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

A founder's firsthand account of how he merged with a competitor to materially change the trajectory of his company.

Outline

Here on The Review, we’ve dedicated thousands of hours to detailing every aspect of company-building, which includes exits. We’ve covered prepping to take your company public or the decision to sell , but haven’t spent as much time on the process of merging with another company as a founder. They’re uniquely difficult to execute well. A majority of the time they don’t work because bringing two companies together — balance sheets, cultures, products and people — is far more difficult in practice than one company subsuming another.

Bob Moore , co-founder and CEO of ecosystem revenue platform company Crossbeam , knew the odds of a successful merger were against him. But he also knew the high rate at which startups fail in general. So when he saw the opportunity to materially change the trajectory of his company by merging with its fast-growing competitor, Reveal, it was a decision he didn’t take lightly.

When I was considering merging my company, Crossbeam, with our fast-growing competitor, Reveal, I understood a harrowing statistic: mergers fail ~75% of the time. Most of my advisors — and most of my board — disliked the idea. Some feared distraction, some were skeptical we could align on terms, and some would have preferred that we just tough it out on our own.

But two reasons led me to quickly gain conviction that it was the right move for us: The dynamics of our market and the alignment of our founders.

Companies like HubSpot, Stripe, and Anthropic use Crossbeam to identify and share overlapping accounts with their partners. They use this “second-party data” asset to enrich their own data, reveal insights about how to win deals and find signals that indicate who else they should be selling to. At the time of the Reveal deal, we were approaching $10M ARR with some incredible logos in our roster and about 800 paying customers.

This visualization of the Crossbeam network shows tens of thousands of companies (nodes) connected by hundreds of thousands of partnerships (edges) — each connection is a pipeline through which data can flow between companies under tightly controlled rules.

If we were right about network effects and the power of our platform, then we should’ve been growing much faster.

Genesis of the deal (and why it almost died before it even started)

It took 18 months from conception to completion for this deal to happen. For most of that time, it looked completely dead.

I met Reveal’s CEO, Simon Bouchez, at an industry conference in 2022. This wasn’t a normal meeting of competitors: we laughed.

Crossbeam had a silly mascot running around handing people drinks and Simon had just gotten off stage where he was introducing a made-up word (he coined the term “nearbound” as a category-creating term akin to our later “ecosystem-led growth” tagline). The absurdity of our situation wasn’t lost on either of us and we were quick to empathize.

Crossbeam’s mascot PAM at the fateful Partnership Leaders Catalyst Conference in 2022

As it turned out, we were both repeat founders fascinated with solving the same problem. We had kids almost the same age. We were confused about why we chose to attend a conference in Miami in August. Most importantly, we admitted to each other a hard truth: Because our companies rely on a network effect, our customers would all be a lot happier if there was only one of us out there.

The next week, we were on the phone exploring what it might look like to try and bring the companies together. As good as the idea was, the timing was awful:

Both companies had raised capital within the last year and still had an overwhelming majority of that capital on our balance sheets. We felt internally — and knew our investors felt — like we had an obligation to duke it out and “win” the space.
We didn’t have a good basis on how our companies could be valued against each other. We both knew the ZIRP-era valuations were not defensible, and our ARR was changing so rapidly that it became a battle of whose forecast was more aggressive.
It was very difficult to articulate what success would look like, mostly because we didn’t have enough post-revenue operating history to compare it against.

We mutually decided to stop talking and regroup in a year if we thought it was worth another conversation.

One year later: the deal rises from the dead

In the following year, both Crossbeam and Reveal grew revenue at triple-digit percentages — but still missed all of our ambitious targets while burning huge amounts of money. Our burn multiple was 5.9x, and we still hadn’t made strides in winning large enterprises or more complex deals with higher ACVs.

Crossbeam had strongholds in analytics, cybersecurity and ecommerce, with big logos like Snowflake, Okta and Shopify in our network. Reveal had the EMEA market and had picked up huge logos in CRM, HR tech, and customer experience like HubSpot, SmartRecruiters and Qualtrics. Meanwhile, a far greater number of companies were using both of our products in free tiers. We were so distracted playing small ball with each other that we couldn’t put together the bigger play of landing large, cross-functional, horizontal deals.

Almost a year after our last attempt, I dropped Simon a WhatsApp message: “Worth catching up?” We both knew it was time to get serious about what it’d look like to combine our companies.

Simon caught a flight from Paris to Philly. In that meeting, we found the conversation kept gravitating to two sets of stakeholders: our customers and our teams. If we did this right, we could go from a “one plus one equals two” to “one plus one equals ten.” But it would require a lot of extremely hard decisions, conversations and an abundance of clarity both internally and externally.

Once we had agreed to pursue this idea seriously, one of the first things we did was create a set of “core values for the deal.” These were a set of principles we agreed to live by in the process of navigating this complex experience. If there was an argument, a stall, a blow-up or any confusion, we would look back to these values as our guiding light:

1. Customer experience wins

What it means: Every decision should make this merger feel positive and valuable for users, even if it’s harder for us.
Why it’s important: Our customers have to feel this is great news or the narrative — and loyalty — will turn against us.
When it’ll come up: In messaging, customer communications, migration experience and pricing or packaging choices.

2. One company

What it means: Once we merge, there’s no “Crossbeam” or “Reveal” — just one team chasing a single north star.
Why it’s important: Scorekeeping or protecting old ways will slow us down and fracture the culture.
When it’ll come up: In merging products, brands, leadership structures and shared tools or processes.

