Don't browse for places to go work for. Browse for new startups whose products you would want to use. When you find one you love, apply for a job at it. You'll have a leg up on the competition because you know and love their product.
Companies fail because nobody wants to use their product. The process of going from a product nobody wants to one lots of people want is difficult and fraught with uncertainty; most startups fail to make this leap, which is miserable for most of the employees involved. Conversely, if you love a product, chances are there are many people just like you who also love it or will love it once they hear about it. Passionate users = growing userbase = more capital or revenue = your stock options will actually be worth something.
(Disclaimer: I worked for two startups that totally flopped; in both cases, I had no idea what they actually did until I started. Then eventually I said "fuck this getting rich shit", went to work for Google - which wasn't really a startup at the time, but I loved their products - and ended up making a lot more than any realistic startup would've gotten me. YMMV, but this seems to be a pretty decent heuristic.)
That's a good suggestion to look at the product first and see if I'll like it. I will look westward for those companies because I find more interesting software and other products there. Most of the startup ideas in my city, Chicago, hate to say it, sound mundane. Chicago is big, has many software jobs, but not much in the way of software startups or unicorns. It's not a tech center of USA and entrepreneurs built a different mindset I think. Some have even gone as far as saying, a company like Snapchat will never have grown as big as it did if it started in my city.
I'll probably not work for Google, not because I don't want to, but generally speaking any company that has been doing well for 10+ years hasn't given me any offers or rejects my resume.
Companies fail because nobody wants to use their product. The process of going from a product nobody wants to one lots of people want is difficult and fraught with uncertainty; most startups fail to make this leap, which is miserable for most of the employees involved. Conversely, if you love a product, chances are there are many people just like you who also love it or will love it once they hear about it. Passionate users = growing userbase = more capital or revenue = your stock options will actually be worth something.
(Disclaimer: I worked for two startups that totally flopped; in both cases, I had no idea what they actually did until I started. Then eventually I said "fuck this getting rich shit", went to work for Google - which wasn't really a startup at the time, but I loved their products - and ended up making a lot more than any realistic startup would've gotten me. YMMV, but this seems to be a pretty decent heuristic.)