Crunchbase CEO Talks Team Diversity, Product Pipeline

Despite entertaining a 27 million user base, 40 percent of which is international, Crunchbase CEO Jager McConnell isn’t satisfied with his reach. Over the next year, he’ll be leading the online data company to roll out a number of new products and transform the team composition.

Today’s Crunchbase

In its current capacity, Crunchbase targets companies and individuals looking for information within and across their sectors. The platform can be used to discover opportunities for sales, partnerships and recruitment, or it can serve specialized purposes. A real estate specialist, for example, can search for expanding businesses that may be in need of office space.

The company offers Crunchbase Pro for individual consumers and on Thursday launched Crunchbase Enterprise, which “gives you the same prospecting opportunities but sort of supercharges it.” The latest product enables salesforce.com, inc. CRM integration as well as extraction of datasets into Excel spreadsheets and internal systems.

New Technology

The Enterprise rollout will soon be followed by a new version of Crunchbase.com, an Android app and an update to the iOS app.

Recent Series B funding will also help expand the product offering to include Crunchbase Marketplace later this year. The new platform will feature aggregated data from vast partner sources, which can be filtered depending on user needs.

“So building that corporate community master record is a big challenge, and frankly that funding is going to help us hire the right people and get an engineering team on staff that can deliver on this big vision that we have,” McConnell said.

Crunchbase Marketplace will ultimately supplement three existing ways the company collects and sorts data. Presently, the information comes from community submissions, machine learning and Crunchbase data analysts.

New Team Composition

As McConnell diversifies his portfolio, he’s also diversifying his team.

With a crew that’s 43 percent female and 49 percent nonwhite, the CEO is looking to see that diversity reflected proportionately across departments. He's particularly focused on enhancing the engineering staff.

“The impact to culture, the impact to productivity, having diverse thoughts and different perspectives leads to innovation, which ultimately leads to the long-term success of the company,” McConnell said.

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