Interview with Bryan Mahoney CEO of Chord Commerce on Headless Platforms and API-First technology for ecommerce and DTC

TRANSCRIPT:

Darius 0:02
Welcome to the retail tech podcast. My name is Derius Vasefi, producer and host of the podcast. This interview is being recorded on clubhouse. And so you know we're gonna be taking audience questions later. So if you come up on the stage just a heads up, it's also in the title that it is being recorded. And the interview will be published on the website retail tech podcast.com.

My guest today is Brian Mahoney CTO of core commerce, which is a headless commerce platform. And Hi, Brian.

Bryan Mahoney 0:44
Hey, Darius, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. What's the How should I kick this off? First time in clubhouse, so take it easy on me.

Darius 0:59
No, you're doing great. You're doing great. Where are you located? You're in New York.

Bryan Mahoney 1:05
Yes, I'm about 45 miles north of New York City in a little town called Cold Spring. I, my family and I moved out of Brooklyn last year, and in a week were relocating to the west coast. So a lot of moving in our lives.

Darius 1:20
Wow. That's a big move.

Bryan Mahoney 1:24
It's a big move. Yeah. I mean, we're, we've talked about it sort of forever, that opportunity to live in California. I'm Canadian. So I've lived in Canada for most of my life and spent the last seven years in the US and California was always on the roadmap. And now that we can work in more of a distributed fashion, the time just seemed right to take that chance.

Darius 1:47
Yeah, well, just beware, if you come to California, you may never leave. A lot of people have told me that's fine with me. Yeah, I mean, there's good and bad everywhere, of course. But of course, yeah, the weather is really different here. So Well, yeah, I'm really excited to learn more about CT I, you know, I've, I'm a founder myself of a startup, work with the startup studio, and retail and ecommerce is one of my passions. And, you know, headless Commerce has definitely made a bigger move since the pandemic, I feel even. I mean, it was around before then. But it seems like there's at least more news about it. But it's just like, really interesting for me how new companies are innovating. So I'm really interested about hearing about the, you know, the the story of court and how you got here from I think you used to work at glossier and a bunch of other really cool stuff. So yeah, you just take it from here and tell me about yourself in court.

Bryan Mahoney 3:00
Yeah. Well, I mean, I that's great. And I think you're absolutely right. headless has exploded onto the scene. I, I'm the CEO of a company that has headless in its in its pitch line. And I'm not a huge fan of the word headless actually, I think, while it's true, it's it's buzzy right now, and it's receiving a lot of deserved attention. I much prefer API first. That's the what I've spent, like the bulk of my career, building our technology stacks that adhere to the sort of the manifesto of being API first. And so that's what we've built at cord, who has its origins in a company called arpha. And the tech stack that we built there was informed to a large extent from the experience that I had at glossier, that you mentioned before. So the the very quick origin story on on us. As a company is I worked at glossier from 2014, through the end of 2018, I was the Chief Technology Officer there. And for just about every single day of my tenure there, I worked alongside of Henry Davis, who was glossier as president and chief operating officer. And we were really proud of the work that we did there. When I think back, sort of a quick trip down memory lane, the technology stack that we launched in October of 2014. When glossier first went live was an API first architecture. It was a Ruby set of Ruby API's on the back end. And it was a single page application powered by Angular on the front end in it, in a lot of ways it was it was somewhat ahead of its time. single page applications back then, meant that you needed to do an awful lot of

