UpYourStack with Crossbeam

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Hello, and welcome to UpYourStack, the podcast for sales marketing operations, leaders looking to optimize their HubSpot tech stack and drive better business outcomes. I'm your host, Noah Berk, Co-CEO of Aptitude 8. And in today's episode, we're joined by Bob Moore, co-founder and CEO of Crossbeam. Bob has a strong background in building SaaS companies and a passion for helping businesses use their data to make better decisions. 

He's helping companies share information with their partners and secure and efficient ways to improve collaboration and results. We'll talk about Bob's journey, how Crossbeam works and why partnerships are so important. We'll also cover how understanding a company's tech stack can help you make better decisions and what the future might look like for business collaboration.

Let's get started.

Bob, welcome to the show.

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Noah.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Absolutely. Well, Bob, let's just dive right into here. I'm really excited to learn more about your journey and a little bit more just about you in general. So maybe Bob, can you do me a favor and introduce your background? And really your your personal connection to this type of work that you do now?

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Yeah, absolutely. My personal connection is I'm just an enormous nerd. I think there's there's not much more to it than that. So yeah Bob Moore, I'm the co founder and CEO of a company called Crossbeam. I've been building that company for about six years now. It was founded in 2019. And prior to that, I built and sold two SaaS businesses in the data analytics and data infrastructure spaces.

So the first one was called RJ Metrics which we sold to Magento, which is now part of Adobe. And the second one was called Stitch Data which was acquired by Talend in 2018 a little before I started Crossbeam. So the common theme in all these companies has been helping people use data to make better decisions and to build their businesses in more efficient and productive ways.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So how did the idea of Crossbeam really come about? I mean, you worked on these other startups was this something that was buried in the back of your mind, like they're. There should be a mechanism to help partnerships and identify opportunities.

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Yeah, big time. So I'm, I should admit that I'm really not a partnerships person by trade or by training or by background. The fact that Crossbeam has ended up Playing this really interesting role in kind of this ecosystem led growth movement is almost a, just an artifact of the kind of data that we ended up unearthing.

So while I'm not a partnership person, I most certainly am a data person. And Crossbeam is one of those classic startup stories where it could have never existed if not for the company I built before it, where I felt this pain so tremendously, right? So I lived and breathed the excruciating pain of, trying to make data driven decisions with my partners day in and day out at RJMetrics and Vestige

and the circumstances that come up are so incredibly common. You end up building products in the modern tech economy and realizing that your buyers don't make buying decisions anymore based on, whether or not the sales rep bought them a round of golf or how much they like the, whose button was shinier in the UI.

They make purchasing decisions based on how well what you are building and selling works with the stuff they already have and whether it's the growth of the API economy, making these interconnected solutions more common, or it's the success of the digital transformation movement, pushing even the biggest enterprises in the world onto these cloud based platforms.

The reality is that one of the biggest considerations as to whether or not you win is what ecosystems you play in and what your role is in those ecosystems. So, at Stitch, Stitch as a company was middleware. We were a data pipeline company, like Fivetran, where we pull the data out of all your SaaS tools and we drop it into your data warehouse and that enables your analytics pipeline and kind of modern data stack to take form.

So nobody bought Stitch unless they already had a bunch of SaaS tools and they already had a data warehouse and they already had a business intelligence tool sitting on top. So. What we found time and time again was the best prospects for us were the ones who just bought Looker. The, the best customers of ours were the ones who were just standing up Snowflake, right?

So, and by the way, the most interesting prospects for for Snowflake or for Looker were the ones who were experimenting with Stitch. These are all pieces of an interconnected

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: I'm seeing how all this is coming together. haven't even done the big reveal. What Crossbeam does,

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Incredible. Yeah. And it's I tell this story just because it's something that so many people in modern business tend to nod their heads to really aggressively,

right? Because this is the shared experience of anyone trying to build a company in the modern tech economy. So okay, we're in that situation at stitch and every single day we have these questions. Hey, partner. How many customers do we have in common and who are they? Hey partner, are my sales reps currently trying to sell to any of the same companies that your sales reps are trying to sell to?

Hey partner, what closed one deals do you have in the last week who also filled out my demo form three days later? These questions are virtually unanswerable in legacy spaces because they require drawing a venn diagram between my data and my partner's data and math is working against you like mathematically You cannot draw a Venn diagram unless you have all of the data from both of the sets So we get into this kind of prisoners dilemma style data standoff with our partners where The only way for us to answer the questions we want is for one side or the other to like grossly overshare.

