The winners of Comparably’s annual Best CEOs awards received the highest ratings by employees who provided anonymous ratings on their CEOs to Comparably.com. The award winners are segmented into two lists in rank order: Top 50 CEOs at large companies (more than 500 employees) and Top 50 CEOs at small/mid-size companies (500 employees or fewer) in the U.S. See below lists for employee commentary and methodology.
Top 50 Best CEOs of Large Companies (Ranked)
1. Satya Nadella, Microsoft (Redmond, WA)
2. Craig Menear, The Home Depot (Atlanta, GA)
3. Sundar Pichai, Google(Mountain View, CA)
4. Brad Smith, Intuit (Mountain View, CA)
5. Brian Halligan, HubSpot (Cambridge, MA)
6. Jeff Bezos, Amazon (Seattle, WA)
7. Bert Bean, Insight Global (Atlanta, GA)
8. Alex Shootman, Workfront (Lehi, UT)
9. Marc Benioff, Salesforce (San Francisco, CA)
10. John Legere, T-Mobile (Bellevue, WA)
11. Lynn Jurich, Sunrun (San Francisco, CA)
12. Timothy Cook, Apple (Cupertino, CA)
13. W. Craig Jelinek, Costco (Issaquah, WA)
14. Julie Sweet, Accenture (US) (New York, NY)
15. Carlos Rodriguez, ADP (Roseland, NJ)
16. Doug Mack, Fanatics (Jacksonville, FL)
17.John Van Siclen, Dynatrace (Waltham, MA)
18. Rami Elghandour, Nevro (Redwood City, CA)
19. Elon Musk, SpaceX/Tesla (Hawthorne, CA)
20. Mike Morhaime, Blizzard Entertainment (Irvine, CA)*
21. Bryce Maddock, TaskUs (Santa Monica, CA)
22. Cathy Engelbert, Deloitte (US) (New York, NY)
23. Ed Bastian, Delta Air Lines (Atlanta, GA)
24. Ryan Smith, Qualtrics (Provo, UT)
25. Michael Dell, Dell (Round Rock, TX)
26. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase & Co (New York, NY)
27. Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber (San Francisco, CA)
28. Amy Zupon, Vertafore (Denver, CO)
29. Harley Lippman, Genesis10 (New York, NY)
30. Hubert Joly, Best Buy (Bloomington, MN)
31. Andrew Cecere, U.S. Bank (Minneapolis, MN)
32. Reed Hastings, Netflix (Los Gatos, CA)
33. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook (Menlo Park, CA)
34. Steven Berglund, Trimble (Sunnyvale, CA)
35. Mark Parker, Nike (Beaverton, OR)
36. Bob Sulentic, CBRE (Los Angeles, CA)
37. Susan Wojcicki, YouTube (San Bruno, CA)
38. Colin Doherty, Fuze (Boston, MA)
39. Michael Sullivan, Acquia (Boston, MA)
40.Daniel Schulman, PayPal (San Jose, CA)
41. Frederick Smith, FedEx (Memphis, TN)
42. Richard Fairbank, Capital One (McLean, VA)
43. Arne Sorenson, Marriott (Bethseda, MD)
44. Gene Hall, Gartner (Stamford, CT)
45. Gail Boudreaux, Anthem, Inc. (Indianapolis, IN)
46. Bruce Cerullo, Nordic Consulting (Madison, WI)
47. Brian Roberts, Comcast (Philadelphia, PA)
48. Scott Wagner, GoDaddy (Scottsdale, AZ)
49. Mary Barra, General Motors (Detroit, MI)
50. William McDermott, SAP (Newtown Square, PA)
*Mike Morhaime is now the former Blizzard CEO and the one rated for these awards. The new CEO took office in Oct. 2018.
