The First Customer - How to redefine partnership dynamics with Crossbeam CEO Bob Moore

[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to The First Customer podcast. the first one of 2024. Today's a very special episode. I was talking a little bit to Bob before the show. you know, there's some key kind of people in the Philadelphia tech scene, Chris, Sarah and Jake Stein and all these different kind of just great. Minds and you all go back some, at some point to Bob and I hear it. You gotta meet Bob. You gotta meet Bob. So Bob do a talk at the foundry event at the Philly tech was incredible. and got lucky enough to get them on and here he is in real life. Bob, how are you, buddy?

[00:00:59] Bob: I do exist. Yeah. This is not my AI avatar. Hey, 

[00:01:02] Jay: not yet. 

[00:01:03] Bob: no flatter to be here. it's been fun to follow the podcast as it's coming together. You've had some great, good friends on here and, happy to have it to join the pack and share some stories.

[00:01:11] Jay: man. so your CEO of Crossbeam, what is Crossbeam and kind of who is your customer right now?

[00:01:16] Bob: Yeah. So Crossbeam was a company that I co founded, just as a result of frustrations at all my past companies around, how to, Grow faster through partnerships. you know, partners historically get a bad rap, right? Of the people that schmooze at conferences and kind of do hugs and chugs. But, you know, create these very difficult to measure and scale of results.

I wanted to bring a much more data centric view to the universe of partnerships and the way to do that was to basically unlock a data layer that had never really existed before. And that data layer. Is really just the answers to simple questions like, Hey, partner, how many customers do we have in common?

And who are they? Or are my sales reps currently selling to any of the same companies as your sales reps? Crossbeam effectively functions like an escrow service for data, right? We sit in between those companies who partner with one another and provide the secure independent platform. Where you can answer those questions, but you can also maintain total ownership over your data, total control over who sees what, when, and under what circumstances, and ultimately on earth, the center of all those Venn diagrams, which in aggregate are this extremely powerful.

data set that you can use to build a whole, go to market engine. And the whole practice is referred to as ecosystem led growth. And we're just this key kind of technology platform that, that empowers like the unlocking of all those playbooks.

[00:02:42] Jay: It's such a great platform. I, as a small business owner myself, Partnerships, like you mentioned, are kind of like this elusive, you know, sometimes they look like they're the easy way out. If you just get a bunch of partnerships and you have a bunch of leads and everything will be great. who, how do, how does a company that's a small business or like kind of a growing, you know, stage business, what are the ones that, that you've seen that kind of get it versus the ones that don't?

Right? Because it's hard to, who, Figure out if you've never done it before, but like, what's successful for those, like, what, is it just finding a company that may have leads that maybe customers are of yours? Is there like more to it than kind of creating those partnerships at that level? Like who gets it at a small business level?

[00:03:22] Bob: Yeah, there's kind of, you'll find that I answer a lot of questions in terms of like a two by two matrix, right? So that's kind of like. and this is actually a two by two matrix I refer to all the time. when this question gets asked, which is like the, we call it the ELG readiness matrix, right?

So how ready is your company for ecosystem led growth? And it's really two dimensions. One is just your overall scale, right? Like how large of a business are you in general, whether that's from a revenue standpoint or a existing ecosystem footprint standpoint, but the other one, and probably the more important one is like how ecosystem dependent is the value proposition of your business.

So if you think about a company that is like a middleware company, right? Like the company, Jake Stein and I, started together stitch data. that whole business was just like, we help you move data from. This software product over to that software product, right? Like we're like this, you know, this data pipeline that sits in the middle.

So we were all the way on the end of that spectrum. Like our business, the value proposition of our business was 100 percent dependent on our integrations into other products and the ability to move data back and forth. Right? So you think about that's like way on one end of the spectrum. any software as a service company, modern software technology company that exists in the cloud is probably somewhere on the far end of that, that band just generally because it's very difficult to exist in the modern technology economy without hooks and integrations into other products.

You want to sell to salespeople, you're going to have a Salesforce integration. You want to sell to people in HR, you're going to integrate into all that. Applicant tracking systems and, you know, HR management platforms. So, because of that, the, there's this prolific universe of companies in modern technology that are pretty heavily ecosystem dependent in terms of being able to deliver on a full value proposition.

so, where you are on that spectrum kind of, kind of dictates. what you should do in terms of investing. Now, if you're not ecosystem dependent at all, you're real standalone business and you're small, the honest answer is that you might really. have to wait, until you get to a place where you can actually get some real leverage out of these ELG strategies.

