YouSaid · the spoken record

Anand Sanwal

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25
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2018-12-07
most recent
2018-12-07
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Great. Thanks, Harriet. Likewise, I'm a big fan. I marvel at how much you've grown this franchise. It's really, really impressive. I think a lot of the hard work, luckier you get kind of mantra is very applicable to what I've seen you do. So kudos and congratulations on all the success.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, I mean, I think when we think of our clients, right, there are these large enterprises who are trying to figure out how to grow. So I think us building sort of this operating system to help them grow is where we want to be. From a technology perspective, it's really building kind of a machine learning driven management consultant. Basically, you tell us what your challenges are and we will curate the data for you. We will run the calculations on it and we will create the presentation that you can use to your board of directors to convince them to do some transformational action. So I think that's what we're building, right? It's a very hard substantial problem, but we think if we can do that, huge opportunity for us to build a really big business and also make our clients a lot more successful, a lot more evidence driven in how they drive their organizations forward.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, so as of late, in the early days, we had lots of those, right? Because we were worried about could we make payroll? We don't have those moments as much anymore, right?”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think the fact that the company, and I don't know the number at what number, but there's sort of these moments in the company where it's almost becomes a different company, right? In a good way, but it just, we've evolved and grown to a point where the things that worked at stage one are no longer going to work at stage two. And we try to get ahead of those things, but sometimes you don't know what you don't know. And, you know, if somebody had said, hey, this is when it's going to start to break down, like get ahead of it, that would have been very, very, very helpful. You know, it might be that there is no playbook there, but if there was, that would have been really valuable to know.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think it would be dead. Yeah, I think we would have tried to force ourselves into a market that was much smaller. And yeah, I think us not having the benefit of that cushion forces us to have lots of client conversations and it still does. I mean, I probably talked to 40 customers in the last six weeks. I think we have, yeah, it just created clarity that I don't think we would have had to get if we raised money. Harder I work, the luckier I get.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Think it actually remains the same. It's influenced the psychology of persuasion. So it's a book that's helped me think about how to persuade people to do marketing better, newsletter, et cetera. It's had an amazing impact on how I've grown as a professional.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Which didn't work. Oh, I never thought of that. That's a great idea. I write that down, right? Like that's a really helpful conversation because somebody's adding value and that's an incredibly good sign at the interview stage if somebody's adding value that early.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, so there's no best answer. I'd say it is situational, right? I would say at the most general level, there's sort of two components to a good answer, right? First is they've done the homework on the company, right? So they can sort of articulate who our customers are, how they think we make money, sort of the basics of the business. And then I'd say the people who really take it to the next level are the ones who do functional or role-specific preparation, right? So as an example, if somebody comes in for a product role and they've actually signed up for a free trial and they can say, hey, I like this and here's some things that have you thought about this, right? I think that shows like a level of insight that's really good. So that second part is more functional, right? If somebody's coming in from marketing, you know, they've looked at our marketing assets, they'll have some ideas about what they like. Hey, what about this? Like, I think all of a sudden, like it goes from, it's not an interview. It becomes a conversation, right? And then I can respond and say, hey, we thought about that.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So, the question I like to open with is just tell me how you prepared for this conversation. A lot of doing well, you know, and again, at CB Insights, is about being prepared. Doing the work glamorous or not glamorous to make sure that you put yourself in the best position to be successful. And, you know, it's actually shocking how few people take time to prepare, even in interviews, right? Which you would think is probably a pretty important thing. it immediately tells me if somebody cares and it gives me a sense for like if they're going to do the work and their analytical capabilities and it's really helpful to see how somebody thinks through and responds to that question”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “This is, I think, mostly my fault. I still, in my mind, think of us like a 25 person startup. Now we're 210 people. And so when we were 25, everybody knew what was going on. It just sort of happened through diasmosis. And I think I haven't done as good a job at communicating to the team internally enough about our game plan, how things are going, our progress, what's going well, what's not going well. So I think that's another scaling challenge is just realizing even myself that we're a different company and how we communicate has to evolve given we're in multiple offices and a much larger team now.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, so again, I'll kind of speak to our mistakes, right? I try to learn from other founders who've been there, but I would say that I've made plenty of mistakes, and John and I have made plenty of mistakes on our own when it comes to scaling. I think on the people side, right, one is not realizing quickly enough that we might need a different type of leader or talent as we scale, right? The sort of adage of different wars need different generals, right? Sometimes I think that is true. I think one of the other things that we've not done enough, and I think we finally are sort of doing it hopefully going to do a better job of it, is actually getting, as we've gotten bigger, getting our senior leadership team together more. They are busy hitting their goals, growing out their organizations. They don't often get an opportunity to talk to each other maybe as much as they should. And so getting them together more frequently and sometimes for just activities that aren't just about work, I think is going to be really important. And I'd say the other kind of leadership challenge we've had.