telecom, healthcare, education, financial services, and retail. “We’re happy to handle the technology portion,” Moskowitz says. “They own the problem, we own the solution.”
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Robot Co-op (Seattle, WA)
Josh Petersen, co-founder
A half-dozen programmers (“robots”) sit around a large communal table in Capitol Hill and crank out code for popular social websites like 43 Things, 43 Places, 43 People, and Lists of Bests. Petersen co-founded the company in 2004 with funding from Amazon. His team has since built the Robot Co-op into one of the most profitable Web startups in town. The websites get crazy traffic (up to 2 million registered users this year), and the company continues to chug along with seemingly sustainable profits. Through the recession, the team has “worked hard on simplifying our business, getting our operations tight and easy to manage (important with a team of 5) while maintaining solid revenue and profitability numbers,” Petersen says in an e-mail. “We are keeping it real, profitable, and fun, while hanging with some well-funded and heavily staffed peers in the Seattle tech scene.”
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R.W. Beck (Seattle, WA)
Russ Stepp, president and CEO
OK, this one doesn’t quite count as private anymore, since the company is now owned by SAIC (NYSE: [[ticker:SAI]]) in San Diego. But R.W. Beck’s story transcends its recent $155 million acquisition. The engineering and business consulting firm’s expertise in key technical areas like energy and water management is legendary. With 550 employees (125 at Seattle headquarters), R.W. Beck has made its mark in everything from water treatment design in King County to utility capital projects for Puget Sound Energy—all while doubling its revenue in the past three years. “We do independent engineering and translate that into a financial plan so investors can get a return on investment,” Stepp told me last month. “Our plan with SAIC is to build more capabilities jointly with them. Over the next six months, we’ll identify them and continue to expand.” In short, as energy and water duel for the title of world’s most precious resource, you’d do well to know R.W. Beck.
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Valve Software (Bellevue, WA)
Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director
How can a video game company with massive hits like Half-Life and Counter-Strike, and millions of fans worldwide, be considered unsung? Because they don’t seem to talk to anyone outside the industry (including me). Newell and Mike Harrington, now at Seattle startup Picnik, co-founded Valve in 1996 and built the company into a digital entertainment powerhouse. Valve is well-known for its game franchises and development tools, but what really puts the company in great financial shape is the fact that it’s a major distribution portal for games. The company’s platform, called Steam, distributes more than 800 games and other digital content to some 20 million people worldwide. That’s a major advantage, as all game companies are struggling with their own sales through the recession. Valve has more than 160 employees, including artists, programmers, and writers. In a city full of promising gaming companies, it is a quiet but well-established leader.
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Winshuttle (Bothell, WA)
Vikram Chalana, co-founder and CTO
It’s one of the fastest growing tech companies in the Northwest. Winshuttle makes software to help corporations manage reams of data between spreadsheets and SAP business-management programs. The company has been doubling its sales every year for the past four years, so it’s clearly solving a very real problem. Although its growth slowed a bit in early 2009, Chalana says, business has picked up in the past three months—to the tune of 44 new customers (including Bridgestone-Firestone, Conoco-Phillips, and Bayer CropScience), resulting in the company’s largest revenue quarter to date. The bootstrapped company now has 70 employees worldwide—including offices in France, England, and India—up from 60 workers a year ago. In the past few months, Winshuttle has rolled out two new products, one in business intelligence and the other in governance and compliance, as well as an online community site. “With the economic conditions thawing a bit, we are seeing an increasing number of customers engaging with us,” Chalana says.
