Building the Anthropological Internet: A Conversation with Quilt CEO Anurag Banerjee

In this episode of the CEO Series, Leonard Murphy sits down with Anurag Banerjee, CEO and co-founder of Quilt, to discuss the company’s unique approach to understanding human behavior through AI and anthropology. Anurag shares the inspiration behind Quilt—building a digital index of humanity to foster understanding and reduce biases. Unlike traditional research models, Quilt integrates digital data with primary research to provide a holistic view of consumer behavior, blending AI-driven insights with human interpretation.

The conversation explores the impact of generative AI on market research and how Quilt has leveraged technology to rapidly deliver in-depth insights. Anurag also shares Quilt’s unconventional business model—operating without a sales team and relying on referrals and thought leadership. As the industry evolves, he envisions Quilt building long-term trust, similar to legacy firms, while maintaining its innovative edge. This insightful discussion offers a glimpse into the future of AI-driven research and the shifting landscape of consumer intelligence.

Transcript

Leonard Murphy: Hello everybody. It's Lenny Murphy with another edition of our CEO series of interviews. And today, this is one that I have wanted to get for a long time. So, big shout out to our mutual friends Jeff Cren and Martin Phils for helping to make it happen. I am joined by Honor Banerjee, the CEO and co-founder of Quilt Honor, Glad to have you here.

Anurag Banerjee: Thank you. I'm excited. And Jeff and Martin are really nice people, so I'm excited to be riding on the coattails here.

Leonard Murphy: they are and…and they say the same about you. So there's a mutual admiration of society going on. so I'm going to let you tell the story of Quilt and then we'll dive in. so the listen I'll add some context for our listeners,…

Anurag Banerjee: I was in corporate America for a long time and…

Leonard Murphy: But let's just get into tell us your story and the quilt story and then we'll get into details.

Anurag Banerjee: Then starting 2012 I started building companies and quilt is a third in that series and…

Leonard Murphy: Happy birthday.

Anurag Banerjee: I had the good fortune of meeting my current co-founder Dr. Angad Chowri whose birthday it is today ly and exactly happy birthday Angad and our mission was to index humanity based on how they represented themselves on the internet. So we thought of Google having index information but there wasn't this index of humanity if you will. So from an anthropological perspective, Anga is a PhD in anthropology how do we build something that enables us to understand people better.

Leonard Murphy: All right.

Anurag Banerjee: When we were starting the company it was the time of Cambridge Analytica. So that was a complicated time in human history obviously for multiple reasons and we felt that there was a better way for me to understand Lenny and vice versa.  And there was this poignant moment when Angad was home and my then six-year-old daughter asked Angad what are you guys doing what are you building and I try to explain it with some tech and AI and then stepped in smoothly and he said who's your best friend and my daughter named a particular child and he said why is she your best friend and she says because I know everything about her and I'm just like yeah and that's what daddy and we're trying to  build a framework where more about the other and if you do you understand more you hate less etc. so quilt is while we are in the sort of consumer research space, we're in the people understanding business and we work with philanthropies and with marketers on helping them understand their constituents better based on everything on the internet and the AI tools are a way of getting to that end.  Amen.

Leonard Murphy: So that's fasci mentioning the friends at Cambridge Analytica the because there had been this throughput for a while from the advent of social media with social media analytics will replace primary research and no it did not replace primary research but it certainly augmented and as were all of the other data feeds the data digital exhaust of our lives right they become very useful and that's continued right and then of course Cambridge Analytica was this interesting mix of primary research plus kind of digital exhaust to create profiles of people and…

Anurag Banerjee: All right.

Leonard Murphy: Obviously was a very effective marketing solution take aside everything else right it powered marketing results They did whether you like their results but we still had not seen anything with that interesting mix that you have just applied around anthropology with that particular lens of taking this data and structuring it in a way from that anthropological lens but aligned to business issues. And it's what I found so fascinating about Quilt is I looked at you as a company and through our introductions and thought man this is what the world is going to look like from a research perspective. fundamentally my view would be there's a data layer right and that data layer may be primary it may be what we think of as kind of digital exhaust or secondary then there's a series of apps built on top of that that are aligned to a specific business issue.  So u an ad test right segmentation whatever the case may be but then with this if I understand correctly there's also kind of this human curation component that is there as well to ensure that we're capturing that anthropological component but it's all driven by technology did I capture that correctly is that kind of at a very high level the structure of the.

