[Raised $117 million] Ep.135 - The First 100 with Bob Moore, co-founder of Crossbeam | Network Effect | Atomic Networks | Founder-led Sales | SuperNodes Marketing | Virality

Bob Moore is the founder of Crossbeam, which is a platform-led ecosystem that helps companies build sales partnerships by understanding their overlapping accounts using a process called account mapping. There is a vast network effect as customers attract other partners to the network. The Company raised $117 million from notable investors such as Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with participation from prior round lead investors Redpoint Ventures, FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital and Uncork Capital, along with Salesforce Ventures, HubSpot Ventures and Okta Ventures.

So far that network has grown to 18,000 companies. 

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Transcript

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Let's do it. Broadcasting from around the world. You're listening to the first 100. A podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers. Here's your host, Hadi Rodwan. Bob, good to have you on the show. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. How are you? Amazing. Thank you for stopping by. And we'd like to start with a very quick introduction for our listeners. Bob Moore is the founder of Crosspeam, which is a platform led ecosystem that helps companies build sales partnerships by understanding overlapping accounts between each other. And this is practically a network effect story, which will dive into it. And you've raised today the 117 million from multiple investors like Andreessen Horowitz, First Mark Capital, First Round Capital, and many more. Take us to the top, Bob. How did you end up in that space? I know you're not the first time founder, so you've built two companies. Tell us, how did Bob end up being an entrepreneur? Yeah, it's a great... question. I'm a, I think before being an entrepreneur, I've always been a huge data nerd. I think it's all rooted in that. And if you go all the way back to my time in college, I studied computer science and statistics. And my first real business, at least in software was, I built a poker odds calculator as part of a class project and part of my senior thesis. And that Poker Odds Calculator was a piece of software that I sold online that became really, really popular and kind of became basically my livelihood throughout my sophomore and junior years of college. And I learned so much by doing that, but one of the most important lessons was how incredibly scalable and profitable at scale software could be. And I really fell in love with that universe and that business model. But in particular, software that used data to allow people to make smarter decisions. And I think if you look at the trend of the companies that I've built, that's, that's kind of been a through line that's always been there. It's like, how do we give people access to data that they otherwise would not have had that will somehow become actionable or fit into the flow of how they make decisions? So whether it's giving you advice on how to play a poker hand. or it's helping you cultivate a bunch of ecosystem-led growth strategies that help you grow faster through your partner ecosystem, it's that same through line. It's like more data, better decisions. When I graduated from college, I went to work at Insight Partners, the venture capital firm, and really did that just to get a rapid-fire education in what makes software companies actually work at scale. My poker business was just me, kind of one man solo show. Uh, and Insight allowed me to see companies in all different stages, good, bad, and ugly, uh, and that was really a formative experience. But the whole time I was there, I just kept thinking about starting a company. And it's also really hard to have a job where your job is to basically like slide a check for $50 million across the table to some other person who gets to go off and use it to build something awesome. And. Like you can only do that so many times before you start to think you're sitting on the wrong side of the table. Um, there at least that was, that was the case for me. So, um, yeah, in 2008, after a couple of years at Insight, I, um, uh, I left with a, uh, my co-founder of my first company, RJ Metrics, and, uh, I'm sure we'll get all into this, but since then I've built, uh, three SaaS companies, um, RJ Metrics, Stitch Data, and now Crossbeam. Um, and that's, uh, that's been the journey. Amazing. I mean, we'll go back to the earlier companies, but if I'm an eight-year-old, what's actually Crossbeam? How does it work? Yeah. So we help companies figure out where their data overlaps. It's really that simple. So if you are working with a partner or you're looking at potentially acquiring another business, or you have a technology integration that you want to build and you want to make sure it's worth building, or you're trying to build a go-to-market plan where you're going to sell your product alongside another product and some kind of joint venture, these questions pop up. It's questions that could be really simple, stuff like, hey partner, how many customers do we have in common and who are they? Or are my sales reps currently trying to sell to any of the same companies as your sales reps? And historically, these questions are actually very difficult to answer. There's technological reasons why it's hard, like Our data lives in different places. Maybe I keep it in Salesforce and you keep it in a Google Sheet and our third partner keeps it in HubSpot. There's kind of data modeling related issues where like I'm selling to Delta Airlines and you're selling to Delta Fossets, right? And how