Bob Moore is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience, who started his first business venture when he was at Princeton. In the early 2000s, as online poker was becoming popular, Bob jumped on an observation he made to create the Mooraculator to computerize what his peers were calculating in their heads to level the playing field for others who wanted to make money playing poker. After graduation, he joined Insight Venture Partners as an analyst and learned the importance of data when doing due diligence. Eventually, he left to start RJ Metrics with his friend and colleague, Jake Stein. RJ Metrics focused on providing software  that helps online businesses make smarter decisions using data, particularly in the e-commerce space. That venture quickly scaled and attracted $23 mil in venture capital, and was later sold to Magento. From RJ Metrics, Bob spun out to launch Stitch, a simple, powerful ETL (extract, transform and load) service built for developers which he then also sold. In 2018, Bob started his current commercial business — Crossbeam, with a focus on data. It acts as an escrow service for data, allowing companies to find overlapping customers and prospects for their partners while keeping the rest of the data private and secure. Bob recently took Crossbeam through $10mil venture round and has a lot of insight to share about his business journey thus far. Tune in to find out more.

Key Takeaways:

[1:17] Kevin introduces his guest for this episode — Bob Moore.

[3:46] Kevin does a speed round with Bob.

[11:31] Bob has founded four companies so far and is involved in several others in other capacities.

[12:19] How did Moore commercialize his first business, the Mooraculator? What was the business model?

[20:14] What was Bob's exit strategy?

[21:07] How was Bob's experience at Inside Venture Partners?

[23:49] Why was Bob chosen for his job?

[26:30] Who did Bob meet at Inside Venture Partners?

[27:10] Bob shares the journey of how he and Jake Stein got together to solve the same problem with RJ Metrics.

[31:19] What was the business journey of RJ Metrics?

[36:40] Whose insights gave rise to RJ Metrics?

[38:45] Who were RJ Metrics' top customers?

[41:23] How did RJ Metrics raise $23 million in VC funds

[47:03] RJ Metrics was eventually sold to Magento.

[48:45] Why was Stitch a distinct standalone from RJ Metrics?

[51:10] Bob explains how Stitch fit into RJ Metrics, why clients were interested in it and how it came to be a spin off from RJ Metrics.

[54:44] What was the investment in Stitch like?

[55:37] Why did Talent want to buy Stitch?

[58:38] What was the genesis of Crossbeam?

[1:05:25] Bob and Kevin discuss the relevance of blockchain to Crossbeam.

[1:07:05] Bob recently raised $12 million in venture capital. How and why did Bob decide to raise capital?

[1:09:50] Bob explains the business model behind Crossbeam.

[1:11:07] What has Bob learned in his years of experience that he is applying to Crossbeam in terms of culture.

[1:17:53] Bob talks more about equity and fun and why they are important to his company culture.

Links:

Bob Moore on LinkedIn

Mooraculator

Insight Ventures Partners

RJ Metrics 

Elon Musk

PayPal

Tesla

Philadelphia Alliance for Capital & Technologies (PACT)

Philly Startup Leaders

Dean Miller 

Chris Cera

The Awesome Foundation

Rounders Movie

AOL

Comcast

Party Poker

Poker Stars 

Dollar Shave Club

Threadless

Warby Parker

Rent The Runway

Fab.com

Trinity ventures

Magento

Adobe

Hubspot

Salesforce

Amazon Redshift

MailChimp

Trello

GitHub

Crossbeam

Pinkwashing