But then you've got these three other quadrants, right? You can think of, which is like high levels of ecosystem dependence, but you're small. Well, that's a really exciting one because it means that you can actually. Immediately investing in like this foundational level of using ecosystem like growth as a growth engine.

You're small, so you want to focus on the top of your funnel. You want to focus on lead generation. You want to focus on market making. And a great way to do that is to find technology partners where you actually have a one plus one equals three Kind of better together story with whatever those products are, and you lean into that story to go after the existing markets of those products.

So if you have 10 customers, but you can integrate into a platform that's got 100, 000 customers, make that integration the absolute best in your category, and then lean on that as a means by which to target and focus your audience and your messaging. and ultimately, hopefully some co selling and collaboration efforts with that third party partner, even if they're at a very limited scale, in order to really focus your go to market efforts.

And you'll find that commonality of all of your customers use these multiple technologies together. And yours is 1 of them is way, way more compelling as a pitch than it is to just randomly selling your technology to random companies who may or may not have other hooks. It may or may not be building a stack.

Now, if you're in the section where you're big, from a scale standpoint, but you don't have much ecosystem dependency, that's where you make a very different style of investment, which is you say, Hey, how can I actually leverage my large existing user base to let ecosystems work for me? you know, create new value propositions in my product that allows me to sell that large existing base, more things by building or compelling tech integrations, right.

Or by allowing. companies, they're probably knocking down your door trying to get at your customer base because of your scale. How do we leverage them to, figure out ways to just deepen the loyalty of our customers, the engagement of our customers, the stickiness of our product through actually building technology, right?

So that's more of a product investment realm. And then the, that top quadrant of like, you're big and you're heavily ecosystem dependent. Well, that's like the AWS is of the world. That's the sales forces of the world. Like you, you've kind of made it and you ought to be, it's very likely that ecosystem led growth is like the strategy for your entire company.

So, sorry, it's a long winded answer. Right. But,the playbook that gets run kind of depends on where you fall in that two by two. And it's important to be intellectually honest. if you're in the corner that says just kind of hang around the hoop, because that's an okay answer too, if it's the right one.

[00:07:52] Jay: It seems like you've thought about that a little bit.

[00:07:55] Bob: Yeah. By the way, I forgot to plug. There's a,I have a book called the ecosystem led growth that's being published by Wiley. it'll be in Barnes and Noble and airport bookstores and all kinds of stuff. It comes out, March 20th, 2024. so that matrix is actually, in the book. There's a whole like section on, is my company ready for ELG, which is basically the rant that I just gave you.

only it's more articulate and easier to consume in, in book 

[00:08:19] Jay: No, that was

great. That made a lot of sense. Yeah, we'll definitely post a link to it. and that's, I mean, that's something we should probably talk about, too, but let's switch back to Bob. you know, a lot of founders have, like, their, kind of, like, Growing up intermediate, you know, not really a business owner, not really an adult yet, or I am an adult.

I'm just starting out. Do you have any of those stories where you, did you have like a side hustle business as you were kind of getting older, as you were in high school, or did you go straight into school and making businesses?

[00:08:48] Bob: yeah, I mean, high school, I graduated high school in 2002. So, like, when I entered high school, we had, like, dial up AOL, and like, there was no internet. Really? It was like, you know, the AOL internet was the internet, right? That there was no, like, open web, at least in terms of my sphere of awareness and like, mainstream adoption.

By the time I graduated. it was an entirely different world. We had like high speed broadband internet, like cable, you know, Comcast at home had come internet mode of the house. And, you know, the actual open internet had become much more widely known and adopted. So what a radical thing to witness in like your formative years.

So I became really obsessed with. I started a web design company, in high school called qualm industries and, learn how to, before I learned HTML, I learned flash. I learned how to build games and like interactive menus and website experiences in, what at the time was macro media flash. Adobe would later acquire them.

and, My web design business in high school was like a flash web design business. So I built a bunch of websites. there's a cheesesteak shop in Philly called Tony Luke's. I was like the original web designer for Tony Luke's. I built a website in the nineties. I'm talking like pizza shops, auto mechanic garages.