jump through some hoops with with JavaScript and with pre rendering to just do simple things that you would take for granted for say SEO All optimization. And so it was it was an interesting experiment to see like how far we could push API first, taking advantage of some emerging headless infrastructure companies like contentful, that was also bursting onto the scene. So we learned a lot in doing that. The company scale. I mean, I think like, the glossy story is really well known. I'm not gonna, I don't need to repeat it here. And I think after four plus years in a startup, it was for me anyhow, it was, it was time to move on that the team was doing a great job that had grown significantly, and I was sort of pining to get back to, to building and to being an operator and, and Henry was too and so we left on the same day, a month later, we started a company called arpha. So in in February of 2019, and the hypothesis that we had there was that we saw a real opportunity for the creation of a new type of CPG company. So instead of focusing on a single brand, and trying to grow it to a billion dollars of revenue, we we saw the future of commerce as being smaller brands that were powered by companies that were less technology companies, but more tech enabled companies, and that we're going to be category defining that weren't afraid of going after certain niches or, or even creating them. And so that's what we set out to do. And so we created two brands in 2020, with this nuance to wanting to not just co create products at those brands, but also like co create the brands themselves like that the DNA that went into those brands should be co piloted by this very same group of constituents that we would sell those products to. And it was a lesson learned along the way at glossier, like, I think to this day, maybe the company that does content and community and to some extent, product co creation, better than anyone else, like they, they set the standard for that. And we tried to push that even further. So we launched one brand, at the beginning of 2020, sort of like it, right when the pandemic was was getting going, it was a gender neutral sweat brand called Hickey. A few weeks later, we launched a menopausal beauty brand called called state of menopause. Both of these brands were the initial customers of the cord commerce platform. So while we got to work in 2019, on the brands, we also got to work on proprietary data and technology stack. And I say data first, because we really built it bottoms up, you know, for us, if you're going to lean into API first or headless, it can be really hard. And one of the things that makes it easier is having a unified data strategy. And so that was really the the underpinning thesis of the technology stack that we built at arfaa. And so fast forward to the launch of that second brand. And this was August of 2020. And this is probably like the height of the interested in headless commerce and a lot of companies are launching. And there's a bunch of evangelization around the headless approach and some of the opportunities, static site generation is is gaining in popularity. And folks are really figuring out how to apply some of these methods to e commerce, because there was, as you mentioned, at the outset, just so much momentum and growth. And we as a company and as as sort of like founders that had a good track record in the industry, we're getting a lot of inbound interest around the technology that we had created. And so we asked ourselves, the very difficult question is, is the opportunity for us

bigger to become the picks and shovels vendor? Should we should we create to we take this product that we created for ourselves to market for other like minded founders? Or should we continue to create brands. And so we thought about it for a minute, we considered spinning the tech out as a separate company. But we were still small, we were still early stage. And so we decided to really go all in on being a software company. And I think this is important. We didn't see an opportunity and headless and decided to stop we were doing and build a product to go after it. We had built the product. We had built it for ourselves. We love to say that it is a it is a commerce stack, built by other AI operators for other operators. Because for the entirety of my career as a technologist. I've really been on the operator side, it's my first foray into running a sass company. And so we did that we announced in August very quietly that arpha was going to pivot we were bringing to market a product that we call assembly which was the sort of internal codename for our data and tech stack. And we kept answering the same question like are you a brand company? Are you a tech company and so that's why we now exist as core commerce. We really wanted to answer that question with a lot of finality. And we did that by By becoming a brand new company, so we became chord commerce, we raised a series A in early 2021, we acquired a data visualization company as a way to sort of accelerate our data story to put a different wrapper on top of the data model that we've been working on from, really the beginnings of 2019. And so we now come to market as one of the players in headless. But I think if we talk about the different components of the stack, we're not a point solution for headless commerce, we I would really like to think of ourselves as the operating system for API first commerce.

Darius 10:39
Okay, well, that's a pretty, pretty amazing story. And I mean, things things are definitely moving fast. I mean, you've done really amazingly and you know, just over a year of getting caught up and running, you've raised about what 25 million so far is that? We raised out, we announced an $18 million series, say at court. Okay, but before that, what was it? Did you just go directly to series A, or like a seed, or?

Bryan Mahoney 11:12
Well, it's to two companies come together as one as part of the series A, so arpha did its own fundraising before, and we use the proceeds there the funds that we raised there to create brands and create the technology stack, but that was that's really sort of a separate endeavor. So we raised the series A at cord, that's what we've been talking about. And that's your very prototypical series A is like be used to build the product to build the team. And that's what we're hard at work to do right now.

