Anand Sanwal

Executive Chair & Co-Founder, CB Insights · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutiveinvestorauthor@asanwal ↗LinkedIn ↗anandsanwal.me ↗

Sanwal co-founded CB Insights in 2008 and served as its longtime CEO before transitioning to Executive Chair in 2024. He previously managed the Chairman's Innovation Fund at American Express.

14statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 4.07/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 4 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Anand argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

JPMorgan is avoiding blockchain and digital currency, unlike Goldman Sachs

“When you compare that, for instance, to JP Morgan, you don't, you see JP Morgan has sort of avoided the digital currency space, right? They're not doing anything in blockchain or Bitcoin you know, like Goldman is, right?”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 10:34 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

How they sound: speaking style how? →

246 words/min while actually speaking · 22.6 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Anand Sanwal: only 1 usable question→answer exchange on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,469 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said14 Episodes1

Everything Anand Sanwal said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported

JPMorgan is avoiding blockchain and digital currency, unlike Goldman Sachs

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 10:34 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Insight

Unfunded corporate partnerships with startups are always a waste of time

“Oh god, yeah so big companies will come to you. If you're a startup here, they'll come to you and say, hey, we don't have any money, but we want to do a partnership, and like, they'll use terms like joint value creation. Like, you should just run fast from the…”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 15:00 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Disclosure

CB Insights sees a bigger opportunity competing with McKinsey than Bloomberg

“I, you know, I really think of us more, to some degree, going after, like, McKinsey, right? So if you think about McKinsey services as a pyramid, there's sort of that bottom layer, which is sort of, you know, what are my competitors doing, and where are market…”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 16:45 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Disclosure

CB Insights is running pilots with legacy credit bureaus

“I don't think we're going to be a replacement for, ah, the DNBs and experience of the world. You know, we're sort of actually doing pilots with them to see if we can integrate our data into their risk models, right?”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 6:37 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Insight

Sanwal advises B2B data startups against being the low-cost provider

“Do not be the low-cost provider. Like, just do, like, again, I'm going to be very emphatic about these, this advice, but You know, your mileage may vary. We started at some ridiculously low price, like, just don't do that.”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 12:11 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Insight

Distribution partnerships almost never work for startups

“And then, sort of similar, distribution partnerships sound good, but they almost never work.”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 15:30 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Business lags behind sports and politics in adopting predictive analytics

“Political forecasting, professional sports have sort of adopted predictive analytics and used it to make better decisions. The business world really hasn't, right?”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 1:33 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Disclosure

CB Insights stopped licensing third-party data to avoid platform risk

“Now that we've been burned a couple times by some big companies that, you know, made a strategic decision to go in a different direction, we no longer build in other people's sandboxes, right? We're gonna go get the data ourselves”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 13:18 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Insight

Selling predictive algorithms requires giving visibility into underlying drivers

“I think if people don't know who you are, and you come out and say, hey, I can predict X, Y, and Z really well with this score it's a really tough sell. So I think, you know, you have to build trust and credibility. You have to give visibility into the drivers…”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 14:33 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Disclosure

CB Insights has taken no outside capital besides NSF grants

“We're back by the NSF, so it's the only money we've taken”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 0:56 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Disclosure

CB Insights collaborated with The New York Times to predict unicorns

“Last week we worked with the New York Times on trying to predict The next unicorns, right?”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 3:27 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Disclosure

CB Insights received 143 sales emails after NSF funding announcement

“We had a funding announcement. It was a small, the NSF funding a couple weeks ago. I've been tracking it. So we've gotten a 143 inbound emails from salespeople.”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 9:15 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

CB Insights' average customer contract is around $35,000 annually

“Our business is we sell a data product like, you know, like the way Bloomberg does and not, not at quite the price point Bloomberg does, but, you know, our average ticket I think is around 35 K a year.”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 21:40 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

25% of CB Insights data is investor-submitted, 75% programmatically extracted

“Yeah, so the data that we get is, we have about 25% of our data comes now to us directly submitted from the acquirers or the investors, and 75% is programmatically extracted.”

Anand Sanwal Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 23:01 Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
Anand Sanwal, CB Insights // What's Next? (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)	Sep 14, 2015	20m

Anand Sanwal

The record, in short

Their most notable supported claim

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

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