You want to know what customers we have in common? I have to give you my entire customer list so that you can draw that venn diagram and get the answer out or vice versa. And that's where the standoff comes in and people fall back to this age old, decades old practice, which was the only stopgap for this thing, which is known as account mapping.

And the legacy account mapping process is a bunch of sales reps and sales leaders. Under the cover of night, emailing spreadsheets back and forth to one another to attempt to basically play battleship with their CRM data and try to find where the hits are. Meanwhile, always dealing in data that's stale and inaccurate, failing miserably to be able to match up accounts and ultimately leaking a bunch of data that is completely irrelevant, right, to all these other companies out there.

It's one of the largest, most widespread shadow IT practices

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So, so this seems like an obvious problem that everyone has and now we're going to get into really obviously what you do, cause you figure out how to solve for it. And was it astonishing when you're like, wait a second, no one has solved for this problem that third business and maybe for listeners out there, you can give me a favorite and describe now that they understand what the problem is.

What does Crossbeam do and why is that so impactful?

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Yeah. So you can think about Crossbeam basically like an escrow service for data, right? We're this secure, independent, third party platform that sits in between any companies that want to collaborate with each other. And we're trusted by everyone and we can see all the data on both sides. And we allow both companies to set up these very specific data sharing rules and governance around who can see what, when and under what circumstances and by being the keeper of rules and the controller of the pipelines, we allow you to basically draw those Venn diagrams in the cloud, but only share the data that meets certain conditions such as, is it a shared customer? Such as, did it enter a sales pipeline under the circumstances that meets this rule set?

And what that allows for is an enormous amount of confidence that the people participating in these account mapping activities have ultimate control and ownership over their data. And that it's only going to the places it needs to go and is controlled. Very specifically on a partner by partner basis.

And then what it unlocks is this new data layer that has just never existed before. Which is, what sits at the intersection of everything I know and everything my partners know. And how can we use that to then unlock these go to market motions and these ecosystem like growth strategies to grow our companies faster.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: It's brilliant when you think about it, because when you were describing the problem and you're saying, Hey, listen, these sales teams get together at the night when everyone's away, start sharing all these spreadsheets, you can only think that your mind like, as an executive team, are they aware that all their data is just going right the door and there's no source of truth.

There is no chain of custody of this data as you're emailing spreadsheets over to who knows who to understand what's going on. So I imagine that's a big thing that's really companies are interested in is the fact that as you said, Bass is an escrow

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: We we knew this was gonna work when we started getting RFPs from legal and compliance teams, right? We thought those guys were going to be our enemies. And, be the source of the most resistance because we started this company a couple months after GDPR went into effect, and it was the most contrarian thing in the world.

I walked into countless VC firms pitching a data sharing business when everybody's talking about how no one's ever going to share any data again, right? But this, what we found was once we got to critical mass and a lot of lawyers and a lot of companies worked really hard to figure out how to fit this practice into their privacy posture and into the way in which information gets controlled within their business, that there were these pathways that could be opened up by using the features that we've unlocked.

And not every company does it the same way, right? Everybody has a different security posture and stance and controls the exchange of information within their partner ecosystems differently, and has different agreements and expectations set with their customers. However, the cool thing about cross-team is the flexibility, and being able to set up that posture allows every company to have their own.

And that is the big unlock.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Bob, you mentioned something about critical mass. Can you talk more about that? So, in order for the business to take off, did you have to have a certain number of companies beginning to leverage the platform? Or was it something that two companies would say, "Hey, I want to work with each other".

They come and say, I want to use Crossbeam platform, or is it a discovery platform for companies to find other companies that work with similar type of customers?

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Yeah, so it's a wonderful question because if you. You hear me give this big speech about all the reasons why Crossbeam is great. It sounds oh, maybe this is just a natural thing that should have existed, and then did the

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: That's what I thought as you're Bob Moore, Crossbeam: like the reality is, 2019, 2020, 2021.

It was a slog for this company because we are a network effects business in the truest sense, right? We're like LinkedIn for data. So it only works if everybody's on it. So, how do you solve for the cold start problem where nobody's on it? There was no such thing in the early days as someone coming to our website and signing up and having a good time. Because if you showed up to our website and signed up for the product and got dropped inside, statistically speaking, zero of your partners would be there. And there is, and believe me, we tried, there is no such thing as single player mode that has product market fit within Crossbeam.

