Jun 11, 2024 · 1h 14m · my-first-million
$100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode, CB Insights founder Anand Sanwal joins Shaan Puri and Sam Parr to share actionable frameworks for building high-margin B2B data companies, before analyzing emerging business ideas and his vision for an entrepreneurship boarding school.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 36.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 4.6 Guest teaching 5.0 Guest disagreement 2.0 The hosts pushing back 2.5
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:00:51 Dismissing sportsbook benevolence
Anand firmly shuts down Shaan's theory that sportsbooks like DraftKings would willingly subsidize addiction clinics, calling corporate ESG claims pure lip service.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 21:21 Pressing on $800M buyout rumorsSam puts Anand directly on the spot regarding headlines about an $800M CB Insights sale, asking if walking away with hundreds of millions would be enough.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 15:21 Data has no intrinsic valueAnand systematically breaks down why novice data entrepreneurs fail by mistaking raw data collection for customer edge in his ECO framework.
The host holds their own ▶ 27:16 Live financial lookup on Raiser's EdgeShaan demonstrates research capability by instantly pulling public filing data for Raiser's Edge, revealing $1B in revenue and $250M in free cash flow.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The PDF Era: Bootstrapping via High-Ticket Sentiment Reports | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Anand details the founding story of CB Insights, starting with manually phoned sentiment surveys sold as high-priced PDFs. Shaan demonstrates domain knowledge regarding hedge fund channel checks and front-running quarterly earnings, while Sam asks about the small sample size. | |
| Sponsor Break: Core Career Skillsets and Copywriting Guide | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Following a sponsor read on career copywriting, Anand discusses the role of trust in data pooling and recounts having to rename Chubby Brain to CB Insights after Goldman Sachs refused to cite a goofy source on slide decks. | |
| The ECO Framework for Profitable B2B Data Companies | 3 | 7 | 3 | 1 | Anand schools aspiring founders on why data has zero intrinsic value without an actionable customer edge, laying out his ECO (Edge, Collection, Opportunity) framework. The hosts primarily listen and prompt him to apply the model to CB Insights. | |
| Capital Efficiency and Responding to Acquisition Rumors | 6 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Sam presses Anand on leaked reports of an $800 million sale process for CB Insights. Anand pivots to discuss successful data co-op models like Raiser's Edge, where Shaan pulls up financial metrics showing over $1 billion in revenue and strong cash flow. | |
| Monetizing Data Exhaust and Talent-Sourcing Concepts | 6 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Shaan pitches data concepts around executive vesting schedules and tech founder investing options. Anand critiques the recruiting idea as better suited for a high-touch services business than a pure data play. | |
| Sanwal's Next Mission: The School of Entrepreneuring | 4 | 6 | 3 | 4 | Anand delivers a critique of conventional schooling and pitches his experiential School of Entrepreneuring modeled after IMG Academy. Sam challenges whether parents will buy into an unproven educational brand, which Anand counters with homeschooling demand data. | |
| Experiential Retail Models: Slime Museums and Autonomous Markets | 5 | 5 | 1 | 3 | Anand shares back-of-the-napkin economics on Sloomoo slime museums and autonomous micro-convenience startup Dillo. Sam investigates Dillo live and pushes back on its maturity after finding only six app store reviews. | |
| The Sports Betting Epidemic and Physical Addiction Clinics | 6 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Anand discusses the online sports betting epidemic and proposes commercial real estate addiction clinics. Shaan suggests betting operators might fund these clinics via CSR initiatives, which Anand rejects as naive corporate lip service. |
Statements from this episode (19)
Sanwal: Profits From Crisis Sentiment Reports Funded CB Insights
“You know, we knew from the get go, mortgages had a lifespan of, like, the crisis had a lifespan, and we knew credit cards would have that too, but it helped us put away enough money and got, you know, me paying the team out of that business versus out of savin…”
Sanwal: Early PDF business made around $700,000 in its first year
“We probably made, like, 700,000 dollars.”
