TECH TITANS: Wisdom to Young Entrepreneurs with Brian Dhatt, CTO at BigCommerce

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're bringing you an episode of Tech Titans. It features our greatest leadership advice distilled into shorter summary episodes. Brian from BigCommerce joins us in this episode to share his best advice on how to make it all work as a tech leader. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Tech Titans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) What advice would you give me? You're, I think you're farther along in life than me, correct?

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:00:27) That would be correct. I've got about 12 years on you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) What advice would you give for me?

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:00:32) Keep making mistakes. Keep taking chances. At every point in my career, I can say over the years I was, you know, personally, I was more risk averse than I think I should have been. And we're resilient, right? We're naturally resilient as humans.

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:00:50) And so I'd stick my neck out there more. I would worry less about is this the absolute perfect thing for me to do right now, or is this the right opportunity for me now? Just go give more things a shot. Go give more things a try.

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:01:07) And then I would say too, keep going young. Right? There isn't—I feel like, again, as long as you love what you do here, you're going to keep growing. You're going to keep changing. You're going to keep doing new things.

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:01:20) And so I would just say, you know, concentrate on learning, developing, and growing, and the right things will happen next.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:29) I agree. And as far as my research talking to other people, you hit on a couple of things that I've seen come up across successful people. And it's that they manage to maintain their curiosity deep into their career. And at the same time, they'll make decisions based off of relationships or interest and problem over a higher salary. And, you know, because you have success—of course, people make six figures, great, you know, you achieve whatever success. But then there's the people who have the financial side and the joy, and they're still really happy and they're still waking up and loving what they do. Of course, there's difficult days. You know, it's not always pretty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) But for the most part, the 80% is like they're really enjoying growing the people around them and what they're doing. And I've never had somebody come talk to me on the show or off the show and tell me hopping from paycheck to paycheck or hopping for a higher pay raise is how I got to where I want to be. I know a handful of people who are depressed that do that, and I feel for them.

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:02:44) Yep. Same. It is extraordinarily easy, especially over the last few years in technology, to just—you get recruiter inbounds every single day. Every one of my engineers, every one of my leaders, myself, there's always an inbound saying you could do this. And sure, you could eke out 10% more, 20% more and not really advance your own cause, not really kind of go further down the path that is going to make you happy, is going to really make you become what you can.

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:03:18) And so, you know, I am with you in thinking about, well, what's the strategic move for me, or what's the thing that's actually going to bring me happiness in this industry, or bring me to a place where I'll be proud of myself if I actually get this done. And so I think that's a really important lens to use when you look at your career and the choices that you make in your career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:42) What is the big thing happening in e-commerce? I'm not an e-commerce nerd. I saw this episode and I always like to ask, you know, you've got you and you've got the Shopifys and your competitors and all of those things. What's the big thing you're all talking about right now?

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:03:56) I think the biggest point of discussion at the moment, especially when you're choosing platform, is about composability in your platform or composable commerce. And so this is a fairly new trend where folks are saying, my brand is different. My customers expect different things out of me. And so what they don't want is to just have an out-of-box, one-size-fits-all type of experience for their customers. They want to think about what are the components I can put together that will create the experience that best represents my brand.

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:04:32) If you imagine the olden days when—did you have the very first iPhone? And you remember there was no App Store. There were just the set of Apple apps there that made up the iPhone, and you couldn't do anything else with it. It was a great device. But the day that the App Store came out, you could start saying, I want to use Gmail for email. I want to use, you know, not yet at the time, but something like Spotify for music. You could kind of put together everything on your phone in a way that made sense to you. And retailers are doing the same thing right now where they're saying, I need a different customer experience because I want my customers to feel different when they're working with my brand. And so we're just seeing folks want to kind of take components of platforms like ours, components of other platforms, and then mesh them together in a cohesive way that really represents them well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:35) At your size and scale, if you could share maybe—if you can share the number of people in your org, generally in your technology org. And then who is around you? Obviously, you don't have 40 direct reports, right? You have a handful of direct reports, and those in a business as it grows tend to be the people overseeing the things that are most important to the business. So I'm always kind of curious to see who is around the CTO at your scale. Can you share some of that?

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:06:02) Yeah, absolutely. So within our organization, we've organized into a couple discrete groups. So I've got, of course, we have a head of product, and he leads both the UX side of the house and the product management side of the house. And so you can imagine there's a scaled team that sits in both those organizations, which sits side-to-side with any of our engineering teams around the world. We've got a head of software engineering.

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:06:32) Software engineering, I'd call the engine of us getting things done on a roadmap and done in the product. This is the largest portion of our organization, hundreds of engineers. Pre-pandemic was spread across four locations, post-pandemic all over the world. And each of these teams is responsible for an aspect of the product. You can imagine there's a team that spends all their time thinking about the shopping cart, or there's a team that's spending all their time thinking about payments or promotions and so on.

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:07:03) So essentially, his organization is broken down into small teams that each take responsibility for some aspect of our platform. There's, of course, an infrastructure team. They're the ones who are making sure we are reliable, scalable, and operating well in all the locations we have data centers around the world. Cybersecurity is another team, and they're really focused on making sure we are staying ahead of the bad guys and protecting our merchants, protecting our company. They're also doing things like thinking about compliance with PCI and GDPR privacy regulations and so on.

(Brian (from BigCommerce) at 00:07:48) And lastly, we have somebody seeing—a seed of platform strategy. And they're thinking broadly about remixing the platform. When we run into a new opportunity or we're trying to think through a new problem, they think broadly across all these teams, and they say, "Hey, could we be thinking about putting together BigCommerce and another company differently?" You know, our strengths together. Could we be thinking about building differently? So actually getting into the architecture and saying, "Why don't we crack that open? You know, it's constraining us right now." And so we have one person who kind of disruptively thinks about how should we be changing the way we're thinking about this platform and how should we be thinking about, especially where do we partner out in the industry to create an offering which is stronger than we can on our own.