As the Series A crunch quietly begins to take outseed-stage startups, the largest tech companies are happy to soak up their talent. Fortunately New York has a rising class of tentpole companies, including Google and eBay, that are soaking up tech talent faster than ever.
In New York, digital media and Internet jobs grew by 18.7 percent last year, according to new research from Cook Associates Executive Search. The majority of that growth came from the second half of the year, with job growth slowing to 3.6 percent in the third quarter and 3.4 percent in the fourth quarter. A whopping 27,000 individuals work at the city’s tech companies, which means every single one of them (plus 2,000 hangers-on) belongs to the New York Tech Meetup.
Cook Associates Managing Director John Barrett says the sector’s job growth was unsustainable and has simply stabilized in the back half of the year. Still, 60 percent of NY’s 327 tech companies with ten or more employees increased their headcount last year.
The biggest tech employer in NYC is Google, with AOL, eBay, Fab.com and LinkedIn rounding out the top five. Notably, Fab, the city’s biggest privately held startup, runs most of its tech operations overseas. Below that, AppNexus, Etsy and Warby Parker round out the biggest NYC-based startups, giving us a hint as to who might emerge as the next generation of NYC tech leaders. Yelp and Pandora finish out the top ten as they grow their sales teams in NYC.
I’m unclear on the inclusion of Warby Parker, though. The company recently said it only had 113 employees. Meanwhile 10Gen, excluded perhaps because Cook Associates says it focuses on “pure play” digital media and Web companies, has said it has 200 employees. Also excluded from the ten ten is Tumblr, which has 150, or Foursquare, which has something like 135.
The Cook Associates survey also outlined a list of companies with fast-growing headcounts. Some of the obvious suspects were there — Indeed.com, Buzzfeed, Birchbox, Squarespace, Bitly, Yext, and Tumblr.
Others to look out for, or perhaps apply to, include Chloe & Isabel, Complex Media, Moda Operandi,FiftyOne, Yodle, Operative, Conductor, MediaMath, Lot18 and Quirky.