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Uncharted Entrepreneurship - hosted by Brent Peterson out of the Minnesota chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization – brings you daring stories straight from the trailblazing entrepreneurs who are unmapping business frontiers across every industry. Settle in around our virtual campfire as Brent sits down to pick the brains of startup pioneers, visionary founders, and intrepid CEOs whose origin stories - marked by unexpected twists, lessons, and stumbles along unpaved paths - will inspire your own trek in launching a boundary-pushing venture. Trading war stories, strategies, and even warnings, these audacious guests invite fellow founders and future leaders into their confidential circles in a uniquely transparent, wise, and motivational way. So join us off the beaten business trails to light your entrepreneurial fire!
Brent Peterson (00:01.582)
you
Brent Peterson (00:13.422)
Alright.
Welcome to this episode. That was new. This is my new intro that I just tried and I'm going to say 20 seconds is way too long. So experimenting today. I have Bob Moore. Bob is the founder of Crossbeam. Bob, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us your day -to -day role and one of your passions in life.
Bob Moore (00:37.528)
Yeah, thanks Brian. Great to reconnect. As he said, I'm Bob Moore, CEO and co -founder of Obert Crossbeam. We're a software as a service product that basically the simplest way to explain it is to think of us almost like an escrow service for data. So whenever two companies want to partner with each other, we sit in between those companies and we're this safe, secure environment where you can compare your data sets to each other and figure out how and where to collaborate. So.
you know, questions like, hey, partner, how many customers do we have in common and who are they? Or are my sales reps trying to sell into any of the same companies as your sales reps? We let you kind of fine tune the rights and permissions around drawing those Venn diagrams. You can surface all the stuff that drives value for your business, but keep all the rest of your data private and secure. So we've got about 18 ,000 companies that use it now, including a huge universe of folks in the modern kind of retail and online retail tech stacks.
Um, and prior to that, I was an even bigger data nerd. So I, uh, I started a company in 2008 called RJ metrics, which was a data analytics platform for e -commerce companies. We were acquired by Magento in 2016. Uh, and I was in house at Magento, which is where I originally met Brent, um, running the Magento, uh, business intelligence team there for a couple of years. Um, and then after that, I started another nerdy company called stitch data, uh, which was all about data pipelines and data infrastructure. We got acquired by talent in 2018.
And then start a cross beam and I've been been at it across beam for about five years now So that's that's been the journey to date Yeah
Brent Peterson (02:15.47)
That's awesome. Thanks, Bob. Um, all right. So, uh, we did talk in the green room. We have volunteered to be part of the free joke project. And so all I'm going to do is tell you a joke and all you have to do is say, should just joke be free or do you think somebody should charge for it? Or as somebody said earlier in the week, should I be paying you for the joke? Um, or in this context, maybe we should partner with some other company that actually has funny jokes. We can, we could try to get the good joke data coming up and seeing where we're going.
Bob Moore (02:42.264)
This is good, yeah. Ecosystem of jokes.
Brent Peterson (02:45.198)
All right, ecosystem of jokes. Yeah. All right. Here we go. My wife thinks it's weird that I stare at the window during a heavy rainstorm. It would be a lot less weird if she would just let me inside.
Bob Moore (03:01.176)
Alright, alright. Someone should pay for that joke. I think the question is how much. And I feel like it might be in the change in my pocket category. But I'll give it on a scale of stone face to falling out of my chair. I'll give it a smirk.
Brent Peterson (03:19.63)
All right. Yeah, more, I got some more sound effects. Okay, good. We're not going to, I got to, and this is all new. So I'm trying to allow it in my new little studio. Yeah. Yep. All right. Cool. All right. So, um, uh, RJ metrics, uh, it sounds like you've had a, I mean, it's been a fantastic career you've had so far.
Bob Moore (03:29.688)
This is the best podcast I've ever been on. We've got sound effects, we've got intro music, there's been a joke. What more can you ask for?
Brent Peterson (03:48.11)
I'm gonna write you up as a serial entrepreneur. I started using Crossbeam when it first came out, when I was at Wajento, and it's such a valuable tool. So let's start with maybe the reasoning behind how you found, why you decided to do this, and maybe some of those stories around why, how that startup went.
