On the Up and Upstart 100

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On the Up and Upstart 100

Read Time: 3 minutes Published: October 9, 2018

According to CNBC’s Upstart 100 list, we’re worth keeping an eye on—they’re right.

This morning, CNBC unveiled its premier Upstart 100 list—an annual industry-agnostic list of promising young startups—and as you may have guessed, we’re on it. While young and IT are typically not two words you’d expect to associate with each other, it’s kind of our thing (and definitely what we would call ourselves if we ever decide to drop an album).

So, how did we land a spot on Upstart 100? Here’s our take, according to CNBC’s methodology:

Scalability: Our proven ability to scale comes down to our team’s ability to service our existing customers while simultaneously acquiring new ones in over 11 markets (a number we expect to quadruple or more next year). So, while our customer success team tackles thousands of IT requests in real-time—from everyday connectivity issues to emergency on-site support, our sales team is working with prospective customers to discover custom IT solutions that will improve the lives of de facto IT people and IT professionals everywhere.

Sales growth: We’ve quadrupled our revenue from 2017 to 2018 (and have plans to more than triple that in 2019). Did we mention how much we love our sales team?

User/customer growth: We have the pleasure of working with some of the most innovative companies in the game. We’re guessing our users feel the same way as our active user base has grown sixfold in the last 12 months.

Workforce diversity: Numbers are one thing, but this may be the metric we’re most proud of. Our team is diverse in every sense of the word, from background and personality to experience and taste in music. We’re also probably one of the only places where you’ll see former members of the Genius Bar and Geek Squad getting along (for some reason we imagine that rivalry closely resembles that of the Yankees and Red Sox)

Access to capital and community: According to CNBC, this KPI helped to ensure a balanced geographic distribution for the list. Seeing as we’re headquartered in NYC, this metric could’ve potentially worked against us if it wasn’t for the VCs we’ve had in our corner at every stage—from Primary Venture Partners and Bowery Capital in our seed round to Bessemer Venture Partners in our series A.

Intellectual property: If you keep up with the latest happenings at Electric, then you may have heard about the recent release of our proprietary technology, Turbine. Our automated approach to employee on-boarding is the brainchild of our product and engineering team and one of the largest pain points for our current customers, and a deciding factor when it came to securing a spot on this list.

Industry size and industry life-cycle stage: IT is as old-school as it gets when it comes to industry. At one point, our own founder saw IT as an outdated and unnecessary concept for a modern company. However, not being able to connect to a printer is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the IT issues faced by modern companies—we were just the first to realize it and make efficient, automated solutions accessible. If you think about it, it makes complete sense that all signs point to growth in the IT industry; as internet usage grows exponentially, the demand for IT services increases.

With that, we have just one question for our fellow list members; do you need IT support?

Team Electric

The Electric Team provides real-time IT support to 25,000 users and centralized IT management to over 400 customers.

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