Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce (Part 1)

Jimmy has been in the e-commerce platform space for a long time. In this interview, he discusses how BigCommerce is using its open platform to extend the platform’s capabilities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to BigCommerce.

Jimmy Duvall: I’m the Chief Product Officer at BigCommerce. I’m celebrating my third anniversary at the company tomorrow. I’ve been in this space for a pretty significant amount of time.

I’ve spent almost 20 years in the industry, from website builder days and early capabilities of just a PayPal button to Yahoo! stores and Magento, which transitioned into eBay, I’ve seen it all. One of the big reasons why I stayed in the commerce industry is the effect that it has on people who use our products. It’s really simple. We help people sell the things that they want to sell.

It’s really quite fulfilling for us as a business as well as the person in the company utilizing our software. I get to run the product organization which is an encapsulation of the people who help figure out what to build – design it, define it, and facilitate it through the launch and support.

We’re almost 10 years old. In the next few months, we’ll strike the 10-year mark as a business. It was originally founded in Sydney, Australia. That transitioned to headquarters in Austin, Texas. I’m based in San Francisco.

We have a number of sites across the globe. In Austin, we have two sites. San Francisco is the primary development and technology center. We have our European headquarters in London. Sydney, Australia is both technology and market-facing for Asia Pacific. We have a small presence in Singapore. We have a development team in Kiev as well. We are spread across the globe with over 500 employees.

We’ve over 60,000 customers utilizing our platform. Our primary focus is the mid-market customer. Mid-market for us is typically sub-$200 million online, but it can go down to the relatively small entrepreneur who wants to have a platform that will grow with them.

Our core strategy is to offer a platform that really meets the needs of the retailer that is looking for growth. We know that there are a lot of technologies available. We really believe that ours is a platform for growth. That’s where we see ourselves really differentiating.

Sramana Mitra: We’ve been covering the company for a long time. I just looked up on the website. DealRadar 2010 says, “BigCommerce has 3,000 customers, yearly recurring revenues of $1.5 million, and forecasting 13,000 customers by the end of 2010.”

Jimmy Duvall: It’s crazy. It’s fun to be part of the story to be honest. Our growth is continuing to accelerate. We took funding about a year or so back. It was our Series F. It helped us cement our growth. Things are going really well for us.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce
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