Bob Moore (04:13.336)
Yeah, so this was, um, Crosby is one of those companies that I think could have never been a founder's first company. Um, and there's a couple of reasons for that, but you know, the most relevant one here is that it was, it was born out of pattern recognition from what I saw in all these other environments that I was in, in, in my previous companies before starting it. And if you go back to the RJ Metrics era, you know, this was a company that, um, we,
As we got larger and larger, found ourselves very, very dependent on the other technologies that our customers were using. So we had really awesome integrations with Magento. We had awesome integrations with other e -commerce platforms. And what our customers were already using could often be one of the biggest predictors of whether or not they would become a customer, how...
which sales rep even we might assign to the deal, how we might present the deal and talk about our features and functionalities. It was a really interesting indicator of quality of fit for the people that we were prospectively selling into. And then also over the course of servicing that account and trying to grow that account, our ability for...
our customers to use our tool alongside other technologies also proved to be a really good predictor of preventing churn or increasing growth in accounts, right? Like the more integrations you turn on, the stickier the product becomes. So it ended up being pretty influential in the way we thought about forecasting and the way we thought about cultivating demand generation and creating leads, and then the way we thought about growing accounts. And yet, you know, being the data nerds that we were running a data analytics company,
If you looked around the whole business, the whole thing was data driven except for partnerships like our sales team, our marketing team, even like our finance and our HR and our ops teams. They all had these really cool systems of record that had all this captive data that could kind of tell you what happened in the past and try to guess at what might happen in the future. And then you look at the partnership team and they're trying to answer these questions. Like I mentioned earlier, right? Really simple ones, like, you know, how.
Bob Moore (06:21.624)
much demand can we generate from our partner ecosystem this quarter? Or which of the deals do we think we should, you know, leverage the partner narrative in the messaging or maybe even literally involve the partner in trying to win? And it was all governed by this really archaic process called account mapping, where we were basically just like emailing spreadsheets back and forth with a bunch of our partners to try and, try and like take a gut shot at what accounts might overlap or maybe just the ones where we already knew that they overlap. So they were super late stage and it was almost like,
It was more like doing attribution modeling after the fact than it was actually trying to drive demand or drive outcomes. And I thought, well, this really stinks, you know? And I kind of dug into it a little bit. And the reality was that, you know, in order to answer those questions, you need all of the data from not just your data set, your data silo, but from the partner's data silo as well. And this is where the whole world seems to be working against you, right? Like math is working against you because if you want to draw a Venn diagram between,
my customer list and your customer list, the only way to do it is if you have all the data from both of the data sets, which means I need to give my partner my entire customer list in order for them to answer that question or vice versa. And no matter how much I love my partner, it's kind of a non -starter. And then you get into all the data challenges of like, I'm selling to Delta faucets, but you're selling to Delta airlines. And we are emailing these spreadsheets back and forth and they just say Delta on them. And the false positives and false negatives of the matches,
Not to mention the most valuable moment when you could uncover that there's some intersection or opportunity to collaborate or co -sell or cross -sell is the second it happens, right? The second I get a new lead, the second you close a new customer. And yet most of these account mapping processes, they were happening quarterly at best. And in some companies, they would happen like once a year. So it was just a bad system that I think led to poor outcomes and a lot of confusion. It just felt like it was a decade or two behind.
the way we were running our sales organization or our marketing automation systems or things like that. So then after we got acquired by Magento, I just assumed, right? Archie Metrics was a startup. We were 150 people when we got acquired. I just assumed that when you get into the big leagues and you're like $100 million plus revenue company,
Bob Moore (08:39.704)
There's some module in Salesforce that you can turn on for a bunch of money or something that just like magically solves this problem for you. Like I assumed it was a solved problem, just not for me as a startup guy. So I get in, in the house of Magento and Magento had just spun out of eBay. So they had inherited a bunch of technology from an even larger company in terms of internal operations. And I look around and what do I see?
a technology partner ecosystem that has over 500 technology partners in it who have integrations built and kind of like a one plus one equals three value proposition with the Magento platform. I look around on the channel side and there's over 10 ,000 global agency and system integrator partners like the Magentos of the world, right? That kind of bring the solutions from Magento to life. And all these same problems were there.
So the Venn diagrams in the cloud, the account mapping processes, the quality of data, the latency of data. And that was kind of an aha moment on the market side, because I said, wow, if you could solve for this problem and kind of unearth the answers to these questions in a more modern way, in a more kind of data -first way, but do it in a way where the world could have a lot of trust built on top of it, you would unlock this data layer, which has really never existed.
which is kind of the answers to all of those theoretical what's in the middle of this Venn diagram questions across the N squared number of B2B companies out there that might have any kind of partnership ambitions. And that sounded really, really exciting. And then when that kind of got tucked in the back of my head, and then we started Stitch, which was this data pipelines company. And what Stitch was really good at was extracting data via APIs, cleaning up that data, organizing it into a universal model, and then dropping it into
like a data warehouse or a modern data analytics platform. Now Stitch would do it within the silo of your own company. So our customers were just like one company that wanted to get their data from here into their warehouse there. But around the time we were selling Stitch, the two observations kind of merged together and clicked for me in this moment of, oh, what if we could actually solve for that missing data layer using the modern data stack and the technology that we developed at Stitch, which was really, really good at being able to go and...