There was a pet store called monster pets that I was the webmaster for a while. and, You know, really, avoided, I think everybody in my family up until that point had to work at Wawa as like their high school job, it was like a rite of passage. And I somehow dodged that bullet. Cause I was among other things, making enough money, kind of doing the web design stuff that I was able to kind of write my own ticket in that way.

and you know, that kind of just started a chain reaction, right? I got into college. And that pulled me into computer science. And, in college, I had a handful of small businesses. The most successful one was, I built a poker odds calculator called the Miraculator. there was a software product that, at the time that these things are all over the place now.

but at the time it was like the first of its kind, it was this Java applet where you could put in your, the cards you had in your hand in Texas Hold'em poker, and it would tell you the odds of winning. You know, winning the hand or catching the flush that you were going after or whatever else. And, Google AdWords was very new at that time.

And no one was buying ads against like poker. So I was able to buy clicks for, you know, how to win at poker, how to, have a advantage in online poker, what are the odds of getting a straight flush? Like everything. And for 10 cents a click, I could drive people to my website and have a 10 percent conversion rate to somebody buying a 30 software product.

Right. And I was like a college sophomore, junior. And I'd wake up in the morning and like eight more people had bought this, you know, 30. I think I made another 200 bucks. I was like, holy crap. Like this is a, kind of life altering. So I fell in love with software through that. and, yeah,the entirety of my career,you know, from 2008 onward, after I came out of college and did a couple of years in venture capital, it was all software focused and I don't know.

[00:11:44] Jay: Well, I know that you actually lived that life because you said a word that nobody says anymore, which Webmaster, is not, it's not a very popular phrase anymore. but, you know, I remember the Macromedia Flash days very well. And if I had made Tony Luke's first website, that should be like, On your LinkedIn or something somewhere that's like a,

you know

that's a Philly, staple.

[00:12:06] Bob: there should, I should shout out to this is like, since this is the first customer podcast, right? They were actually my first customer at quantum industries. And this is a really random thing of like. I, I grew up in a town called Glassboro, which is in Southern New Jersey. Rowan university is there now.

And Rowan has swallowed the town. But when I was a kid, Rowan was. It's called Glassboro State College. It was a very small state college, a tiny fraction of the town's economy. it was like this middle class kind of working town in South Jersey. super diverse, like just really, awesome place to, to grow up, but not a center of technology, and not kind of known for entrepreneurship or innovation necessarily.

but in fifth grade, super randomly, one block away from me, a new family moved into town and it. Sedona family. and it was this family who had,all grown up in South Philly and they finally were able to move out to the suburbs and buy their dream house because their family cheesesteak shop had taken off and Lucid O'Neill was Luke.

and, there was a kid in my class, my exact age, Mike, Mikey Luke, and his dad is Tony Luke jr. so I Got to know the Luke family fairly well. And, you know, by the time I was in 10th grade or something, word got around that I knew how to build websites and that's how I got that client.

So it's a little bit of like, you know, random circumstance that I just happened to live a block away from, you know, the Tony Luke's dynasty there and got the opportunity to, You know, if we get built, build a website for the better part of a decade,

[00:13:36] Jay: I mean, that's how it happens though, right? I mean, it's, there's always just some random kind of connection. and, The poker thing is interesting too, because there certainly was like that huge, crazy spike in like online poker

[00:13:49] Bob: the timing 

[00:13:49] Jay: I remember that it was just like everybody was doing it.

They were sitting at home on a Friday night instead of going out, they were sitting home playing online poker and you knew the guys who were really good and they were making good money.

[00:13:59] Bob: Oh, it was great. I mean, there was this era it's coming waves, but again, yeah, this is like, I entrepreneurship has humbled me in so many ways. And one of them is like, I have absolute conviction that it is so much more luck and timing than it is anything else. And like, the, the things that have not worked, that would have worked at a different time that I've tried to do and the things that have worked, despite me, like, not necessarily being great at them, but having hit at the right time, have kind of added up to show me that, like, that's such a big factor.