Anurag Banerjee: Yeah, 100%. it's fascinating you said apps because that's exactly what a sphere platform is a set of apps that sit on top of digital data. We have the ability and some organizations do input their brand health trackers, their qual studies into it and we mix and match information. So, there is no one way to know a human being. You can't know them through a focus group completely. You can't know them through a survey. And you can't know them through the digital exhaust. But when they come together, a bit of magic happens. And our job is to be one component of that magic. As we're saying, the only way to study people is by quilt, which is, incorrect and arrogant.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. No, but that's interesting. even my own journey recently of utilizing AI for that synthesis. So, it's really interesting that you mentioned That I've been from a speed standpoint. I just recently had a couple projects that dropped on my lap and they had to quick turn around and there was no way in hell I can do this in the time frames you want unless I used AI to synthesize my own proprietary data like the grit report things like that with secondary put it together with the context and deliver it and it was incredibly eyeopening for me to experience that firsthand I mean I knew it theoretically I talk about it all the time but that impact but you've done that at scale effectively. Okay, that's based on my experience I would guess that certainly less than 24 hours and…

Anurag Banerjee: Yes. Yes. We can do a multi-country segmentation study in take a guess how many weeks, hours, days, months. Many

Leonard Murphy: With the bulk of that probably just being whatever human intervention there is to point it in the right direction. Is that Yep.

Anurag Banerjee: Yeah, like a 120 page deck that's looks like this beautiful finished McKenzie/Canfar report is 24 hours or less which is my and when we saw it it was probably two weeks and it's iteratively gone down faster and faster and faster from data collection to analysis to articulation writing and representation  in that because the PowerPoint is the killer app as I always joke. so it has to be in a deck for me for this. Yes.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. that's the part that I have not found personally yet. I've played with things like Dectopus and some of that, but it's still kind of a pain in the butt. It's not quite there, but All right. So, our listeners are predominantly traditional market researchers and a mix of suppliers and buyers. and I expect many of them are experiencing an urgent need to go to the bathroom right this moment. because what you describe is incredibly disintermediating to the traditional model of research. Now I would say if you've been listening to me which this sounds arrogant for the past 10 years shouldn't be surprised because cut it was logical that we were going to see companies like you emerge. But it sounds like that your position is that you do some specific things but it is also the synthesis of primary research that is part of that process and adds more depth on the deliverables. Is that accurate? So somebody has focus group transcripts that go deeper. Yeah.

Anurag Banerjee: Yes, so we think of ourselves as primary researchers and the difference between a social listening company and we need them for so many things like campaign measurements.  So the brand watches the world melt waters talkers are amazing companies and they have a very clear Our functions to study Lenny. So if I take Lenny in this frame and it might be # greenbook which is what is studied in digital exhaust but I'm decoding the curtains the books behind you the curation that's happening in this podcast. I'm coding so many other things. We have 25 billion visual tags that we are applying. So when a TikTok video happens, it isn't just # Nike. there's a mom and a daughter running on a beach. It's about, perseverance, strength, family. All those codes that a researcher would, see while doing an ethnography or a focus group are what we get. but it is still not complete. You still want to ask the lady how much she ran, when she ran, what she ate. And I may not get all of that from the Instagram. So the complimentarity of different data sets whether it's a panel or a focus group is super important because without that the marketer will never have complete information.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, got it.

Anurag Banerjee: I believe I'm the best at internet research but that is again one component of a person's life.

Leonard Murphy: Back in the day, there was a term called netography that was going around. it kind of fell out of style…

Anurag Banerjee: Yes. Yes.

Leonard Murphy: But effectively that's what you are doing is netgraphy. I'm constant your time for our listeners.

Anurag Banerjee: I can go for a  Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: You go for a little bit longer. All Because we were chatting before this and we kind of ate up a little bit of our time with our in conversation. thank you for any additional time. sorry lots of questions go through my head. First let's talk about the impact of technology because you started building this before er exploded onto the scene. double barrel question. What has been the impact on your business from a delivery standpoint from the explosion of generative AI from a technology standpoint and have you seen a difference in acceptance of your solution on the buyer side because of what cha perplexity gro I can do all of these cool things. What do you think?

Anurag Banerjee: Yeah. So it's definitely helped us from a business delivery perspective. and then primarily in the articulation of the language. so the way AI today sits for all of us is it's primarily an LLM based, interface. But there's so many other things in AI that are not being necessarily talked about or used because we have this way to articulate the answer to a question or you have put a report and you get that output. so we have other things that we do outside of this large language model plug-in that we have…

Leonard Murphy: Right. Mhm. Yep.

