Thread by @asanwal

1/ Assessing the health / traction of private tech companies with data has been something folks have been talking about doing for a while

We @CBinsights were initially funded by a National Science Foundation SBIR grant to tackle this

And...

@CBinsights 2/ We built a score called Mosaic to try and track private company health

It quantifies 3 dimensions about private companies:

- Market
- Money
- Momentum

cbinsights.com/company-mosaic

It's done pretty well...

@CBinsights 3/ In 2015, we worked with the @nytimes to identify 50 Future unicorns and as of Feb 2019, 24 hit the $1B mark (48% of our picks hit the mark)

cbinsights.com/research/team-…

@CBinsights @nytimes 4/ BUT, the one M missing from the Mosaic model is management

And so we've wondered if we can build a score to understand if a team is exceptional

Essentially, a way to quantify / predict if a team is exceptional

@CBinsights @nytimes 5/ Their are basic/simple signals that we know folks use around credentials/pedigree:

- school, i.e. Stanford, Ivy League
- former employers, i.e. Xooglers

But if you were building a score to assess team / individual exceptionalism, what are the less obvious signals?

@CBinsights @nytimes 6/ Here's a few (some better than others :)

- Twitter followers?
- Patents?
- Research published?
- Network centrality? (connected'ness to other exceptional ppl)
- Career / promotion trajectory?

What else?

@CBinsights @nytimes 7/ Yes - there are Black Mirror'ish aspects to doing this for sure

In our internal discussions on this @CBinsights, that's been one of the first concerns that come up (beyond how difficult it might actually be)

But it's an interesting challenge nevertheless to think about

@CBinsights @nytimes 8/ If these are the types of data / algorithm challenges you find interesting, our engineering and data science teams are hiring like mad

cbinsights.com/jobs

@CBinsights @nytimes 9/ BTW, we predicted another 50 Future Unicorns with the @nytimes in February '19

11 have already hit the mark in just the last 9 months

cbinsights.com/research/futur…

@CBinsights @nytimes 10/ If anyone is tackling this, would love to chat

There are folks programatically ID'ing influencers and there was Klout back in the day but those are/were social media driven which is an "easier" problem to solve than determining individual / team exceptionalism