Bob is the CEO and Co-Founder of Crossbeam, which has raised over $100m and 15k companies use. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Bob already built and sold 2 businesses.
Today he takes us back to a board meeting in January 2016.
The subject of discussion is a company he started with his Co-Founder, Jake, in 2008.
The business was a hot startup in the 2011/12 era and raised a lot of VC money.
But technology changed. The market moved. And suddenly the forecasts were falling behind what they needed.
It left them with 3 options.
Bob and his Co-Founder, Jake Stein had to navigate the daunting task of making critical decisions in a capital-constrained scenario.
They realised that their early success was fleeting and the market, a moving target, was drifting away from their product.
But what Bob and his partner did was turn failure into a lesson, and build a different business.
Despite facing a lot of rejection, they resiliently worked toward the future of a product they knew would ultimately be successful.
Their experience emphasises the importance of continuous innovation in technology.
In this episode we discuss,
As today’s episode wraps up, it leaves us with a lesson about the importance of always being able to value your business higher than anyone else.
This mindset helped Bob and his partner navigate their challenges and emerge stronger.
From fundraising, and pivoting the business, to laying off employees, Bob is sharing the mindset of valuing the business higher than anyone else, a belief that carried them through the most challenging times.
Learn from the ups and downs of Bob Moore and Jake Stein’s journey and how they applied these lessons to their business.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
Bob is the CEO and Co-Founder of Crossbeam, which has raised over $100m and 15k companies use. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Bob already built and sold 2 businesses.
Today he takes us back to a board meeting in January 2016.
The subject of discussion is a company he started with his Co-Founder, Jake, in 2008.
The business was a hot startup in the 2011/12 era and raised a lot of VC money.
But technology changed. The market moved. And suddenly the forecasts were falling behind what they needed.
It left them with 3 options.
Bob and his Co-Founder, Jake Stein had to navigate the daunting task of making critical decisions in a capital-constrained scenario.
They realised that their early success was fleeting and the market, a moving target, was drifting away from their product.
But what Bob and his partner did was turn failure into a lesson, and build a different business.
Despite facing a lot of rejection, they resiliently worked toward the future of a product they knew would ultimately be successful.
Their experience emphasises the importance of continuous innovation in technology.
In this episode we discuss,
As today’s episode wraps up, it leaves us with a lesson about the importance of always being able to value your business higher than anyone else.
This mindset helped Bob and his partner navigate their challenges and emerge stronger.
From fundraising, and pivoting the business, to laying off employees, Bob is sharing the mindset of valuing the business higher than anyone else, a belief that carried them through the most challenging times.
Learn from the ups and downs of Bob Moore and Jake Stein’s journey and how they applied these lessons to their business.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
Welcome Bob to the show today. He's the CEO and co-founder of Crossbeam. They've raised over a hundred million dollars to date. They're backbands and how it's, and he's already built and sold two businesses. Welcome, bob, great to be here. Well, things are looking pretty good today, but on the show we go back to the moment when they weren't. When are we going back to?
Speaker 2:say let's go back to January 2016, in the boardroom of my first company, rj Metrics, at a really, really critical moment in our history.
Speaker 1:Oh, this sounds juicy. Okay, so what's happening in this board meeting?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this is toward the end of life of the RJ Metrics business, but I think in a way where we weren't entirely ready to throw in the towel yet. So, to give a little context, my co-founder, jake Stein, and I started RJ Metrics all the way back in 2008. So the business was about eight years old at that point and the business at its core is a business intelligence company, so an analytics platform, so, if you think charts and dashboards, kind of helping businesses figure out who the most valuable customers are and how to get more customers like them very heavy data, nerd culture. And it was started in the midst of the Lehman Brothers collapse and the great financial crisis of 08. And we really were fortunate to have a business model that made sense and have early product market fit.
Speaker 2:And from 2009 through 2012 or 2013, this business was a total rocket ship.
Speaker 2:We were able to at first organically get to our first million dollars of ARR our first couple hundred customers, do it all profitably with no outside capital.