Anurag Banerjee: Which writes stuff for us. the second part actually is interesting.  We launched our first generative product in 2020 using Megatron from Nvidia and I think six people signed up. Two of them are my parents. and nobody really cared and then Chad GPD dropped and our phones began to ring off the hook saying, " you're the AI guys. Can you come back and talk to us about that?" So we benefited from the trend. and Sequoia Investing always talks think about the slope, not the interception where you are at that point in time.  So the slope is wild and we're just trying to keep up on the slope. The fascinating part is that it is now getting regulated inside companies. So there are geni councils being set up and geni protocols. And so a large part of the work that Anga and I do is actually appearing in front of boards and procurement councils and saying here's the geni framework right that you should ask the questions on so you can claude does some things that are amazing and here's how you should plug it in mist versus other vertical platforms that are out there like Harvey etc. So, we're benefiting from, I guess, a consumer love for AI. And, some of that is we were just lucky to be the, I mean, Cliff.AI is a domain when we bought it seven years ago. We also bought a hundred other domains. We like AI domains are pennies in the dollar, right? and now, it's hard to get an AI domain, which is really funny. So, we've definitely had, I think, good fortune about being early.

Leonard Murphy: Right. Right. That's very cool. we had talked beforehand that you have what many probably should be a fairly novel perspective on sales that you do not have a sales team that it is all kind of inbound referral can talk a little bit about that how you got to that point and how successful that's been because I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people listening really you're. How do I not have salespeople? yes. Yeah.

Anurag Banerjee: No, I mean sales people have a great function and I think the best sales teams have so much discipline and run such amazing processes. I think the size of our business is a lucky accident. We wanted to have two or three really interesting clients that we would do interesting work for and the two of us with three or four people could manage that.  you could be in a company of 10 and do a couple of million dollars and that would be fantastic and then a client referred to another client and we said we'll just keep doing good work and that sounds really cool in retrospect but at that point in time so okay one more client so Lenny came on and Lenny referred Jeff and that was great and then Jeff moved to another company something else happened so we started blowing up and then we started a newsletter which we would send out to people which were not even our clients and just share information and knowledge and it was about weird tens like the labubu phenomena or we did brat summer before it broke and mob wife and weird food ingredients and I like to write I don't write well but I like to write and so we'd send these out and then it felt like the wrong thing to do was to force Lenny or…

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Anurag Banerjee: Any client into a buying decision  because I hate being sold to and I would rather walk into something and just pick things and buy I run away. So how can I'm sure that people like me who don't want to be pitched all the time. and so we said let's just build great content. our website has too much content. We have thousands of visitors a day that come into this just to read stuff and they spend 30 33 minutes on average. I'm like there's a value we are creating there. And now we hold on very strongly to the fact that we don't have any salespeople and it's not yet a nine figure business, but it'll get there, relatively quickly. and, that's just because of goodwill and us doing interesting work. and it feels really weird, I know, but it seems to work for us.

Leonard Murphy: I think it's wonderful now has a piece of that also been that your focus has been more on mission and value creation for clients versus acceleration. So I think you had a series but you haven't gotten on the rocket ride, right, and I'm willing to bet there's investors calling you every day. Can we throw, a gajillion dollars at you to accelerate the business, but that would change that process, it would eye you to a culture maybe that you've very purposely said, I don't want that. we want to build a good solid B. What I'm hearing is we want to build a good solid business that does good work and is provocative and helps people and through that organically you're going to achieve certain levels of success. did I capture that kind of your position like we don't want a bajillion dollars to become the next whatever big

Anurag Banerjee: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people aren't calling you every day, but it's frequent enough. And I think there are many good reasons to take capital.  And I think we can certainly build things that we're not building today because you're trying to manage your balance sheet etc. And while we are strongly profitable you're still allocating capital in a frugal young startup startup model which I know we've graduated away I think at some point in time capital because I don't think of capital as a bad thing. We have an investor who was extremely long-term multi-deade view and when we did the series A we had obviously multiple term sheets and we picked this investor because of just it do good work and give us a return when you can unlike a four-year fund cycle. but I would say being in a four-year fund cycle is also great because it teaches you certain things of aggressively saying no and…

Leonard Murphy: Is this I think it's inspirational in many ways.

Anurag Banerjee: Cutting and moving and some of that muscle we don't have. So there's definitely some I say flaws in our model that have come but it's our model at this point in time. So we'll see where it takes us. Thank you.

Leonard Murphy: What does the future look like for you both individually as a company? Where do you see things being in two years?