The poker thing is a great example. There was this moment where. Right after broadband internet goes everywhere. So what does broadband get you? Low latency, right? Like you don't have these like couple seconds response times. It's like millisecond response times, which allow you to actually play real poker in real time online, like snappy poker, like no delays, no lags, no worries about like, you're going to lose your money because your mom picked up the phone to make a phone call and like killed the AOL connection, right?

So like, The technology moves faster than the regulatory policy. So the FTC had not yet cracked down on, on any kind of online gambling because online gambling was impossible up until, you know, 2003 or whenever broadband became widespread. So you get this moment in time when,there's opportunity, a window of opportunity before the government kind of, kind of moves in and shuts it down and the original wave of like party poker and poker stars.

All come out and it's almost like DraftKings is now. You couldn't turn on a sporting event without seeing commercial or these online poker casinos where they were all based in like the Cayman Islands. And, you know, none of them were us based and you'd like PayPal, a bunch of money into one of these random PayPal accounts, and then you'd suddenly have a balance in this online casino and, everybody in the world was doing it, and.

Because of that, there was so much advertising demand. Like these casinos had so much money to spend that network TV and ESPN started just putting poker on all the time. There were like, there was primetime TV shows that were like celebrity poker, like no hold them poker tournament and ESPN, like. You know, 12 hours a day was running poker tournaments because they could sell ads on that content for these casinos.

it's just giant, like money making opportunity. 2005 ish or so, through various banking regulations and other things, it all got shut down and it went away for a decade until at the state level, online gambling became back kind of authorized again. But to this, you can online play poker again, but.

Depending on what state you're in, you have to like, download a different casino 

[00:16:29] Jay: Right. Right,

[00:16:31] Bob: point. So, in that window of time, I happen to be going to college, studying what, algorithms, data structures, computer software, probability, and statistics. And, it's like, you know, here's this moment. I know how to build a thing.

There's this pent up insane amount of demand for it that I don't realize. I really built that Miraculator for me to use, and put it online. It's just like stars aligned and it got super hot. And then one day it was completely gone. just because like the, you know, the screws got put to the entire system,

[00:16:58] Jay: right. Yeah, I talked to a lot of people about that. I don't think luck and time and get it's fair. Do most of the time people like to, at least you don't hear about it, right? Like the people who are successful, they're not, you know, like the Oprah's and the Bill Gates of the world are not like, yeah, I was like, super lucky about the timing of how it happened.

[00:17:15] Bob: It's like, you hear that there's these great minds and everything worked out because they're awesome. but a lot of it is timing. whatever Matt Damon is doing at any given time. And, like,

[00:17:25] Jay: just do that.

[00:17:26] Bob: He got, you know, some heat for,promoting crypto and kind of like being in some of those like crypto Superbowl commercials. But if you rewind the clock, the poker fad, same thing, Matt, the movie rounders, right? With Matt 

[00:17:37] Jay: Oh,yeah, 

[00:17:38] Bob: of the big things that was like the bringing in of this Texas Hold'em wave.

It's like wherever Matt Damon goes, that's what's going on. You're in a, you're in a hot, you're in a hot zone. That's probably about to blow up.

[00:17:48] Jay: all right. So I love those stories. it was RJ metrics next. Was that kind of like the next,

[00:17:53] Bob: Yeah. So, all right. So I graduated college. I went to work, at a venture capital firm called insight partners in New York. they're still around. They're actually more than just still around. They're like, they have grown into this, you know, force of nature, venture private equity crossover fund that manages, tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars of capital at this point,really great fund.

It was tiny. professionals. I was one of five entry level analysts. it sounds glamorous to work at a venture capital firm. I was a cold caller. I was not making the investment decisions. I was making a hundred calls a week to CEOs to try to get their revenue numbers and growth rates and see who might be worth spending time with for the partnership at the company.

if you're familiar with the role of an SDR, inside of a, you know, typical software company, I was basically an SDR only I was selling money. it was just a weird dynamic. I, I took that job, because I was really fascinated in business and I was fascinated in technology and software, and this was like the perfect intersection of those things.

and that is where I met Jake Stein. Jake and I, started on the same day at this venture capital firm in New York. we both had Philly connections. He had gone to Penn undergrad and I grew up in, in Glassboro, just outside of Philly, like I mentioned. and he and I, we weren't even on the same team.