Bob Moore (10:54.424)
take a bunch of different data from a bunch of different places that might look extremely different and get it into one standardized universal like transform data model. So basically building Stitch, but instead of everybody gets their own little pipelines, it's all one big pipeline kind of feeding into the middle. And then you just need like a trust and security layer that sits on top of the whole thing so that everybody retains ownership of their own stuff and can have full control over who sees what, when and under what circumstances. And that right there was kind of the...
you know, the creative spark, like the vision moment for Crossbeam. It wasn't just a market observation or just a product observation. It was the intersection of this product market fit potential that emerged. And that was at the tail end of 2018. And yeah, we launched, we launched in early 2019 to do precisely that. And honestly, the vision for this thing has been really steadfast. Like at our core, we are exactly what I just described still to this day. But it took seeing that pattern across multiple companies to, you know,
have it all come together and make it worth going after.
Brent Peterson (11:55.502)
Do you think the idea of the partner manager kind of grew up at the same time that Crossbeam came around? I know that the partner managers have existed among bigger companies like Magento or BigCommerce. They've always had a partner manager, but like at Magento, we developed the partner manager about the same time or right before Crossbeam came out. And I think still a lot of agencies struggle in that role. But if you look at the technology partners, especially during the pandemic,
Bob Moore (12:19.353)
Mm -hmm.
Brent Peterson (12:24.91)
that role took off and those people were like the kingpin of how you managed your partners. And at the same time, Crossbeam came in to help that data part. Is you think there's any correlation in there? Or do you think that's just a natural evolution of where our market has gone?
Bob Moore (12:43.96)
Yeah, as much as it would make my ego feel great to say that we brought on some kind of, you know, some kind of revolution in, you know, the staffing or the titling or whatever. I think this is actually a byproduct of two things being true at the same time, which is there has been this maturation happening in the API economy.
that has been really profound and exponential in nature that's happened over the course of the last decade that has just significantly lowered the barrier for building technology integrations between technology products in such a way that very few tech products, even ones that are at the startup stage are very small launch at this point without some kind of integration or hook into some kind of like mothership platform, like an e -commerce platform at a minimum, but even more often.
a large abundance of integrations where kind of the data and insights that go into and then that flow out of that product is just kind of limitless, right? And when you get into that zone,
you're no longer in a world where, OK, maybe you've got one deep technology partner that you have this incredibly deep, complicated, expensive integration into. But you instead are participating in an ecosystem of tools and products that interoperate really seamlessly and add up to a very interesting strategic value proposition that's bigger than the sum of its parts to the people that are buying it. Put another way, I think.
buyer behavior has actually fundamentally changed in the last decade because of that, where Mark Andreessen had this quote 10 or 15 years ago that software is eating the world, right? And it's been kind of used in a lot of different contexts. And I've always been such a huge believer in that. And you can kind of see it in practice prove to be very, very true if you look at the way the technology landscape has evolved. But...
Bob Moore (14:39.832)
Something else has happened, particularly more recently, which is that the way buyers buy that software has evolved from, let me take my traditional shrink -wrapped CD -ROM style, it's all encapsulated in this one deliverable, and it delivers a finite value proposition. Let me take that from the shrink -wrapped world into the cloud, which is kind of like software 1 .0. But then as you get into the SaaS 2 .0 era, it's...
People aren't making decisions based on, I'm going to buy this because I like the way that feature worked, or the way my sales rep treated me, or the way the user interface was glossy. They're making those decisions based on how this technology they're going to buy interoperates with the other technology that they've already purchased. Like if you have a Magento store and you're thinking about buying a marketing automation solution, you better believe one of your top criteria is how extremely well it integrates and interoperates with Magento.
And that happens in the service partner universe as well, right? Like you could have the best reviewed consultancy in the world, but if the tech stack that they tend to operate on and have expertise in is not aligned with the technology decisions you've already made, or you're in the process of making, then it's going to be a non -starter. So that Mark Andreessen quote, software is eating the world, like agreed. Lately, I think ecosystems are actually eating software because people are buying their individual technology products and service offerings as part of a ecosystem purchase.
