After working at online companies including Twilio and Dropbox, Megh Gautam joined Crunchbase as its chief product officer in summer 2023. He came to the company inspired by the possibilities of generative AI, planning to use the technology on Crunchbase’s vast troves of company and funding data to make the service more useful. Crunchbase has rolled out several new AI-enabled features, including smarter search and filters, and Predictions and Insights that aim to tell more of the backstory behind how a company is doing and how it’s likely to fare in the future.

I talked to him about bringing AI to Crunchbase, improving the platform’s utility, and what the future holds. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. It was excerpted in the Forbes CEO newsletter.

You joined Crunchbase about a year ago. When you came aboard, what ideas did you bring with you to utilize both the data that Crunchbase has and new advancements in technology?

Gautam: I had the pleasure of using Crunchbase at every single company I have worked with. As I started working, [I was] like, what is the source of truth if I want to look at startups or if I want to look at growing companies? There was really only one, which was Crunchbase. When I joined Crunchbase, it was obvious that nothing that I would’ve launched would’ve been successful on day one without the use of Crunchbase. I was extremely passionate about making it grow and then fit into the use cases.

It is the easiest place to start a conversation: Everyone’s heard of Crunchbase and they all have a slightly different twist on it. If you [are] a reporter, you’re like, I want to look at stories. You may be subscribed to News. I met students and they’re like, I use Crunchbase to look at companies that have raised money, and I try to go after those companies to see if they have openings or even internships. All the way to the traditional: I am a prospector. I want to have a list that I want to go sell into. It was really helpful for us to understand that we mean extremely different things to extremely different people. What makes us unique is our data, our presence, and we can use that as a foundation to build and answer the questions that people come to Crunchbase to answer.

Crunchbase Chief Product Officer Megh Gautam.

Tell me a little bit about your plans to build Crunchbase’s services and use AI.

We’ve been investing in old-school AI for a while, where we had prediction models, we had regression models, but they were all the “whats”: [what] we are using [is] this. AI for us was also a “what.” That is, we’re going to use this particular technique and it’s great. When the gen AI and LLMs came to life, I was pretty singularly focused on how this helps solve our customers’ needs. One of my colleagues was like, ‘It’s AI in the service of what?’ We have to be really, really thoughtful about what problems we are solving for our customers.

I’m a big proponent of the jobs-to-be-done methodology, which is customers, prospects, people “hire” the product to go do a job for them. For the intern, it is finding a job. For the CEO, it is how do I raise more money, it’s finding investors. If you know what you’re looking for, Crunchbase had the highest quality data. It’s all a winner-take-all market because we are serving this market. We know exactly what queries are working. We’re optimizing for that.

Then we realized that if you know........

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