It only works if you're working with partners. So you, the way you phrased the question is very smart because the solution that we ended up discovering was actually to only allow companies to sign up in pairs in those early days. And what we ended up doing was these things called joint jam sessions, where there was no such thing as an onboarding call unless it had two partnered companies on it.

And they would both go through and set up their each of their accounts at the same time. And establish their initial rules and have that first aha moment of discovery, and that worked fairly well. But as you can imagine, getting one company to agree to do this is tricky, let alone getting two, right?

So had, it was a very founder-led sale style motion in those early days. The first few companies we got on, no surprise, were all those companies from the modern data stack ecosystem that I had worked with at Stitch. I was literally just trolling through my Rolodex, cashing in every favor that I had built up.

And e-commerce too, right? A lot of the big e-commerce vendors were early customers because at RJ Metrics we sold to e-commerce companies, and I partnered with all those businesses and sold it to one of them. So we got these early kind of atomic networks. There's this guy, Andrew Chen at Andreessen Horowitz who wrote a book called The Cold Start Problem.

I borrow a lot from his vocabulary, and it's a great book, but Chen talks about these atomic networks. What is the smallest network of connected entities that is required in order for a minimum viable value proposition to be realized, right? And for us, we did realize it was actually really simple.

It could work in just a barbell formation, right? Two companies connected by a partnership. And then this is where it starts to get beautiful, which is by early 2021, it got to a point where Whether I did founder sales or not didn't matter because the organic virality of the network graph kicked into a point where it outstripped anything that we could do manually and the thing got a mind of its own. So what would happen is you get that initial barbell signed up, and those two companies enjoy it. And then you got to ask the question. It's like, why aren't I doing this with all my other partners, and then all of a sudden?

Partner A and Partner B both invite another 10 companies on and for those 10 companies, you don't need the joint jam session because their partner is already there. So then you can do a more traditional PLG-driven, like self-onboarding or customer success-assisted, and they are almost guaranteed to be successful.

And have a high rate of engaging and signing up because the email they get is literally, Hey, this person that you know and trust at this company. That's an important partner to you. They want to hand you a big payload of data. And all you have to do is sign up for this platform.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: like a really hard thing say no to.

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Good. It's a pretty good conversion rate on right? So, between in, 2019, I think maybe at the end of the year, we were still south of a hundred companies on Crossbeam, and then we probably got to four or five hundred in, 2020, and then we were in the thousands by 2021, and today we're at over 30, 000 companies that are on the network, and seven out of every ten of those signed up because they were invited in by somebody else who was already there.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Awesome. That's such a great business. So I guess it leads to my next question. Some of the listeners in the news may have heard about a merger. How this play a part in one? Why merge? And then two, how did this impact the business as a whole?

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Yeah, so I used that LinkedIn analogy earlier, right? So, let me I'll paint a picture through that metaphor. Around the time that Crossbeam started, a lovely and brilliant entrepreneur in Paris named Simone Boucher started his own company, which was called ShareWork, nearly identical in vision and in execution.

But Simone had also sold a company previously. He sold a company that was in the HR tech space. So in the same way that I was gobbling up early users in the modern data stack, This company's share work in Paris got some really nice like gravity nodes in their network graph in the HR tech space and also because they were in Europe rather than the US there were there was this technology seen in Paris that had really adopted that platform well and ShareWork rebranded a few years into Reveal. Which is a brand that's probably more familiar to more people out there. And we found ourselves for the first few years barely seeing them in the market, barely bumping in because we co-existed inside of these, like kind of siloed clusters in different verticalized SaaS categories among our customers.

But by 2022, 2023, it started to become more and more clear that there were these very large horizontal players that kind of cut across multiple ecosystems, where the fact that there were two companies out there just made it worse for everybody. And this is a rare thing, right? I'm a big believer in having a lot of players in any given space, and drives innovation and all this other stuff that you can imagine.

But, using the LinkedIn analogy, imagine a world where there were two LinkedIns. And half the people you know are on one, and half the people you know are on the other one. Well, what's the solution? It stinks for you because you have to sign up for two platforms, maintain your profile on two platforms, check two platforms, activity feeds, and whatnot, and it's a terrible user experience in that regard.