Anurag Banerjee: I'm so glad you said two years and not five because you can actually look out I think 6 8 months now and two years you can make a leap too. so thank you for that. I'm really really envious and impressed by the trust that a lot of the legacy organizations have built.  So when I see leaders at a Canar or IPS sauce or Neielson many others that are there they've been around for decades there's a level of trust that they've built that I aspire to have and we have that in some spaces but at the scale that they have there's what 7,000 client management team can there are these deep relationships and I've done great work over decades I want to get there I want to be the position of trust because the complicated part of AI is because anybody can write code today. So there is honestly no moat. anybody can do a quick set of analytics like you just talked about you doing that piece of work. there are tools. So the art where knowledge meets digital work is going to go to zero and you're going to be left with wisdom and trust. And so the aspiration for quilt is how do we become wiser the big companies have and how do we have the trust that they have. our technology is significantly better than anything in the market obviously and if you just ran 10 jobs in GPT and 10 jobs in us you'd see we would win all day long. but what we don't have yet is that multi-deade strong trust and reliance and frameworks that the world has enjoyed and loved. Right? So that's the hope.

Leonard Murphy: All right. So, this may sound self- serving and that's not my intention. To achieve that, people need to know about you and I think you're kind of the best kept secret out there.

Anurag Banerjee: All right. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: I mean, your strategy obviously has served you very well. but even I didn't know about you, which sound again sounds arrogant, but it's kind of my job to know about companies like you and I didn't see you on the radar. Right. So as you look forward to achieve that goal a thinking of all right we've built a fantastic word of mouth referral business obviously you get SEO benefits we have all the content right there's a great inbound funnel but to start engaging in a more active way externally whether it's through platforms like Greenbook or... or whatever it doesn't matter right but to have more of an outbound perspective to engage with the broader industry. is that part of your thinking?

Anurag Banerjee: It should be so both Ang and I suck at sales and suck at marketing in that conventional way. I realize it's a podcast. I should have framed that language better. But I mean it's the truth,…

Leonard Murphy: No, not at all.

Anurag Banerjee: We're terrible at it. we've done some sponsorships. I think the issue sometimes is,…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yep.

Anurag Banerjee: As a sponsor, they have you up on stage and speaking and it just feels like paytoplay and I'm allergic to paytoplay. I mean, I hope but having said that, we need to engage for sure and engage better. It'll also help us honestly in getting good talent. and there's senior talent that we would love to get that u and I'm making a pitch here for that. So we have several open senior positions that we love to fill and right now they don't you don't know about us, they don't know about us. So we're kind of hurting ourselves a bit here. So we need to sort of put on a brave face and go ahead and do some speaking at these events and sponsor some of these events which we'd be happy to. Okay.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. We can have a follow-up conversation about that. but setting that aside, I mean, I think the importance is because I've seen this with other disruptors over the years in the industry, the early social media analytics companies that were kind of resistant to playing in this arena and my position always was and we saw the same thing with Qualrix Zappy others it's like but you are because of your just position now you have the ability I would think to start building an ecosystem around you. And that's important for this interconnectivity. to your point, you're not going to be the answer to everything, but you have the ability to help synthesize information that can be. And if you're the tip of the spear from an engagement process through trust with your buyers, then that more active outreach and building of that ecosystem. I would encourage you to think about cuz I have not seen another company in this specific era around the AI centricity that is native right has built that it's all early stage right or…

Anurag Banerjee: No.

Leonard Murphy: it's all later stage companies that are trying to adapt but they're trying to protect their existing revenue streams and it's just not an easy transition for those companies. So I think that you're in a unique position to kind of leverage that mentality and start building that ecosystem around you. And I would encourage you to think about doing that. and again we can have an offline conversation because I think what you're doing is important, You are the equivalent of the other example would be the DIY explosion, The industry sneered at Survey Monkey, right? And they looked down at them this DIY surveys unprofessional etc etc until it came out that they had a billion dollar valuation right and then you said suck I'll say everybody said WTF and that woke people up to realize that the world had changed and that there was a lots of other use cases for technology and different solutions and different approaches that were that were complementary and to traditional market research and to ignore that was wrong and then companies like Survey Monkey started to engage and building ecosystems and became kind of nexus centers within the industry. I think you have that same potential. So sorry I didn't mean to go off on a tangent…

Anurag Banerjee: That's true.

Leonard Murphy: But that's why I was excited to have this conversation, right? I think.

