Uncrunched

The valuations of messaging apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat and others are, obviously, stunning.

Twitter is our de facto identifier now (think of all the times you see Twitter handles on TV news and other media). Not Facebook, and certainly not Google.

Allowing proper private communication among users is an obvious easy win. And yet Twitter has never really cared about private messaging. Direct messaging is a long neglected product, and Twitter doesn’t seem to care much about it.

I wonder if Twitter execs regret not paying more attention to private messaging, and if they occasionally fantasize about the extra tens of billions of dollars they might have added to their market cap if they had done so.

It’s not too late.

In the early days of TechCrunch I realized we could really use a data repository to help keep track of all the financing, M&A and people news around startups.

We’d cover all of these things as they happened but it was a huge pain to go back and research historical information. I thought about creating a basic wiki for startups but the lack of structured data was an issue. If I created a profile for a person I wanted there to be links to the companies that person worked for automatically created. Adding them in by hand wasn’t going to work, and anyway the links would quickly become stale.

So we built CrunchBase in 2007, a wiki with structured data, and started dumping data into it. We quickly abandoned the first iteration and by late 2007 we had a pretty good application that served the community well for years.

When AOL acquired TechCrunch in 2010 I kept telling them that CrunchBase was probably the most valuable thing they were buying. It took a while but they finally got it and started putting real resources towards improving it.

Today there are an astounding 23 people working on CrunchBase, led by Matt Kaufman. I’ve known and sometimes worked with Matt for some 15 years now, and he’s a very good product guy. It’s in the right hands.

Yesterday CrunchBase relaunched and has some really nice new design and data organization features. You can read all about it on TechCrunch.

I really like where CrunchBase is heading. I do urge them to keep the data open to all, something we built in from the beginning. This is community data, edited by people in the community, and it’s important that the community continues to feel free to use and repurpose the data.

Some rules around the API are needed, and there have been some bad actors that have taken advantage of the openness of CrunchBase in the past. But the benefit to everyone in having this data available and open far outweighs the damage done by those very few bad actors.

Congratulations to the team on a great relaunch. I continue to use CrunchBase daily and am so proud to see it continue to grow.