And that has a really, really big impact on how anybody that's developing a product or service in the technology space should be thinking about both how they develop their product, but more importantly, how they bring it to market. And that is the big, big change right there, which is that like, and this is a long way to way of answering your question about partner managers, but it really does speak to why I think that role started surging so much kind of in the 2019 plus era. The API economy got so mature.
that the way that people buy software changed fundamentally enough that companies, especially on the tech side, companies started noticing that partners actually move the needle in a very, very different way than the classic, like, hugs and chugs at conferences and press releases, like reputation that a lot of partnership programs have. They started becoming much more fundamental to how their buyers bought. And that made the partner manager hires seem much more essential. So yeah, and then we become this, CrossFit comes in as this...
Bob Moore (17:05.464)
massive efficiency and data layer that you can layer in on top of those teams and make them much more horizontally impactful, you know, make their work much more tightly tethered to the work of sales and marketing teams as opposed to operating in a vacuum. And it all starts to add up to something really exciting. And I think that's kind of the confluence of factors that are true at the same time when you look at that world.
Brent Peterson (17:28.398)
Yeah, so that'll lead me right into my next question. I know that you just wrote a book. It's on ecosystem -led growth. Tell us, like, why did you write the book? And why are you so passionate about this ecosystem and how it helps grow your business and ecosystems? Yeah.
Bob Moore (17:49.656)
Yeah, yeah, it is. It's like a snake eating its own tail, right? Ecosystems lead to more ecosystems. So I'll say this about book writing in general, right? Which is like, I'm generally a huge skeptic of most business books, especially ones written by like the CEOs of operating companies. Like I have in my years as an entrepreneur written countless, uh,
blog posts and white papers and ebooks and other things like that, right? And some of them are hits and some of them get read by nobody and you never know. The thing that's different about this one is this is actually published by like a real publishing house. So Wiley, you know, we got a book deal with Wiley to...
Kind of properly produce this book for mass distribution like you can walk into your local Barnes and Noble and pick it up off the shelf and if it's not there somebody bought it and you can hopefully go to the desk and demand they they they stock more but it is it's a proper book and I I take that a lot more seriously because Book publishers are not in the business of publishing Advertisements and they're not in the business of publishing things that nobody cares about or is gonna buy
So the fact that we were able to get a proper book deal for this thing means that the market pool for this conversation and for this messaging and for this information is there despite us, right? It's not just us, unlike with a white paper or like a blog post that you might write where you're kind of pushing your own company's narrative. The great thing about ecosystem -like growth is that there is a entire universe of people.
actively looking for and consuming content on this exact topic right now, because there is a really, really, really big why now around the whole thing. And what we were in a position to do because of the number of customer stories and playbooks and raw data and kind of the narrative that we have around, you know, all these factors that we've been talking about leading to ecosystem led growth being relevant. I was in a really unique position to be able to tell that story and to compile those things and to kind of.
Bob Moore (19:56.696)
you know, produce the book that could just basically be the one stop shop authority on, hey, when your board brings up this topic or when your company is interested in trying to do this in a modern way, it's an unquestionable, there is one resource that you need to grab first as kind of the canon on this matter. So that's the goal of the book is to be that. And when complimented by the distribution that Wiley gives us,
you know, we're able to add a lot of legitimacy to that and a lot of kind of third party editing and fact checking and all the other great things that come with having a real publisher put it out. So we've been able to accomplish that. And it was thrilling in the first week it came out, we actually made it onto the USA Today National Best Seller List, which is like super exciting and very unexpected. So we've been able to get this book in the hands of a lot of people.
and have actually kept it. It's still number one in the business development category on Amazon here three or four weeks out. So it's been great to see a lot of it continue to move. And I think, again, that speaks to like, look, we have a mailing list and we have an audience. And we certainly we do stuff like this and we help raise awareness of the book. And that's great. But none of that would be happening if there was not something else going on here that was bigger than us, which was kind of like a built in demand for this subject matter. So.
It became a no -brainer to put the work in to do the book when all of that became really clear. It's great to just see it come to fruition now that it's out.
Brent Peterson (21:24.558)
Yeah, I'm a big believer in the book Traction and I'm an EOS guy. How would companies use this book to help them in that same sort of idea of there's actionable things to do in it?
Bob Moore (21:28.92)
Yeah, love that book.
