On a related note. I always thought Xero made for an interesting case study for saas founders, as the company has went public when it had 150~ customers. That's pretty uncommon, and means that Xero's financial (including user/subscription growth) metrics are available for every year since founding.

All here: https://www.xero.com/au/about/investors/financial-info/

Disclaimer: I work at Xero: API, integrations & add-on ecosystem.

Would be nice if the data wasn't buried in PDFs.

What's the incentive for them to make it more convenient to find?

Investor confidence? Better visibility?

What company out there doesn't do PDFs? Genuinely curious. I'd hesitate to say that switching to non-PDF data would raise investor confidence all that much.

Investor confidence is definitely not affected by the fact that the company uses PDFs.

> The list will include the largest saas companies and smaller startups. For now in order to get a ranking you must have in between 40 and 1000 employees

If the list intends to include “the largest saas companies” it seems strange to exclude companies with over 1000 staff.

Also, it's much easier to jump from 10 employees to 40, rather than from 1000 to 4000. So this list is very biased.

If you go down to page 5 or 6, GNU Emacs is listed.

Note: “fastest growing” in terms of numbers of employees, not necessarily in terms of influence, customers, revenue, or profits

I think the head line should reflect this metric. Though I have my doubts on whether number of employees is a good metric.

Number of employees is not necessarily a very indicative metric for fastest growing

One thing that’s eye opening is how many of these aren’t in the Bay Area, but are in a few other cities that never get any attention for producing a lot of software companies.

Some of the bigger SaaS companies are missing from the list

I'm curious how you get your metrics/info on each company.

Based on the data exposed, probably from LinkedIn's employee count.