But there's a more insidious piece of it, which is, okay, which LinkedIn sales navigator do I buy a seat for? Which LinkedIn recruiter does my people team sign up for? My sales ops team's only gonna let me integrate with one tool in this category if I want to hook it into my CRM system. Which one do I pick?

And what we found was, because the two companies both existed and were on their own kind of firm footing, it made it nearly impossible for a large chunk of the market, and the bigger you got the harder it was, To actually commit to one tool or the other and instead they had this fraction of a value proposition that couldn't get fully realized because where they were getting their data was split between which of their partners were on which network.

And Simone and I we met at an industry conference in Miami in 2023. And frankly really hit it off. I think we were both extremely self-deprecating. And there wasn't a lot of posturing around Hey, my company's great. Your company stinks. It was more the opposite. We were immediately making fun of ourselves.

And I think we had a big foam rubber mascot running around this conference. And he had just given a talk on stage introducing this concept of near bound, which was a word that they just totally made up. And it was just we both admitted the absurdity of I've got my stupid blue mascot running around, and he's making up words to try to convince me.

And it's we just hit it off. And however, we're both people who really want to win. So we hit it off and had this good interaction and then, competed like hell against each other for a year or so. But we kept running into these cases where if you looked at our product request list from our customers, and you stacked ranked them by the frequency of requests.

It got to a point where the number one feature request among our customer base was to merge with Reveal. And it got to the point where the number one feature request we could build any number of things, all the integrations in the world, make, unless you had an integration the two of you, no one really wanted it.

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: The customers were pounding the table like Please get these networks together, because I'm tired of logging into two tools, and I can't convince my company to fund a software investment in something that's got half of the value for it.

So we set our egos aside and did the very hard work of trying to architect a way in which to bring these things together, where it wasn't going to make everybody happy, but it was going to, we knew that bringing them together would create something that was unquestionably better for everybody.

Then some of its parts. And that creates an excess, right? If 1 plus 1 equals 3, you've got an extra 1 to play with that you didn't have before. And you've got to use that extra 1 to Endure all the pain of, you can imagine the kinds of questions that come up, in public.

It's what do you call the company? Who's the CEO? Which tech platform do you end up using behind the scenes? It's who controls the board? What's the ownership structure of the company? Like, how do investors get repaid and in what order? And we had both raised substantial amounts of capital.

It was one of the most complicated, like a private-to-private merger. Inventor-backed tech businesses almost never happens. Unless it's like Vista buying all of these

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: I was say that.

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: just smushing them together, cheating. If you just, yeah. But like a proper private-to-private merger is like unheard of.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: We just went through that ourselves when we merged two HubSpot elite partners together, OBO and Aptitude 8. And I mean, it's complicated. It's what are you going to call the company? One thing I always say is let ego set it. There's no ego here. Whatever does the best is what's ever in the best interest of the company.

And even though I'm the Co-CEO of Aptitude 8, it's always hard when you give up the name. I'm like, Hey, listen, I know I'm the CEO of this company, but OBO is going away as a name. I these are difficult decisions, let alone the board, how all that works.

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Yeah, it is. It's complex, but I think that the guiding light that got it through got us through it all was just our customers and what they wanted, and the promise of where we are today, which is we are on. I think there's. Fewer than 200 companies left that haven't migrated over to to the crossbeam network and we're in the, the final phases of completing that in less than a year, we closed that deal at the end of June in 2024 and we're here recording this right at the start of February, I guess, in 2025.

By June, it'll be done. And like the completion of kind of the full product integration and the networks being merged and everything, and that is we're we're, yeah, we're really proud of that. And it's been a lot of hard work, but fortunately, customers are happy and it's just better.

It's just it's legitimately the promise of why we did it. Absolutely unquestionably came true. And meanwhile, Simone and I are running around doing sales kickoffs for all of our biggest customers and stuff like, saying, hey, guess what? That thing you used to have. Not only do you still have it, it's now 100 percent better overnight.

This is a result of this, so...

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: That's great and you didn't have to increase the price or maybe you did? That's a different story, but we'll get to that.

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: No, I mean, yeah, we worried about increasing the value first and the rest.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Well, that's awesome. One of the things you said earlier, one of the reasons, you're talking about. Hey, if you're going to integrate, one of the questions that these companies had is Hey, if I'm going to integrate with one CRM, which one do I use, Reveal or Crossbeam?