3. Frontload internal pain

What it means: Do the hard, uncomfortable integration work immediately instead of punting problems forward.
Why it’s important: We need to make this our hardest year so the next five can be our best.
When it’ll come up: In restructuring teams, merging systems and tackling tech or UX debt early.

4. Focus on the future

What it means: Tell a story about where the new company is going, not just how the old ones combined.
Why it’s important: This moment gives us outsized attention — so we must frame a big, forward-looking vision.
When it’ll come up: In launch announcements, motivating teams and pitching investors or press.

The values were written in intentional order, with higher values taking precedence when trade-offs emerged.

Getting it done: from term sheet to close

Simon and I had a handshake deal, and a good understanding of what it would take to finish the job. But there was one big hill to climb: investor support.

Equity ownership

This would be a stock deal, so the big question was, “How do we value each company?”
_To me and Simon, the data told the story: If you compared our ARR, the split was 70% Crossbeam, 30% Reveal. If you compared the size of our networks it was, miraculously, also 70/30. And the post-moneys of our last VC rounds? You guessed it: 70/30.

Board structure

We were fortunate that many other potential landmines were easy — Simon joined the board along with one of Reveal’s lead investors. We kept my seat and Crossbeam’s three investors, and left an independent seat open.

Investor rights

The other pill that Simon and I agreed to swallow was stacking up the liquidation preference on the capital raised by the two companies. This ensured downside protection for all the investors who would suffer dilution from this deal.

Getting to signature

Believe it or not, ALL of this was in the term sheet. Again, in the spirit of the deal values, we ripped off all these band-aids in advance so nothing could get us stuck in the closing process. From the date we sent the first term sheet draft over (January 18, 2024), it was just under two months to the signing of the document (March 16, 2024).

The journey from term sheet to closing the deal

A signing a term sheet (more formally known as a Letter of Intent) is not the same as closing a deal. The term sheet lays out an initial understanding of how a deal will be structured, but it simply kicks off an intense “due diligence” period during which definitive documents are negotiated, additional discovery is conducted and more.

Here’s what our target closing timeline looked like the day we signed the term sheet:

Term sheet signed: March 16
Rough financial model finalized: April 5
Org chart finalized: April 30
Target close and signing, and external announcement: May 15

Coming together: day zero

On closing day, each company held their own “just us” all-hands meeting where the founders explained the deal, talked about the decision and motivation and then invited the other founder in to meet the company.

This was possibly the most important hour of this entire experience, and we covered a lot of very important topics to set us off on the right foot.

Messaging and narrative: “merger” versus “acquisition”

So much of this deal’s success can be chalked up to “not letting egos drive.”
While structurally this was an acquisition of Reveal by Crossbeam, Simon and I would only refer to it as a merger.

This decision came down to the very first core value of the deal: customer experience wins. Reveal had over 10,000 companies on its platform that would be migrating over to Crossbeam (more on that later), and the message we wanted to send was one of thoughtful and equitable treatment of every customer regardless of where they had started out.

Leadership and reporting lines

Simon and I split duties along the lines of skillset and background.
I’d become CEO, and because I had an engineering background (and experience as a VC and in finance), would have product, eng, marketing, finance and ops rolling to me. Simon would become COO, and had experience with more of the customer-facing aspects of the business — so sales, customer success and partnerships reported to him.

The new org chart was transparent to everyone and also placed ourselves side-by-side as co-founders.

Difficult team changes

In the end, we netted out at about 120 people, down from what would have been 200 if we’d not merged and continued with our pre-existing hiring plans as independent companies.
For teammates who’d be impacted, Simon and I personally worked with them ahead of the company all-hands.

Defining success

We felt it was also essential that we define the team’s concrete measurable goals for what success would look like one year from that day.
If we did our jobs well, these would all be true in a year:

Our company would have crossed $20M ARR
Burn would drop to less than $1M / month
We would be one team with one (awesome) culture as shown in team retention and satisfaction scores
We would have one product, one network, and one customer base
The company would be spending 100% of its time on forward-looking innovation and growth, rather than artifacts or unfinished business from the merger.

After the honeymoon: the real work

Merging products

This was the highest-priority part of the merger. Our one-year goal was having “one unified product,” and within a month of closing, our technical teams ran a complex analysis of various options around how to achieve it.

We decided to have one platform absorb everything about the other (including its customers), and we ended up bringing everything over to Crossbeam.

We outlawed the word “migration.” Instead, we adopted the term “crossboarding” for the process of moving Reveal customers over to the Crossbeam network.

This tail-ended with a nearly 100% rate of crossboarding for active free tier users of Reveal.

Pricing and packaging

Pricing and packaging also included getting every paying Reveal customer on a new contract that was based on “Crossbeam paper”.

The result was collapsing the two revenue systems into one pricing framework tied directly to customer outcomes, not legacy metrics.

Rebalancing the C-suite

Four months after the merger, Simon and I came to a hard realization: the majority of our C-suite was hired in a different era with different market dynamics.

Reflecting back on the deal

The merger that everyone said wouldn’t work ended up beating the odds. At the one-year mark, we hit every single one of our goals:

Clear $20M ARR
Burn less than $1M / month
One team, one (awesome) culture
One product, one network, one customer base
Company focused on PDE and GTM innovation

This deal solved the biggest problems in our companies, gave us a sense of new momentum and possibility, energized our teams and radically accelerated the hard changes we knew were necessary but feared may kill our companies.

I’ve been a founder since 2008 across three separate venture-backed companies, seen booms and busts, expansions and contractions, fire sales and windfalls.

I believe we were both lucky and good and am extremely grateful to have found a partner in Simon who had the courage to do what was right for our companies and customers. We have a lot more work to do — and now, a stronger foundation on which to do it.