Wow, great information. Thank you once again Andre. So amazing to find someone who has been thinking about/researching this problem set. I took a different approach because I am an industry analyst. I wanted to answer different questions, such as:
-How many cybersecurity vendors are there? (Still don't have that answer, after 17 years. :-) It's a moving target with acquisitions, failures, and startups every year, but there are 3,032 in our database this morning.)
-What is the country distribution? (52.8% are in the US)
-How many in each of 17 categories?
-How fast is each growing? How fast is each *segment* growing or shrinking?
-Investments (there are 2,200 investors in 1,560 companies)
Then comes the enrichment, pulling in more datasets.
Then build a tool that allows me to filter/search/sort and export.
I have one question about your comparison of data sources. In all of these tools it is easy to find a vendor by name. If you start with a list of 108 then they are great tools. How do you generate that list? What if an investor wants to understand a particular market? Did you test their ability to give accurate search results? In cybersecurity for instance: "Find all the API Security vendors." Or, more refined: "Find all the API Security companies with 20-40 employees and less than $20 million in investment." Pitchbook cannot do this.
It took us years to find all the companies we print in Security Yearbook every year. Just to categorize them took over 4,000 hours of my time over the last five years!
Wow, great information. Thank you once again Andre. So amazing to find someone who has been thinking about/researching this problem set. I took a different approach because I am an industry analyst. I wanted to answer different questions, such as:
-How many cybersecurity vendors are there? (Still don't have that answer, after 17 years. :-) It's a moving target with acquisitions, failures, and startups every year, but there are 3,032 in our database this morning.)
-What is the country distribution? (52.8% are in the US)
-How many in each of 17 categories?
-How fast is each growing? How fast is each *segment* growing or shrinking?
-Investments (there are 2,200 investors in 1,560 companies)
Then comes the enrichment, pulling in more datasets.
Then build a tool that allows me to filter/search/sort and export.
I have one question about your comparison of data sources. In all of these tools it is easy to find a vendor by name. If you start with a list of 108 then they are great tools. How do you generate that list? What if an investor wants to understand a particular market? Did you test their ability to give accurate search results? In cybersecurity for instance: "Find all the API Security vendors." Or, more refined: "Find all the API Security companies with 20-40 employees and less than $20 million in investment." Pitchbook cannot do this.
It took us years to find all the companies we print in Security Yearbook every year. Just to categorize them took over 4,000 hours of my time over the last five years!