So maybe we take a step back, here is how does, it works with something like HubSpot, how does a Crossbeam, we'll use an example as Crossbeam integrates with HubSpot. What type of value do the users get from it? And then how would one get started CrossFit as a house by user?

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Yeah. Great question. And I'll, this gets meta. So I'll be even more specific in my example, right? Because HubSpot is a customer of ours and uses the platform. So I'll set that aside when I'm talking about HubSpot. And I believe the nature of question is if I am a business where my CRM is HubSpot, I am a HubSpot customer, and I happen to use HubSpot as a CRM.

And I'm connected with my own ecosystem that may or may not include HubSpot itself. How do I actually use this thing? And this is where 

Imagine how you think it should work, and if we've done our jobs right, it's exactly that, right? So, you sign up, we have a great free tier that allows you to sign up and get started without needing to make a financial investment up front, and that kind of unlocks your ability to connect your CRM system, so you'll connect your HubSpot to it.

And then within Crossbeam, one of the coolest things we do is we allow people to compare data across CRM systems. So, if you use HubSpot, but one of your partners uses another CRM, and then maybe another partner's earlier on, and they don't have a CRM stood up, and they use a bunch of Google Sheets, and then somebody else wants to upload Excel files You can connect an account map with all of them.

It doesn't have to be like all the HubSpot-using companies connect with each other, and everybody on the other CRMs connect with each other. We're the great equalizer here. 

So, there's this process that happens, which is almost entirely automatic, where we map the data that's coming in from HubSpot, the leads and the accounts, et cetera, into these universally understood objects that we call populations.

And those populations are basically lists of people or companies, right? It's who are all of my active customers? And what are all the metadata dimensions on which you might want to slice them, right? Geography, what products they use, how long they've been a customer, activity, stuff like that. So you get like this.

This unit that constitutes the unique identifier for a record in that customer table, and then all these columns that can potentially later on be used to slice and dice and set up your data sharing roles and do analytics and stuff like that. And we do that for our standard populations, our customers' opportunities, which are basically anybody you're actively selling to with some kind of realistic near-term time horizon to closing a deal with an understood dollar value on that deal, and prospects, people you wish that you were selling to.

And every single company that's on Crossbeam sets up those three populations, like those are your gold standard three. You can create custom populations, you want to look at churned customers, you want to create some kind of specialized list, you can do it. But everybody's got those three. So, then you connect with partners, and it is like LinkedIn, it's a both sides have to opt in to connect with each other.

It's not a co op where everybody just throws their data in a big pile. Every single company you connect with, you are specifically saying, Yes, this is my partner. I want to connect with them. And you approve the data sharing rules. So nothing goes to anybody without your approval. And then, once you and your partner are connected, think about the situation you're in.

You have these three populations and they, by definition, also have these three populations and you know that they're set up in a way where the data has integrity and is trusted and then magically right away you can get this really cool thing that we call the account mapping matrix, is a three by three grid and it's here's my prospects, opportunities, customers versus your prospects, opportunities, customers, and you can look at that in terms of the count of companies.

You can look at that in terms

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: is this in, is this actually in HubSpot or are they in Crossbeam to be able to look at this data?

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: It's both. So, Crossbeam as a UI has all the bells and whistles, right? Like you can access so many things, and there's a lot of features and functionality where when you're physically logged into Crossbeam, you get to like really flex your muscle and go crazy with reports. There's some really cool stuff that you can do inside of the HubSpot UI.

We have a co-pilot product. So, for sales reps, for sales leaders, for people that, Want to look at a record and say okay I'm looking at this company that I'm trying to sell to or I have a call with in five minutes And I want to understand what the 360 degree ecosystem story is around this company. What other products are they using?

Who are the reps at those companies that sold those products? How long have they been using them? They pull up copilot and it gives them all that data Along with kind of an AI generated summary of the key points that they ought to know going into Whether it's a call or whether they're trying to figure out how to crack the account it synthesizes everything that's known throughout your ecosystem into this one view.

So that's right inside of the HubSpot UI. But all of the like advanced account mapping and the report generation and things like that, you can do inside of CrossBeam.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Are most of the companies that you work with tend to be like technology oriented companies, or are they also in services? Maybe they're in home services or mostly in B2B. I mean, talk to me about your customer base.

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: We've got so in the early days, back when we had that first hundred companies, they were almost entirely B2B SaaS software companies that were ISV partners with each other. What's happened to us in the last several years is a lot of very interesting diversification because of where we've gotten pulled in the network craft.

