Over the last six months we’ve been obsessing slightly more than normal about who’s running the hottest new start-ups. To be honest, we’re partial to a bit of entrepreneur stalking at the best of times, but putting together the Startups 100 list gave us the ultimate excuse.
In short, if you started a really cool business after 2005, we hunted you down and pumped you for information. If we took a special liking to you, we tried our very hardest to convince everyone else working on the list that you deserved to be there. Some of the entrepreneurs we spoke to left such an impression it was heartbreaking to leave them off the final countdown.
With such stiff competition it was no easy feat whittling the list down to a mere hundred. Discussions occasionally turned into full-blown arguments, and more than once someone (admittedly nearly always me) asked the question: “I know it’s a cool website, but what does it actually do?!”
But with Barclays estimating there are somewhere in the region of 400,000 new businesses set up every year we had to draw the line somewhere. A hundred may even seem quite generous a list to some, but with our three year cut off point we had well over a million to choose from.
So after all the blood, sweat and tears, we’ve handed the list over to you guys to mull over. We hope you find it as entertaining and as much a source of debate as we did.
And to those of you still in the planning stage… Get cracking, or you won’t make next year’s list!
