Exceptional 100
Welcome to the second edition of the Exceptional 100.
Investment and thematic strategies
Hiring trends and actionable recruiting methodologies
Macro and micro visualizations of talent concentration
Predictions on talent vibration
Deal flow and proactive community building
Future market opportunities and talent mapping
Geographic Scope
Educational Institutions
Among the top ten represented educational institutions, there were some variances from our 2024 list, but Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT still led. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Columbia, University of Michigan, UC San Diego, and Georgia Tech all ranked significantly higher in terms of representation among the 2025 list as compared to 2024.
Programming Languages
The 2024 list had Java outnumbering Python. This year we have Python surpassing Java in terms of programming language prevalence. Last year our assessment based on available data was that as organizations continue building AI-enabled products at scale, we expected Python usage to increase. It seems this has held true within our data sets, at least over the past 12 months.
Career Data + Characteristics
Roles + Titles
Gender
Women
Men
made the 2025 Exceptional 100 List
Bachelor's
Graduate
Master's
PhD.
*To note: 51% of the 2024 list held graduate degrees; we included students and people in researcher roles in this year’s list, which accounts for some of the differences when compared to 2024.
13%
were involved in collegiate or competitive athletics
10%
are active contributors or maintainers of prominent open-source projects + communities
40
had roles as TA’s or performed research specific roles while in school (both grad + undergrad)
28
are published authors, writers, or have published extensive academic research
26
were previously founders or founding team members at some point before their current role
10
consistently maintain personal blogs or websites
10
have art backgrounds and/or a history of artistic practice
10
are or were musicians or vocalists, through school careers or after
7
have a history of direct involvement with competitive gaming, gaming communities or game development
7
people have a history of participating in math clubs and competitions domestic + globally
5
people have a history of participating in debate, Model UN or other similar clubs
Career Movements Across Funding Stages
individuals have been involved in venture capital as scouts, advisors, or partners
Talent Concentration
We analyzed the frequency of current employers across the 2025 Exceptional 100 list, as depicted below in the bubble chart. As with last year, this chart depicts a trending combination of age of company and funding, highlighting the relevancy and frequency of each with regard to this year’s list.
Companies founded 2010 or later still have the highest concentrations within the 2025 dataset. A key difference to last year’s list is the slightly larger concentration of talent from public companies. While a majority of the people on this list have worked in their current role for over 2.5 years, we are seeing aggressive development and investment in hyper-scale attributable teams at larger organizations. The talent wars will likely continue to be waged and it will be interesting to see where talent migrates and manifests toward. This year we also included one unfunded (Two Sigma) and also a company that has raised at Seed (Thinking Machines, co-founded by Lilian Weng who made our 2024 list).
Talent Trajectories
While trajectory has no value judgment (positive or negative) and refers only to the directionality of work history, we continue to work toward a more intensive understanding of career paths and patterns related to tenure. We hope that overtime, this will support our work in tracing talent concentrations, predictive capacity, and deeper comprehension of community expirations.
individuals have held at least one position within at least one of these 5 companies
individuals have held more than one position within at least one or more of these 5 companies
Tenure Distribution
The below chart shows the median tenure at each funding phase across the data set of 100. This reflects all career history data points. Seed has a very low tenure, in part due to the scaling of the represented companies from Seed (hiring point) to Series A.
The median tenure across all company funding stages is 25 months.
Exceptional 100 2024 Talent Migration
From the 2024 list, there have so far been the following changes and updates.
8% have started founder journeys
8% changed companies
We expect to be able to enhance our analysis on the talent vibration and migration year over year. For this year we can give visual insights and observations from the prior year to present (September 2025).
*A few things to note: data points are reflective of our data as of August 25, 2025; and the Sankey diagrams below are based on the specific historical data of transitional movements and may not reflect present day.
The 2025 Exceptional 100
To fuel a portion of our investment pipeline and improve our lens on talent, we perform necessary diligence and work to begin conversations with highly talented individuals at the earliest stages. In this annual exercise of the Exceptional 100, we are providing visibility into the initial phases of our process, by showcasing 100 current standout builders and high-impact contributors within hyper-growth enterprise companies.
Utilizing our iterative framework to discern which career characteristics determine strong product and technical talent, our internal tooling and systems enabled us to run further queries and prompts to select these individuals.
In addition to our framework, search criteria and parameters included, but were not limited to:
Focus on engineering and product roles
At least 4 years of experience
Experience and career trajectory
Emerging technologies and internal high-impact infrastructure
Excluded current Pre-Seed and Seed
No educational institution-based prioritization within queries
Excluded extended durations at managerial layer*
Examination of specific tenure at companies, based in part upon funding round/stage of growth
*While some of these exceptional individuals manage teams within their organizations, we want to reinforce that this exercise is intended to examine emerging talent and we sought not to be reliant on the basis of traditional, hierarchical titles within organizations.
In future years, as we expand our knowledge of global talent pools and markets, we hope to lend greater scope to our reports. We did not name any individuals at our existing portfolio companies as this exercise is intended to be an external study and observation. In leveraging public datasets, we acknowledge the risk that certain data which we evaluated and published may be outdated or inaccurate. For current employer/role we optimized for reporting within 60-90 day threshold. All data provided is as of August 25, 2025, at a 95% confidence level and with a margin of error of ±3% with regard to current day accuracy of the data set sampled.
We would love to know your thoughts and what you've found most insightful.
Extra special thanks and gratitude to Sophia Hu, Vincent Huang, and Jack Griffin for all their work in making this publication possible!
About Exceptional
Exceptional Capital invests in the next generation of foundational Enterprise Software in the US and globally at Pre-Seed and Seed. Our thematic and collaborative strategy takes advantage of a deep network across several diverse communities. We partner with the most ambitious entrepreneurs and aim to provide founders with confidence, capital, and credibility to realize their vision and build exceptional companies.
