Alumni signal: 6,140 ex‑Big Tech founders and C‑levels from a people database, with Apify and Claude Code

Description and use

A curated list of 5,991 distinct former Big Tech founders and C‑levels was assembled using Apify and Claude Code, enabling stakeholders to engage early and effectively.

Problem

Stakeholders need timely lists of former Big Tech founders and C‑levels to target for investment, partnership, or recruitment, but existing announcements are late.

Outcome

The process yielded a curated list of 5,991 distinct ex‑Big Tech founders and C‑levels, with detailed segmentation and a subset of 300 profiles for deeper career insight.

Workflow

• Define filter JSON with mode, countries, pastEmployerDomains, leftPastEmployerAfterYear, seniority
• Run Apify actor in count mode to verify segment size
• Run actor in people mode with profileDetail: "row" and maxResults: 4500
• Run second actor run excluding first dataset to capture remaining 1,491 rows
• Merge results, deduplicate historical snapshots
• Export final list of 5,991 distinct people
• Optionally pull profile tier data for 300 people with compact:true

Evidence

6,140 people.

Source

Run 1, maxResults: 4500: 11 minutes 32 seconds, 4,500 rows.

Source

Run 2, the same input with "excludeDatasets": ["<dataset id of run 1>"] and maxResults: 2500: 6 minutes 19 seconds, 1,491 rows

Source