What is Why You Should Join?
Why You Should Join is a monthly newsletter highlighting early-stage startups on track to becoming generational companies.
On the first Monday of each month, we recommend one startup based on thorough research, original analysis, and inside information we’ve reviewed confidentially. With each piece, get 5000 words of in-depth research focused on market size, product strategy, and competition (instead of hype or money raised). We go deeper than any other source to help ambitious new grads, FAANG veterans, and experienced operators find the right company to join.
We’re fortunate to work with several top venture firms who regularly meet with and tell us who their top portfolio companies are. Our current partners include Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Founders Fund, 8VC, Thrive Capital, Neo, and Latitude Capital.
Why You Should Join does not do sponsored pieces. We receive no financial incentives (i.e. referral bonuses) from the companies we cover. To stay unbiased, we select companies independently based on merit and potential. Since we aren’t attached to a specific venture firm, we’re not limited to a specific portfolio; instead, we cover who we see as the most promising companies overall.
Our work is regularly shared with the engineering communities at Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT. Check out our favorite prior pieces here:
👨💻 Warp - Revolutionizing the most foundational developer tool. (by the former tech lead for Google Drive & CTO of Time)
🌲 Pinecone - Vector databases index the AI revolution. (by the former head of Amazon AI Labs)
🔒 Opaque - Multi-party computation is the future of business intelligence. (by the former founder of Databricks)
Why subscribe?
Subscribe for an inside look at the next Uber, Databricks, or Figma before anyone else.
For top talent, gain a clear, focused, and unbiased view of which the most promising companies to join are.
For investors, gain a clear, focused, and unbiased view of which markets and opportunities top firms are interested in.
Our work is designed to be a clear, focused, and unbiased resource for engineers, product managers, and designers wondering which company to join next.
We ignore buzzy funding rounds, hyped technologies, and Twitter spam to help you understand which companies actually have potential to lead large, important markets.
Our approach takes a lot of research and effort to execute well, which is why we release just one piece per month. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it :)
Why are you doing this?
We (two Stanford CS majors) were researching startups we’d want to join ourselves but couldn’t find any resources that were as in-depth or high-signal as we needed. Existing lists focused mainly on who the investors were, how much money was raised, and were often full of late-stage companies we’d already heard of.
To us, it was important to understand a company’s market size, core problem, product strategy, competitive landscape, moats, and team before deciding to dedicate several years of our life there. There weren’t any resources going that deep, so we began doing our own research. Our friends at Stanford loved our work, so we began sharing it online via this newsletter.
Joining the right startup can be an incredible career accelerant. You can have far more of an impact than you would working at a big tech company. We think that if more people worked at the best, most impactful startups, the future would arrive just a little sooner.
We hope our work can help you find the right startup to join.
Additional Resources
Since we write about just one startup each month, there’s no way we can cover all the amazing companies out there.
If you’re looking for more incredible companies to join, a great place to start would be the portfolios of our partners.
If you’re a founder with a company we should cover or an investor interested in working with us, please email us at ericzhou@stanford.edu and uhanif@stanford.edu.
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