What is the importance of Clearbit's proprietary data set towards product-market fit and how has data commoditization affected the company?

I think it's important to know that person and contact data is not proprietary. It's email addresses, phone numbers, number of employees, location—most of it, almost all of it is public data or public facts. It really is a coverage question more than a proprietary question. Which provider has the most amount of whatever field you care the most about. But there's no moat there except time. Finding this data is very, very easy, and hundreds of companies have done it.

Our differentiator in the beginning, is that we could do it on any company, no matter the size, because we started with the website, then hit all these public sources, and could do it in a couple seconds. You could give us a domain name we've never seen before, two or three seconds later, we have a profile about that company. That's how our network built out. If we hadn't seen something, we could go find it. That was the tech and the differentiator. Which made us really good at long-tail and smaller companies, when the incumbents weren't, because they were focused on the Fortune 500 or 5,000.

Over time, they got better at the long-tail. Everyone did. Web scraping became more of a thing, APIs evolved, the technology evolved. Salesforce made their libraries much easier to work with and integrate with. Today, I would say, in person and account data, there's very little differentiation left. The place where there's proprietary data today is around insights and signals. Not who is this, not the facts of what this account is and who this person is, but what have they done recently? Do I have any signal that they're in market? Do I have any signal that they're not in market? And that comes down to what's changing on their website? What's in the news? What websites have they visited? Have they visited my website? And the Reveal product is our biggest differentiator in that world today.