Today, we’re excited to announce the beta launch of CB Insights Board Search. Board search offers the power and convenience of our Deal and Company Searches, but with a focus on discovering our growing database of over 85,000 board relationships and connections.
First Some Background
We’ve been collecting board relationships for quite some time via the machine learning technology we’ve built (what we affectionately call The Cruncher). The Cruncher parses several million articles regularly and powers 75%+ of the overall data collection efforts at CB Insights, and one of the data points The Cruncher extracts is Board of Director relationships.
So as an example, you could visit Sequoia Capital’s profile and dive into Jim Goetz’s board relationships as shown below:
While we’ve had this data on investor and company profiles for some time, the Board of Director data, however, wasn’t searchable across all of our Board data.
Why Board Search?
The simple answer is that customers kept asking for it. They wanted to answer questions like:
- Who sits on the boards of the most fin tech or big data or biotech companies?
- What boards do each of the partners of Benchmark sit on?
- I have a meeting with partner X. Can I see the boards she sits on and see who else she might know?
Those questions and many others can be answered with the new Board Search on CB Insights. For example, here’s a search for board members of venture-backed FinTech companies in New York:
Alternatively, let’s say you are going to meet Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital and prior to the meeting you want to see the boards he is either sitting on or has sat on, you can find that very easily:
Finally, suppose you’re evaluating a company for an investment and want to understand who is on their board at present to do some backchannel diligence. In this example, we’re looking at the Board members of SeatGeek.
How did we build it?
Much like our other searches, CB Insights Board Search was implemented using our Go-powered APIs which make use of Amazon CloudSearch. This is an extremely fast document-based technology that has sped up our search time five-fold versus direct database queries.
What’s next?
Board search in its current form unlocks a ton of discovery potential, but we see many opportunities to expand it. Some ideas we’re exploring include
- Alerts on specific Board members when they join a company board
- Triggers about relationships you might have based on your LinkedIn or Twitter connections
Like this original incarnation of Board Search came as the result of customer feedback, we expect it will evolve as a result of additional customer feedback as well.
Any ideas? Feel free to drop them in the comments – we’d love to hear from you.
At present, Board Search is only available to paying customers at certain subscription levels.
(featured image courtesy of StockMonkeys.com)
Check out CB Insights and get a demo of Board Search.