Matt Kaufman, Head of Operations at Crunchbase, explains how investors and entrepreneurs use the platform's dataset and API. Onavo used it to identify target investors, while Facebook combined Crunchbase data with its social graph to find candidates with startup experience.
Chapters
About a year ago, AOL asked me to come in and just look at it and say, you know, it was like it was a nights and weekends project. In fact, I was working at Oodle, which is 2 buildings over and on the top floor. And we were working on selling the company and there was a lot of stuff going on. And AOL said, hey, you know, come and just look at it and see, you know, what do you think? Like, what's going on with it? And so we looked and we looked about— looked and understood about the data. But the other thing we started talking— Talking about and talking to people about was who's using CrunchBase and why are they using it. So the first set of people who were using it were investors, and it was pretty obvious why they were using it. Every time they heard of a new company, they would just look up the company, or they met a new person, they would look up that person on CrunchBase and see, oh, you founded company X a few years ago, here's who funded it, here's what happened to it, and they were using all of that data. And in fact, today, when we look at the CrunchBase API, and there is an API associated with CrunchBase, and it gets anywhere from maybe like 50 to 120 million calls per month, the main people who are calling the API are investors. And what they do is— oops— they're downloading the entire dataset of CrunchBase and they're looking for interesting stuff. They're looking for companies that just started. They're looking for companies that just failed, companies that just raised money. Companies that just hired somebody. They're mining it for all kinds of interesting stuff. So investors use CrunchBase and when you talk to a lot of people in the investment community, what they'll tell you is that it's not something they use once in a while but it's something that they use 4 or 5 times a day and it's just there. The next set of people who are using it are entrepreneurs. And I've heard some really interesting stories about entrepreneurs using it. The best one is that there's a company called Anavo. And they do some really interesting mobile analytics and stuff. It's super clever. If you're ever curious, go look at it. And I talked to the founder of Inovo, and he said, you know what, I founded a bunch of companies before. I founded a few. I don't know what a bunch is. I've gotten funding. I can get funding from anyone. I know how to do it. I have a team. I have an idea. I've done this before. But I need to find the investors who are most likely to make me successful. So he's a data guy and Inovo is a data company. So he downloaded the CrunchBase dataset, he identified all of the companies that were similar to his, and then he figured out who all the investors were that were doing very specific investments into the type of technology and company that he was working on. And then he went to those investors and he said, here's my idea and I want to get money. And they were in Israel and then they got funded, I think by Sequoia, and they moved here at the beginning of this year. Did he do that through like a regular function on your— He used the API and he downloaded the whole thing and he coded it. So what was the name of the company again? Onavo, O-N-A-V-O. This guy named Guy Rosen. So we know that a lot of entrepreneurs are using it. They're using it to find investors. They're using it also to find other partners and other people that they'd be interested in working for or working with. Business teams. So imagine yourself as a business development person and you're out there and you're trying to find who to partner with. CrunchBase is just this plethora of information. It's got all these companies in it. It's all the founders. It's who's invested. And as people try and figure out connections between yourself or your company and some other company, CrunchBase is a best place— is a great place to go. Maybe not the best, but it's great. A good example here with business teams is a few weeks ago we met with Facebook's CIO. So the CIO there, he's responsible for all of the internal systems. But a lot of the— one of the big things at Facebook that they're really focused on is hiring. And it's trying to figure out who the right people are to hire. And we met with him and he's like, you know what we use Crunchbase for? It's that we know from interviewing and surveying our own teams that the most successful people on the business side and the sales side are people that have a startup background. Facebook is really big now and when they hire salespeople, you know, it's— you can hire salespeople from a lot of backgrounds and successful salespeople from a lot of backgrounds, but Facebook found that the ones that were most successful and the best at trying to evangelize what Facebook was about was people with a startup background. But how do you find out who has a startup background? They can go to everybody's— they can go to the social graph And a lot of people in their social graph list the companies that they work at, but from Facebook's perspective, they have no idea what those companies are. They're just strings. You know, it's like Oodle, but you know, what's Oodle? Or it's Twilio, but who knows what Twilio is? So what Facebook was doing was they were taking the Crunchbase dataset and all the companies in Crunchbase, they were mashing that up with what they got from the Facebook social graph of all these people they were interviewing, and they were able to find people who had social connections or perhaps direct connections with the startup community. It's like, wow, if I can find somebody and I know that all their friends work in startups, whether they work in a startup or not may not really matter. They may be able to be successful. And I think what Facebook is doing is kind of an extreme example, but we also know that other companies use it to prospect acquisitions. Corporate development teams use it. All kinds of different examples. Thank you.
