Sam shares a tip from a friend who does daily private company research: in the UK (Companies House) and Australia (ASIC), privately held companies above a revenue threshold must file annual reports. These are publicly accessible and often free. The conversation pivots to the broader business opportunity of building clean, consumer-friendly interfaces on top of this kind of raw public data — citing Import Genius as a proven model.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Finding Private Company Financials [00:00:00]
Sam: I have a friend who does some kind of daily private company research, and I was like — how are you getting all this data? He said: did you know that in Australia and many countries in Europe, if you’re a privately held company above roughly $40 million in revenue, you have to submit an annual report?
I didn’t know that. So I went to the Australian version and the British version. Britain’s is called Companies House — completely free. You can look up all these companies and see their dividends, revenues, executive pay. Australia’s equivalent is ASIC — the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, like their version of the SEC — and that one costs a small fee per report.
My friend built a company in Great Britain around this. He aggregates it, presents it, makes it searchable. Simple, beautiful business. I looked up Ibis World — a research company similar to mine — and I could see the founder just pays himself $10 million a year. It’s right there in the filings.
The Opportunity: A Layer on Top [00:03:00]
Sam: The idea is — and these might already exist — you could build a layer on top of these public databases to make them user-friendly, searchable, and clean. Take the raw filings and make them easy to navigate.
Import Genius is a great model here. It’s publicly available customs data. Their interface isn’t even that polished, but it’s clean enough to find what you’re looking for, and it’s a real business.
If there’s an entrepreneur in Australia who wants to take ASIC and build a consumer-facing product on top of it — or maybe that already exists — that’s a cool opportunity. Same thing for any country with mandatory private company disclosures.
Shaan: And I wish that existed in the US.
Sam: Yeah. That’s the problem with the US version — it doesn’t.