Speaker 2:And then, once the venture markets woke up, we found ourselves able to raise funding and we brought on some really awesome institutional VCs and our boardroom started to fill up with all these kind of new thinkers and advisors, and I'll get into the details. But what happened between 2014 and 2016 is things started going sideways. The competition started heating up, the product market fit seemed to slip and by the time we got to January of 2016, we found ourselves in a board meeting where we looked down at the facts of the situation and realized we're going to run out of money this year and the growth of the business may or may not support us raising more money or even make raising more money that logical. And it gave us kind of a handful of options Door number one, door number two, door number three do we go, try to raise more, do we try to sell the business or do we trim expenses and try to make this into something that can be more self-sustaining? And that was the topic of discussion on that day.
Speaker 1:Wow. So you went into a position where you're kind of like the darlings of the VC world. You had great metrics, you were raising, you had a great board, life was looking very good, until suddenly in a position where you're not, there's these choices coming up, but you say these three doors you've got to have a look at.
Speaker 2:What we did that, I think, was the fatal mistake that caused the flatlining that we saw by the end of 2015 was we neglected one really critical fact of the physics of how to build these companies, which is the market is not a fixed point.
Speaker 2:The market is actually moving to.
Speaker 2:So we did all of this work in the early 2010s to find our spot to overlap with the market, and then we planted our feet and turned into an almost exclusive go-to-market, sales-oriented let's monetize this thing that we found that overlaps with the market in these ways kind of organization, and under our feet, while that was happening, the market actually drifted away from the place where our product was the best product, and we were so incredibly hyper focused on optimizing the growth machine of the business that we didn't realize that it was actually getting harder to sell, that the sales cycles were getting longer, that the prices were getting lower, that the churn rates were getting higher, that the win rates were decreasing ever so slightly, ever so incrementally, and we had the capital to just keep throwing more resources at the growth.
Speaker 2:So if you have a SDR team that has 10 people on it and all of a sudden it's 10% less effective than it was a quarter ago. We hire one more SDR and your outputs kind of look the same. And it's not until you've gone through several quarters of this decay of the underlying performance that you start to realize oh wow, we're throwing human beings at a much more fundamental product market fit problem that has come onto the company. And that's kind of the moment that we found ourselves in in that board meeting on that day.
Speaker 1:So it sounds just sorry if noise of the phase one of a founder's journey is to find product market fit and phase two is scaling. I suppose what you're saying is just because you've sold phase one you can't scale it exclusively to scaling in phase two. You've got to keep on checking eye on phase one continues throughout phase two.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that phase one success is fleeting and, depending on your industry, things may move in much, much, much slower cycles, right. But when you're talking about technology, businesses and in our case you know we were in this market the software as a service, business, intelligence, kind of data analytics market the rate at which innovation happens is staggering and the idea that you might sit in one spot and actually be able to hold on to a pure form of product market fit is kind of laughable in retrospect. The not to get too nerdy about it, but the thing going on in our space in that moment that pushed us out of product market fit was we had built this platform that was kind of like a one-stop shop. So when you're doing analytics, you need something that pulls all the data in. You need a place to put that data that's your data warehouse and then you need the charts and dashboards that sit on top of it. And you know it's kind of at a minimum three pieces, maybe four if you count like a data modeling layer in there. But our product was all of those things. So if you bought RJ metrics, we took care of pulling the data in, we housed it for you, we gave you a UI to define what your metrics would be, and then we gave you the dashboards.
Speaker 2:And what happened was in 2012, amazon released this new product called Redshift, which was a large cloud scale data warehouse that you could deploy right inside of your existing Amazon cloud. And it was just a way, way, way, way better version of that data warehouse storage layer that had existed inside of our product and that also, you know, existed in countless other business intelligence tools. It was the best analytical data warehouse that had ever been released. You know, pound for pound, dollar for dollar right, there's a lot of powerful databases, but it was cheap, it was easy to deploy and spin up and it started just getting. It became the fastest growing product in AWS history.
