Matt Kaufman, Head of Operations at Crunchbase, explains how the startup database began as a 2007 TechCrunch summer internship project. Early contributors Mark McGrenaghan and Henry Rourke helped build what grew organically into a major resource for tracking startups and investors.
Chapters
So I think what I was going to do at the beginning is just go through a little bit of a history of CrunchBase. So CrunchBase is the definitive database of startups and investors and entrepreneurs. It was started about 7 years ago as a summer internship project at TechCrunch. So at the time, TechCrunch was very small. It was Arrington. There was probably maybe 1 or 2 other editors. And they had this problem, which was that every time they talked to a company or a founder, They'd have to go try and refigure out, like, where did that company get money, and who were the co-founders, and did they start another company, and like a lot of basic information that it just took a whole lot of time. So that was problem number 1. Problem number 2 was that there were way too many companies to cover than the editors of Crunchbase could possibly do. So Mike had this great idea. He said, hey, we'll just create this database, all these companies and founders. They can just put their data in there and you know what, it's sort of like being on TechCrunch and so they should do it. And so this thing was built as a summer internship project. I wish I knew who the people were. Do you remember the names?
Mark McGrenaghan and Henry Rourke.
Yeah, so I think that was 2007.
They quit school to do it.
So they built this thing, they put it out there and then it's there, it's running, And then basically not much happened with Crunchbase. Like the site that's out there today, actually up until a few weeks ago on the homepage it still talked about Google Wave and MySpace and some other stuff like that on the homepage, which I thought was kind of cool because it just demonstrates how long it's been since there was a real upgrade. But what happened was people started putting in data. And people really did just start filling it out. They filled out company profiles and they filled out profiles about investors. And all this stuff— let me see if I can— so this is Crunchbase, this is what it looks like, not very exciting. But people started filling out all of that information and slowly the dataset grew to a point now where if you look at the dataset, there is about 425,000 profiles and those profiles have slowly garnered a lot of traffic. And you can see our traffic is a nice straight line, it just goes up and to the right, it's like The best line you can have, I guess. And all of this happened in here from 2007 really up until the beginning of this year, all organically. And it's not to say nobody was working on Crunchbase. There were people who were working on making sure that the quality of the content was good, like Janae Tier over there. And there were a couple of engineers who were making sure that the platform didn't fall over. But their real job was making sure that TechCrunch ran. They were the TechCrunch engineers. And obviously TechCrunch took precedence. I mean, you didn't want TechCrunch to go down as a website. So it just kind of grew organically. And it was great. So,