Bob Moore (21:43.032)
Yeah, it's a it's this is the best thing about the book, right, which is this is not like a like a academic textbook on the matter, right, or historical analysis of of ecosystem led growth. This is the the back half of the book is chock full of real world playbooks and kind of.
very detailed explanations of how to bring those to life inside of your company, both from a kind of operationalization standpoint, like the cross -functional alignment needed to make these things actually happen, but then also from an execution and measurement standpoint, like what are the actual jobs to be done of the specific practitioners that exist in these different departments and how they can actually bring these things to life. So we follow this map, this playbook map throughout that more or less walks up and down the funnel, right? So we start with,
marketers in the marketing organization, the ways in which this data fabric that flows out of your ecosystem can make its way into the marketing org and kind of radically change the way that you do everything from qualifying leads to messaging customization to activating dormant leads that exist out there in your lead list that might be able to give off some signal in your ecosystem you wouldn't have seen otherwise.
down to like ABM and personalization and targeting and things like that. And then it works its way down to sales, which is the best part in my opinion and like the meatiest middle, which is how do we actually go about arming sales leaders and account executives with the context around their deals that allows them to personalize, you know, who they're going after inside of these companies, how they message to those people, how...
if at all, they lean on partners and the actions of partners to help further and differentiate themselves in the context of deals and kind of the co -selling cross -selling methodologies that are the bread and butter of all this. And then there's a whole section as well on customer success and the ways in which growing accounts after they've been closed through the power of service partners as well as technology partners in your ecosystem. There's some real tried and true stuff with some great hard data in there, but at every step of the way,
Bob Moore (24:00.184)
We talk about the playbook, but then we tell it through the lens of a successful company that's been able to roll it out and talk about how it's impacted their business and the way they brought it to life internally in their companies. So it's very much geared to be that actionable reference guide. If you pop open chapter 11 and just jump right in and start learning about the marketing tactics, it's going to make sense, even if you haven't read chapters 1 through 10. But the front half.
kind of grounds it in the reality of the why now, right? And the currentness of the matter.
Brent Peterson (24:37.134)
Yeah, I'm going to do one little pitch for Crossbeam because the one thing that I really liked about it is that if I'm with a partner and we're both on the same or we can see that there's seven cross deals or something like that, you don't have to expose your data. The whole ecosystem, the whole partnership helps.
each of us know that we have seven common deals and it kind of gets those partners to try to find the deals even if they don't want to expose that data. So in terms of the book, I'm assuming that, and again, I apologize, haven't had a chance to read it yet, but we kind of walk through some of those scenarios and help each of the individual agencies to understand how much data they should share and who they should share it with and how those...
how that data is going to impact each of those stages that you just described.
Bob Moore (25:31.064)
Yeah.
Bob Moore (25:34.968)
Yeah, this is such an important part of it because there's a dynamic in the modern tools landscape for doing this kind of thing, which includes Crossbeam, where maybe the most important thing to understand about these kind of data collaboration platforms is how much you have very, very incredible control over who sees what when and under what circumstances.
Believe me, it may have been the most contrarian thing I've ever done in my life to start a data sharing company like the same month that GDPR showed up in late 2008. But it is precisely what we did. But having kind of come up in the era where GDPR and CCPA and the incredible importance on modern data privacy has never been stronger, that actually turns out to be a superpower in these platforms. Because they...
They exist in a world where that stuff is critical and there needs to be a great answer to those questions for any company that's coming online. So your example is a great one, right? Like one of the things you can do is not share any raw data with anybody at all and use this stuff specifically to understand the rolled up statistics and aggregates around how you and the universe of your partners and your potential partners are actually intersecting. You know, if you're deciding whether or not to build that next integration or whether or not...
to train your agency's services team to become certified on XYZ product or to embark upon some bigger investment of time and energy, this is such an easy way for you to draw that picture and say, okay, let's take a look. What percentage of our company's total revenue is made up of businesses that are also using this other product? When somebody is using this other product,
How much higher is our ACV? How much longer do they stick around as a customer? How much shorter is the sales cycle? Does it actually make a difference or not? Like, are the customers we share with this prospective partner or existing partner better customers? And in what kind of quantitative way? And you can answer all those questions without ever sharing who those customers are, which is profoundly powerful in strategic planning, in making sure that your investments get done right, et cetera. And then once you do embark upon that deeper partnership and you've got...
Bob Moore (27:50.04)
your NDAs and your partnership agreements and your rules of engagement in place as you would anyway with any partner, then you may get to a spot where you say, okay, I'm actually comfortable opening up the data sharing a bit. And we're gonna become aware of when we have a mutual customer who that customer is. And maybe we'll let each other know who the sales rep is that owns that account or who the account manager is that owns that account. Or maybe we share a bit more about what's going on in our overlapping pipelines when we think there may be.
kind of complementary opportunities. Or maybe one side decides that's OK, and the other side decides to keep it tight. And the power dynamic between the companies is just such that that's the way it works out. And the beauty of these platforms is you get to apply the rules around how and where and to whom that data makes it to the other side. And that becomes a superpower in a really big way, where you can kind of cultivate your ecosystem.
based on your own standards and policies. And it's that flexibility that has made it possible for us to have close to 100 publicly traded companies on the platform now, just by way of example, right? Where this isn't just scrappy, small companies kind of figuring out growth hacks. This is some of the largest companies in all of technology that have adopted these set of practices. And it's because of that level of control. So we go into, there's a whole chapter in the book on kind of data sharing strategies and policies and practices and.
all the different ways you can set those things up.