Darius 11:40
Right, right. Okay. So, in the I mean, the concept of API first versus, I guess, headless, which is the the buzzword right now. What's the difference between companies that are not API first?

Bryan Mahoney 12:01
Yeah, I mean, not API first. To me, it just means monolithic. So you're using I mean, the prototypical definition of headless or API first is that the separation of concerns like the logical separation of concerns, and so if you have a presentational layer, and if we're thinking about e commerce, like that's prototypically, brand calm, the the tools that you use to deliver that experience are largely decoupled from the tools you use to manage that experience. And so some of those some of those building blocks would be things like your customer data platform, your content management system, your product management system, or your order management system. And so, you know, ideally, in an API first environment, you're using the best so point solution for each one of those platforms, that is absolutely right for your business. And if you build it in an API first way, as your business evolves, either because it comes becomes more sophisticated or your customers are asking for something different, you can change out portions of that without affecting anything else. And you can still continue to deliver a very bespoke experience on on what is the head if we look at some of the momentum behind just ecommerce in general recently, it is it is multi channel and omni channel are similarly buzzy terms. And each one of those different channels you can think of as being ahead. And so how do you as an organization, make sure that you have the right tools so that you can have a single source of truth for all of your customer data, you can have a single source of truth for all of your content. So that should you want to go after a certain opportunity you have that you have the ability to to syndicate that content everywhere, collect data wherever that is, and then ultimately facilitate order orchestration. So the difference between an API first company that has that has been built that way is that they can take advantage of those opportunities as they present themselves to them, they can show up in a way that is bespoke for the audience that is asking them to be there, as opposed to a company that adheres to is to sort of more and more a more of a monolithic approach, where you are going to be constrained to some degree by the platform. And so should you want to go and sell on another channel, you may need to wait for that platform to make that available to you. And then the way that you show up can be further constrained. So there, I'm not here to throw the monolith completely under the bus. I think it's, it's good for certain brands, I think you just need to be honest with who you want to be as a company, how much you want to be able to customize those experiences. And you know if the answer to all of those questions is yes, then you know, headless or API first is will will afford you some of those luxuries.

Darius 14:46
Okay. Yeah, so I guess I'll go even further and I will throw the monolith under the bus. I don't have a problem doing that. Because I've I've gone through some very painful experience. This is getting more and often running at large companies. So I know what life is. So really the main differentiation is the decoupling of the back end and the front end. Yes, right. Okay. So now you can go another level of when you say API fit First, the only API that I mean, the the the back end. And the front end, decoupling is not really the only API. Like you said, you can also have multiple API's in the backend, probably with like, what's called microservices, maybe take up type of architecture. So it's not just that the coupling, it's also what's done in the on the backend side itself, which makes it a lot more flexible. Right?

Bryan Mahoney 15:48
Yes, I love that you said this. So I think a lot of times, the the first foray into headless for a lot of brands, and this is where I see headless people get it wrong, initially is when you think about like one, as long as I'm going through an API, and I've got maybe a statically generated from it, I'm headless, and I'm good. But if you don't really think about what is the right point solution for the problem that you're trying to solve, you can you can find yourself having something that is, well, it's not monolithic, it's not any better for your business. And I think the product management is an excellent example here. So if you were to say you're going to use Shopify, or Magento, or big commerce in a headless way, but where you leave the product management responsibility to those platforms, what you're saying is that all products are created equal. And I'm willing to embrace the constraints that you're giving me in terms of product management. So now your, your team is doing product management in one platform, maybe they're using a content management solution for their marketing content to the rest of the website content. And so you've now introduced this complexity where if you want to change the PDP, you have, like one team working on product attributes in your order management product management system, and then you have a content team working in something like a sanity, or contentful. And you can imagine if everyone's in the same office, and you want to coordinate a change people like okay, hit the Launch button, and like I publish in this platform, you publish on that platform, and then you wait for the build server to work and hopefully, the changes that publish the right way. So I mean, I think that's, in some ways, if you're in working within a monolithic environment, you don't have to deal with that. As soon as you move into something that is API first or headless, you have to think about how these different systems are going to work together. And and that's why like we at court advocate this approach to not that two headed monster for content, but really having a if you have microservices having a single API that you can fetch that content from, that facilitate storytelling across a lot of different channels.

