Monday I caught up over lunch with long time friend and superb Japanese entrepreneur, Nori Matsuda.  Matsuda-san is the CEO & Co-Founder of Sourcenext, a publicly listed consumer software company in Japan.

During the discussion, he talked to me about how he thinks about building public technology companies.  He mentioned a metric he thinks about a lot: Market Cap per Employee.  He thought that this was an interesting expression of a company’s culture, of how much opportunity, how much energy there likely was at the company.  He then rattled off the Market Cap per Employee of several large public tech companies.

I built this simple chart below, and I think it’s telling:

If you’re thinking of working at a public company, then this is probably an interesting metric to look at and consider.

Alternatively, if you’re running a startup, it’s also an interesting metric.  You might consider your current valuation and divide it by the number of employees.  See where you stack.  It’s probably at least some kind of indicator of the opportunity and the momentum in front of you.