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I have no idea why things are working there, but they seem to be. And, you know, I think part of the reason for that is us just being very open to who we hire and sometimes by necessity, right? Like a most amazing engineer at Facebook when we were eight people wasn't going to come and join us, right? Like, why would they? And so we were really resourceful and really scrappy. And then I think we ended up finding people who were, you know, more outstanding than anybody we could have found at one of those pedigreed firms or from a pedigreed university.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, so I can only speak for us, right? But I think for us, like pedigree has sometimes led us astray. We are, because of how we've grown and how And who have a bit of the chip on their shoulder. And CB insights, as nicely as the newsletter is growing, is still very much challenge or brand. And so what we find is sometimes people with pedigree don't have that chip on their shoulder, right? And they don't have the ability to work in an environment that's a challenge, right? And it's where things maybe aren't as structured, right? So it's, again, not to say that we don't want to hire people who come from great backgrounds or do, but I think being open to all sorts of people has been really good for us. I think if, you know, John and myself, if somebody looked at us, if an investor looked at us back in the day, they'd have said, yeah, these are, you know, had some start experience, went to a big company, I wouldn't fund these guys, right? Like I think, you know, to some degree, that's fueled us to some degree, but I think it's also the entire CB insights to some degree. And I mean this in the nicest way. Like we're like this big eclectic group of misfits that I think if somebody just from the outside looking in looked at, they'd say, oh,”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Whatever that might be, and then we'll just try to name it, right? And I think it makes some people uncomfortable. And then a lot of people write back and they're saying like, oh shit, I didn't think anybody would actually say that you guys just did. So I think like we're sort of religious about telling the truth. You know, the example I can give you with corporates is we have a lot of enterprise clients who come to us and say, hey, should I start a corporate venture fund? Right. And I think if we were purely not as focused on the truth, our answer would be every time, yes, you should and hey, here's a subscription to CB Insights to accompany it. And I would say in three-fourths of those cases, we tell them, no, we don't actually think it makes sense for you because of our framework for thinking about it. But I think that if reverence and truth telling are sort of really important, so it doesn't, not everything that we write looks self-serving, right? Because I think that's a quick way to lose interest and lose your audience very quickly.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Very much lived by as to Yeah, I mean, I kind of touched upon it a little bit before, right? I think there's a few things. One is highly visual, right? It's just the way the world is going, right, when you look at our social media, Instagram, et cetera, right? So Ailey Visual is important. Our clients are people at large corporations. They want to make sense of things quickly. So one, I think that's one of the key things, right? I think irreverent is important, right? Like, you know, there's people doing really amazing things in our world. And so we try to highlight those. We do want to teach you something, but then there's also lots of venal, ridiculous, foolish things that go on too. And we want to kind of point those out. So I'd say that's kind of a second thing. And I'd say the third then would be kind of saying the things that we hear from our clients or when we're at a dinner event that people say about what's happening in the industry, but that actually nobody wants to put out there because everybody sort of talking about X thing or we don't really get into people, but exponential.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “But I think, you know, the key is that you're going to have a viewpoint on us. And maybe you may say it's not for me and I don't like it and I want to unsubscribe and we're totally good with that.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Out there, is there ever a question in your mind? Is this too out there? Yeah, I mean, we do, and the team sometimes will rein meat in in particular, but I think, you know, what we don't want to be is plain vanilla. We want you to either love us or hate us, but we want you to have an opinion, right? And I think that's one of the things where in B2B, especially folks want to play it safe, right? And, you know, we want you to be entertained. We want you to learn something. We want often we'll say the things that people in our industry are saying, but nobody actually says out loud. And so I think that's part of it, right? But it does, you know, we end it with I love you. It does rub people, some people the wrong way, but I would say those people are the minority, and they're probably not people who are going to become our clients, right? Like we're okay with that. Like, we have a certain personality as an organization that see the insights and you're going to buy into the product, but you're also going to buy into that. And then again, like the numbers don't lie, right? We cross 500,000 six weeks ago. We're probably at 520,000.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Read a lot of stuff, and I've done this, and I think my team does this all the time. We'll read stuff and say, well, that actually isn't that interesting. Like I thought it would be, and the way it's come out isn't. So it's either fully rethink my thesis or just start over or just wrap the whole idea together. But yeah, I'd say most of it today in B2B. And I love this because the bar is so ridiculously low. You know, most of it's just not written to be read, right? It's written because somebody thinks that content marketing is worth doing. And so they put somebody kind of average on it and average folks turn out average stuff. No, I mean, I do agree. And speaking of kind of that not written for humans, yours is most definitely written for humans. And often so much so that it sometimes is kind of quite out there, so to speak, Anand. Is there a real question in your mind? And I think this often I receive them at midnight every night in the UK and I always read it on my balcony. And sometimes I sit there and go like, wow, that really is.