do we make sure that we kind of know that a match is a match? But probably more important than any of that is the security and privacy implications of, you know, if you want to draw a Venn diagram between my closely held sensitive data and you're closely held sensitive data, math is working against you because you cannot draw a Venn diagram unless you get all of the data from both of the data sets. Well, this creates like a data standoff because I'm not going to give you my entire customer list just so we can find the five that we have in common and vice versa. So what do you do? And historically, the way companies solve for this is this age old practice called account mapping. which is really just amounts to emailing a bunch of spreadsheets back and forth without the bosses finding out about it. And it is a rampant, rampant practice inside of basically every enterprise of any kind of scale and, and most kind of mid market, mid stage companies as well, regardless of their industry. And that process is fundamentally flawed and very broken and ultimately, you know, not particularly secure or compliant. Crossbeam solves all of the ugly stuff I was just talking about, right? Like we're. We're basically almost like an escrow service for data. We sit in between companies who are collaborating with each other and we ingest the data no matter where it's coming from. We standardize it automatically on our universal data models. We can compare data from anywhere. Our matching algorithm figures out what matches and why. And then every single person involved in the network has absolute ownership and control over their data. They get to say who can see what, when and under what circumstances. And they're able to dictate, you know, that maybe they share a little bit more with closer partners. Maybe they just share aggregated statistics or rolled up analyses with, you know, less mature partners or everything in between. And, you know, in a lot of ways, it's almost like LinkedIn for data, right? Like you can't connect with someone unless you've both opted in. It's very rare that people connect unless there's. a real life relationship between those companies already in place before they start to cross beam with each other. But yeah, we're up to 18,000 companies that use it now, including the overwhelming majority of the large late stage publicly traded enterprises in the software category. Amazing. I mean, I'm very curious to know how did you uncover that there's a pain point there, because this is very specific. It needs deep insights or it needs someone who has worked in that space and they have the pain point. How did you find out after two exits in the SaaS world that this is a problem that's big enough to be solved? Yeah, this is one of the luxuries of starting multiple companies is, you know, if you zoom out from the day to day or even the year to year of building one of them and look at things on a, you know, 10 year time span, it actually becomes very clear to see how it's like dominoes that fall in sequence. Like each company could not have. possibly existed if not for the specific experiences in the previous ones. And with CrossFing, that's incredibly true. So this account mapping problem is one that we faced directly head on at both of my previous companies. At RJ Metrics, it was when we went to sell the business, we had multiple buyers lined up and they all were asking for a full customer list. And it was kind of terrifying because if it was just one buyer, maybe we could swallow that pill, but somebody was not gonna be happy. We were going to pick buyer B and then buyer A was going to be upset. Well, guess what? Buyers A and B hate each other because they're direct competitors. They're both looking at acquiring us. So now by giving our full customer list and how much each customer is paying to both of these companies, we've effectively armed our future enemy with the keys to the kingdom. And yes, I know there's NDAs and yes, I know it's supposed to be used just for the evaluation of the deal, but let's get real. It still causes us to lose sleep at night. So What we said in that moment was, man, I wish there was just something that would allow us to figure out just the overlap. Because the reason they're asking the question is they wanna know, are you already selling to our customers? And when you do sell to our customers, how much are they paying you? So that they can forecast, wow, if this product was then cross sold to the rest of our customer base, what realistically could we generate in terms of revenue? They wanna know which customers to call to get a back channel reference, right? And if we could have just done the center of the Venn diagram, we would have done it with both companies because those centers won't overlap because they are mutually exclusive products, right? So like it would have been this beautiful, elegant thing. Instead, you want to know what we did? We just sent everybody the spreadsheet and we lost sleep over it. And, you know, probably, you know, in retrospect maybe shouldn't have, but, you know, it all fortunately worked out in that case. Then fast forward to my second company, Stitch. Instead of it just coming up when we were selling, it came up every single day. And that's because Stitch as a product was middleware. So all Stitch did was it connected to the APIs of 70 different SaaS tools and extracted the data from those tools and then transformed it in a way that it could be stored in a data warehouse and then deposited it into a data warehouse. So if I'm a company and I wanna analyze all my data from Salesforce and MailChimp and Stripe and Trello and Jira and all these other places, all in one spot, you could use my company's product Stitch. it would pull the