Data-Based Businesses, Executive Briefings, and Spotting Scams with Anand Sanwal

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Shaan Puri** (1:02)
I love how even though I tried to pick a non nerdy data one, it actually underneath the hood was a nerdy data one. You're like the, you're a data hammer and the whole world is just little nails that you're just trying to hammer with your, you know, like.

**Sam Parr** (1:15)
But dude, this is the best business there is.

**Shaan Puri** (1:17)
You're just hovering in the data like a vacuum. You're the data Dyson that's just taking in this data from everywhere you can.

**Sam Parr** (1:32)
Man, founders are, like, a lot of times not good at explaining what they do to idiots.
So can I do it? So all right, I'm gonna make you look cool. I'm gonna be your wingman.
So you run a, I don't know if you call it software or a data business, but people pay subscriptions, and your company, CB Insights, you're now getting close to 100 million a year in revenue, which is like a huge accomplishment, hundreds of employees as well. And basically, and this is the part that's kind of hard to understand for someone like Shaan and I, because we haven't run like really, really huge companies, but basically when a company that has a thousand people have to decide what software they have to buy, like let's say it's just like some customer support software or payroll or something, they need to do tons and tons of research to make sure that the business that they're gonna pick, the vendor they're gonna pick, like will stay in business or will be around for 10 or 20 years, things like that, as well as a bunch of other information. And you have crawled through what you call dirty data. So all this data out there exists, but you just put it in bits of software that make it really easy to digest and understand so a person can make a right and smart decision. And they pay you like 30 or 50 or $150,000 a year to access all that. Is that right?

**Anand Sanwal** (2:43)
Sounds about right, yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (2:44)
And more importantly, fan of the show and prolific idea guy, before this episode, before we did this episode, he sent over a Google Sheet that is 77 rows of random startup ideas, which just tells me you're one of us. And so this is great. You made our job really easy. We have a bunch of ideas we can go through.
There's a few kind of interesting CB Insights stories that you've blogged about in the past I wanna talk about, but let's do those at the end, because I think the ideas are gonna be a lot more fun. Sam, you favorited yours.

**Sam Parr** (3:19)
Sean, one of the reasons why he's fun, you said that he's one of us because the idea thing, that's true. He's also fun because even though he comes off like this polite guy who's introverted, he's a shithead, Anand's a shithead. His Twitter is hilarious. He writes this famous newsletter to 500,000 people now and he signs it with, I love you. And in his Twitter, the bio says, please buy a CB Insights subscription, I owe people money.
And he always does, he kind of pokes a bear a bunch in his stuff, so he's got a really cool attitude, but hopefully we'll get that out of you.