We like got to know each other, you know, in the break room, like over the foosball table. and. you know, just kind of both felt like we wanted to do something entrepreneurial as our next step. and got to know each other over the couple of years that we were there. And, when the idea for RJ Metrics kind of formalized, we decided to quit together and start this company together.

and we left Insight on a Friday in September, 2001, 2008. And, On Saturday, Lehman Brothers collapsed.and we were kind of off to the races,needing to bootstrap a company that didn't quite exist yet, having just quit our job. So it was,it was quite a time.

[00:19:43] Jay: Yeah. And we talked about before Jake's been on the show, a lot taller in person than I thought he was going

[00:19:48] Bob: Oh, he's a, yeah, 

[00:19:49] Jay: was like, wow. I didn't know he was like a giant. It was like,

[00:19:51] Bob: yeah. Despite that, I promised you could beat him in basketball.

[00:19:54] Jay: don't know, man. He could just stick his arms up.

[00:19:57] Bob: She'll destroy you in ping pong though. That's 

[00:19:59] Jay: Oh my God. I couldn't imagine you probably read. Yeah. He could reach, the whole table. but I do find it interesting. what is your side of the equation with the, with having a co founder, right? Like I've. Had businesses started myself. I have businesses that I've co founded. They're totally different.

completely. And if you, I mean, it sounds like your first real, you know, business was co founded, have you done any

solo as in the, what is kind of your side of the, this relationship for you guys?

What are you bringing to the table? and what does Jake bring into the table?

[00:20:31] Bob: Yeah, it's such an interesting answer looking back on it. and kind of looking at now as well, to answer your question from RJ Metrics on, I've never started a company without a co founder. I'm a big fan of, having a co founder. I think it's kind of, both for like intellectual, and like mental safety, as a founder, I think it's a really important piece of particularly the early years of going through.

This process, but,with Jake,I was actually the technical co founder at RJmetrics. I had the CEO title, but I wrote all the code, for the first year and a half of the business until we hired our first engineer. And then even after we hired an engineering team, it wasn't until we had, I don't know, probably 15 plus engineers that I actually.

Stopped like being a contributing engineer who was expected to like, you know, make code commits and everything in every sprint. so, you know, probably four or five years into the company, I was still like quote unquote on the engineering team while also, you know, being the CEO and, I always kind of had marketing rolling up to me and, product for whatever that's worth or defined as inside of these various orgs, in addition to.

kind of like core operational stuff. so I was like a business geek who knew how to code Jake. I think it was always a significantly better salesperson than me. Jake knew how to have uncomfortable conversations a lot more better than me. He knew how to make more direct asks. he's a lot more of a, I think kind of a, and lifelong learner. I think that's one of the things that I benefited from just being around Jake more like, I tell the story sometimes like there was a, in the early days of the company, when it was just the two of us, I read some business book, it was probably like the lean startup or something that had just come out in that time.

And I came in and I said, Jake, this book, I read this book. It was awesome. Here's this thing that I think we should do. And this thing I think we should do. And it's such a great, like this changed my thinking on this and blah, blah, blah. And he thought it was like, that all sounds really awesome. Was there anything in the book you didn't agree with?

and it just like stopped me in my tracks and I was like, Oh no, did I just drink somebody's Kool Aid? like what, what did I like? It's, it can't possibly be true that like everything that this book says is actually right. And the gospel and perfectly applicable to our business. I think it's just like these business books are very often worded in such a way to be persuasive and compelling.

I think Jake just always had this layer of being able to kind of cut through some of that. And, you know, he's a little bit of a, you know, Warren Buffett's, number two is this guy, Charlie Munger, who, unfortunately passed away in the last few months. But Charlie's nickname was the abominable no man.

and, you know, Jake was kind of like my abominable no man. here's Annie going to be on TV.

I got her and he's hanging out. but yeah, the,the Jake thing, like he kind of kept my head on level, like, I, I think a lot of things are good ideas, even when they're not good ideas.

Jake thinks everything's a bad idea.

Good balance. 

think we, yeah, it's a really healthy balance for those things. Yeah.

[00:23:23] Jay: well, very cool. so who was your first customer at Crossbeam? Right.

[00:23:30] Bob: this very interesting pattern here, which is there's a, there's with the exception of RJ Metrics, my first customer at every company has been the previous company that I started. so like at,at Stitch, that's kind of debatable, but ultimately like Stitch swallowed a bunch of existing RJ Metrics customers.

