automate find CEO name

December 30, 2005 6:01 AM

i have a list of private companies and am looking to automate the collection of the ceo name for each one.
posted by finnstones to technology (8 comments total)

What format is it in? Text file? How is it laid out?
posted by yerfatma at 6:28 AM on December 30, 2005

Does your list contain this information, or are you wishing to dig it up from some external source?
posted by odinsdream at 6:30 AM on December 30, 2005

i am looking to dig it from external sources. web scraping, research databases, whatever.

i have the list in excel, - companyname, url
posted by finnstones at 6:34 AM on December 30, 2005

Sounds like something that could be tricky for a computer to do -- have you thought about a human service like Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk? I'm not sure if their service is up and running yet, but it'd be a decent match for your needs.
posted by mikeh at 8:20 AM on December 30, 2005

Depending on the length of the list, and how often you need to do this, creating any automation system even if you find a nice, XML-exposed or easily scraped online DB, might be considerably more work than just being a data-mining grunt (or paying a high school/college kid to be one for you). The size of your list, or how broad it is geographically will also have an impact (if they were all companies in one state you might get lucky and find a nice online state DB for that state). I don't believe private companies are required to register in any national database like public companies are with the SEC.

Thus, a list of private companies might be quite a bit harder- any resource you find might not be up to date or necessarily accurate. The company URLs will also be useless- there's hardly a standard RSS or XML feed from all company sites that expose tagged executive membership


All that said, a little web searching for me has already turned up one interesting link at Hoovers.com. While it costs money (could not find a price, even for the individual/student "Lite" option), it looks like you can search on specific companies for just the CEO, or other specific executives, by city/region/state/national, and it even exposes the results in excel.

If you have the scripting skills, and the money for this or a similar resource, it sounds like it could be what you're looking for: a one-stop programmatically accessible resource for querying the executive staff of one or more private companies.
posted by hincandenza at 8:27 AM on December 30, 2005

The annual report (form 10k) should list a publicly traded company's executive officers, including the CEO. Edgar is the free SEC database that contains all of the registered annual reports.

There is a lot of other cool information you can mine from a 10k.
posted by b1tr0t at 9:40 AM on December 30, 2005

On second read, you want private, not public companies.

Private companies are registered at the state level, and not at the federal level unless they are huge (google would have been big enough to be listed federally, but they decided to IPO instead). Certain states, like Nevada, don't disclose much information about owners. They might not publicly disclose executives either.
posted by b1tr0t at 9:42 AM on December 30, 2005

You want a way to get this data from Hoovers/D&B. I have seen some places that license this information. Someone might have an API that you can get into. Otherwise, go to their zapdata.com site and see if that may be useful to you.
posted by sachinag at 11:12 AM on December 30, 2005