Speaker 2:But I think what we underestimated was the ecosystem that would end up getting built around Redshift, and what happened was over the course of just a few years there, between 2012 and 2015, this new paradigm for how to do data work and analytics work emerged, and it's now known as the modern data stack.
Speaker 2:The change that happened wasn't that we were losing customers to XYZ directly competitive products. It's that all the products that did what we did were a dying breed and you were losing to people buying and basically stitching together a stack, a modern data stack. That was better. The sum of those parts was way better than the total value proposition of ours, which was kind of an average of each of the layers right Kind of kind of averaged out. So that that was the very sneaky way in which the market kind of changed under under our feet and it was also really hard to envision pivoting in a way that would actually save the ship without basically saying we're going to participate in this modern data stack thing and throw away 80% of our product and just grab onto this one piece that you know we think has a future, because suddenly, even if you incrementally improve your product by 30%, 40%, 50%, the fundamentals of the market had changed.
Speaker 2:Exactly right. Yeah, I mean, if we made a, made a slightly better mousetrap, it didn't change the fact that people's engineering teams were already putting all their data in a redshift data warehouse anyway, because they needed it for other applications beyond business intelligence inside their companies. Right, and they said, well, why would we have an entirely redundant data stack to this thing that we've already got, that we can just pop some dashboards on top of and we it just? By that point in time it turned out that we were kind of sitting at the kids table.
Speaker 1:How did that feel? Because obviously you've spent first stage, kind of eight years of your of your career, building this product. You've had the recognition and the success and you're walking into this board meeting with this existential threat. How does that feel?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and coming into that board meeting, I think we had, you know, missed our 2015 sales targets by some abysmal rate. Right, it was like we were 50 or 60% towards our target, where we wanted to be. It's funny to talk about the feelings of it, because the things that I remember are all of the human aspects of those conversations. It's all the relationships and the way those relationships were affected.
Speaker 2:Right, because even more so than the investors. It's the employees on our team right, like folks who hold a bunch of stock options and are wondering if they're going to be worth something at some point in the future. You know, I'm based in Philadelphia, which isn't necessarily known for the magnitude of its tech scene, and I think at that moment we had also carved ourselves out a really interesting spot as one of the you know, one of the leaders in that tech scene, one of the most visible companies and outspoken companies in that tech scene. So to be thinking about different courses of action that might include tarnishing that reputation or kind of bringing it down to reality also affected our thoughts about our relationship with the community right and our ability to be a contributor there and a spokesperson for our city on a national level and things like that. So all of that weighed very, very heavily, kind of kind of going into that room.
Speaker 1:So in those circumstances you have you carry this burden of sort of response to people. How do you maintain that separation so you can make rational decisions and separate it from the emotion?
Speaker 2:There's this calculus that you've got to do, which Jake and I always had this kind of a joke, but it's actually kind of a truism to. People would ask us like, are you ever going to sell the company? You know, when do you think you're going to get acquired? And we always had this line, which is, we're going to sell this business the minute somebody offers us more than we think it's worth. And it's kind of that's kind of like a brain teaser, right, because our point of view is that we ought to always be able to think this business is worth more than anybody else possibly could, because we have the most knowledge about it. We know the market, we know the team, we know where all the bodies are buried, we know what's good, what's bad, what's ugly. Our math on what could this become, what could it be ought to stretch out farther into the future than anybody can possibly foresee, and therefore we should be able to accrue the most value. And therefore no one who is a rational person will ever buy this company from us successfully, because we will always place the highest possible value on it. So the minute somebody offers us more, we'll sell it. So kind of a tongue-in-cheek answer, but there are actually two circumstances when you're applying that logic and you do end up selling the company. One of them is somebody is willing to pay you for a lot of forward credit, so much so that it actually extends beyond what you are able to foresee as being like the destiny of the business. And the other one is when you are actually looking at math that has you putting a finite end on the accumulation of value in the company.