Brent Peterson (29:19.086)
I do want to touch a little bit on the Magento ecosystem. I know that we both were in that and it does exist. I think there's an ebb and flow to every ecosystem, right? And I think definitely in e -commerce, there's a lifespan for a product. Is there a correlation between the life cycle of an ecosystem and how partners engage in it? And...
Are you able to uncover some of that data in terms of how Crossbeam works? And I'm not looking for any hidden secrets, but it feels to me as though the Magento ecosystem is still strong in Europe, but maybe in the US, there's no energy behind it, right? But at the same breath, it could just be that it's always been that way. I think what I'm more interested in is maybe from a broader...
a more globalistic standpoint is that the behaviors you've seen in the ecosystem markets.
Bob Moore (30:24.088)
Yeah, this is ecosystems are really interesting lens to view all that through. I think even in the Magento specific example, it's bigger than ecosystems, but ecosystems are maybe the canary in the coal mine that start to indicate where there's a bigger story going on. There's this great Jim Barksdale quote that I always butcher, but it's something to the effect of, there's only two ways to make money in software, bundling and unbundling.
And when you look at what's happened in SaaS and with the cloud over the last few decades, I think, you know, it's pretty clear to see that we've witnessed just an enormous unbundling cycle that has happened. I kind of got at this earlier, right, with the shrink wrap software versus how people consume things in the cloud these days. You know, the API economy and the cloud revolution have enabled...
effectively the unbundling of what were once these very, very large monolithic pieces of deployed software. And, you know, Magento is an interesting example of it's an open source platform that does a lot, right? It is an extremely, extremely robust product where there's immense flexibility. And for the vast majority of consumers of it, it's installed on premise and then kind of customized on premise. There are cloud versions and cloud offerings of it. But...
By and large, if you look at the long tail of people that actually have it deployed, it's deployed in kind of a more conventional, non -pure SaaS sense. And you think about the disruption that has happened and where a lot of the innovation and kind of market value has been created from an e -commerce platform standpoint over the course of the last 10 or 15 years, you can't help but look at players like Shopify, right? That have been able to...
take a more kind of SaaS -first cloud -based approach that in the early days felt a little bit early for the market and maybe made it feel more like a toy than a tool. But by kind of being present to stand on the shoulders of the giants of the cloud revolution, kind of started to look more like this baseline foundational platform on which you could very easily and seamlessly
Bob Moore (32:34.84)
integrate other tools and technologies. And to the extent that you look at a company like Klaviyo, which is one of the only IPOs to even get out last year that has these incredible business economics and growth rates, and they're literally just a byproduct of the Shopify App Store ecosystem. It's an ecosystem player making an ecosystem -led growth play inside of a SaaS -first ecosystem. So you see these giant.
bundling, unbundling cycles happening. And they usually happen as a result of some kind of major technological shift that's kind of, you know, underneath everything. The other phrase I always love is like, ecosystems are really, they're network effects, right? They're exciting for that reason. They create moats for companies and network effects are like the greatest thing you can have in a business if you can have it. But like,
you know, ask Friendster how they feel about their network effects, right? Network effects are great until they're working against you. And then they can also be at the heart of like an unwinding of some sorts. And like, you know, when your network, which is effectively your ecosystem and some other ecosystem out there that maybe has more momentum or is more kind of forward focused are in direct competition with each other for resources or the time and attention of various companies, you can kind of witness this very terrifying, like unwinding effect as well.
Um, so I think that's a little bit of what, what you see out there is, um, depending on sometimes it can be affected by geographic regions. Sometimes it's affected by stage of company or profile of company, but I think, um, you know, Gento really did a great job of, uh, participating in like the modern software movement and the internet 1 .0 movement. Um, and then.
there was this big unbundling cycle, I think, that's happened with the API economy that's pushed a lot of the cloud e -commerce platform vendors more into the forefront. And at least the logical question of like, what's next? And like, with the economy in the tech sector kind of doing a little bit of cleanup over the last year or two and efficiency becoming more and more important, in a weird way, we're starting to see a little bit of like a rebundling cycle, I think, with so many companies that got
Bob Moore (34:46.712)
venture funded or maybe they were a feature, not a company and are now kind of getting acquired or merged or like reconsolidated back into these like mothership style platforms. It's interesting to see that happen. And part of what I think may help drive that as well as the advent of artificial intelligence. And it's hard to clock right now the impact that AI is going to have in aggregate on any of these spaces. But it's also easy to see that it's significantly lowering the economic investment required to have a more robust comprehensive.
platform created in -house, right? Like technology development is a lot more efficient and rapid as a result of what's possible because a lot of these platforms. So it's on Atlantis that we could start to see a bit of like scope increasing in terms of what a typical platform can do with AI kind of sitting behind it, helping make that happen. So like maybe the AI movement kind of kindles and accelerates like this rebundling cycle that maybe we're going back into here.