data out and it would drop it into like your Snowflake data warehouse or your Amazon Redshift data warehouse or your BigQuery data warehouse. So, um, the business of Stitch was overwhelmingly ecosystem led. Um, our number one source of customers and new leads were actually, uh, the companies that we were partnered with, because, uh, a good example of one would be like Looker, the business intelligence tool, the data analytics tool. If Looker's trying to sell to a customer, what they want to do in their demo is show these really awesome dashboards that includes all the data that matters to that person and show how essential the analysis could be. But what if that person says, oh, this is great, but where's my MailChimp data? Well, Looker didn't have a product to go, ingest the MailChimp data. What they needed to do was send them to Stitch and get them to hook it up. And then Stitch would move the MailChimp data into the warehouse and then Looker could analyze it. So we participated in what they call the modern data stack. We were part of that stack. And what we noticed at Stitch was that this was not this stackification of how people buy products and how products get built and delivered. So that multiple tightly integrated products get bought kind of together to form a stack inside of a company. This was not like a secular trend inside of analytics. It was happening everywhere. The entire sales technology, marketing technology stacks, business productivity stacks. Even within more vertical applications like HR, you see this popping up. This was something where it was very much going to be, if software was eating the world back in the 2010s, like ecosystems are eating software in the 2020s. Buyers aren't buying isolated software products, buyers are buying into ecosystems. And it causes them to buy multiple products and it changes the order in which they buy things, the... criteria that they use to decide whether or not to use a particular product, it's a really, really big deal. And at Stitch, we grew that entire business on the backs of these ecosystem-led growth strategies. We worked with all these other technology companies that we were directly compatible with because when people use our products together, they got more value out than just the sum of the parts or what they would have gotten using them alone. So that was eye-opening. And it kind of led to this idea of, hey, ecosystem-led growth is a... a really big deal for the for the go forward, go to market strategies for most companies. But there's this one problem. Every single day, we'd get on the phone with Looker and we'd say, Hey, how many customers do we have in common? And who are they? Hey, are my sales reps, you know, selling to the same companies as your sales reps? And what companies are those? And if it sounds familiar, it's because it's the whole thesis for crossbeam, right? Like we could not answer those questions because of the prisoner's dilemma problem and taking our relationships with our customers really seriously and not wanting to over disclose unless it's extremely relevant and pertinent to delivering value to our customers in a greater way. So, you know, we kind of had to figure out a way to limp through it and it worked well enough, but who knows, you know, how much farther we could have gone if we were able to extract and surface that missing data layer and leverage that to. to really build the companies and these practices at scale. So when we sold Stitch, and I'm a lunatic, right? I should have gone and probably like sat on a beach chair for a couple of weeks or something, but I had this crossbeam concept had been with me since all the way back in the RJ Metrics days. Like I'd been carrying it around with me for four or five years. It wasn't something we would have ever tackled at Stitch, but it felt like there was a really compelling why now behind it, right? Like the... the tools of the trade, the cloud, the digital transformation movement, the API economy, the modern data stack, these were all the things that you needed as prerequisites to actually build something like Crossbeam in the first place. And in 2019, when we started it, even two or three years before that, not enough of that was in place or widely adopted for Crossbeam to ever make sense. And it felt like this inevitability that something like this would emerge. And if I didn't do it then, somebody else was going to. So that really is the origin story for the business. And again, like dominoes falling, no RJ metrics, no stitch, no stitch, no cross beam. And that's just the way it played. Amazing story. Thank you for sharing this. I mean, the show is about the first 100. So let's pick cross beam ad. Talk us, because it's the most challenging one. Talk us how you acquired your early customers, especially when you're thinking about building the trust element. Cause you said two partners, they're not gonna share their data. There is that trust element, there is Crossbeam, which is the escrow agent. How do we bring all of this together? Yeah, so this is going to be potentially the most useless advice that anyone ever gets from your podcast because it relies on the fact that I was a third time founder in order to pull this off. So, which is a luxury and a privilege that I try not to ever take for granted. If you think about how it works, right? Like it's like LinkedIn for data. So what's true about LinkedIn? It's a network effects business. If no one else was on LinkedIn and you signed up and showed up, it would be a absolutely terrible product experience. Is the nature of how you derive value from it is the social experience of other people being on there. Well, if Crossbeam is the same way, and you think back to the early days of Crossbeam, we should