Darius 17:49
What kind of what's the biggest challenge in getting, I guess, brands or retailers, your customers understand this new architecture, and the potential for it.

Bryan Mahoney 18:07
I mean, I think it's inertia is is honest to goodness, that the biggest the biggest hurdle, if you're a product manager, if you're a head of e commerce, you're, you're you're staring down to very separate challenges, I would say in your product roadmap, there's, I want a better relationship with first party customer data, because I know I need to get there like there are changes that are coming that are fundamentally changing the equation about how I acquire customers. So I need to get better at data infrastructure, I need to get better with with first party data. And on the other side of that, like in a similar bucket is boy would be great. If my website was faster, I know that Google is going to start dinging me in terms of my my page and ranking results based on like just how fast my site is. And I twin that with mobile conversions that are probably going through the roof, and my site takes seven, eight seconds to load. So I want to solve that. And at the same time, I have all these features that I'm I believe that if I get my engineering team or my agency to bill that's going to unlock all sorts of revenue. And normally what has happened is that feature list, it always wins out, like let's just build this feature and build this feature and build this feature. So when we show up and say, well, the way that you can get have a better relationship with first party data, the way that you can have a better stack that you never need to reply, come away from the way you can unlock all of these performances requires a real platform, maybe just a Front Entry platform or perhaps a full stack re platform. It means you need to put that product feature punch list on hold for weeks or months in order to get that done. And that is a massive challenge. It was, I think bigger a year ago, even bigger two years ago. But now with the headwinds that brands are starting to run into in terms of performance and data privacy. We're now starting to see that pendulum swing And people are saying that you know what, now's the right time for me to pause on this feature development for a minute. And really make sure I've got the infrastructure that I need in order to scale. So long winded answer to like a super relevant question. It's inertia, you know, how do we how do we insert ourselves into the conversation, that prioritizes that front end replies are mean, that investment in your data infrastructure so that you actually can get insights into how your business is doing?

Darius 20:26
Okay. What's a typical implementation? Like?

Bryan Mahoney 20:33
Yeah, it's a good question. So we have two flavors of our product, we have one where our SDK can be deployed alongside of shop defies order management system and checkout, we call that chord performance. And so brands that are already on Shopify, it's the perfect product for them, it means they're replac, forming their entire front end, so they get a much more performant front end, they get something that is truly API. First, we remove the product management responsibility from Shopify, we move it alongside of the content management solution that will stand up for them. Plus, they get best in class data infrastructure. So implementation, there is a front end rebuild, it's with a lot of components that we shipped to make that as straightforward as possible. We don't believe in templates, we do ship a component library or a starter kit that gives agencies or brands pretty good insight into into how to do it. Best practices, I guess you would say. And the process will take depending on the complexity of the brand, and the size of the product catalog, anywhere from four weeks to four months is is the sort of prototypical timeline there. And then brands that are considering the full court offering what we call autonomy. So we have our own order management system and our own payments API. So if you're not already on Shopify, maybe you're on a legacy system, and you're now you need to do a full re platform that can take longer, because there's a data migration component to that. So that is not normally going to be accomplished in four weeks, the we're looking more like eight weeks to again, similarly, four or five months.

Darius 22:08
Okay, so so you work with I can see on the website, you've got the performance and the autonomy packages, like you mentioned. And so as far as like implementation is that pretty much like how you do that mostly with agencies? Like your partner agencies or directly with customers as well?

