Ecosystem-Led Growth - with Bob Moore, Founder and CEO Crossbeam

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Bob Moore, the founder and CEO of Crossbeam, and the author of the soon-to-be-published book Ecosystem-Led Growth. We'll be covering three main topics with Bob, primarily from his new book. First, the $2.6 billion mistake that Bob made in his career, which is really the genesis of Ecosystem-Led Growth.
A little bit more detail into the Ecosystem-Led Growth revolution that's happening as we speak. And how for you as a SaaS entrepreneur, founder, and a marketing to consider an Ecosystem-Led Growth strategy. So Bob, with that, please take a moment to give an overview of your journey, becoming my guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Bob Moore** (1:25)
Thanks, Ray. It's awesome to be here. I've been a big fan of many of your episodes in the past, so super flattered to be in the room with you, geeking out on these things. For folks out there who haven't heard from me before, my name is Bob Moore, co-founder and CEO at Crossbeam. Crossbeam is actually my third SaaS company. So just really briefly, I started my career out working in venture capital at a firm called Insight Partners on the investment team there. And I left my job after a few years there to start a data analytics company called RJ Metrics.
And RJ Metrics, we'll talk about it more a little later, but was basically a SaaS company helping e-commerce businesses make smarter decisions using their data. I'm a big data nerd, I'm a computer science statistics person, going back to my education.
And RJ was a huge, huge learning experience. We ran it for eight years. We sold it to Magento in 2016, which quickly became absorbed by Adobe. So it's part of the Adobe Commerce Cloud technology now. And then my same co-founder and I started an even nerdier business called Stitch Data. If you think of RJ Metrics as charts and dashboards, Stitch Data is like the data plumbing that goes on behind the scenes, allowing data pipelines to exist that move data out of SaaS tools into data warehouses and other analytics platforms.
We kind of became part of that modern data stack movement, and we sold that business to Talend in 2018 And Talend is now part of Qlik.
So a lot of consolidation always happens after these things. But then on the heels of that, I started Crossbeam, which is what I've been working on since basically the beginning of 2019 And we could talk more about Crossbeam, but the core idea is that our goal is really to unlock this new data layer that has never really existed at scale before, which is like the answer to the question, what's at the middle of the Venn diagram between my data and another company's data that I might be collaborating with or partnering with? And if you can unlock that data, you can unlock a whole lot of really interesting use cases that were kind of impaired before by the lack of that data. So I'll leave it at that for now. We're about five years in at Crossbeam, having a blast, working with over 18,000 companies that use the platform. We've got some great investors around the table and really still just getting started.

**Ray Rike** (3:48)
We're really looking forward to today and we're going to really dive in to the details in your new book, Ecosystem-Led Growth. But in this small industry world, your co-founder at RJ Metrics and Stitch is actually going to be on the podcast next week talking about his new entity also. So it's like RJ Metrics reunion week for me.

**Bob Moore** (4:10)
Well, we had the word Metrics in the name of our company. So I feel like if you don't get our whole exec team on this thing eventually, we did something wrong.
But it's an interesting point actually that RJ Metrics was a good company. It was not a great company. It made a good return for most of our investors. It didn't make a portfolio returning kind of event. However, the human beings that we incubated there, that we met, that we were lucky enough to work with, that we got to watch grow up and learn and mature as we all figured out these problems together, some of the most amazing people I've ever been lucky enough to work with. An interesting side effect is many of them have gone on to start additional businesses on the heels of RJ Metrics. Jake's company Common Paper is one, Crossbeam is obviously in that world. The three co-founders of DBT Labs, the company behind the hugely popular DBT open source product in the analytics space, we're all RJ Metrics alums.