Emergence interviewed 85 CEO candidates before hiring Jager McConnell for Crunchbase
Santi Subotovsky · 1063 How We Spent $7m To Spin Crunchbase Out of AOL · Jun 22, 2018 · at 8:59
Santi Subotovsky describes the search process to hire an external CEO and founder to lead Crunchbase after acquiring it from AOL.
0:00 / 0:10exact quote · 10.9s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We talked to over 85 CEO candidates for that process, and we ended up getting, I mean, we're fortunate to get Jagger McConnell from Salesforce”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Santi Subotovsky
Investors are a terrible target market because VCs are notoriously cheap
“Investors are not a great market. I mean, we're very cheap. We don't like to pay for technology and it's a small market, so it's going to be very hard to build a big company if you're just targeting investors.”
Crunchbase organically became the system of record for private companies
“Crunchbase has become the system of record for private companies, and they have done that organically without any major investment or any defined strategy.”
Emergence spun Crunchbase from AOL to build a next-gen Dun & Bradstreet
“So when we spun it out of AOL, we had the thesis that we could create a next gen B to B database. So think of next gen Dan and Bradstreet with a much more efficient and organic data acquisition model. So think of LinkedIn, but for companies instead of for peop…”
Less than a third of Crunchbase's original users were actually investors
“More than one third of the use case for Crunchbase, the lookup use case, original Crunchbase use case, We're not investors. We're salespeople. They were using Crunchbase for prospecting, and that's what got us excited. One-third was HR-related, people in the r…”
Crunchbase's historical network moat is nearly impossible to recreate from scratch
“The power of the network is something that is very hard to recreate. If you were starting from scratch, then you can create a great tool, a great platform. But if you don't have the history that crunch base has, it's going to be very hard to build that.”