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Overview

People data is critical for evaluating teams. You need information about founders (background, previous experience, education), executives (who’s leading the company), and employees (team size, hiring patterns, talent quality).

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What You’re Looking For

Founder and executive profiles:
  • Work history and previous companies
  • Education and credentials
  • Previous exits and successes
  • Board positions and advisors
Team composition:
  • Employee count over time
  • Department breakdown (engineering, sales, etc.)
  • Leadership team changes
  • Key hires and departures
Talent signals:
  • Where people are moving from/to
  • Hiring from strong companies
  • Founder quality indicators

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Providers

Coverage across these providers is relatively similar: not as large a gap as with company data providers. Choose based on which data points matter to you, how timely updates are, and quality of support.
ProviderStrengthsWeaknessesPrice
People Data LabsSupport has been great (personal experience). Free “cleaner” APIs have been useful in data pipelines.Uses Elasticsearch SQL which can make filtering difficult via API.$$
CoresignalRecently improved, “cleaned” datasets.$$
MixrankOffers managed SQL databases for easier integration.API can be difficult to work with.$$

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Considerations

Data privacy: People data has privacy implications. Understand what data you’re getting and how it was collected. Some regions and websites have strict rules about processing personal data. Accuracy varies: Professional profiles may be outdated. Current employer might be stale. Test data quality by comparing with your portfolio or verifying manually. Enrichment use cases: People data is often used to enrich signal data (add founder backgrounds to company records, building a holistic view of a company’s leadership team, etc.) rather than as a primary source. See Considerations for cost and vendor relationship guidance.