$100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, what's up, we got Anand here. People don't know this, right before the episode, I asked the guest, I was like, oh yeah, what's your role now at the company? And I always ask this, I say, how can I brag about you? How can I say something really impressive that you've done to give you credibility right away so people know that they should listen? And I was like, can we say that your company does over $100 million in revenue? His words were, I got in trouble last time, I came on for divulging too much info, but you could say, what did you say?
Around the $100 million-ish neighborhood, around $100 million number, so we'll go with that.
You've come on before, and I was looking at the comments and they were all basically, this guy's fantastic, love his ideas, more of this guy, we need a part two, we need a part two. So here we are, part two with Anand, the founder of CB Insights, who has transitioned on to doing bigger and better things now.

**Shaan Puri** (0:57)
I don't know, he's transitioned on. I don't think he's doing bigger and better things though.

**Sam Parr** (1:02)
Other things, smaller for sure actually, smaller and worse things.

**Anand Sanwal** (1:06)
Yeah, I'm just chronically online on Twitter, so yeah, it's definitely smaller, smaller things right now.

**Sam Parr** (1:12)
We don't normally do this, but actually we're gonna make an exception for you. I wanna hear the founding story of CB Insights because you guys started out selling like PDFs and shit like that, and somehow that went from selling PDFs to starting a nine-figure company. So I gotta hear this story. Can you take us back to the beginning?

**Anand Sanwal** (1:30)
Yeah, sure thing. So I left American Express where I worked, Jan 1, 2008, had written a book.

**Sam Parr** (1:36)
Were you a big dog at American Express or were you just like a normal guy there?

**Anand Sanwal** (1:40)
I was a vice president, so it was funny why my wife's father was like, oh, you're a vice president, like next you're gonna be president, and she had like no idea, there's like 40,000 other vice presidents.

**Shaan Puri** (1:50)
That's what I used to think too. I heard VP, I was like, oh, you're next to the line.
But that's a pretty liberal job title, right? Like they hand those things out.

**Anand Sanwal** (1:58)
Yeah, they hand those out a lot to make you feel like you're doing a lot.

**Sam Parr** (2:01)
Well, give people a sense, you were making like 200 grand a year or something like that? Is that like roughly?

**Anand Sanwal** (2:06)
Yeah, 200, 250
So it was good living, but I always wanted to do my own thing. Left, gonna do this consulting, financial crisis hits, big banks are main customer. They basically are worried about staying solvent, so they just ghost us. And I'm paying two guys from my old team out of pocket, and I'm just married, so we're watching savings go down every week, every two weeks. And we worked in the credit card industry, so we said, what can we do in that space? And we started calling ex-colleagues who worked at like Capital One and Citi and other places, and basically started doing this, call it like a sentiment survey. What do you think about delinquencies and loss rates? Like the metrics that matter in that space.
And we'd give it back to them for free. And they just liked it because they were like, oh, am I super optimistic and all my peers are super pessimistic? Like, I need to recalibrate.

**Sam Parr** (3:02)
Why did you originally think that that was a good idea? Like, usually I have to see something to even know, oh, that's a business? Oh, cool. Like, did you see something that existed? And you were like, we could do that for credit card data.

**Anand Sanwal** (3:13)
No, no. So, I mean, in the beginning, we just stumbled into tons of things. Like I was just like, I can't keep paying these people out of my pocket. So, it was like, we were doing consulting for a school. Like, we just kept our feet moving and anybody who would throw money at us, like we were like, yeah, we'll do that for you. Like, it didn't matter. This was just an area. This guy, Dominic, who's my, you know, my teammate, he's like a savant on this stuff. So, we kind of were like, hey, maybe we could do this. And we were like, you know, it was just a guess. So, we started doing GLG calls, you know, the expert network calls that was like making a little bit of money, definitely not enough to cover costs.