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “And discuss one of, as I said before, my favorite elements of CB insights, which is the B2B content element. So talk to me about this because when we chatted before, you said that most B2B content is crap but need not be. So let's start on why it's crap. So why is most B2B content crap today, Anand? Yeah, I mean, I think it sort of fundamentally comes down to for whatever reason B2B content providers don't write for human beings, right? They sort of have a perception that their clients are these robots, I think, that just want to read buzzwords and just want to read about product announcements. And so they make it sort of hopelessly uninteresting. So I think that's one of the critical parts of writing, good research or good content is to write it as if you want it to be read, right? And so I think sometimes just reading back what you've written and saying, what I actually want to read this is very enlightening because you”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And I think it's immensely rational for why these investors push this narrative, right? They're dealers of capital. And so it makes sense that companies get addicted to it. So it's in their business interest to do so. But I would say right now what we're seeing really, and I'm surprised it's continued because I candidly thought when I looked at data a couple of years ago, it would have subsided, is like the foie grind of startups, which is sort of it's bad for tech, it's bad for entrepreneurship in general because we're just sort of overfeeding startups. And again, I don't think that that makes for great long-standing companies. And the data doesn't suggest that overfeeding startups with capital is a route to success, right? We can find an example here and there, but if you look at over time, there's no evidence to suggest that just stuffing companies with capital is what makes them more successful. No, I couldn't agree more. I think Eric Paley wrote a brilliant piece on this in Tech Crunch once. So absolutely aligned to that. I do want to kind of maybe slightly move off the fun.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “It actually helps us serve our team better. It creates new opportunities for them. It creates momentum in the org, right? Like selling is its own high and retention of customers creates a high. It lets them see the impact of their work in the hands of clients. And then a lot of our team are equity owners of CBI. And so now they also know that their ownership stake in CBI Insights is becoming more valuable and that it's not getting constantly diluted with round after round of financing. And the final thing is on product market fit, I think this is talking to clients is what has gotten us there. You know, when we started the company, we thought CB Insights would”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “In our case, that clarity is very real and it's very important, right? So at a fast growing company, there's never a lack of things that we want to do. And so minimizing distraction is important. And so we've been able to just focus on clients, minimizes distractions for our team and for our senior leaders. For our senior leadership, many of them have come, I think of them as VC back company refugees. They've come from traditional VC-backed companies. And they're amazed that they get to exclusively focus on building their organization and hitting their goals, right? There's no random investor requests around the board meeting that take them away from their objective of building world-class teams, doing world-class work. And I think us not being reliant, we kind of internally refer to it as on a sort of a VC sugar daddy to sustain ourselves helps us do better work. And I'd say the final point on sort of the clarity piece is, you know, we found that if we focus on clients,”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, I still stick to that. There are three main reasons before that I think revenue funding is the best source of funding, right? One, it's the cheapest form of capital, and I'll kind of dial into these. Two, it provides clarity on where you as an organization and your team should focus. And then third, I think it helps achieve product market fit the quickest, right? So on the point about cheap capital, I think this one's the easy one. Revenue from clients is not dilutive, right? And then at the same time, it sort of has this double benefit of actually validating what you're building and telling you what you're building is real or not real, right? It's better to get that feedback from the market very quickly. So, you know, you're not chasing a ghost and that you're building something of value. So I think that's the point on sheet capital. On clarity, I would say everybody at CB Insights knows every day when we come into work who we serve. It's our clients, first and foremost, and then each other. And I know that's sort of a talking point that everybody says, but, you know,”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I mean, it's very illuminating, right? So I was a millionaire on paper. Cosmo was expected to go public. We'd filed for our S1. I was trying to get friends and family to buy equity in Cosmo and thank my lucky stars that we actually didn't get any allotments because none of those people would be friends of mine anymore. And then just sort of, I wouldn't say overnight, but pretty darn close to overnight. It all went away. And then I had to look for kind of a real job. And, you know, I mean, I think I still outside of, you know, the years of CBI, it was the year and a half or so that I learned the most in. So really great experience. But I think, yeah, seeing it how quickly it can go from good to bad was a good lesson to have early in my career.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “My first foray into startups was joining what is now a pretty infamous company in New York City startup history, which was Cosmo.com. This was during the first dot-com explosion. We raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Our business model, if you were to boil it down, was essentially buying things for $2 and selling them for $1 and hoping somehow that that would work out in volumes. And I think interestingly enough, it's sort of a business model. We're seeing some current startups trying to copy today as well. It didn't end well, as you might expect. It made a lot of great friends at Cosmo, learned a lot of great skills. Like I also learned how not to build a business.”

    2018-12-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source