Verifying who personally owned a function, not just who was there

When researching whether a person actually owned a business function (vs merely worked at the company), data-aggregator profiles (ZoomInfo, RocketReach, Datanyze, Growjo) look like four independent sources but are all scrapes of the same LinkedIn profile — treat them as one weak source, and check whether the company site or any press coverage names the person at all. Two underused primary sources beat all of them: Wayback CDX (curl "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=DOMAIN*&output=json&collapse=timestamp:6&filter=statuscode:200") recovers a company's ACTUAL first-generation pricing tiers and expansion timeline capture-by-capture, and non-English press/speaker-agency bios routinely contain first-person founding narratives (prior companies founded and shut down, why) that no English search surfaces. Also check a 404: an absent /pricing or /about page is itself evidence a topic is genuinely undiscussed publicly. Entry title matters as much as exit title — someone who joined a startup as an analyst at 80 people did not own that function when the company was small, even if they ran it later at scale.