The merger playbook: A founder’s firsthand story of the deal that beat the odds

This week, Bob Moore, co-founder and CEO of Crossbeam, details every aspect of merging with a fast-growing competitor.

The Merger Playbook: Crossbeam’s CEO Breaks Down Every Detail of the Deal That Worked

75% of mergers fail. But Bob Moore, co-founder and CEO of ecosystem revenue platform company Crossbeam, knew a deal with fast-growing competitor Reveal could materially change the trajectory of his company.

Leading up to the deal, Crossbeam was approaching $10M ARR and had 800 customers (including Snowflake, Okta and Shopify). But uncover the up-and-to-the-right metrics and you’d see a different story — the company was spending too much cash to generate each incremental dollar of revenue and that revenue was coming too slowly.

“Our journey to $10M ARR had felt like chewing glass, and we still saw a buffet of it ahead of us,” Moore says.

In this essay, Moore goes into extreme, firsthand detail about how he and Reveal’s co-founder and CEO, Simon Bouchez, architected a merger that beat the odds. He takes us through:

How they split the equity ownership and structured the board

The values that dictated every aspect of the deal, with examples of how they were used in practice

Why the messaging and narrative were so important and how they were deployed across different channels

How they combined two teams and products, and the difficult tradeoffs they had to make in the process of doing each

Moore’s account of the merger goes beyond the vague headlines and PR talking points you normally get when it comes to M&A. If you’ve never run a real process yourself, you might be surprised at the sheer number of details to make it work. It’s a fascinating look at how two companies actually come together.

Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!

-The Review Editors