internet search engine reshaped the world,' September 2018 (source).

87. Atlassian

Founded: 2002

Valuation: $26.6 Billion (source)

Customer: Software Developers.

Problem: Collaboration tools for developers didn't yet exist.

Quote: "We started in the software team, building project management and collaboration tools for software developers, and over the last decade we've expanded into IT teams, sort of in adjacency. And then in the last four or five years into broader business teams, so finance, marketing, HR, legal, etc." — Atlassian Co-Founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, September 2016 (source).

88. YouTube

Founded: 2005

Valuation: $170 Billion (source)

Customer: People who made home videos.

Problem: There was nowhere to share "home videos" on the internet.

Quote: "Our users were one step ahead of us. They began using YouTube to share videos of all kinds. Their dogs, vacations, anything. We found this very interesting. We said, 'Why not let the users define what YouTube is all about?'" — Youtube Co-Founder Jawed Karim (source).

89. Glossier

Founded: 2012

Valuation: $1.2 Billion (source)

Customer: Millennial women who care about their appearance.

Problem: Women want to have better skin and be more beautiful.

Quote: "I wrote out, ‘Here are all the things we need to launch: Website. Chemist. Office space.’ And then I just checked them off, one by one,” Weiss told The Cut about building the business. “Put all the balls in the air. Got pregnant with Glossier. Incubated. Gave birth to four beautiful products.” Glossier’s Soothing Face Mist, Priming Moisturizer, Balm Dotcom salve and Perfecting Skin Tint foundation." — Glossier Founder Emily Weiss (source).

90. BlaBlaCar

Founded: 2006

Valuation: $2 Billion (source)

Customer: Travellers who want to share transport.

Problem: There was no way to easily organize carpooling.

Quote: "If we look at the way we use our cars today, there’s a lot of room for optimization. In France, owning and operating a car costs about 5,500 euros a year, which accounts for gas, tolls, depreciation of the vehicle, repairs, insurance, and other things. But 96 percent of the time our cars just sit there, doing nothing, and when they are driven, three times out of four the driver is the only occupant." — BlaBlaCar Co-Founder Frédéric Mazzella, July 2016 (source).

91. Deezer

Founded: 2007

Valuation: $1.5 Billion (source)

Customer: Music Lovers.

Problem: Streaming music wasn't legally available.

Quote: "'I wanted to access my music, and my friends, anytime and anywhere.” — Deezer Founder Daniel Marhely (Source)

92. Away

Founded: 2015

Valuation: $1.4 Billion (source)

Customer: Travellers who learned about Away through social media.

Problem: Suitcases were fragile and unsuitable for travel

Quote: "I was determined to find the perfect suitcase, but that didn’t exist, so we created it" — Away Co-Founder Jen Rubio (source).

93. Grammarly

Founded: 2009

Valuation: $1 Billion (source)

Customer: Students

Problem: You couldn't use spellcheck outside of Microsoft Office.

Quote: "In 2009, Alex Shevchenko, Dima Lider, and I started an English writing assistance company. From the beginning, we were trying to define a new technological space. We knew it would be a long road, but our mission was clear early on: We wanted to improve lives by improving communication." — Grammarly Co-Founder Max Lytvyn (source).

94. StockX

Founded: 2015

Valuation: $3.8 Billion (source)

Customer: Sneakerheads

Problem: Collectors of rare shoes had nowhere to buy and sell

Quote: "The stock market has been the most efficient form of commerce for 200 years, all we did was copy that, and point it from old commodities, like stocks and bonds and oil and gas, to new commodities, like streetwear and watches and handbags." — StockX Founder Josh Luber (source).

Note: In the very beginning, they focused only on rare sneakers.

95. Alibaba

Founded: 1999

Valuation: $50.3 Billion (source)

Customer: Small and medium-size businesses.

Problem: SMBs didn't have good ways to sell internationally.

Quote: "I believed in one thing: global vision, local win. We designed the business model ourselves. Our focus was on helping small and medium-size companies make money. We never copied a model from the U.S., like a lot of Chinese Internet entrepreneurs did. We focused on product quality. It has to be "click and get it." If I can't get it, then it's rubbish" — Alibaba Co-Founder Jack Ma (source)

96. Unbabel

Founded: August 2013

Valuation: Undisclosed

Customer: B2C companies.

Problem: Machine translation was not accurate enough for business use cases.

Quote: "Vasco, who has a PhD in language technologies from Carnegie Mellon, was passionate about translation. But it was a conversation with a friend that triggered the idea for the company he now leads – Unbabel. 'My friend had an AirBnb for rent,' Vasco explains. 'He was contacted in English – fine. French? Okay. German? It was a mess. He had to use Google Translate, which meant a lot of mistranslations. We spotted an opportunity – there had to be a way to do this better.'" — Nesta profile on Unbabel Co-Founder Vasco Pedro, 2020 (source).

97. Bolt

Founded: 2013 (originally Taxify)

Valuation: $1 Billion (source)

Customer: Taxi drivers/users.

Problem: Ordering a taxi could be frustrating and slow as there wasn't a centralized platform.

Quote: "This is an industry where customers really care if they get good value for their money, so if you can offer customers 20% better pricing or you can make sure the drivers take 20% more on every ride then that really pays" — Bolt Founder and CEO Markus Villig (source).

98. Pipe

Founded: 2019

Valuation: $2 Billion (source)

Customer: Founders with reoccurring revenue streams.

Problem: Founders need to give away large amounts of equity in their company to raise capital from VCs.

Quote: "We’re helping companies grow on their own terms. You could say we’re building the Nasdaq for revenue. Virtually every company in the world has a recurring revenue model already, or if they don’t, they’re thinking about how they can shift to it.” — Pipe Co-Founder Harry Hurst (source).

99. Ramp

Founded: 2019

Valuation: $ 1.6 Billion (source)

Customer: Financial Controllers.

Problem: Companies can easily spend and lose track of expenses when using corporate cards.

Quote: "The first problem we are focused on is a misalignment between credit card companies and their customers and the second is helping make the lives of financial controllers, CFO's and financial teams easier" — Ramp Co-Founder Eric Glyman (source).