So it almost, RJ was its customer as like a middleware layer, basically. Then at Crossbeam, the first customer was Stitch. Like literally, you can look, we have 17, 500 companies on Crossbeam right now. Customer ID number one, is Stitch data. and that, that's no coincidence, right? Like the, these things, particularly a network effects business like Crossbeam, they only come together when you're able to kind of put the pieces,together in such a way where, Some first domino falls down and it's always like the company that you've just been working at that becomes like the guinea pig for that, probably because the idea for the business was inspired by a pain you really felt with that company.

And it's like built literally to solve the biggest problem of this business. So, so yeah, it's a little bit of a cop out answer once you let the dominoes fall after the first company, but it's always the last company, you know, even a question. It's just like within our first. You know, wave of customers, the companies that bought my previous companies, like, we sold our geometrics to Magento, which then got acquired by Adobe and Adobe became a customer before too long on the Crossbeam front.

And we sold stitch data to talent and talent became a customer of them. And it's like, that was actually less because of relationships and more because Experiences at those companies proved that this product was needed

[00:25:05] Jay: Right.

[00:25:06] Bob: easiest ones to pitch because it was like, let me show you exactly where this is going to plug in and like, be relevant to what you do.

[00:25:13] Jay: tell me about the book.and not let's say the contents, but why did you write a book and how did you write a book and like, was. Is it easy to do in 2023 2024 to like, to find what you need to go out and write a book? Or is this like, is it a big learning process? I mean, did you drive them before?

Tell me about the book.

[00:25:37] Bob: Yeah, so there's 2 sides to that, right? Which is like, the literal process of, like, putting the words down on the page and compiling the doing the work of authoring a book. And then there's the anybody can, like, write a PDF ebook and digitally publish it on Amazon's marketplace or something.

Then there's this whole other level, which is getting a book deal with a major publisher who has distribution and kind of, you know, relationships with the major retailers and can make you eligible for bestseller lists and, you know, put you on the promotional,path and all this stuff. So, we were really fortunate to be able to, get a book deal with Wiley.

who's a great business and technical publisher. and,we're kind of in that latter category with this one. I don't think I could have. Pulled it off or gotten that book deal at any point in the last 15 years, except maybe for now. and a big part of that, I think, has to do with just the magnitude of the audience that we've been able to build up here across being like at RJ Metrics.

When we sold that company, we had maybe 400 paying customers, right? and every single customer that used this was someone who was paying us and that meant that we didn't have to have a lot of customers in order to have a lot of revenue at Crossbeam, this is much more of like a product led growth business.

We have a free tier We have you know freemium offerings and that 17 000 That's companies, right? So then you get up close to the a hundred thousand level when you're talking about actual users in the product. we have conferences, we have a, you know, you know, Slack user community, we have our own like thing called Crossbeam Insider, which is our own little, almost like a little media company within the company that we run.

Right. So we have all these like social presence and distribution channels, email lists, all that kind of stuff. So. Look, if you're being realistic, like what makes a publisher want to publish a business book, the fact that, there's a message and some storytelling that will resonate and will lead to a good book, but B and probably more importantly, is that the.

the energy that can get put behind this is going to have some reach associated with it. And that's either because the author is like Britney Spears or something who commands like has a bajillion Instagram followers and people will see the book and buy it. I ain't no Britney Spears. so, you know, I need the other side of that coin, which is, there's.

A, a very specific form of extremely micro celebrity where, the people that do know about this stuff are passionate about it, that all of them are going to buy this thing, right? Or all of them are going to engage with it. And then the market's big enough to matter. And I think that's a combination of our user base and the broader, like software and venture capital industries at large through our investor channels and everything else.

We hit that bench. Mark, finally. so getting the book deal done, I somehow in the last two or three years of my career, I've just met, way more authors than I ever have. some through our investor channels, some just by getting better connected and networked among like more high profile CEOs of technology companies that have kind of made it to the point of, you know, authoring these books, just like paying a little bit more attention, you get to know enough of those folks and you kind of accumulate.

You know, who you should know inside of these publishing companies and you get the right. And you get the right advice on how to position, you know, the pitch and,you know, all of that, just kind of, the stars kind of aligned for being able to get in front of the right person, make the right pitch in the right way, and have the right audience to back it up and getting that book deal.

