The Next Big Thing likely comes from California, New York, Massachusetts or Washington

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The Wall Street Journal have just published their 2012 “Ranking the Top 50 Start Ups”

They, sort of, headline the article, “The Next Big Thing” which is, in our view nearer the mark as some of the companies started up in the last century and in their top ten the latest one was founded in 2007!

Their inclusion criteria are:

“To be eligible for the ranking—compiled by research firm VentureSource, which like The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp.—companies must be based in the U.S., have received an equity round of financing in the past three years and be valued at less than $1 billion, as the aim is to identify lesser-known start-ups. More than 5,900 candidates were considered.”

As per their infographic of the top ten 10% of the companies are in the Health Care sector. If a comparable UK listing was compiled we doubt if this sector would be as prominent.

We also noted the following numbers breakdown by state:

1   California 37

2   New York 4

3    Massachusetts 3

4   Washington 2

5= Colorado 1

5=  New Jersey 1

5=  North Carolina 1

5=  Texas 1

California is remarkable but understandable and possibly New York is a population #’s scenario with Massachusetts linked with their Institute of Technology. Washington we find interesting with one company Donuts Inc (a new domain registry company) based in Bellvue and the other Cheezeburger being based in Seattle. Both Amazon (AWS Global Start-up Challenge) and Microsoft (Bing Fund)  as we have mentioned before fund directly and indirectly new startup ventures and are based in Seattle and Bellvue. Whilst there may be no direct link we doubt if this is an entire coincidence.

In our list in addition to their top ten we’ve selected our personal choice of “interesting” companies.

For the top ten the WSJ provides mini bios for each company (difficulty in finding a direct link so – scroll down on main article to” The Top 10 Venture-Backed Companies” picture & click on that!) . The one fun fact we sort of smiled at was Xirrus’s “The company’s conference rooms have names from Star Trek like the Holodeck, the Transporter Room and Warp Core. “ Whilst it didn’t raise a smile here we thought 10Gen Inc’s was incredibly ….. sensible “Everyone at 10gen, regardless of title, does customer support, including the CEO, CTO and engineers.”

Of our interesting additions Cheezburger generates wide public acclaim for its “fun” but we favour  Donuts Inc ( if the new gTLD’s take off so could they) RockMelt (a sort of Social Media browser {or Wowser} as they describe it),  Machinima for all you gamers, and Vidyo (not only for the name but also its enterprise video conferencing).

As ever we will leave you with a video – this go round it’s the WSJ’s, rather hesitant interviewee Emily Maltby explaining it all.
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