Bob Moore: You Never Really Start From Nothing

Bob Moore has sold two software companies and raised more than $100 million for a third. So how did he get here? Like most entrepreneurs, he got his start when someone gave him a chance. For Bob it was a neighbor who owned Tony Luke’s, the Philly cheesesteak shop, and paid a seventh grader a couple hundred bucks to build its website. That turned into a high school web design business. At Princeton he ran three businesses at once, each with very different business models. None became a huge hit, but they forged him into an entrepreneur. Right after college he joined Insight Partners, where he learned what investors look for in software companies and made friendships that have lasted his whole career.

Being an entrepreneur can be humbling, and luck plays a bigger role than most people admit. Bob and his co-founder, Jake Stein, quit their jobs to start RJMetrics on a Friday, and Lehman Brothers collapsed the next day. They kept at it and sold RJMetrics to Magento, a real win. Then Looker, the rival that had beaten them in head-to-head deals, sold to Google for $2.6 billion. As Bob puts it, “your $100 million rounding error was greater than the amount that we sold RJMetrics for.”

Bob didn’t stop. Each company fed the next. Raising money got easier, and so did finding early customers: Crossbeam’s first three were companies he had already built or worked with. His story shows how relationship capital and the entrepreneurial spirit compound over time, as long as you have grit, stay humble, and keep going.

www.whogotmehere.comTime stamps:

00:00 — Introducing Bob Moore

01:15 — Dial-up modems, AOL, and a house that valued tinkering

02:30 — Tony Luke’s: building the coolest cheesesteak website you’ve ever seen

03:45 — Skipping a summer at Wawa: his first web design agency

04:52 — Princeton and “financial engineering”

06:10 — Insight Partners: 100 cold calls a week, one deal a year

07:06 — Ryan Hinkle and Deven Parekh

09:05 — His class at Insight, and meeting Jake Stein on day one