So,it doesn't necessarily come easy. What did come easy. Is writing it. and I might be the last person to write a book in the pre like chat GPT era, right? Like I had most of the manuscript written with zero zero AI support. It was useful in like putting the glossary together. but, the book is like, actually written by a human.

but the, The process of writing it became very easy because it was really just a matter of synthesizing the same stump speech that I've been giving in the same stories that I've been telling over the course of the last 10 years, and more specifically, the last 5 with Crossbeam. As a CEO, a big part of your job is just repeating yourself over and over again, right?

Like telling the same story and you're constantly looking for social cues and responses and seeing what's resonating with people. And then your story evolves and adapts so that you've got the best possible way of conveying the information. and you know, I've got several years of having like really worked this stuff down, whether it's the RJ Metrics, backstories or the origin story of Crossbeam or like why people.

use the product or why partnerships is something that people historically hate and now are starting to love. And all of that stuff comes forward in the book, right? It's a little bit business biography. It's a little bit origin story of the market that cross being plays in. And it's a little bit business advice and playbooks, of like how to actually execute this stuff inside your company.

It's, you can think of it as like those three parts, all three of those, like. spin me up and I'll talk about it all day. And I, over the course of a summer, I just blocked off the mornings in my calendar, three days a week. And, you know, I dropped my daughter off at, and I go to the local public library, here in my town in South Jersey, and I write for three or four hours and in that three or four hours, I'd write several thousand words.

and. You do that over the course of a three month period and you've got yourself,you know, 250 page book or so and it just kind of, it was not a lot of new ideas. It was a lot of new organization of things. We've been really battle testing over the last several years.

[00:30:53] Jay: Love that. All right. couple more questions one. I'm very curious about It is the new year Goals galore. What is your process for like creating goals that you're actually gonna give a shit about? After tax day or after, you know, whatever, pick a date. is it a real process? This is something you've repeated, or is this something you're just going to wing every year?

You're like, this is what I want to kind of set out to do for these next 12 months.

[00:31:24] Bob: Yeah, I mean, I think that time horizon of 12 months is arbitrary, right? Like, it just so happens that's how long it takes for our planet to go around the sun. So, like, You know, if it took, nine months for our planet to go around the sun, like would we have our nine month, goals and time horizon set up, right?

Like there's a, there's this interesting, you know, we, as humans, it's helpful to have these like time down constructs. But I think when I'm thinking about goals, I really try to think about like. What is the thing that we want to achieve, and that will really matter, you know, how will we measure whether or not we have achieved that and then what's a realistic time in which to, to think that we'll reach that point of measuring it and, you know, we use okay.

Ours at Crossbeam, objectives and key results. there's a lot of different ways to kind of slice that, but the, at its core, okay. Ours are like objectives are these statements, that you hope to be true. Okay.and these key results are quantitative, right? It's these very specific, discrete things that you can measure.

and you can measure them reliably and continuously. And it's not like, yes, no, we did or didn't do this thing. It's like, you know, we hit this percentage or we hit this dollar amount, or we hit this number of users or whatever else. And, We go through an OKR process on an annual basis, a strategic planning process at Crossbeam, but the OKRs aren't always 12 months.

those OKRs can be, especially when you get down to the team level, not at the company wide level, they can be quarter, they can be six months, they can be some other arbitrary timeframe. they can be cascading, like one of them doesn't start until another one has been achieved, right? But, the important thing is that you're continuously just being intellectually honest about whether or not this thing still matters.

And I think the older a company gets, the easier it is to do OKR strategic planning, goal setting on like longer time horizons. Like I don't have an issue right now at Crossbeam at all saying, here's where we want to be in a year. because we have enough history that we can kind of have line of sight right into, like, where things are going and what the inputs are to those things.

And, a lot of it is operational and execution related. Whereas when we were at year 0 or year 1. We couldn't see our hand in front of our face, let alone three months down the road, let alone 12. And like trying to go through that process would have just been a fool's errand. Like it's like premature optimization, but it's like playing business, right?

like doing OKRs at a zero year old company. It's like, you can do them, but do them for like the next two weeks. Don't do them for the next 

[00:33:47] Jay: It even feels like playing business when you've had a business for a while and you do okay, ours for the first time, you're like, what am I even?

