The Ledger
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why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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?”
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…”
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…”
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?”
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.”
Distribution partnerships almost never work for startups
“And then, sort of similar, distribution partnerships sound good, but they almost never work.”
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?”
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”
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…”
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”
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?”
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.”