Sanwal: Goldman Sachs forced Chubby Brain rebrand to CB Insights
“We tried to sell Chubby Brain, like, the service to Goldman, and they were like, we can't use a service called Chubby Brain, and so and, like, you know, they weren't, it wasn't just them being, like, hoity-toity. They were like, listen, at the bottom of every …”
Sanwal: Fintech, AI/tech, and marketing are top verticals for B2B data
“Financial services AI companies now are big buyers of data tech and then, like, the sales and marketing ad tech world. Like, those are your big three verticals that you want to think about generally for, you know, and there are big data businesses and other ve…”
Sanwal: Single-source data hacks create fatal supply chain risk
“On collection, the big one is folks sometimes have a hack. They're like, oh, I got to in with this person and they can give me this exhaust data from their company. The problem with companies built like that is like when you lose access to the hack, the whole …”
Sanwal: ZoomInfo built early datasets by manually calling company switchboards
“Henry Shuck at Zoom Info, like they used to call into company switchboards or whatever, and they'd be like, hey, what's Bob's extension? And like, that's how Zoom Info would get, you know, Bob at IT's, you know, number and extension. So a lot of really good da…”
Sanwal: CB Insights Bootstrapped for Six Years Before Raising Capital
“We bootstrapped for six years. I mean, we were, like, we're a very pain-tolerant company, I would say. So we raised after six years.”
Sanwal: CB Insights has potential to exceed its $800M valuation
“I think, like, I think this business, especially with generative AI, has, like, a lot of legs to grow. But yeah, I mean, selling for eight hundred million back, you know, then Would have been a fantastic outcome for everybody involved, but yeah, I think we can…”
Sanwal: Data companies must evolve from proprietary sets to workflow tools
“So I think that that's an, a really impressive formula going from data to data co-op to workflow tool, right? I think like that's kind of the future, right? Because you want to get into people's workflow,”
Puri: Milk Road used proprietary crypto whale research as free marketing
“We would go to like 25 of the biggest crypto whales. These are guys who are placing tens of millions or a hundred million dollar bets on NFTs and coins... And we interviewed them and we talked about how, what's your bullishness? What's basically sentiment on t…”
Sanwal: Recurring data subscriptions create a relentless production treadmill
“Once you start a data business, like you are now on a treadmill, right? Like you have to, somebody's mind a subscription, right? So what Sean did was smart in the sense of like, if it wasn't working, he didn't have to keep doing it. Right. But once you sell it…”
Sanwal: Building an IMG Academy-style entrepreneurship school for 6th-to-12th grade
“What I'm trying, what we're working on is building a school of entrepreneur-ing, so it's a in-person, sixth to 12th grade school, you know, if you know the IMG Academy, right, like, for sports, right, like, the basic idea is, like, people go pro in sports at a…”
Sanwal: School of Entrepreneuring will not be a VC-backed exit-driven startup
“This is like my significance box, right? And so I might start two, three other companies. Like I'm trying to, we're trying to think of an engine to like build 200,000 companies. So this is like my next thing for
Till, like, you know, when I die at my desk, lik…”
Sanwal: Sloomoo Institute slime museums generated $30M in revenue last year
“I think I just read that they did thirty million, now they have LA, Atlanta, a couple other places, so I think last year they did thirty million at these slime museums”
Sanwal: Dillo invests $100K per residential autonomous store with revenue sharing
“What these guys do is they put this convenience store, it's, like, Amazon Go style, so it's, you know, one person goes in, they sort of, they badge in Only one person can be in the store. They're on a clock, so they got to get out in a certain amount of time, …”
Sanwal: Dave & Buster's enables peer-to-peer gambling on arcade games
“I think Dave & Buster's now allows gambling on, like, Top Shot. Like, you know, Sean and I are playing against each other, like, I can literally bet Sean, like, hey, I'm gonna get 10, and you're gonna get less.”
Parr: Sports betting apps assign account managers to encourage losing gamblers
“DraftKings or whatever? They have account managers. So if you become, I read about this one woman who was making like, a 150 grand a year, so whatever that puts her at in terms of class, but not like crazy wealthy, and she's, and she lost all of her money, and…”
Sanwal: None of 80 surveyed teachers use proven daily quizzing methods
“Like, it's, like, proven stuff that says, you know, if you want a young person to, like, learn something, you should quiz them daily. Like, it's shown to work, but, like, if you talk, I've talked to probably 70 or 80 teachers, not a single one can, does it.”
Sanwal: Education should enforce proven teaching scripts rather than artisanal improvisation
“We still treat education very artisanally, right? It's like, you know, it's like everybody's an artist. Like, oh, Sam likes teaching history this way, and Sean likes teaching it this way, and Anand likes teaching it this way. It's like, hey, just go and, like,…”