have never had a first user. Like whoever that first user, that first customer was that signed up, They would have had an absolutely terrible, terrible experience. They would, there's no single player mode, right? There's like nothing they could have shown up and done that would have given them any value. And we found ourselves stuck in what is referred to as the cold start problem. Andrew Chen, who's a partner at Andrews and Horowitz, one of our investors wrote a whole book on this called the cold start problem. It's, it's great if you want to geek out on, on network effects and the implications there, but we found ourselves with our own little cold start problem. And You know, network effects are great when they're working, but they're absolutely terrible when you're at that stage, because you have to kind of overcome that cliff. So how do we do it? Founder led sales, heavily, heavily relying on my personal Rolodex and relationships from past companies is how we did it. So what we started doing, we realized that we could build what Andrew Chen refers to as atomic networks. So what is the smallest possible micro network? that could exist of connected companies in our case, on our platform that would allow people to see the value. Like do we have to have a hundred or a thousand companies on or could we pull it off with two if it's the right two? And the fortunate thing in our case is that we could pull it off with two if it's the right two. So what we started doing was I would go out to my personal network and this is companies who I had worked with as partners at my previous businesses. companies who were big customers for my previous companies, companies where they had employees that used to work for me at my previous companies. You know, cases where our investor network's always been really strong across being, largely because it's made up of people who I've known across multiple companies and who, you know, kind of have these long-term relationships with. So can I lean into the venture investors networks, even of investors who hadn't even invested in us yet, right? Who were just kind of tracking us, like asking for favors for warm intros, et cetera, for us to try and get. these atomic networks going. And what we would do is when we got a really good conversation and people were excited about the concept of what we were doing, we would ask the question, okay, who's your most important partner that you think might be willing to experiment on this with you? And will you get on a call with you and them and me to talk through about how you might bring it to life? And our sales calls, almost 100% of the time became what we call jam sessions, which were these three way or more phone calls, not with a single prospect, but with two prospects at once, who would agree to sign up at the same time to create their own little atomic network of two companies, where they could use crossbeam, exchange data with each other in the ways that were appropriate for their companies, and then translate that into more value. And we did dozens and dozens and dozens of these. If you look at, you know, 2019, 2020, that era, you can visualize it actually in like a network graph drawing and it's a bunch of these little barbells, right? Like two dots connected by a line. And what becomes exciting is when it works with the two, suddenly it becomes explosive because both companies get it and they say, oh, wow, I'm already on here. I'm already onboarded. I already have a good case study and a story I can tell about why it's valuable. I'm gonna go to my other 10 partners, my other 100 partners, and I'm gonna say to them, look, you gotta get on this thing because here's what it would look like if you were on there. And we had that start to happen. And in the early days, we had some really, really crucial early adopter customers who just became, we call them super nodes in the network graph, like a node in the network graph that just sheerly by their desire to have more companies to connect with on Crossbeam and get more value out, they went out and invited in everybody that they knew to connect on it and they vouched for it and they knew how to pitch it because we had done the jam session. They started holding their own jam sessions and inviting folks on. And, you know, in 2019, in our first year, we got to maybe 100 companies on the platform, like in that entire year. And it was these little atomic networks. And man, the number of days that year that it's like, is this gonna work? It's like, it's- It was a very, very much an uphill battle, but you start to see these little pieces of evidence that the network starts to have a mind of its own. And then we started to have different verticals and different kind of clusters show up. And over time, the virality took over and I stopped doing those founder led sales calls almost entirely except for market research and things like that. But the network started being the driving growth force of the company. to the point where we now have over 18,000 companies that are on Crossbeam, seven out of every 10 of those companies who are on the platform are there because they were invited in by somebody else who was already on the platform. So we don't have an SDR team, we don't do cold calling or outbound, we don't buy ads. We do inbound marketing and content marketing and we do some event stuff, but from a demand generation standpoint, it is such a pure... exercising product-like growth and network effects and virality. And that has really been the engine that's made this business tick. I mean, this is an amazing story. And I had two follow-up questions. One of them was on, when do you know the founder let's say strategy has to cease? And then what is the alternative here? Because as