Top 50 Best CEOs of Small/Mid-Size Companies (Ranked)
1. David Cancel, Drift (Boston, MA)
2. Sameer Dholakia, SendGrid (Denver, CO)
3. Giuseppe Incitti, Sitetracker (Palo Alto, CA)
4. Robert Wahbe, Highspot (Seattle, WA)
5. Gavan Thorpe, Boostability (Lehi, UT)
6. Mahe Bayireddi, Phenom People (Ambler, PA)
7. Ariel Cohen, TripActions (Palo Alto, CA)
8. Greg Besner, CultureIQ (New York, NY)
9. Bob Pritchett, Faithlife (Bellingham, WA)
10.Whitney Wolfe Herd, Bumble (Austin, TX)
11. Howard Brown, RingDNA (Sherman Oaks, CA)
12. Scott Wolfe Jr., zlien (New Orleans, LA)
13. Brian Hartnack, Archer Education (Los Angeles, CA)
14. Brew Johnson, PeerStreet(El Segundo, CA)
15. Nick Mehta, Gainsight (Redwood City, CA)
16. Blake Murray, Divvy (Lehi, UT)
17. Steve Carlson, ForwardLine Financial (Woodland Hills, CA)
18. Stephane Donze, AODocs (San Francisco, CA)
19. Harry Glaser, Periscope Data (San Francisco, CA)
20. Sean Kelly, SnackNation (Culver City, CA)
21. Alexander Austin, Branch Metrics (Redwood City, CA)
22. Anindya Datta, Mobilewalla (New York, NY)
23. Cynthia Barreda, NetCentrics (Herndon, VA)
24. David Glass, LHP Engineering Solutions (Columbus, OH)
25. Timothy Harris, Swift Navigation (San Francisco, CA)
26. Timo Rein, Pipedrive (New York, NY)
27. Francis Davidson, Sonder (San Francisco, CA)
28. Erik Huberman, Hawke Media (Santa Monica, CA)
29. Christine Crane, BoldLeads (Chandler, AZ)
30. Karl Mehta, EdCast (Mountain View, CA)
31. Matt Westgate, Lullabot (Providence, RI)
32. John Wise, InvestCloud (West Hollywood, CA)
33. Ryan Malone, SmartBug Media (Newport Beach, CA)
34. Zohar Dayan, Wibbitz (New York, NY)
35. Oleg Rogynskyy, People.ai (San Francisco, CA)
36. Chuck Goetschel, Rallio (Irvine, CA)
37. Max Roper, Appetize (Los Angeles, CA)
38. Sam Shank, HotelTonight (San Francisco, CA)
39. Robert Blatt, MomentFeed (Santa Monica, CA)
40. Anant Kale, AppZen (San Jose, CA)
41. Dustin Moskovitz, Asana (San Francisco, CA)
42. Gleb Polyakov, Nylas (San Francisco, CA)
43. Peter Swaniker, Ximble (Carlsbad, CA)
44. Steve Elliott, AgileCraft (Austin, TX)
45. Alan Rich, Chrome River Technologies (Los Angeles, CA)
46. Brooke LeVasseur, AristaMD (La Jolla, CA)
47. Christian Gormsen, Eargo (San Jose, CA)
48. Shafat Qazi, BQE Software (Torrance, CA)
49. Sarah Nahm, Lever (San Francisco, CA)
50. Kylie Wright-Ford, Reputation Institute (Cambridge, MA)
For Best CEOs in 2017: https://www.comparably.com/articles/best-ceos-2017/
Methodology
Comparably Awards are derived from sentiment ratings provided by employees who anonymously rated their employers on Comparably.com between November 26, 2017 and November 26, 2018. There were no fees or costs associated with participating, nor was nomination required. To qualify, Large companies (more than 500 employees) must have a minimum of 50 employee participants and Small/Mid-Size companies (fewer than 500 employees) must have a minimum of 15 employee participants. Winners were determined based on how their employees rated their CEO. The answer to each question was given a numerical score and then compared to companies of similar size across the U.S. Additional weight was given to scores at companies with more participation from their employee base. The final data set was compiled from nearly 10 million ratings across 50,000 U.S. companies on Comparably.com. Contact Comparably to set-up interviews, or for additional employee commentary, images, and company descriptions.
About Comparably
Comparably is a workplace culture and compensation monitoring site with a mission to provide more transparent and rewarding workplaces. Employees can access salary data and rate their companies, CEOs, and work experiences through the lens of specific demographics including gender, ethnicity, age, tenure, industry, location, and education. With nearly 10 million ratings from employees at over 50,000 U.S. companies, Comparably has become one of the most used SaaS solutions for employer branding and trusted third party sites for salary and workplace culture data. For more information on Comparably, go to www.comparably.com. For highly-cited workplace culture and compensation studies, including Comparably’s annual Workplace Culture Awards, log onto www.comparably.com/blog.