But that certainly doesn't mean that ecosystems cease to exist. I think what it means is that they are, you know, the ecosystems that matter are the ones between these big super nodes in that network graph that matter a ton and the asteroid fields that kind of fly through them and surround them are still there just participating differently within their gravity. All right, I'll stop the physics metaphors here. Hopefully that's all making sense though.
Brent Peterson (36:10.894)
No, that was great. I think that, you know, the whole explosion of the partnership market, like you said, maybe in 2019 it started and this unbundling bundling effect has also ebbed and flowed. And I can think of Commerce Tools who came out as, you know, this bespoke headless system that really played on microservices. And then Magento is there as it's huge monolith. And then recently now Commerce Tools come back with some bundled products so people can get things to
to market faster, right? There's always this pull between what can I do? And let's just face it, Shopify is also, Shopify is a monolith as well. It just doesn't have to be deployed. But there is a pull and I guess the bottom line is, and what I think what your book is answering is that this is gonna be a cycle and you need to be part of it and play in it and use the data the best you can. And one last comment, I'll make a comment on the AI.
Bob Moore (36:50.36)
Yeah. Mm -hmm.
Brent Peterson (37:09.582)
I think what we're going to really feel in the AI, and especially in your space, is how it's going to affect the analytical part of it. There's going to be so much more that the end user and the customers and even partners are going to see from an AI tool that's going to tell us, instead of having to have a person open up a spreadsheet and try to figure something out, those spreadsheets just be automatic. And you can say, in even a natural language, I want to see this relationship. And here's the...
Trajectory I want to see and here's how I'd like that to play out and it's going to give us a bunch of scenarios and we can try them or not.
Bob Moore (37:45.144)
Yeah. And that's, you know, a lot of people, a lot of very smart people are spending a lot of time trying to think right now about what companies and jobs and other things are going to be kind of fundamentally disrupted or destroyed or undermined or re -envisioned by AI. And one of the things that I think is interesting about partnerships and partner data specifically is that...
in a lot of ways, it becomes a force multiplier for a lot of these AI applications as opposed to something that gets disrupted by it because it is this very proprietary second party data that only your company can find useful because it is your partner ecosystem is yours alone. And while other people may also be partnered with those companies, the way in which they partner and the combination of all the companies out there that you're partnered with is always unique to yours. So, you know, it.
A lot of people spend money to buy data from a third party data broker and they pay money and they get a bunch of contact records and emails back. But if somebody else shows up and pays money, they'll buy those same exact content records and emails, right? It's this third party, fully commoditized thing. That should be terrifying to those data brokers because it's something AI would be fantastic at doing, like compiling and researching and going and basically building up these lists and information based on what it can find by scouring the internet and other resources.
The second party data coming from your partner ecosystem is unscrapable, right? Like it lives inside of the CRM systems that are inside of walled gardens that AI can't see. And what you really need is whatever the AI agents and co -pilots are inside of your business that are helping your team members do their work or maybe doing work on their behalf. The question is, what's the context window for those agents? Like what can they see and what are they aware of? They can go dig up their own and scrape their own third party data from the open internet.
But then how do they get to know about what else is going on in terms of the buyer behaviors and personas within your ecosystem? They can't scrape that. They can't go find that. They need to be provided with that. And only a robust partner ecosystem that actually exists and has that connective tissue to other companies and is fed data by platforms like Crossbeam can actually leverage it. So I think in a weird way, you know, the partnership stuff is pretty conducive and aligned with making these AI technologies actually work.
Bob Moore (40:04.344)
and giving them something that they're armed with that's unique and differentiated that every other company is not also going to be able to do by just turning one of these things on.
Brent Peterson (40:12.974)
Yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself and I can't say it better myself. I'm actually gonna, I marked that little clip. I mean, that is such a perfect example of how we are still gonna have, I mean, I'm a firm believer that humans are also always gonna have to be involved because at the end of the day, we're not generating content for robots to read the content. We would like somebody to read it and buy it and use it and feel it and touch it or whatever that thing is. So AI is gonna play a role and I feel like,
Bob Moore (40:17.048)
Thank you.