you said, you don't use SDRs. So how would you then continue the non-organic growth? So that's the first question. And then the second question. in a very interesting business like yourself, how would you think about the pricing? How would you price the value versus what the actual partner is paying for Crosby? Because it's not a pure SaaS business. It's an ecosystem, as you said. Yeah, yeah. So on your first question on when to kind of know that founder-led growth can or should stop. So my generalist answer to this, and this is not specific to Network affects businesses, but to me, everything has to do with repeatability and consistency. You meet some startups, you know, they'll do founder led sales and they'll sell to 20 companies. But if you called up those 20 companies and you asked them, what are you doing with the product? How does it deliver value? If you had to pitch this product to another, if you were suddenly a sales rep for this product and you had to pitch the value story to, you know, a company you never met, how would you pitch it, position it? If you're getting 10 different answers or even five different answers that are very distinct among that population of 20 companies, then you're not ready to stop the founder led selling. Product market fit isn't just about getting a lot of people excited across a wide bevy of use cases. It's about identifying a repeatable value proposition that you are able to consistently deliver. Particularly at an early stage, this becomes important and it becomes a universe of very hard choices because Maybe you do have five value propositions that are kind of interesting. And you kind of have to pick, you know, which one is going to be the lever that you use to go achieve the largest amount of scale possible early on to validate the fact that any of them are actually good enough or big enough to warrant building a business behind fundraising on if that's your goal or ultimately building, you know, something that matters. So, you know, for me at Crossbeam, it really was when we got to a point where I felt like the jam sessions were boring because it was the same exact pitch, using the same exact words, describing the same exact scenarios, the prospects asking the same exact questions, being confused by the same exact things, being excited by the same exact things, when it got to a point where it felt kind of rote, that was the moment where it felt like, okay, I think that I could potentially hire an awesome human who maybe has experience in sales or experience in customer success, experience in market development, who is smart and likeable and can do this at scale without it being me, the founder. And that was, you know, we made some early hires across being one in particular, Lauren, who runs our customer success specialist team today. the OG Lauren has done way more jam sessions than I ever have. And she was able to kind of take that ball and run with it once it became repeatable. And, you know, I'm sure it's not always repeatable. And I'm sure there's ones where it doesn't go well and where it's choppy, but it felt like a high enough percentage of the time these things were successful and you knew what was coming around the next corner. And I said, okay, the highest level use of my time as a founder is no longer doing this it's something where I can bring in, you know, somebody with a lot of potential to kind of run, run with that ball. but not put the fate of the business in their hands, which wouldn't have been a fair thing to do, right? In determining what's our actual value story, what's our North Star, what are we trying to actually get out of these conversations? So, you know, this is my example, and I think it shows up in different flavors in different businesses, but that's how I knew how to stop. Amazing. About the pricing, yes. How do you think about pricing? Pricing is the hardest thing, pricing across me is the hardest thing I've ever had to do at any company. Like, I'll be honest. It is not all the things that made you jump to that question are true. So imagine a world where you deliver a product that delivers value. However, in the process of delivering that product, your customer is actually spending their relationship capital and social capital with all the people that they're connected to and close with in order to get people onto your platform to use it. What does that do to the relationship dynamic and the incentive systems that exist between you and that customer? In a social media company like a LinkedIn or like a Facebook or something like that where in the early days people, before everybody on the planet was on it, people had to invite their friends and had to go do that. It was a much easier proposition because the thing was free. And it's a little bit of, hey, we're gonna get mutual value out of this and it costs you nothing. I don't feel bad spamming all my friends kind of telling them to get on, bye. you know, if cross-being is something that you have to pay for, then by asking your partners to come on, you're not saying, hey, join this thing, it's cool. You're gonna get immediate value. You're saying, hey, come buy this thing. And that's a very, very different conversation. So we kind of looked at pricing and packaging in a couple of different phases in the life of the company. And the first phase, while we were trying to build those atomic networks and kind of get past the cold star problem, we made a conscious decision to just give it away largely for free. And this still exists, by the way, in our pricing today. To sign up, to connect with partners, to set up and govern your data sharing rules, these things cost nothing. You can show up for Crosmium even as a giant company, connect your Salesforce CRM system, set