Bob Moore
Co-Founder & CEO, Crossbeam · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveauthorinvestor@robertjmoore ↗LinkedIn ↗robertjmoore.com ↗
Bob Moore is a SaaS entrepreneur who co-founded the partner ecosystem platform Crossbeam, as well as cloud data pipeline Stitch and business intelligence software RJMetrics. He is also the author of the book Ecosystem-Led Growth.
27statements → 9claims → 2claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 1.78/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 2said about them ↓
2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 7 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
9 assertions · 14 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Bob argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Moore: RJMetrics alumni later founded prominent data companies dbt, Stitch, and Omni
“The three co-founders of DBT all worked at RJ Metrics. The founders of Stitch, myself and Jake, which became the early competitor to Fivetran and played in that space. Omni, which is a hot new ticket in the BI space, their founding CTO, Chris Merrick, was our …”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Bob Moore on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Bob Moore said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Moore: Early on, Crossbeam refused product demos unless two partner companies attended
“We didn't do product demos or sales calls. Unless two companies were on them at the same time.”
Bob Moore: Validate early startup ideas with founders, not just buyer personas
“Founders by definition need to develop an extremely high level of empathy and understanding for the needs of people across multiple personas.
And also understand a baseline grasp on how markets evolve over time and what makes for something that's more durable …”
Moore: RJMetrics achieved product-market fit simply by surviving until the market evolved
“Actually we fell into product market fit, not because of something we changed about our product, but because we were early to the market and we didn't die because we had figured out a way to kind of like operate the company profitably and not run out of capita…”
Moore: Building a startup by relying on customer consensus severely caps upside
“Maybe you index a little higher on the extreme outcomes version. Like if your north star is wrong, your north star is wrong and you're really gonna stick yourself. But if you don't do that, you cap your upside really severely because your whole company becomes…”
Moore: Traditional acquisition funnels fail for multiplayer products lacking single-player utility
“Content marketing, buying ads, whole outbound, anything that lands a fresh new person that's never seen it before on our website to just sign up directly through our funnel would fail miserably because they'd show up, they would have no connections, and they w…”
Moore: Crossbeam's most requested feature was integrating with its main rival, Reveal
“The number one requested feature throughout all of Crossbeam was for us to integrate with Reveal and to support the companies that were on the Reveal network.”
Moore: Assess founder-market fit with a two-by-two matrix of interest and experience
“I think this is a founder market fit, like pre-screen. Almost like this two by two matrix of how much fun would I have doing this? How much will it light up my brain? How intellectually interested am I in the problem is one dimension. And then the other dimens…”
Moore: Product-market fit is ephemeral and does not permanently persist
“If you're at zero, stage zero or stage negative one, and you're just a heat seeking missile for product market fit without regard to those other things, the problem is product market fit is extremely ephemeral.
We experienced this at RJ and at Stitch in good w…”
Moore: FOMO prevents angels from giving honest feedback to successful repeat founders
“The FOMO of not being in on their next thing is greater than my willingness to create confrontation with them, which is not a hard ratio to keep over one. Then I'm not going to give them as candid feedback as I probably rationally should, or I'm not even going…”
Moore: Pitching multiple ideas at once forces genuine critique from peers
“Forcing them to compare and contrast and say like, which one, why this one, why not that one does create a little bit of like a forcing function of, you know, being able to criticize all these ideas.”
Moore: Programmatic SEO yields A times B landing pages from A+B articles
“The cool thing is you only have to write A plus B number of articles or pieces of content to stand that up, but you get A times B number of unique landing pages or microsites as a result of doing it.”
Moore: Founders wrongly treat product-market fit as though markets are static targets
“A lot of founders, they talk about product market fit as though markets are stationary and your product is the thing that you move.”
Moore: RJMetrics essentially combined early versions of Fivetran, Snowflake, dbt, and Looker
“RJ Metrics was Fivetran, Snowflake, DBT, and Looker. All together in one product. We built all four of those products in order to build RJ Metrics.”
Moore: RJMetrics alumni later founded prominent data companies dbt, Stitch, and Omni
“The three co-founders of DBT all worked at RJ Metrics. The founders of Stitch, myself and Jake, which became the early competitor to Fivetran and played in that space. Omni, which is a hot new ticket in the BI space, their founding CTO, Chris Merrick, was our …”
Moore: Stitch matched RJMetrics' eight-year revenue run in 19 months without capital
“So Stitch never raised any additional outside capital. We basically like landed the plane of creating a really good home for RJ, bankrolling Stitch, creating a little bit of outcome for folks that had been involved in the RJ journey along the way. And then we …”
Moore: Founder dismissiveness toward customer shifts signals a lack of intellectual honesty
“When you feel like your rate at which you are being dismissive of people and things that you feel like don't know as well because they haven't been doing this as long as you goes up, it's time to do that intellectual honesty check and, like, See if maybe there…”
Moore: Network effect PMF is uniquely tested by customers risking social capital
“There's a really important difference between a network effects driven business like this one and a traditional SaaS business where each individual user or player is contained to their own silo, even if they're in like a multi-tenant system. And that big diffe…”
Moore: Rapidly scaling network effects businesses is inherently capital intensive
“Like I wanted to pick something that would be very, very hard to get started, which network effects businesses are. There's this huge cold start problem. And by definition, doing that rapidly would be capital intensive.”
Moore: 70% of Crossbeam sign-ups came via invites from existing users
“Seven out of every 10 of those companies that signed up for the platform signed up because they were invited in by somebody else who was already on that.”
Moore: Crossbeam did not charge its users for two and a half years
“We basically didn't charge anybody anything for the first two and a half years of this business.”
Moore: Crossbeam raised $100M and rival Reveal raised $50M during ZIRP
“Where we had raised, you know, a hundred million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz and others during the Zerp era, they raised fifty million dollars from Insight Partners and others during the Zerp era.”
Moore: Crossbeam and Reveal merged in an all-equity deal with massive runway
“We both had like five plus years worth of runway in the bank. And we decided to do this deal as an equity deal with no cash exchange and just bring it all together under one hood.”
Moore: Crossbeam's partner network requirements make the product intrinsically viral
“The business itself is intrinsically viral. We're like LinkedIn for data. Like you can't use Crossbeam unless all your partners are also on it, or at least your most important ones are. So you are
Intrinsically motivated to invite your partners on and talk the…”
Moore: Invested in Fanatics when it was just three guys in Jacksonville
“One of the businesses I invested in at Insight was Fanatics. At the time it was called Football Fanatics, and it was three guys in a strip mall in Jacksonville, Florida that had an e-commerce website that had like pretty impressively good growth stats.”
The other half of the tape: Bob Moore's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode on In Depth. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Tristan Handy 2
Every mention by year
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Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| How to find — and keep — product-market fit | Bob Moore (Crossbeam, RJMetrics, Stitch Data | Sep 19, 2024 | 1h 6m |