For a few brief moments, we actually thought this might be a good logo. Man, were we dumb.
We’d previously detailed what the CB in CB Insights stands for and how customer pressure required us to change it. But our bad ideas at that time knew few limits. One of the early incarnations of our logo is below (and above). This thankfully never saw the light of day except in some early mockups but the fact that this was even in the running is sad and scary as we look back and laugh.
If you’ve seen a worse startup logo ever, leave it in the comments. If you are able to share a logo which is worse, we’ll send you an awesome t-shirt. (see it modeled here by the sexiest team in banking)
Thankfully, a friend who worked at advertising in American Express advised against this and suggested the name was “edgy enough”. The logo icon could be something that leaves something to the imagination. And so we became this.
And then following our conversation with an investment bank, we had to grow it up and became this.
We’ve now got a killer product with customers who love us. And we are bootstrapped doing millions per year in revenue. But in the beginning, anyone looking at our name and logo would never have suspected we had a clue 🙂
If you’re interested in joining a team who now has their isht together, we’re hiring in marketing, biz dev, research and engineering. Here’s all of CB Insights job listings.