Anand Sanwal

Executive Chair & Co-Founder, CB Insights · 2 appearances 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.

18statements → 9claims → 4claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.89/5average certainty → 1.78/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 27said about them ↓

4 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 5 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 8 assertions · 5 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 5 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
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.”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 56:53 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Anand Sanwal on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

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

Disclosure
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…”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 35:40 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Insight
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,…”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 1:10:58 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Assertion Supported
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.”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 56:53 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 1:10:32 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 …”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 13:29 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Insight
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…”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 16:49 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 22:08 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Insight
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,”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 23:47 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Insight
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…”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 29:36 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Disclosure
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…”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 41:15 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Disclosure
Sanwal launched Formidable Fellowship with $500,000 to fund young founders
“We started a non-profit with 500 K. We're given thousand dollar grants to middle and high school entrepreneurs, and so kind of, I just had our first class Had 23 grantees.”
Anand Sanwal Mar 3, 2025 ▶ 1:33 He launched a sweaty startup in high school. Now he'll be a millionaire by 18
Disclosure
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…”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 9:10 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sanwal: Early PDF business made around $700,000 in its first year
“We probably made, like, 700,000 dollars.”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 12:02 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Insight
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 …”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 18:14 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Assertion Supported
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…”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 20:29 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Assertion Supported
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.”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 21:09 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Assertion Supported
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”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 47:20 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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, …”
Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 ▶ 50:19 $100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal

The other half of the tape: Anand Sanwal's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 25 times in 8 episodes on My First Million. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Sam Parr 18Shaan Puri 7

Statements about Anand Sanwal, by other people (2)

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Parr estimates CB Insights generates roughly $100 million in annual revenue
“You started a company called CB insights that is in the range of a hundred million dollars in revenue or something like that.”
Sam Parr Mar 3, 2025 ▶ 2:15 He launched a sweaty startup in high school. Now he'll be a millionaire by 18
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Shaan Puri: CB Insights made $300k pricing a PDF up to $100k
“The best thing that ever happened to us was my buddy was like, no, no, no, you need to charge like 12,000 dollars minimum, 25,000 as your medium, and then have a 100,000 dollar option. He's like, dude, it's a PDF. Like, are you sure? And that's what they did. …”
Shaan Puri Aug 26, 2024 ▶ 12:20 Jesse Pujji on Bootstrapping a +$1B Business + Selling To The Ultra Rich

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
00821542021202220232024episodesmentions
0242021202220232024episodes it came up in
0022442021202220232024episodesmentions per episode
2024 11 mentions in 3 episodes 4 per episode
2023 13 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
He launched a sweaty startup in high school. Now he'll be a millionaire by 18 Mar 3, 2025 4m
$100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable ft. Anand Sanwal Jun 11, 2024 43m
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