The 20 best unicorn startups to work for, according to their employees

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Line of Unicorns

Alan Levine / Flickr

2015 was clearly the year of the unicorn: startups that raised boatloads of venture capital money and were valued by their investors at over $1 billion.

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It's already looking like 2016 could be the year that many of these unicorns run into trouble, as venture funds are getting tighter and more expensive, and some valuations are already deflating.

But other unicorns will continue to soar.

To find out which ones seem to be doing well, we went to the insiders: employees, via the employee reviews of their employers they shared on job-hunting site Glassdoor.

We began with the 156 companies on the Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard. Glassdoor whittled that down to 83 companies for which it had the data of at least 30 employee reviews over the last two years. (This created a different list from Glassdoor's recent survey of the Best Places to Work for 2016, which included many of these companies, but only used reviews from the past year).

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We then ranked those 83 by employees' total satisfaction rating, where employees rate their companies on a 1-5 scale with 1 being least satisfied, and 5 being most. (Glassdoor itself is also a unicorn company with a rating of 4.7, but it excluded itself from this list.)

The average company rating across all 445,000 companies on Glassdoor's site is 3.3. The average rating for the 83 unicorns on this list is a 3.8, and all of the companies on the Top 20 were rated higher than a 4.