So, I'll give you some examples. Service companies, and I would say traditional channel partnerships in general, have become really big. We've got a bunch of these enterprise customers who brought us on through their ISV teams, and then the channel teams realize the nature of what we do, and all of a sudden, we're connecting to system integrators and resellers and people that are in the more classic channel motions that exist out there.

You can imagine that having the same data escrow concept has so many really valuable applications when it comes to avoiding channel conflict, creating coordination and transparency among folks that are in the channel together. It's just that the relationship is less of this. blob of interconnected companies and more of a linear value chain, right?

And it's a question just like, where you are in that value delivery. So, the use cases are some are the same, some are a little different. But we're very prominent in the channel now and have a ton of services companies on there. But from a vertical standpoint, it's also diversified a lot. So, tech got us in, so SaaS, pure play SaaS, right?

Got us into vertical SaaS. So construction technology, accounting software, educational technology, e-commerce specific, and retail specific technology. And then once you're in vertical SaaS, you get into vertical vendors, right? So we're in, we're in construction software and all of a sudden we've got, one of the nation's largest valve manufacturers becomes a customer because they, from a distribution standpoint, partner with and care about customer intersections with the project management software that is used in order to manage a project where these valves get installed, right?

And like the intersection of customer bases and who uses what tech and who's buying from what vendors becomes really important intelligence in creating their own customer experiences that are really valuable, and helping them focus on the right markets. Similar in you know in e-commerce we go into we start the big e-commerce platforms and that takes you to like Inventory management systems and inventory management systems takes you into shipping and logistics.

And then that takes you into, like, know, I think this goes with your whole network effect. It just growing and growing. And

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: It's absolutely wild. We have a visualization that we use internally that I love that is you've got this giant cluster in the middle, and then all of these kind of like outer peripheral clusters, and then you've got these arms like shooting off from the outer clusters from a guy, this be so much 

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: fun.

Pure play vertical, and these are expansion points.

Yeah, the biggest like my, my, they often say that like the CEO's job ultimately is like you're a capital allocator, right? And I think this is probably one of the most fun, but also most challenging part of my job is like, we have to really deliberately decide where we want to try and stoke the flames and invest.

It's we see a cluster that's like really interesting in like the cannabis production and distribution universe, right? Where there's like a giant cluster there, and meanwhile, every AI company under the sun is starting to turn on Crossbeam and light that up and trying to think about how to break into like emergent verticals and, be there, before a lot of these companies even get established as like a de facto standard, like figuring out and meanwhile, like the legacy channel business with channel people that have been doing this for 30 years, trying to infiltrate that, which is an absolutely massive Tam but has a lot of, slow to adopt consumers.

It's what do you pick? What bets do you pick there? And, do you want to let the market pull dictate it, or do you want to let vision dictate it? And, our eyes can be bigger than our stomachs for sure because we want to help all these people. 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So, so maybe one of the things I would want to switch topics to here is what do you see as a, the evolution? I mean, you didn't necessarily start off as a partnership guy. You fell into it because of your data, but how do you see the role of partnerships evolving in the next five years?

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Yeah, so there's a lot of dimensions to this. And I think one thing that is unquestionable is that the closeness the partnerships function to the go-to market function will be tighter than ever. And it's always been, you ask any partnership person anytime Hey, do you feel like you're part of the, what helps this company grow?

Like they, the answer's always yes. And I think there's a and affinity that partner People feel toward their contribution to a company's own growth trajectory. And that's great. But what I think we've been able to help bring to light at Crossbeam is how incredibly powerful the data and relationships that exist inside of these ecosystems are when they're actually able to be controlled, understood, harnessed and deployed in real world workflows with the people that run the last mile of bringing a deal over the line and the world of partnerships, in a pre Crossbeam era, I think had a reputation, deserved or not, of folks that worked really hard, but had to practice their work through hugs and chugs, right?

It's you go to a trade show, and you have great relationships with the people from the other companies, and you cultivate those relationships, and you socialize, and you figure out again, these like back channel account mapping practices and you find the deals and that's a real skill and it's to be applauded, but in a world where technology allows for that to get unlocked in real time at scale with enormous amounts of control and governance wrapped around it, you now have, you've gone from playing with tinker toys to driving a semi truck, right?

This is a 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Your metaphors, by the way, are fantastic.