up your standard populations, connect with a thousand partners. share data with them, receive data from them, look at it in our user interface and not pay a dime. The things that we put up pricing barriers on all had to do with the operationalization of that data. Like if it's just about data access and growing the network and getting on the network, it's free. But the minute you wanna take an action that indicates that you're actually using this data to make decisions or to run your business, that's where you hit a wall. And it comes in basically three different forms for us. One of them is users. If you have more than three users, usually that's a dead giveaway that you are rolling this out to your entire team, or there's something where there's enough people logging in the product that is part of a workflow that people have been trained on that's like actually deployed widely at your company. It's not about kicking the tires. Another one is integrations. So if you are pushing your data back into a data warehouse, or you're pushing your data into some other SaaS tool where you might use it to... you know, do better forecasting or filtering or kind of influence the customization of messaging or anything like that, you hit a paywall on that. You pay when you wanna use integrations, which by the way is our own ecosystem led growth strategy, right, like that's where we start to drink our own champagne. And the third one is about, it's kind of a cousin of the integrations one, which is our... the embedding of our data directly back into CRM systems specifically. So in other words, arming your sales team with a Salesforce widget or a Chrome extension or another surface area that can be consumed by your go-to-market team so that they've got this data in real time, in the moment, in the context of a particular account anytime they're looking at it, no matter how they're looking. And that becomes a really popular common rollout strategy, which is You kind of, the partner team will bring Crossbeam to life and kind of seed that data layer and then curate internally what's appropriate for different people in different roles to be able to see. And then you buy seats from us in order to deploy that out into your CRM or other surfaces. So, you know, look, I say there's 18,000 companies on there. That doesn't mean there's 18,000 of them paying us, right? Like it's your classic freemium model style dynamic. But the nice thing is we have big enterprise customers that pay us close to a million dollars a year now. And we have a product like Growth Self-Serve Motion, where you can sign up for as little as a couple hundred bucks a month, right? And get access to a lot of those premium features. And you kind of have this journey that folks are on from a PLG self-serve into like a sales-assisted motion into like a true enterprise deployment. And that is really working for us right now. And it took us a while to get there because we... You know, it used to be all free and then it was just enterprise and we introduced PLG within the last 18 months or so. And it's all kind of starting to gel, but you know, we're in 2024 right now having this conversation. We launched this thing in 2019. So you're talking about a five-year journey just to get pricing and packaging in a place where it really, really works for the business. It's, it's been very challenging because of the network effect dynamics, but I think we're, I think we're there. I mean, it's all about experimentation, right? You had two startups, you learned a lot. Were there any crucible moments in the past that could have gone the other way around and you've learned from them and you've implemented them at Crossbeam? Oh yeah, this is, so I actually, I've got a book coming out very soon. It comes out on March 12th. It's called Ecosystem-Led Growth. It's being published by Wiley. You can find it on Amazon or in Barnes and Noble or it'll be in some airports. That book, the first third of that book is basically one of... those stories that could be an answer to one of your questions, which is like, it's called my $2.6 billion mistake. And it basically is the story of how, uh, how RJ metrics was a great idea. Executed poorly, uh, by me and our number one competitor was, was Looker. Uh, and they went on to sell to Google for $2.6 billion, right? But there, there was a time when RJ Metrics versus Looker kind of felt like the conversation happening in a lot of buying decisions, in a lot of boardrooms, you know, in a lot of other places. And, you know, for us at RJ, I think, you know, there were kind of two things I would call out that I think we did wrong when I look back on it. One of them is fundamental to the business model itself. We built a technology that did not play nicely with others. It was a full stack solution. which meant we didn't have any partners. We didn't really have any integrations. You bring us your data, you put it into RJ and we ingest it and we transform it and we model it and we warehouse it and we allow you to query it and then we present it in dashboards and charts and then we allow you to export those and download them. And it's like, you show up, we do it all and we send you the result. And that made some sense in like 2008 era, but you know. By the time we get into 2012, 2013, the cloud is really starting to take over. The API economy is maturing. The interconnectivity between businesses and the way that people buy and consume products went from a very siloed, like kind of on-premise legacy philosophy around how software gets consumed into something that was much, much more ecosystem driven and much more about like the fabric of technologies that people were buying. And we just didn't participate in that at all. and we didn't stay ahead