Bryan Mahoney 22:34
Both? Yeah, I mean, it's we have three cohorts of customers right now, which is, which is really fascinating. We have more customers than I would have expected that are building greenfields docks like theirs, they've started a company, they've decided that they want API first from day one. And they have a small in house team, in some cases, like one engineer, and in other cases, you know, two engineers, like the ultimate luxury, and they're building directly. And then first, for some more established brands, those that have maybe scaled quite quickly up to, you know, call it 50 million of gmv. It's I've been surprised to see how many of those companies have no in house technology resources at all, and, and rather are relying on agencies. So we are one of our growth strategies is developing that relationships with some really great agencies, agencies that are sort of lamenting the fact that they're working in templates and want to use more modern tools they want to have, they want to deliver a better developer experience to their team, because it will allow them to go and get better talent, retain that talent, and then actually just deliver a better customer experience. And I say, it's a bit of a surprise, it shouldn't be like I spent 15 years running an agency. And like becoming we were the in house design and technology team for most of our early stage companies. I don't I don't know why it's so surprising to me. But I guess spending four years like last year, where we had a pretty big tech team, it was like, you know, nearly a third of the more than a third of the headcount of the company. I just expected more commerce brands today to have in house resources, then what has proven to be the reality.

Darius 24:14
Do you find that's an interesting observation. Do you find that brands that do have a an internal team perform better and go longer than when they don't? Is there a difference?

Bryan Mahoney 24:32
I don't know. It's a really good question. I I think, most importantly, what when I'm people who who know me are probably tired of hearing me say this. But I think if you're a brand, you need to think about your technology stack as a recruitment and retention tool. Like if you're serious about using technology to make the experience with our customers better. You you need to think in that way. And so when I say recruitment and retention tool, it might be an opportunity If you to recruit and retain internal talent, but it's also applicable to agencies that you want to have access to work with. So the best agencies are going to be looking for the same sorts of things like, what is your approach to data? Are you using modern tooling? Do I, you know, do I get to use the JavaScript frameworks that I want to use? Can I write tests? First, do I have a development environment, we have a staging environment, all of those sorts of things we facilitate, and a lot of other headless providers facilitate as well. And so I do think, increasingly, you're seeing brands who want to be tech enabled, whereas like, a couple of years ago, it was pretty easy to just use a theme, and to install a whole bunch of different apps, and you didn't need an agency, and it didn't need any tech resources, and you could do a meaningful amount of business. And like, suddenly, that's gotten an awful lot harder. And I think pick the brands that are gonna win are going to be the ones that choose to be tech enabled, make great choices around their stock, and use their stock to their advantage to either recruit great talent internally or through an agency.

Darius 26:05
Yeah, technology is really one of the products of new brands. So if they either have to own it, or they have to have a really solid, probably equity based partially relationship with an agency so that it is not a risk factor for them.

Bryan Mahoney 26:28
I completely agree. I mean, you asked like, what are some of the challenges before too, and I completely forgot about the one where we'll, we'll work with brands to convince them that headless is right, or API versus right. We'll we'll demo the core platform, we'll get them to sign up. And then can you help us find an agency? And so I mentioned inertia, like we have managed to overcome the sort of like the replatforming. inertia. And then but there's another roadblock is like, well, how on earth are we going to resource against this? So if you're a good agency, you're busy. And I think you're you know, you're absolutely right, that these brands are that are choosing to invest in technology, or the there the ones that are that are going to stand out?

Darius 27:11
Yeah, so so can can a customer, use autonomy? And then use a different front end? On top of it?

Bryan Mahoney 27:23
Yeah, great question. So so we provide JavaScript tooling on the front end. So we provide the customer data platform. And that's we're unique in that regard. So I really believe that without having a customer data platform without having a consistent way of capturing behavioral events, so that we can model them again, the transactional events, leaves you blind and makes headless an awful lot harder. So the best way for us to deploy the CDP is by baking it into our SDK. So it's a lot of acronyms smashing. But that's, that's where these these two belong. The current version of our SDK is JavaScript based, largely react components that are delivered being Gatsby. And we have in soon to be in beta, a version of our SDK that works with next as well, we were just getting just a ton of requests for that. So you can't, you can use our tools without either one of those frameworks by just using our core SDK is like specifically the analytics layer. But you'll go an awful lot faster, leaning into react and leaning into either Gatsby or next, because we've built so much into our starter kits will go after view next, after next. But right now, like we're, we're squarely positioned in react land.