Anurag Banerjee: Yeah, I was very kind. two things came to mind as you were articulating that, Lenny.  is about how we are a piece of the puzzle and how we work in great complimentarity.  So last night the US East Coast time I was talking to our common friend Martin Phils his team we had a construct with them where we've given them certain apps as you said to take to market and the point I was making to their sales team was that look this is the tip of the spear and when something happens they're going to come and say okay I want to know more about the consumer now and then you have a business that answers that and we have other apps we can do. So the symbiasis is really nice and I'm glad that that's working out. we have done about historically and an exaggeration for the last two years we've done an event in New York and we call it the evolution of culture but spelled it as AI evolution. So AI and we're trying to talk about how culture and AI work together in movies,…

Leonard Murphy: Is this I don't…

Anurag Banerjee: In theater, in music and how it delivers stuff in the marketing consumer research space. but we held that as our own invite only event and I feel that we need to open that up a lot more. We need to take that content. So, we had a really cool place where someone would take a photo of Lenny and a poem would come out, It would be Haiku poem which would just define Lenny. And to me, those those are the kinds of things that,…

Leonard Murphy: If I'd want to read that. Go ahead.

Anurag Banerjee: Are like AI music while keeping respecting the rights of AI creators. so my young son loves making music and he's like, oo, I want to use a co app, but it's what's nice is he can't make a song that is like Noah Khan's, copyright on it. But that intersection of cultures of film, fashion, poetry, beauty, music with AI is such a vibrant space. And yes,…

Leonard Murphy: Yep. Yeah,…

Anurag Banerjee: We should also answer whether people want to drink a Coke or have a burger or wear Nike shoes. But I want to take that construct and whether it's screenbook other spaces I want to talk about that and less about is somebody aware of your product and into that general format going to have a lot more fun with the technology.

Leonard Murphy: I totally agree. Before this call, I was actually working with I've been with all the different LLMs you have been and…

Anurag Banerjee: Yes. Nice.

Leonard Murphy: They do different things, but my current favorite is Grock 3 just because I like the interface is so it's scary conversational. and creating a blog post on the theory of consciousness, right? And pulling in from all these different sources. because I've been just kind of obsessed with this idea of the role of intuition and how does that play and anyway whole other conversation but to your point that it's fun and interesting and engaging to be able to pull these disperate sources of information together around something that doesn't really have much business value. it's an interesting thing that I just enjoyed thinking about.

Anurag Banerjee: Thank you.

Leonard Murphy: So I love that idea of having a different perspective in the business comes as people connect the dots internally and I could take that and apply it to this business issue that we have. So we should have a follow-up conversation about that. Yeah, you've been very generous with your time more than we anticipated and we could go on for a very long time. Glad that you're working as the audience knows I'm an adviser to pure profile so that's great you're working with Martin that's really cool I'm sure that we will have other conversations in the future and I hope that we do have the opportunity to either do this or to help expose you in some way to the broader world because I think what you're doing is emblematic of what the future of the industry is going to look like. and for our audience members, that doesn't mean that your existing businesses are inferior in any way. I think you're just building the next generation mousetrap based on existing needs. And it's really cool and exciting. Yeah.

Anurag Banerjee: Thank you for having me on, Lenny. I appreciate that. And thank you for, exposing me to the audience. I am grateful. This might be the beginning of us getting our act together on how we communicate publicly.

Leonard Murphy: Yes. I've looked at your site and your content. you are pretty good at communication. the one last question on that note. Do you know the folks at CB Insights? I love you.

Anurag Banerjee: I read them. I love their content. I think Anand and I overlap with American Express. So his career's been such an amazing arc. and I love that he finishes every newsletter with love an amazing I love you. I just spectacular touch and he did it well before it was cool to say stuff like this. So I'm in awe of…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah.

Anurag Banerjee: What they've built.

Leonard Murphy: The strategy you're describing obviously reminded me of theirs as well. just creating really good and engaging content. there's very few newsletters I look forward to every day. And that was absolutely one of them because of it. It felt personal even though it was not necessarily personalized to me. but it felt very personal. interesting that you overlapped a little bit and kind of take a different approach. Okay. where can people find you? I will connect with you directly.

Anurag Banerjee: Right. Yes. Quilt so it's honor atquilt.ai is a great way to find me. I respond to the email happily on the website we have a few places but our website is a little hard to find a contact because we don't want to have too many popups and CTAs there. So it's anoragill.ai is a great way to find me. I'd be happy to chat with whoever would like to reach out.

Leonard Murphy: All right. Thank you so much for the time. thank you to our listeners,…

Anurag Banerjee: Thanks, Lenny.

Leonard Murphy: to sponsors, producers, that is it for this edition of the CEO series. We'll be back soon with another one real soon. Thank you. stop.