Speaker 2:And that was the circumstance that we were in in January, which is, look, we're in a capital constrained situation. So there are cash issues and the business it's growing, but we were hoping it'd be growing 100% a year and it's growing 40% a year and still impressive enough that we can find buyers and there's a strength to it. But we had a really, really hard time picturing how to turn that 40 back into 100. And more likely, it felt like that 40 was going to turn into 20 the following year. So, because of the physics of the situation, with a decaying growth rate, you actually can calculate a terminal maximum value of this thing and assign a certain dollar amount to it, and that makes it possible for someone to come in and say a number that appears reasonable and rational to you. So it's a little bit of slipping into the nerd brain. But the other layer is there's an element of maximizing optionality, and I do want to segue a little into what we ended up doing, because that really is the path that we ended up going after.
Speaker 2:But in a circumstances where you are constrained in this way or it feels like there's a little bit of you that's giving up or that is admitting defeat, like we're not going to have the billion dollar IPO that we had kind of dreamed about, the question is, what do you preserve? And you do have these tough decisions around. Do we try to eke out a little bit more near term wealth? Do we try to eke out some optionality around, maybe retaining ways to continue working on this in ways that we didn't expect? Do we try to maximize for a partner or a quiver that we really like and respect and are excited about the future that we could have with them, like fully committing ourselves to them and our business inside of theirs?
Speaker 2:And these are all factors that come into play and it's a multi-dimensional optimization formula and really it's an exercise that every founder has to go through. And their utility function, their governing function of how to weight these things might be totally different, based on where they are in their career, what their built-in biases are, what they're trying to optimize for. But that was true for us and we ended up going down a path where we tried to just maximize for optionality, based on the belief that there was still a lot of value here to be captured. But just the formulation of what we had in our hands at that moment was a really poor vehicle for capturing it.
Speaker 1:And you mentioned right Ben and Shai. You had three doors.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What we all three doors and what happened.
Speaker 2:So door number one feels like we're going to run out of money. Let's go raise more money. Go out and spend several months doing a proper, wide-reaching fundraising effort. That consumes a huge amount of founder time, requires getting really into the weeds of the pitch decks and the mechanics of the business, and maybe we entertained hiring like a banker or some kind of agent to assist us with that Usually a terrible idea, by the way, particularly when trying to raise venture funds. But we were at a late enough stage that we were looking at some maybe like some debt options that would have worked and some finance vehicles that might have made that more appropriate. So that's door number one. It's like go try to raise money, just throw it all in to raise the money. If we fail there, what we find? On the side of a mountain and the company shuts down and goes bankrupt because we've run out of money. But if we succeed, we live to fight another day and we get more cycles to try and basically turn that 40% into a 60%, 80% instead of 20. So that was kind of door one. Door number two pivot the business and in that version of the world what we would need to do is lay off a huge chunk of the company and actually shed a bunch of the revenue that we had, because it would be unrealistic for us to maintain it and instead say, look, this is the direction that the market is going in. The market is very interested in this composable stack of companies. Let's take the best part of our tech, the newest part of our tech that we built most recently, which happened to be this thing called our Argemetrics pipeline, which was a piece of tech that would allow you to pull all the data out of all your SaaS tools and deposit it into one of these data warehouses, but instead of putting it in our J metrics, it would toss it into Amazon, redshift or a product in that space. So basically, become one of the layers in this new giant composable layer, as opposed to trying to compete against the whole layer. All right. So kind of admit the feet like throwing the talents. They're all right, we're gonna be a point, can't beat them. Join them, let's go be one of the best players in this new space. We think it has legs, all right, so that that was door number two, but would have been very, very ugly and disruptive.
Speaker 2:Door number three sell a company we had, look, we had built ourselves to like a pretty material scale of revenue. We weren't that inefficient, especially by today's standards from a cash consumption standpoint. We were still growing. We had a really awesome kind of clientele like this was an asset that would potentially be a value end of interest to any number of potential Choirs and we actually had some in mind. Right, there were a bunch of technology partners that we had a lot of overlapping customers with. That we got into know very well.