of that curve. So when the market shifted under our feet into that model, we were really poorly prepared to have an offering that could play ball in the way that people wanted to buy products anymore. And because of that, we slipped out of product market fit. In the meantime, Looker on the surface didn't even look like it should have been a competitor because they didn't do 90% of what I just said. They were really just like a modeling and dashboarding layer for the data. They didn't do warehousing, they didn't do the ETL or data ingestion, but they had partners that did, who all participated in this modern economy, right? They were working with Snowflake and Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery on the warehousing side. They were working with, you know, Fivetran and Matillion and the million others on the data loading side. And what that meant was that all these companies could win together. They could go to market together. They could cross pollinate their user bases. They could build an economy of service providers that could... you know, be the expert in implementing and bringing those tools to life together inside of those companies and all those other parties out there in their ecosystem, that was a go-to-market force to be reckoned with. Um, when one company won, chances were really high that the other companies had a chance of winning inside that same target business. And Argeometrics is just sitting here off to the side, trying to do everything for ourselves, uh, needing to do demand generation. We had an army of SDRs like cold calling into companies. Like these other businesses didn't need that. Uh, like they had the ecosystem. So, um. You know, I think we, in not seeing where the puck was going on ecosystems, I think we were too slow to react to the modern data stack movement. And we just kind of sat outside of the value accretion that happened for those companies. And just had kind of a, you know, we did okay, but it was, it was a mediocre outcome and it was an embarrassingly small outcome compared to that looker number, right? So I think that was, I go into a lot more detail around that story and, and kind of how it all, how it all went down in the book. Including, I've got some cool perspectives in there from like one of the co-founders of Looker kind of talks about it from their side and everything. But yeah, big, big learning experience. And I think these are the kinds of things you go through. And like, I learned so many lessons from that about trying to spend more time and energy seeing around corners. But the other lesson I learned was like to move quickly. Like we operated that business for eight years. And in eight years, we went from being ahead of the curve, like too new and shiny, too bleeding edge to have mass market fit. to a beautiful three or four year window of just incredible product market fit and being like a category leader and like leads falling off of our desk and just like ridiculous growth to slipping out of product market fit and the growth of the company just like dying overnight effectively and kind of being stuck at a particular level. That's in eight years. They're like the speed at which these technology cycles happen is like, if you wanna build an enduring company, just having a good idea is not sufficient. And that... I think that hit me hard and really stuck with me in these next companies. Amazing insights. Thank you for sharing this. What's the principle that you live by that has served you well in your journey? I credit my co-founder from RJ and Stitch with this. He's a guy named Jake Stein. He's now the CEO of a company called Common Paper, which does open source legal documents and the software to help people execute them and transact. Jake was so, so big on intellectual honesty and so incredibly low ego. And I think like having him as a influence was really necessary for me. in my journey, you look at the first couple of years of RJ Metrics, and I think I was mainly motivated by some combination of ignorance and ego. Just like knowing that I really wanted to start a company and knowing that I didn't want to fail and just kind of like running full speed through walls in order to make things happen. And in the course of doing so... kind of becoming a little fragile and insecure in the process. And like not letting there be the space to understand where something might be going wrong, where I might have areas to grow, where like evolution had to happen. And meanwhile, I look over at my co-founder and he's like over there meditating, like he's just got this like completely different kind of vibe going on. And he and I... proved to be extremely compatible as business partners. But a side effect of that is that I think we were able to rub off on each other in some healthy ways. And one of the things that I certainly took from him was just like, be wrong a lot and be embarrassed and stop worrying about your legacy and worrying about like never being dismerged or never making a mistake and just like. be overwhelmingly intellectually honest, not just with yourself, but like with your team, with the people who need to count on you for their own livelihoods and their success and their faith in the business. And like I've skewed over these 15 years, I think from being a very kind of closed, frankly like self-centered, like, classic hype boy entrepreneur with Twitter thought leadership threads and other stuff. in embarrassing abundance to just like really, really paying a lot more attention to where there's opportunity. And usually most of the opportunity that exists to do better lies in a place where you're doing something wrong or there's room for growth. So that's been a journey, but I think that is really like the sooner you can