Analyzing AngelList Job Postings, Part 1: Basic Stats
Last month, I used AngelList data to analyze the technologies that startups use. After getting positive feedback on my analysis, I decided to dig into more AngelList data – this time looking at job postings. There is a lot of job posting data available via API, and Joshua Slayton from AngelList was kind enough to send me some additional data that is not available via API.
This series will consist of two separate blog posts:
Part 1: Basic stats about popular startup locations, job titles, vesting schedules, etc. [Full disclosure: this is the least interesting/actionable post in the series]
Part 2: Salary and equity benchmarks. By role, company size, etc.
Preliminaries
I took a snapshot of all jobs on AngelList on August 31st, 2014. There were 12610 jobs posted at the time.
Please note that this is an analysis of companies found on AngelList, which creates some expected biases. For example, the data will be biased toward earlier stage startups, and away from startups in non-English-speaking countries.
Job Locations
Top 20 cities
City # of open jobs
San Francisco 2766
New York City 1676
Los Angeles 485
London 444
Boston 309
Palo Alto 300
Bangalore 263
Washington, DC 230
Toronto 226
Chicago 218
Mountain View 216
Seattle 201
Silicon Valley 186
New Delhi 185
Austin 161
Mumbai 153
Berlin 130
Vancouver 120
Santa Monica 117
Singapore 107Next, I removed all cities that had 3 or fewer jobs (about 5% of all jobs) and categorized the remaining cities into geographic areas.
Jobs in each major geographic area
Geographic Area # of open jobs
Silicon Valley 4130
US (minus SF, NY, LA) 2282
New York 1723
India 839
Southern California 801
Continental Europe 649
Canada 503
UK 493
Asia 238
Central/South America 91
Australia 78
Israel 54
Russia 46Notable observations: SF, LA, and NYC make up almost 50% of all jobs on AngelList. Within Silicon Valley, 2/3 of all jobs are in SF and 1/3 are in Mountain View/Palo Alto/etc.
Openings per company
# of openings at startup # of startups
1 opening 3123
2 openings 1238
3 openings 689
4 openings 349
5 openings 215
6 openings 115
7 openings 78
8 openings 47
9 openings 30
10 openings 26
11 openings 10
12 openings 5
13 openings 7
14 openings 3
15 openings 1
17 openings 3
19 openings 3
23 openings 1
25 openings 1Notable observations: About 60% of openings are at companies that list <=3 jobs, 35% are at companies that list 4-10 jobs, and the last 5% are at a handful of companies that have 11 or more open positions.
Job Opening Types
Type # of open jobs
Full-time 9740
Cofounder 1080
Internship 997
Contract 936Equity Vesting
Most common vesting periods
Vesting period # of open jobs
4 years 11096
3 years 526
0 years 355
2 years 269
5 years 182Most common vesting cliffs
Vesting cliff # of open jobs
1.0 years 11875
0.0 years 403
0.5 years 135Notable observations: 4 year vesting with a 1 year cliff is by far the most common equity vesting set-up.
Job Functions
Role # of open jobs
Developer 6486
Marketing 1795
Designer 1656
Sales 1601
Mobile Developer 1434
Operations 818
Product Manager 810
Hardware Engineer 288
Finance 227
Office Manager 157
Human Resources 143
Attorney 39(The counts in the second column add up to a little more than 12610 because some jobs were tagged with multiple roles.)
In-demand Skills
Skills mentioned in at least 500 job openings:
Skill # of open jobs
Javascript 2372
Python 1341
Ruby on Rails 1211
HTML 1131
Sales and Marketing 1089
iOS Development 1069
jQuery 1016
CSS 1001
Java 991
HTML5 & CSS3 952
Android 852
User Experience Design 816
PHP 777
Business Development 769
MySQL 690
Node.js 644
Social Media Marketing 604
MongoDB 509
Amazon Web Services 503Skills mentioned in 250-499 openings: Angular.JS, Objective C, Sales, UI/UX Design, HTML/CSS/PHP/MYSQL, Product Development, Ruby, Mobile Application Design, Mobile Development, User Interface Design, SQL, Backbone.js, Django, PostgreSQL, Linux, Git, APIs, Sales Strategy and Management, Product Marketing, Mobile, Data Analysis, RESTful Services, and Social Media.
Skills mentioned in 100-249 openings: Big Data, Graphic Design, Hadoop, Adobe Photoshop, Web Design, Web Development, Redis, C++, Mobile Application Development, Photoshop, Product Management, Machine Learning, Software Engineering, SEO/SEM, iOS, REST APIs, Customer Service, noSQL, Twitter Bootstrap, Front-End Development, C, Databases, SaaS, AngularJS, JSON, Business Operations, C#, Growth Hacking, Marketing, Scala, Analytics & Reporting, Adobe Illustrator, Online Marketing, AJAX, Communication Skills, Project Management, E-Commerce, Customer Relationship Management, Full-Stack Web Development, Web Analytics, Sales/Marketing and Strategic Partnerships, Coffeescript, Business Strategy, Account Management, Community Management, Content Marketing, Writing, Backend Development, Amazon EC2, Advertising, .NET, Visual Design, Agile Software Develoment, Software Development, Google Analytics, Adobe Creative Suite, Heroku, and Algorithms.