It’s not always easy to define success in the startup world.

 
Sure, user growth, funding and revenue help paint a big picture, and metrics like web traffic and customer churn can fill in some of the details — but when I asked some of my team who they thought the very best startups were, we found out first-hand just how imprecise the definition of success really is. And we wanted to get precise.
 
Really precise.
 
So we set out to rank the top 20 startups ever. We considered quantitative factors like capitalization and growth alongside more qualitative factors like cultural impact. We were surprised by what we found. 
 
Visit the VERGE blog post for an interactive version of the infographic below.