Speaker 2:So we sat down in this boardroom we looked at the really ugly numbers and kind of, you know, got ourselves nice and depressed Looking, looking through kind of how the quarter had gone. And then we sat down, we got to the you know executive session, kind of sat down like just the board and me and Jake and we said, well, here, the three doors, what are we gonna do? And what we decided to do was all three of them at the same exact time, put in the necessary hustle and grit to try and Basically buy this really interesting decision tree, which was we're gonna get, jake and I are gonna go out and we're gonna try and raise money for this business as we know it today and we are going to, you know, present the case and try to raise money Over here. In door number two, we are going to release a new product under our umbrella. That is, our J metrics pipeline standalone product that fits right into the modern data stack that a totally separate world of buyers can buy. So if you're not buying the main thing, hey, can we at least say the pipeline, so that you can go and do this over over there.
Speaker 2:And it required a lot of product investment, which is kind of how we spent the first six months of that year, kind of like Breaking apart these pieces of our own products so that we could isolate and sell one as a standalone and bring it to market, and that was like took over our product roadmap. It's where we spent the time and energy. And then door number three we went to those six companies that we knew we could have some kind of you know, some kind of conversation with, and here's what happened we got to the place where we could release our J metrics pipeline Pretty early in that year we started doing some of the initial work, but early in 2016 that that came to market In in a real way and we started getting customers on it really quickly. We had a fairly low price point. It was it was more like self-serve than the, than the core, our J metrics product. But it started kind of picking up just a little bit of steam and it was a Minuscule percentage of our revenue, like less than 5% of our revenue but it was growing and the, the unit economics on it, were good.
Speaker 2:It looked like our J metrics back in 2009, right like there was something there that that we saw the mental building around while we were kind of spinning plates keeping the main business afloat. We went out and pitched probably no fewer than 20 or more venture capital, private equity, regional investor, debt financer firms and we were overwhelmingly unsuccessful. We got passed on by every single one of them. You know we were not being viewed as a growth asset but we kind of required the valuation of a growth asset based on our fundraising history and we were just positioned really, really poorly to be Investable in that way. So if we wanted more capital and we really believed in keeping the thing we had going, we would have had to go back to our investors, our existing investors, and kind of beg for some money or Gone through like a down round, like valuation D is just an ugly kind of capital structure situation. But the reality of is we didn't necessarily believe that what we had in hand at that moment had a standalone future story to it.
Speaker 2:And then, under door number three, we had those conversations and three of them which quickly became two of them got really really serious. And you know, the folks that we were chatting with were basically companies that were Significantly larger than us, like a hundred, x or more large. We're talking like large public scale companies that had an existing product that was really compelling and interesting to a large universe of people. But that existing product didn't have a very strong analytics offering and we had a ton of customers in common. So what that meant is they could basically take the RJ metrics offering. The fact that it was this full stack thing was actually a benefit, because they didn't want to have to worry about Integrating with other technology players or anything else. They wanted something that was like one click and you get it and they would just bolt it on To their product. So just make it like an additional piece of feature functionality, a more enhanced advanced analytics product. Maybe they could upsell.
Speaker 2:And those conversations got really, really interesting and we got to a point in one of them where we got an offer that we liked Quite a bit, but it was just a little lower than we would have wanted. Right, it was enough to, like you know, do really well by Our team and our investors and like Jake and I were not going to be able to retire on that outcome, but it felt like we were felt like it wasn't quite the right math. And the thing that was in the back of our head this whole time is we have this RJ metrics pipeline product, this new thing. It's like kind of working and like we didn't want to walk away from it, and what we ended up doing was we went to this potential acquiring. We said, look, we know why you want to acquire this thing. You want to acquire it because we got the charts, we got the dashboards, we got the data modeling layer. It's kind of this, you know, one-stop shop and, in reality, the thing you care about the least out of all this is actually the data pipelines bit, because the data that you want to analyze is just the data from one source, which is your product. You want to do analytics on your own product data. We had built 70 connectors to 70 different SaaS platforms and other things.