Darius 28:45
Okay. I mean, so that's like, really the other dimension of your work, especially well, all of us who are in this, you know, that the technology or even like commerce, is how, like core technologies are changing, like the actual languages, the new languages that are coming up new core technologies. And not only do you have to build something that works now, you also have to keep your eyes open for what's coming. And even like what you said is completely almost like change.

Bryan Mahoney 29:24
Yeah, that's what's so fascinating about having something like a piece of infrastructure at the heart of your stack, like we say commerce with a brain. And so the CDP is our commerce brain. So it allows you to have a single SDK that is that is not only collecting information, but is routing information to different different platforms you want to try. It does give you the confidence to be able to test certain things out without having to do it a large build against, say a new ESP like you can, you can almost do a Bake Off against multiple DSPs by collecting events consistently. At the head and and translating that through your CDP and routing it to, to the different destinations, like I fundamentally believe that a technology stack that is built the right way, should evolve, or should flex as your business changes. And I think that if we go back to the kicking the monolith under the bus, more often than not, when you go in that direction, you have to bend your business to the will of your platform, as opposed to being allowing your platform to bend to where your business needs to go. And your customers will feel the difference.

Darius 30:32
Yeah, well, I mean, this is really the main main advantage of the new like microservices architecture, and the decoupling of the front end and the back end is to be able to stay with the where the customers are going. I agree. So if you don't do that, you're, you know, you're always going to be at least a couple of years behind. And you know what that is? That's like a lifetime in commerce these days. So it really is. Yeah. So how do you handle so let's say for the autonomy product, how do you handle adding additional services? So are you thinking about and I don't know if you can answer this or not, I'm sure there's a ton of things that are not public, on your roadmap, but something like a marketplace, where other plugins can come in and add to your platform?

Bryan Mahoney 31:27
Yeah, that's a that's a great question. So the autonomy product has open restful API's. So the easy enough for different platforms to write integrations against our infrastructure. We're working with a number of different integration platforms right now. But because we're still in in sort of like Build Mode, we want to white glove, the onboarding of those, we want to make sure that if our customers are asking for them, that we facilitate the building, we also somewhat selfishly, we want to make sure that the API's that we've exposed allow for a good experience on the integrator side of things, so that they're, they're not hitting any roadblocks. So we're probably a few months away from having it be completely open season on on anyone being able to integrate against it. But yeah, we're certainly we're working with a few platforms right now that I'm excited about that, I think will, will continue to make headless easy, easier than it is if you go, you go out and all by yourself.

Darius 32:32
So do you work with mostly, like online pure plays, like DTC? Or do you also work with like, a lot, you know, companies that have stores as well?

Bryan Mahoney 32:45
Yeah, I mean, we're primarily DTC focused or digitally native, you know, that that's the the origins of the company. And that's where I think that the tool today provides the most amount of value, but there we are, in conversations with, with customers who are thinking about that strategy more holistically, you know, they have brick and mortar, they have DTC where they have D to C, and they're thinking about brick and mortar. So like, I tried to stay away from the term e commerce I think of it more as just commerce. And so, you know, commerce for me means not just online, it's basically said it now a couple of times on this call, but it's, it's meeting customers where they are, and I think like our our infrastructure does facilitate for that, especially when you start thinking about the data infrastructure to be able to report on the multi channel nature of your business.

Darius 33:38
Right? Yeah, so that's the, you know, if we, if we think, five years, I don't even want to go even further than that, five years from now, with everything that's happening, what's happened in a pandemic, what's happening right now, the changes in online and offline? It's really difficult to, like predict. even five years out, you know, it's like, we don't know what's gonna, what's gonna be around for the complete the holistic retail experience right? out of the shopping malls, how this shopping mall is going to change? How's the experience in the store changing? And how does that really like, you know, merge seamlessly with an online shopper. And you know, a lot of dtcs are also opening up local stores. So they're going the other way too, because that has a different advantage. Yeah,