Brent Peterson (40:42.414)
AI is going to play a bigger role in how we're using that data rather than just generating a blog post. And I think most people think, hey, Genitive AI is all about how we create things in terms of coding or blog posts. But I think the analytical part is far more interesting and far more valuable for partners and of course, for any merchant too that wants to be able to use that.
So Bob, I know we talked about trying to do 30 minutes and I think we're blowing way past that. I joke with maybe we'd spend an hour talking about ecosystem. What is a big thing you see now in the last, this rest of 2024? What do you think we should be looking out for in terms of ecosystem and what a partner should be looking for?
Bob Moore (41:06.328)
Mm -hmm.
Bob Moore (41:15.608)
I'm gonna...
Bob Moore (41:28.952)
Yeah, I'm really tuned into the macro economy and the impact of interest rates having shot up really aggressively and rapidly in late 2022 and early 2023. And I think a lot of us in the technology world were.
kind of hunkered down either experiencing the pain of valuation compression or the venture market's drying up or kind of just waiting for the next shoe to drop kind of out in consumer land or wherever else. And, you know, in the commerce universe, I think that has had its own version of that come true. So when I think about the rest of 2024, I actually get really excited, not because...
Uh, you know, it's going to be as a frothy a market as we got to see in kind of the later pandemic era when interest rates were at zero, but because the chaos, um, the macro economic chaos seems to be at least if not subsiding, making itself a little bit more predictable and well -known multiple quarters out, right? The fed is giving very, very.
uh, seemingly high confidence, reliable guidance that we'll see, you know, at least two or three rate cuts this year and at a particular level of tapering and like rates aren't going to go way, way down, but, um, short of some, uh, black swan event that we're not anticipating. It seems like they're going to be on this kind of like downward tapering trajectory. And that lets people plan, right? It lets people know where interest rates are, whether they'll be able to be borrowing, what the return on invested capital might look like for deploying venture capital dollars. Um, you know, what it might mean to have.
positive ROI on ad spend or hiring another outbound seller or whatever else and how that'll equate to actual valuation dollars out there in the public and private markets. And that is a way bigger deal than I think a lot of us realize until it's impacting us. So there's light at the end of that tunnel and it's not the brightest light that the economy has ever seen, but it leads to stability. And that stability leads to people hiring again, investing again,
Bob Moore (43:30.328)
not kind of retreating and cowering, kind of waiting for that shoe to drop. And instead of saying, all right, we're in a new normal now. This kind of is what it is. We've done our cutting and our trimming and our re -setting of expectations for everybody around the table. Now let's go rock. Let's go build the best thing we can in this environment. And I think that's where a lot of companies are. The companies that made it and that still exist right now going into the remainder of this year, they're looking opportunistically at...
you know, how to build and grow their companies on their own. And if it looks like they can't do that, they're looking at mergers and acquisitions and kind of corp deb related activities to, you know, to continue on to that next chapter. And you add all that up and it makes for a potentially really interesting and exciting year where I think a lot of, a lot of value is going to get built inside of companies where I don't, I don't know that I could have said that, you know, sitting in early April of 2022 or 2023, it didn't really look like that was going to be the case. So we're, you know, we're, we're past the bottom, I hope.
Brent Peterson (44:26.222)
Yeah, good. I'm happy to hear that. And I, you know, I'm, I'm in the entrepreneurs organization and I hear a lot from different types of entrepreneurs or who have now, especially in the tech sector saying that their, their, their market or their, um, their customer, their pipeline is coming back and they're seeing a lot of now decisions being made. And that's maybe that's one of the reasons. And even, especially, I think in the enterprise ecosystem, they're seeing a lot of bigger players. I'm hearing now making decisions in terms of.
we're gonna replatform or we're now gonna go with whatever that new big e -commerce engine is that we're gonna convert to because we just, you know, it's been five years and we need to go to the next big thing. Bob, you know, as I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?
Bob Moore (45:06.936)
Is this? Is this?
Bob Moore (45:16.664)
Yeah, hey, we're here. You mentioned the book, so I'll stick with that, right? Ecosystem -Led Growth, published by Wiley. You can Google it. It's on Amazon. It's in major booksellers nationwide and internationally, for those of you not in the US. Yeah, buy it, check it out. I would really appreciate your feedback. My website is robertjmore .com, and you can learn all about the book and get links to retail outlets there as well.
Brent Peterson (45:45.07)
That's perfect, thanks Bob, it's been a great conversation and I really appreciate you coming on.
Bob Moore (45:50.776)
Cool, thanks Brent, love spending time. Appreciate the platform.
Brent Peterson (45:52.974)
Yep.