Speaker 2:So we went in there we said, look, we're gonna walk from this deal. It's it's not priced right for us. There are two things you can do to fix it. One is you can come up on your number. The other is we can structure this deal the way that you've got it, but we want to keep chunk of the intellectual property of the original business. We want to continue to own our geometric pipeline. We want to carve it out as a separate product. You can keep the tech that supports just your products. You know data flow, but we basically want to, you know, continue to own this thing.
Speaker 2:And through a bunch of negotiation, we figured out a deal structure and a legal structure that actually made that possible and allowed us to retain the intellectual property and the source code and everything else of the pipeline product and have the acquisition of our geometric speed, everything else, the traditional business, the revenue associated with it and the technology that would allow them to build this bolt on product. And that company was called Magento. It's a large e-commerce platform provider, one of the biggest in the world, with a really awesome story, history and open source ecosystem around it. They acquired us in June of 2016. So we're talking five months after that board meeting. All of this stuff happened within five months and the thing that was left the Argemetrics pipeline. Well, they had bought the Argemetrics brand, so we couldn't call it Argemetrics pipeline. We basically launched it as a new company called Stitch Data, and Stitch Data became one of the earliest and fastest growing players in kind of the modern ETL or extract transform load market for building these data pipelines to SAST tools.
Speaker 2:Postmortem on Stitch is that in about two years, stitch got as big as Argemetrics did in eight years from a revenue standpoint, but with a much, much, much smaller team and with no incremental new investment coming into it Beyond the initial capital we put it.
Speaker 2:We took some of the money from the sale and gave it to Stitch as kind of seed capital and in 2018, 10 years ago, callend, which was a big publicly traded data infrastructure company, came in and offered us $60 million in cash for Stitch after just under two years of work I think it was 19 months or 20 months or something like that and remember earlier I said there's really two situations where you actually say yes to a deal. Well, this was the other one, which is somebody came along who really fundamentally appreciated the underlying value of this thing and gave us a number that it was very, very difficult to say no to. So, really just, I think we lucked into, or optionally, our way into being able to have a very, very strong finish after what looked like a really, really bleak moment when we were kind of starting to admit defeat.
Speaker 1:And for this kind of batch of your concept like maximizing optionality. If, in that board meeting being nudged as doing the right thing for your team and your investors, and your sort of there's a way to responsibility led you down a path of how do we do, how do we try and follow as many things as possible, which ultimately led to an even better outcome.
Speaker 2:Desperate times call for desperate measures, kind of thing Like I. I don't even know if I would advise always doing that right, like there are some situations where you're in a position of strength and trying to maximize optionality or pursue every possible angle is a terrible decision. You can end up with like analysis, paralysis, you can kind of dilute your efforts across a bunch of places. But for us it was not clear to us that any of these three doors were actually going to work. And ironically, the door number two, which would be pivot the whole business and lay a bunch of people off, was almost the failure scenario, because if we weren't able to raise money and we weren't able to sell the thing, then we would call it a pivot. But ultimately our our, our purpose would be to so aggressively reduce expenses that we were profitable and that we didn't have to go raise more money and we could self sustain. But it would have been like a massive reset button with really no positive outcome associated with it.
Speaker 1:I'm just just curious that that moment, when you had an off front table which, in the position you're in like, all the doors were sort of working but none of them were really working at that stage. So you're seeing thing, you had an off front table which was respectable, what allowed you to push for the triple Lindy. It feels like it might have been quite easy just to just to play it safe, take the money, cover your sort of people responsibilities, but you, but you, you, you went for it.
