Finding the right early-stage startup to work for – a simple method

One thing this methodology doesn't account for is company culture. It would be tough to predict in aggregate, though...

You could start by crawling for key words in job board posts. Companies that value, for instance, 'vacation', 'open source contributions', and '20% time' might (depending on who you are) be preferable to those listing 'nerf gun fights' and 'free beer' as perks.

Another idea would be to look at the age of the founders and early employees, as well as the schools attended. I don't have the data on this, but I suspect that a more diverse employee background would correlate with a stronger company culture. Then again, small companies will tend to hire within their personal networks, naturally selecting for people with similar backgrounds, so you shouldn't necessarily see a relatively homogenous company as a red flag, unless they are larger than ~10 employees and are actively hiring more. (Of course, if the company is very homogeneous but lines up with you exactly, that might also indicate a 'good' match.)

There are probably other ways to predict company culture, but ultimately you won't really know until you have a chance to visit their offices, meet the team, etc. But by doing a bit of research up front you may be able to narrow down your search based on a few red flags here and there.

Quick comment from the author: One problem with this method is that it only includes companies that have raised money. Those that were able to bootstrap and become profitable without fundraising (and are perhaps even more awesome than any company on this list) are not included here. It's a lot harder to get info on those companies, but if anyone has ideas for how to do it, I'd love to know.

It looks like Sprig shut down in April 2014