[00:33:54] Bob: Oh, this is, I used to, I've really become like an old softie in my old age here. But like, I used to be so anti mission, vision, and values. Like I always felt like that was such a, like at RJ magic,

we never had, 

[00:34:06] Jay: me too.

[00:34:08] Bob: I just revolted against the whole concept, right? it was the first thing we did at Crossbeam

[00:34:12] Jay: 

I,

we just did those and we just, and we'd been waiting forever. I thought they were corny and I thought they were, I think it was because of the corporate

world. 

[00:34:20] Bob: it feels like decision by consensus. It feels very touchy feely. It does not feel quantitative, et cetera. But man, did I learn my lesson? It's like when we got to 150 people at RJ Metrics and you like crossover Dunbar's number, right? Like you can't possibly have a relationship. Personally with all those people,

it's like, what actually is the connective tissue that holds the whole company together?

And this stuff is cheesy, but it doesn't have to be like you can really have ownership over it and make it matter as your own thing. And I got some scar tissue out of like RJ just being such a chaos machine in its later years because of how poorly we planned for scale. and then at Stitch and Crossbeam, we were much, much tighter on it.

And it's paid really solid dividends just operationally as the companies have gotten bigger.

[00:35:05] Jay: Yeah, no, it feels like, you know, it can very much feel like the office you know,

just like corporate nonsense, but it is, it's a very, can be very meaningful, you know, as a business owner, like, you're like, this is really what we're trying to do and what we stand for. So it is, it's an interesting thing to do for a new company or a company you're about to create and kind of have some sort of wrapper around what it is you're trying to do. Last question, Bob. And that's almost the weekend. It's the weekend. It's coming up.

[00:35:37] Bob: on a Friday. Yeah.

[00:35:38] Jay: if you do anything on earth and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be

[00:35:44] Bob: Oh man. I 

[00:35:45] Jay: non business related, by the way, nothing to do with Crossbeam or business. If there's anything you do on earth personally, and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:35:54] Bob: Whew. Oh man. It's a really. Really fantastic question. I immediately jumped to, things related to just like zooming way, way, way, way, way, way, way out. And it's like, what are the elements of the human experience that you have a low likelihood of experiencing? But that might be really incredible, largely because of the risks associated with them.

Right? So, like, I jump into things like, take my entire family on a trip to space, you know, it's like, I, I don't think I'm going to do that. Like, I love him too much. And it's kind of frivolous, but like. There's also a part of like touching the heavens and sharing that with the people that matter to me, that sounds like really freaking compelling.

Right. and these are the trade offs to kind of have, so I don't know, I probably should spend more time thinking about questions like that, but, 

[00:36:48] Jay: No, that's a great, that's a great answer. I've heard go to space, but it's an interestingly introspective, thought to say my family, right? Cause that is like, it's like, why do you take your kids to Disney world? It's like, not cause I want to go to Disney world. You wanted to cure kids and you want to see your kids enjoying.

And I was wondering that too. Like if they're not enough to remember something, then is it really for them? Or is it for me watching them experience this thing? Like it's kind of for me. Right. But it's like also for them. It's just a very interesting thought.

[00:37:16] Bob: this is weird. Cause it's like, this is going to space. It's kind of a weird, lonely, like, 

[00:37:20] Jay: Right. 

[00:37:20] Bob: leave humanity behind. But like the whole reason to do it is actually about like being more connected The human experience and like the world living is like, that's, that feels like a shared experience to me, not 

[00:37:31] Jay: No, I like that. I like that. All right. bob If people want to find out more about you or get in touch with you specifically about anything they heard today or Crossbeam How do they do that? Sweet?

[00:37:40] Bob: Crossbeam. com is the place to go. I'm probably easiest to find through there. I do have a personal website at robertjmoore. com a lot of the book promo and everything will be as well. So to hear about the, ecosystem, like growth book, robertjmoore. com is for sure the place to go.

[00:37:55] Jay: Yes, we will link it up and i'll be getting that book and we'll Definitely link the book as well. Good luck with that. Congratulations. And hey, man, have a great rest of your week I'll talk to you, buddy.

[00:38:04] Bob: Cool. Thanks Jay.

[00:38:05] Jay: Hey, man 

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