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: It's all I got. Yeah.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: enjoying each and every one of them. Well, I mean, on in kind of on the next piece here is because AI is supercharging everything. I mean, heck, look at ChatGPT operator. I'm not quite sure when this episode is going to drop. So people may have known about for a couple of months now. 

But how is AI and automation going to play a role? And you mentioned some of it earlier where it can summarize relationships, and it can, it's, do you have that co-pilot relationship, but how's it going to play a role in Crossbeam over the coming years?

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Yeah, this is where I get to be on tape, recorded, saying something that's going to sound so dumb in ten years, right? Or maybe in ten months. Here, right now, where it looks like a lot of this is going, is that, and I think ChatGPT Operator is a great example of this, is that the word of the day is edgentic, right?

So, it's amazing to have these kind of text-based interfaces for dispatching a single instance of a of a GPT to go and do a thing that is specifically requested by you. It's another thing to allow those agents to spin up their own agents, like Mr. Meeseeks style from Morty, right? And complete subtasks within those, and then combine it back together again.

It's another thing when you start to infuse that into a multi-modal situation where voice and images and webpages all can be synthesized as inputs or outputs. And when you look at the partnership world through that lens, like the idea of an agentic partnership organization actually starts to make a lot of sense, right?

In the same way that fundamentally the work I think a lot of the that is the busy work in sales, the work that is the busy work in sales development, the work that is the busy work in content generation and in research I don't know that it's going to kill the human side of those jobs. What it is going to do is make the humans doing those jobs radically better at making high-leverage use of their time.


Skill is I think, most jobs in most industries, you become really good and you use that incredible skill about 5 percent of your time. And the rest of your time, you're like in these routines that maybe a more junior person could do, or maybe are repetitive to you.

It's almost like you can switch off your brain, and it's like system one, system two, right? And like just let you let autopilot take over and then what makes you really good is hey, Sully is flying that plane and he's got to land it in the Hudson, right? It's that one time on that one day makes you worth that senior pay grade.

So, what happens in a world where all of that stuff that's not the senior pay grade can actually, potentially be done by kind of background operators, it just makes for A lot more you get to pack a much bigger punch in the execution.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: And I've been referring to a lot as a force multiplier ultimately in the end, to your point, I like how you use the analogy or you talk about the 5%. And I think oftentimes people are able to turn that 5 percent into 95 percent of their time. It's just gonna be much more impactful for an organization.

And also, let's be honest, there's not enough people out there. Especially as populations continue to age, we're going to need A. I. To help fill in those gaps of the work that needs to be able to get done. And people are going to continue to expect a more personalized experience, more one-to-one connection that A.

I. Is going to be able to facilitate, which is both. If you think about it, interesting that A.I. Is going to facilitate a one-to-one interaction is better, but it is going to speed everything up.

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Yep. It is the thing I think that people forget about innovation, which is that it increases worker productivity. Very often correlate with increases in demand for higher density, higher value experiences and products, right? So it's like the invention of the car. It's like, all right.

Well, we don't need all these people breeding horses anymore. However, somebody has got to make mufflers now, there are these things, where, oh, and by the way, it used to be one out of every hundred people could practically have and maintain, and keep a horse for transportation.

But now every driveway in America, within 50 or 60 years, is going to have one, if not two, cars in it. So, like the adoption of, The adoption of this technology in such a widespread manner, I think will have a pretty large destructive effect on the demand curve side of this as well. And it's just great for like the modern economy, right?

The productivity per human can go way up. I think that the life expectancy and like experience of the average human can very likely improve as a result of this. And yeah, I am, the most terrifying things are also the most exciting to me, right? Like these robots that are very heavily powered and driven by AI.

And you start to think about like, elder care, right? Like when I need 24-hour support later on in my

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Robot Betty. I'm pretty sure from the Jetsons they already showed us

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Exactly. Yeah, I think we're, I we're there. But like this stuff is coming faster than any of us expect. And I think, certainly in our lifetimes, I expect to have my life saved at least once before I'm off this planet. That's something that would not have happened if not for AI.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Agreed. Well, Bob, one thing I think is fun in previous conversations, and maybe listeners would like to know, is you have improv comedy experience. How is that impacted? I mean, I think just listeners, you can get an idea here from Bob's metaphors and analogies of how good he is at this, because he's fantastic at explaining the product via through, and I think that's the best way to explain anything through via through metaphors and analogies, but how has it impacted your growth?