Bryan Mahoney 34:43
I mean, I think that they're going to be less stores are going to be more community centers. I mean, that that's, that's just the reality like this, this notion of how we acquire customers, and how do we keep those customers around is, is as important as ever, and I think like we as an industry, we got a little bit late. See when you could just dump a bunch of money into Facebook and Google and acquire customers that way? Well, that that window has closed, right? And so now when you're thinking about, well, where do I want to go to meet my customers, what's the most effective way for me to acquire them? I think like, in real life is a really compelling option. Like again, going back to the glossier example, those retail stores were absolutely fantastic as community centers and as a way to acquire customers. And more often than not, you made a go into that first glossy brand store was like a pilgrimage, and you brought someone along with you. So you're ready. It's like your, that's your referral program in real life. And, and so like, I'm excited to see how that, how that continues to evolve over time, and how brands use the physical world to make their their online experience even better, even things like wholesale, I think, is super interesting. I mean, I think it can be very, if you get the right placement, it can be very complimentary to the brand building that you're doing online. And so it all goes back to some of these infrastructure decisions that you're going to make, like knowing that you're going to want to show up in multiple channels. And you want to do that in a way that is coordinated, and you have visibility across all of that like, and yet you don't know what all those are, how do you make sound infrastructure decisions today that you can grow into? I mean, geez, five years from now that feels like forever, even like two years from now.

Darius 36:29
That's more, that's more realistic, right? Yeah, in today's world. So if anybody in the audience has any questions, feel free to raise your hand. Otherwise, we'll just continue for a few more questions. And then, you know, we'll let Brian get back to building. So now, so what's the, you know, if you look ahead, at least for the next 12 months, for, for, for you, as a company, what do you think are the biggest challenges that, you know, a us as a platform are going to be facing? or trying to tackle?

Bryan Mahoney 37:09
Yeah, I mean, I think it's more as a company, like we're building as a company. So it's making sure that we're building the right product infrastructure, that we're building the right company infrastructure, like, like any early stage company, acquiring talent, you know, so so an awful lot of hiring, we've got a really ambitious product roadmap. And so there's, there's a lot of trade off conversations about what we can build, how quickly we can ship it, how quickly we can get, like real feedback from customers. And then I think like, the other side of that challenge is how do we make sure that the tools that we're creating are used the right way, either by internal teams so that they are the NPS score, let's say, of our of our SDK, you know, I want that to be through the roof. And if you're an agency who are becoming experts in the core tools, how do we make sure that you're really enjoying that experience?

Darius 38:00
What are some of the toughest roles to fill these days?

Bryan Mahoney 38:06
I mean, across the board roles are hard to fill. I particularly focused on the on product data and engineering. And so getting really great product thinkers, great product designers, great data and data engineers, analytics engineers, and then software engineers that are that don't aren't necessarily just ticket based, you know, give me a ticket, and I'm going to knock it out, but they don't actually product thinkers and are sort of empathetic and understand the the challenges that customers face and want to come up with really creative, generalizable solutions that make their way into our tools. I mean, that's, that's the challenge. And they don't, what's this? What's the expression? They don't grow on trees?

Darius 38:51
Yeah, we don't have the, the the gene sequence here to manufacturer. Yes, exactly. So um, so it's interesting that so your, your official role is the CTO right now or CEO. I am the CEO of cord commerce. Okay. So the CTO and the product are those separate so this is the reason I'm asking this is that you know, I have a product background and I have a technology I'm an engineer, but I'm more focused on product and the way that the product profession and role has evolved and is evolving is really interesting for me. And you know, we're getting to this you know, the concept of product led growth plg and product first or so I'm really interested to hear your thoughts about how that dynamic is shaping for you know, in your experience.

Bryan Mahoney 39:57
Yeah, I don't know like for from my point. Have you It hasn't changed much over the last couple of years, you know, I? Well, my title is CEO and I'm, I'm effectively the CTO as well, like be. That's a mouthful to say that your CEO, CTO, but we're a technology company. And I think it's, it makes sense at the CEO be like the lead technologist in the company. And that's certainly the role that I'm occupying today. So it means I'm very close with the product. org, I'm very close with the engineering work very close with the data org and trying to bring all those together, I think what's uniquely challenging for us at core, because the product that we've created is so big like, it's like it's very vertically integrated. It's like I said before, it's not a point solution, it's, I think of it more as an operating system. It means like, we're kind of blurring the line between software engineering and data engineering. And so having an end product needs to sit at the middle of that. And so finding a product team building a product org that is comfortable traversing both of those worlds is that's that's evolved. I think that if there's a change is like there's the bringing together of those different departments and making sure that they're less siloed, than perhaps they have been traditionally.