Speaker 2:Well, I think part of it has to do with the relationship capital that had been accumulated in that negotiation, because we started that negotiation in like February or March. I mean this, this is a deal that died at least one time right Just by us going back and forth and kind of like where we started out, you know, if the negotiation space was a ruler, or we were at the one inch mark and they were at the 11 inch mark. They were so far apart and over the course of several months we kind of got to a point where we moved each other a decent amount, where we were kind of, you know, within an inch of each other, in the middle, there somewhere, and there was a really good rapport that had been built up with the people on the other side. And I think the whole time it wasn't the kind of negotiation where we were, you know, yelling at each other and storming out of the room. It almost every conversation started with like we really want to do this, we really want to do this too, like can we just like figure this out, because it's like the financial matter of both sides, but it's a at this point, it's like a silly reason to not to not move for it because there's so much potential upside here and it's a great home for the business and the team and you know there is something to be said for the outcome. So I think because of that good spirit it created a lot of you know the defenses coming down and a lot of creativity in deal structure and you know there's a lot of ways to get creative when there's only an inch left on the ruler in a negotiation and a lot of times that comes down to you know, special bonus plans for employees that are involved, or different ways of treating the option plan or different ways of treating working capital that exists in the business to kind of like, you know, free up more cash, to to kind of grease the wheels to get deals over the line and make the right people happy in the right ways.
Speaker 2:In this particular case it had to do with us carving out a piece of IP and I felt super comfortable bringing that up and saying, look, I have a hear me out here. This is going to sound crazy, but I think I might have solved this optimization problem. And I kind of laid it out and said look, you don't even want the whole team, like your preference would be. If our team was, you know, 60 people coming over instead of 80 people coming over, the cost profile of doing it will come down pretty considerably for you all. This would be much more like a break-even style starting point as opposed to something consuming cash. And, by the way, you're not going to use this IP. And, by the way, this and by the way, and to top it all off, if you do this, we will kind of consider this IP that we're retaining as being worth something and because of that, we're actually willing to accept a slightly lower price which gets us to being able to accept the offer.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for sharing that journey. Having sort of talked about it again today, what stands out for you the most?
Speaker 2:It's always great, you know, five years in the future, wherever we are, what are we eight years in the future? I don't even know. You know, almost a decade away from that transaction. When it was happening I don't think I felt like it was something that was going to be worth talking about in 10 years. I felt like it was something that I was like going to be ashamed of and trying to sweep under the rug as quickly as possible.
Speaker 2:And there's a lot of I think there's a lot of personal growth and maturity that comes out of going through something like that, just like a because. Like all the bad things that could happen happened right. Like we did do layoffs, a bunch of people you know did lose their faith in my ability to build good companies or be a good CEO. Like we got the bad one-star Glassdoor reviews that this company sucks and it has no future. Right, you know, we had the articles written in a local press that said you know RJ metrics, lays off team and cells and disappointing outcome. You know all of the things that you get, I think, particularly as a first time founder, part of that reality distortion field that makes you go after it in the first place when all the forces are working against you, is driven out of ego and out of like, a desire to create some kind of you know legacy for yourself.
Speaker 2:And that deal, when it happened, was nothing to celebrate.
Speaker 2:It wasn't until we sold Stitch two years later that it actually looked like a genius move.
Speaker 2:And even that, you know, I think I owe the world to Jake Stein, my co-founder, who ran Stitch as CEO during that timeframe, to kind of get it to that outcome, cause I was locked up working for Magento as part of the deal and I was only able to be involved kind of at the board level in Stitch.
Speaker 2:So the humbling of it not working I think just changed a lot of my perspective on caring so much about the optics of everything and having everything look awesome all the time and like I think, the way that I run Crossbeam while I'm still an eternal optimist and I think have a bit of a reality distortion field, like there's just a ridiculously higher level of transparency and intellectual honesty that exists, whether it's in the way we talk to the team, the way we talk to the public or the way that we actually are critical about looking at our position in the market and where there's opportunities and where there's risks, and I think that is that's what I take away from that experience. When I look back on, it is just like how fundamentally it changed me to be humbled by those two, three quarters of just absolute anguish that's brilliant.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming on today, bob, and I'm sure people can take a lot from this. As you heard today, coaching opens up a whole range of insights and areas to explore. If you have a potential moment to revisit and podcast, or just want to learn more about coaching, book in for a 30 minute chat with me at peer-effectscom.