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Yeah. One of our values at Crossbeam is this is fun, you know, I'm not a fan of forced fun, but I do think it's worth saying out loud sometimes that you have a choice to make showing up at work every day. And we can have an hour-long conversation here about account mapping and data escrow, and CRM systems.

I think the overwhelming majority of people on this planet would pull out their phone and open TikTok and do, literally do anything else to avoid having to pay attention to this. But it gets even worse and even more droll when you're in a world where you're not actually able to enjoy that conversation because it's the 10,000th time you've said that thing.

So what's the difference? How do you find the fun in those situations? Cause If you're an engineer, you're writing code in a language with the same algorithms and the same libraries that you've been working on in the same code base for years and years. And if you're a salesperson, you're doing the same pitch again.

And if you're a marketer, you're writing some variation on the same blog post that you've been pounding the table on for five years. Like, where do you find that fun? And it's a choice. And I think that being deliberate about chasing the things that spark joy and continue to light up our brains and operating the business are really important.

And I find that's what improv has allowed me to do in my job. So, I approach every one of these conversations like this one we're having today, with a bunch of things that improv really helped me build muscle around. One of them is enormous amounts of intellectual and personal curiosity, right?

Even if you're walking down the same road you've walked conversationally a million times. Finding that very interesting thing that's a little different, that one tweak, that one way to take a risk and experiment with some metaphor about cars that you've never said before on spot it might bomb, but if it goes well, it makes it more interesting for me, and it certainly has the opportunity to make the conversation more interesting in general, and improv forces you to listen extremely well, it forces you to really latch onto things that you think the audience might have seen, right?

Like what, one of the things I love about improv is like, if you think the audience saw it, you can't not acknowledge it, right? If you're in a scene about two people that are, having a transaction at a supermarket, and you establish that there was a wall right there.

And all of a sudden, the cashier walks through that wall. Guess what? Your scene's not about the supermarket anymore. Cause the whole crowd just saw that person walk through the wall and they're thinking, oh, this improviser just screwed up. He established there was a wall there. You, as the performer, have to say, Oh my God, you can walk through walls.

And your scene has to change because otherwise you're gonna stew in not naming the thing, right? This is another improv paradigm. I try to give improv paradigms that are not yes and right, because everybody could talk about that. But like this, there's this one improv concept that's named it, you got, like if they, if you saw it, they saw it.

And that is actually where the humor is, which is in the honesty and in the discomfort that comes with the honesty and in being able to see people adapt on the fly and it proves that they're paying attention and that they care and that they're listening and that they're in sync with you and how better to conduct a sales call.

How better to conduct a VC.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Bob, I hope every, if let's just take one thing away, especially this last part here. I had a whole bunch of questions as we close this out, but I'm going to just stop with that because that was brilliant. I mean, what you just shared there it's a way to connect, and especially acknowledging that wall that they just walked through, because I think too often we don't acknowledge the obvious elephant in the room.

At that moment in time, and what better to connect with people than actually acknowledge what they saw. 

Bob, this has been absolutely fantastic conversation. Your journey is amazing. The story is incredible. If I mean, at this time, if you're not on Crossbeam, I mean, you're a little bit late to the at this point, as you're hearing.

But if you are in Crossbeam, congratulations to you. If you're not in Crossbeam, please, by all means, get on top of it and start leveraging it, even if it's for your smaller business, you work with vendors, you work with partners. Bob, that being said, how can listeners connect with you, and how can they learn more about Crossbeam?

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: I am. I have one of the most generic names on the planet, so I am Bob Moore. You can find me on LinkedIn along with 30,000 other Bob Moore's, but I'm the one that looks like this and is CEO of Crossbeam. Please do connect with me. I try to stay connected with all of our all our users and colleagues there.

Crossbeam.com. If you check it out. Our blog, our ELG Insider newsletter, is great. And I did, I published a book called Ecosystem-Led Growth through Wiley last year that's available generally anywhere that business books are sold. I think it's still in some airports, but it's definitely around your local Barnes and Noble and certainly Amazon if you want to double click into some of the stories we told here and many more.

That book is a wellspring of goodies.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Bob, I'm going to get that book. Thank you, by the way. And Bob, it's been an absolute pleasure having you here. Thank you so much for joining the show, listeners. I hope you enjoyed and thank you.

Bob Moore, Crossbeam: Thanks, though. Cheers.