kind of come to terms with that. And frankly, you wanna know what turned the corner for me? Jake's influence helped. The other thing was failing. I think the thing more than anything that kind of woke me up was like, RJ metrics, especially during that product market fit era was like a really hot company that was very much on fire and we could grab it on fire in a good way. Right. Rocketship fire. Um, we could grab headlines anytime we wanted. People would invite me to like speak at conferences and then like, it all blew up. Right. Like we had to, we had to lay people off. We had to restructure the business. We ultimately. sold the thing, you know, somewhat under duress. Like we were gonna run out of money or have to raise more and it was gonna be ugly. And thankfully we found a buyer that like saw value in what we had built, but like, it wasn't what we dreamed it would become. And there was like embarrassing and like disappointing and going through all that and then coming off the other end and realizing like, oh, we're gonna start another one and people wanna come back and do it again. with us, right? And we're still intellectually curious and intellectually fascinated by solving these problems. And there's still a lot more good work to be done, realizing that you can, you know, you can fail. And that doesn't mean that your world is over is a really, really big deal. And I think I kind of had to go through that to really grok it. Amazing. The previous guest has left you a question. Are you ready? Oh, boom, this is, yeah, yeah. So what's a thing that people mostly misunderstand about you? Hmm. Oh, that's a really good question. I would say there's a, one of the things I'm working on right now is like, I care much, much more than I probably led on day to day a lot about like what other people think. Um. Like I think there are a lot of entrepreneurs and founders out there who are really good at not caring about what other people think. Uh, and it's almost like part of what makes them successful. And I think something that I've always grappled with and, uh, have needed to find a way to balance in my life is like, whether it's the team at my company or it's the customers we serve or the investors that we serve, I can be almost too tuned in to, uh, like negative feedback or constructive feedback or, um, So it was like my answer to that last question, right? All about like, hey, be self-deprecating, be intellectually honest. Like, what am I really saying there? It's like, focus on all the negatives, right? And I think that's a little bit of like a part of my job is I need to be like the rah optimist always looking at the glass half full side of the company story. And that's a big part of my job. But I think the thing that's maybe not obvious to people when they see that is how much time I spend probably overly critically analyzing the things that are wrong and or broken. And like, it's an interesting duality from my answer to that last question to this one, which is like, as soon as you think you know something or you're like giving it as advice, you're probably too far over indexed on that thing. And there's a counterpoint that could be made about why that's not healthy. And I think right now I'm in this, the pendulum swings a little bit, but yeah, I think I'm fighting an internal battle between making objective decisions that sometimes are challenging and not what everybody wants to happen, versus caring deeply about making sure that I don't disappoint all the various kinds of stakeholders I have, whose interests may be in conflict from time to time. Thank you for sharing this transparently. Is there a question you would like to leave for the next guest? Something could be a business question, something you're grappling with, you need advice, you need just to ask a question. It's up to you. This is a great opportunity for just like a or to make you ask a really spicy question. I don't know who your next guest is or what their business is, but you should ask them seriously when you really think about it, 10 years into the future, how is it possible that AI has not completely destroyed your company? That's a question we should all be asking right now, I think. Thank you. This is a very interesting question. I did have... A similar question from another guest, something around that, but this is taking it to another level. Bob, one more question. What's next for Crossbeam? Yeah, this ecosystem-led growth movement is a really big deal. And I think what is really next for us is the work we've done to become very well known among partnership teams. we are bringing that to the universe of sales teams and sellers, and we're bringing that to the boardroom and to executives. And I think there's some momentum behind this stuff mattering outside of the classic bubble of partner tech and starting to become more core kind of first priority software in terms of how any business can grow. So I think, you know, doing a lot more. working with companies at the senior-most levels and with go-to-market teams is really the name of the game for us in the couple of years to come. This was an amazing episode. Thank you for stopping by. How can people reach you? How can the listeners of benefit to you as well? Yeah, crossbeam.com is the business website. And if you're looking for the book, you can certainly just Google ecosystem-led growth. You'll find it on Amazon. But I also have a personal website at robertjmore.com. You can read some excerpts from the book and get some other special info and order it directly there too. Amazing. We wish you the best of luck on your journey, Bob. Thank you for stopping by. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Cheers. 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