Methodology

How a row gets in

Each list states its role and geographic inclusion rules. The following founder rules apply to the founder collection; other categories use the inclusion rule in their list file.

A stored Mira experience must have a founder or co-founder title, is_current true and no end date. A named company, a valid LinkedIn profile URL and a US person location with a city and recognized state are required. CEO alone does not qualify. Advisor, consultant, former founder, student, freelance and job-seeking roles are excluded. Placeholder companies and sentence fragments are excluded.

Company and sector evidence

A sector phrase must occur in the selected company's name, role title or industry. Headlines never qualify a sector row. A .ai domain suffix alone is insufficient. “Why this row” quotes the stored field that matched; it is not an independently verified company description.

For multiple current founder roles, each list selects one matching company. Company-name evidence has priority over industry, then title evidence; equal scores retain stored experience order. Other eligible current companies appear as “Also current” on every row, including when different sectors select different companies. No company spellings are corrected.

Cyber and carbon are additional company-name tokens only for cybersecurity and climate respectively. Generic sector-only labels and names identifying funds, conferences, communities, networks, accelerators, labs, incubators, guilds, alliances, projects, media insiders or performer labels are excluded from sector lists. Ltd, Limited and Pvt legal forms are excluded from US lists. State-specific sector lists exclude company names naming another region. Cyber trading names are excluded from cybersecurity. E-commerce includes agencies and studios. These are lexical checks; a remaining name is not independently verified as an operating company. Carbon matches with explicit media, fiber, or financial-services evidence are excluded from climate. An industry match is skipped when the company name directly matches a different sector. Construction and logistics include operators and service businesses. We do not infer software products, funding, company size, hiring plans or contact intent.

Person locations

US person location is required; headquarters do not qualify. Country-only records and county names in the city field are excluded. City lists require the named city and state; nearby metro areas are not included. New York accepts New York, New York City and all five boroughs with New York state. St George is displayed as St. George. State abbreviations are expanded.

Developer Tools Founders in the US (developer-tools-founders-us) was evaluated and withheld with 0 direct matches. Its URLs return 404; it was not published.

Candidate pool and selection

5481 founder candidates come from the Oct 10, 2026 collection and targeted additions on Oct 15, 2026. The original founder lists were evaluated against that shared cache. Other collections record their own candidate pool and inclusion rules in each list file. It is a query-selected pool, not a random sample or a market census. Cross-list overlap is expected.

Every published list includes all cached qualifiers up to 300 people. The original lists keep a 12-person floor. Lists added later need at least 20. Above 300, we compute SHA-256 over each normalized HTTPS LinkedIn URL, sort the hexadecimal hashes ascending, and select 300. This fixed selection is independent of names and is not a ranking. Final display order is alphabetical by name. HTML pages show 80 rows at a time. JSON, CSV, and Markdown contain every published row. Lists below their floor are unpublished. Withdrawn URLs stay withdrawn.

Collection and corrections

Last collected Oct 17, 2026. People pages are rebuilt from committed list files; this editorial update did not collect people. Previously cached profiles were not re-fetched. A collection date is not a profile-update date. Mira can lag real-world changes. Refresh policy: people lists have no scheduled refresh and no promised next collection date. Company and job snapshots can be refreshed with scripts/refresh_snapshots.py. A refresh writes only if every selected page retains at least 8 rows. That script does not rebuild people lists. Corrections are reviewed on request; a rebuild does not count as a new collection. Per-record collected dates use the list collection date when no individual date was recorded. Confirm roles on the linked profiles.

Company and job snapshot inclusion

Each sample fetches at most the first 40 unique IDs in an unsorted Mira query window. Retained detail records are checked locally against the stated country, title or numeric thresholds. Missing values stay unknown. Provider match totals are not published row counts or market size. Company growth is not a hiring signal, and an open flag at collection does not confirm a current vacancy.

• US AI engineer postings: Provider query: location.country equals United States, is_open equals true, and title matches "AI engineer". Retained titles must also match the stated role phrase locally. This sample additionally requires a stored city and state, and a valid posting date within 365 days before collection, inclusive. Current availability is unverified. 35 retained rows; collected Oct 25, 2026.
• US backend engineer postings: Provider query: location.country equals United States, is_open equals true, and title matches "backend engineer". Retained titles must also match the stated role phrase locally. This sample additionally requires a stored city and state, and a valid posting date within 365 days before collection, inclusive. Current availability is unverified. 34 retained rows; collected Oct 25, 2026.
• US companies: 100% to under 500% headcount growth: Provider query: headquarters.country equals United States, headcount is at least 50, and headcount_growth_yoy_pct is 100% to under 500%. Each retained row must satisfy those numeric thresholds locally. Stored growth is unverified and does not establish current hiring. 37 retained rows; collected Oct 25, 2026.
• US companies: 500%+ headcount growth: Provider query: headquarters.country equals United States, headcount is at least 50, and headcount_growth_yoy_pct is 500%+. Each retained row must satisfy those numeric thresholds locally. Stored growth is unverified and does not establish current hiring. 40 retained rows; collected Oct 25, 2026.
• US machine learning engineer postings: Provider query: location.country equals United States, is_open equals true, and title matches "machine learning engineer". Retained titles must also match the stated role phrase locally. Current availability is unverified. 40 retained rows; collected Oct 25, 2026.
• US software engineer postings: Provider query: location.country equals United States, is_open equals true, and title matches "software engineer". Retained titles must also match the stated role phrase locally. This sample additionally requires a stored city and state, and a valid posting date within 365 days before collection, inclusive. Current availability is unverified. 38 retained rows; collected Oct 25, 2026.

Distribution terms

Downloads are provided for reference. Distribution does not grant a license to underlying profile, company or posting content; source rights and applicable terms remain in force. This reuse reference is not an open-data license or a verification of source claims.

Downloads and reuse

HTML, JSON, CSV and Markdown use the same published rows. Access is free and needs no account. Access grants no license to underlying profile content or rights beyond those held by its sources. Cite the list's canonical URL with #summary, collection date and published/qualified counts. Row anchors use the LinkedIn slug.

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Corrections and removal

Corrections or removal: gene@metix.ai. Include the profile URL; we aim to remove within 7 days.