Darius 41:15
Are your product team members technical in background? Is that what you look for? We

Bryan Mahoney 41:23
have a small product team today, but but the two folks in our product organization, both along the way, have spent time as engineers.

Darius 41:34
Okay, yeah. So that's, that's the other, you know, the other change that is coming up is that, you know, a lot of newer product managers really don't have a technical background necessarily. And how do they actually work with a small team, it is, it's really difficult to, to work on a product, when you really don't understand the technology, you don't have to be a developer, but at least on the architecture side, I think, is really helpful.

Bryan Mahoney 42:05
I do too, but I think anyone can learn to like there's there's just like a willingness to get in and write documentation and play with the product and, you know, become sort of immersed in the in the tool that you're creating. So I, I agree, I've seen an awful lot of engineers move into product. And I think a lot of them are doing a really great job is specifically around products that are very, very, very technical. And you know, you negotiating around, like how long something is going to take. But similarly, I've had wonderful experience working with, with product managers and owners and leaders who don't have a background in engineering, but boy, oh, boy, like they're, they're pretty robust. Technology thinkers?

Darius 42:47
Yeah, they understand the business and the customer. So that's really interesting. Alright, so last question is called a, an in office work environment, or is it remote?

Bryan Mahoney 43:02
Well, I mean, we're, we say we're remote first. And that is true. So we are a team that is distributed. We are, we have a portion of the team in Canada. I love that we have some Canadians on the team. We have some folks that are based on the East Coast, and some that are based on the west coast. So we're figuring this out right now. Like I'm I personally, I'm a big believer in in person time. And what I've loved about this experiment that we've gotten through for really like the last two years, it's, it's forced us to rethink the way that we work. And so I'm looking forward to us finding that right balance between using the office spaces that we have. So we have a small office in New York, and then we have a larger office in Denver, you thinking about those spaces as community centers to some degree where when the team comes together, we come together there for something that is more like high frequency collaboration. But we were otherwise working from where we want to work for more sort of like focus time, we are going to be very structured in our thinking around that as opposed to sort of saying, you can be in the office or you can not be in the office. And so I don't miss the days where you have some people who are wearing headphones and others that are having a really loud conversation right beside that person like that. That wasn't a good setup. And I think there's a real opportunity for us to create a setup that that just works better. So we're distributed now. And we're, we're excited to, to work on a new framework for how we we make the most of our time together and we get the most out of that that sort of focus time that working in this way for us to do

Darius 44:43
yeah, and now you're you're even throwing a wrench in there by moving to California. So

Bryan Mahoney 44:49
I do we do have a good number of people on the team that are based on the west coast. So this is probably TMI, but I will be between New York and California. Yeah, I just, we have a bunch of customers that are in California we have a bunch of we're in New York, like, that's where direct to consumer commerce, like those are still the hubs. And, you know, it's, as luck would have it, it's pretty easy to get between those two cities.

Darius 45:13
I think that's it. I don't see. Yeah, California states. I do know a little bit of us geography. Well, I mean, if you if you cover New York and California, especially, I think probably but more like Southern California for commerce and retail. You've got a pretty good coverage as far as being close to the customers and that is also very important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Brian. Really nice. Nice chatting with you and look for you know, for much amazing more, you know, more amazing news with cold.

Bryan Mahoney 45:51
Thank you so much for having me. This is as by way of first clubhouses, this was a lot of fun. Awesome.

Darius 45:57
I'm glad to hear that. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Pleasure. Bye bye.

Interview with Bryan Mahoney CEO of Chord Commerce on Headless Platforms and API-First technology for ecommerce and DTC

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