HERE’S RAPID GROWTH, and then there’s the sort of rapid growth that can melt the enamel right off your damn teeth. Surely that’s what it felt like for the founders in this edition of our annual list of America’s fastest-growing private companies. For they have this year. • The top slot goes to BlockFi, a crypto outfit that, at presstime, appeared likely to weather the crypto winter that has battered and bankrupted so many others—a testament to its adoption of rigorous practices more common in traditional finance firms. As for its growth? Well, let’s just say you have to see those numbers to believe them (page 66). • Still, perhaps no one embodies the spirit of the class of 2022 like Vlad Kytainyk, a Ukrainian immigrant and CEO of No. 50, Kitrum. He made a plan to get his software team in Ukraine out of harm’s way before Russia invaded, and executed it without losing staff or clients (page 96). Kytainyk, like Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed his troops with steely confidence. “If you can’t do that,” he says, “why are you running this business?” That’s the Inc. 5000 brand of leadership—with teeth.
