Interviews

Philadelphia startup Crossbeam makes tools for partnership managers, the people at tech companies who are responsible for tech partnerships and channel partnerships. Director of Content Sean Blanda’s task is to build a publication for partner managers from scratch. He’s previously worked at InVision (Editorial Director), I Will Teach You to Be Rich (Editor-in-Chief), and Adobe’s 99U (Editor-in-Chief/Director). He told Wonder Shuttle about his new role and why he’s excited by the (mostly) thankless work of editing. 

Why did you join Crossbeam? Why are they interested in investing in content this early? 

One of the many reasons why I joined is, I love when the business interests of the thing align with the interest of content. Crossbeam is essentially a data escrow service. It has a profound impact on how quickly people can implement partnerships and choose which partner is the most effective. As a result, the more people on this platform, the better it is. That kind of network effect of people adding their data to the platform is hard going at first, but once it gets going, it’s great. 

That kind of philosophy aligns well with content, right? You have to be really high quality at first, you have to take care of your early audience, you have to be useful, you have to serve them. You have to get them on your mailing list or some sort of distribution, and continually wow them and make their life better. I like that alignment, and that’s why they’re investing so early in content. 

Talk to us about this new publication. You’re only a couple months in, how are you going about setting it up and building your team?

It’s like a B2B trade publication; it’s a magazine for people who are partnership managers. But when you look at it, it’s the Crossbeam blog. We’re not dressing it up more than that, but the objectives there are similar.

I have been fortunate, or unfortunate depending on your point of view, to do almost every job in the publishing stack. So I can kind of be the Swiss Army knife to start, and I view my job as setting the framework for scale. I wouldn’t quite know where to put new hires yet, because I don’t know where the levers are. My job is to figure out where the levers are, and what happens when we push them.