Summary List Placement To build a company from scratch and scale it into a solid business is a Herculean feat in the best of times. By most measures, 2020 has not been the best of times. But all year long, startup founders still raised capital in Zoom meetings, hired workers they'd never met, and created useful products and services — in the middle of a pandemic, an election, and a budding civil-rights movement. They showed real grit, from the seed-stage startups to the aging unicorns.