Awesome. I'm DJ Hynes. I'm Canaccord Genuity's senior software analyst. Thanks for everyone who's tuning in. This is the fourth year that we've done this conference. It's a, it's a great event. We're thrilled to have BigCommerce here presenting today. We have CEO Brent Bellm. We're gonna, we're gonna do this as a fireside chat. I have the Q&A portal up, so if there are questions from investors that come up as we're running through my questions, you know, please type them in. I'll be paying attention. I can work them into the conversation. But Brent, thank you so much for doing this. We really appreciate it. My pleasure. Glad to be here. Maybe just to kick things off, I'm gonna assume most people on the webcast are kind of familiar with the BigCommerce story. So maybe you can just give us a quick recap. You know, what's top of mind coming out of Q4? Hit on current business trends. Like, how are you feeling about the setup for this year? Great. So 3 notable things coming out of the Q4 earnings announcement. One is, as we had promised Wall Street, we did achieve a nice level of profitability in Q4. Our Adjusted EBITDA was about 8% of revenue on the quarter. Our operating cash flow was 16%. That's an enormous turnaround from where we had been in 2022. In 2022, you know, like so many tech companies, we were caught on the other side of growth versus profitability. We grew 27% top line in 2022, which was ahead of all our peers. And unlike them, we didn't miss top line or bottom line guidance any quarter during the year. But investors increasingly said, as inflation went up, "We don't want to hold your stock if you're not profitable." So we did the hard, disciplined work to deliver great profitability in our business. We always said that given 75% plus gross margins, we can hit a long-term EBITDA or operating profit margin of about 20%. And in essence, we improved our adjusted EBITDA bottom line margin by 26 points over either five or six quarters, which is a pretty substantial turnaround. So the business is very nicely profitable now, and we've guided to that in 2024. Second, as said in the earnings call, a priority of ours going into this year now is going to be what we call efficient growth. So in order to get our P&L right-sized, there are naturally implications on your growth rate when you take so much money out of sales and marketing and other functions. So growth rate averaged 11% last year. And it is our objective, and we believe we can get back to higher levels of growth rate, you know, sort of in the years ahead. We really are targeting 15%-20% type growth rates, about now doing that on an efficient and high ROI operating expense structure. That is the priority that we have communicated to Wall Street that we're operating under this year. And then the final point coming out of the last couple of quarters is a big opportunity for us that we're implementing this year is a true mid-market and enterprise full-cycle go-to-market playbook. We had, you know, lacked, I think, the experience and the leadership having come from a lower end of the market historically to be operating with best practices in how we sell, how we market, and how we serve our customers, especially as we have then moved our target to mid-market and enterprise. Now we're, now we're implementing that playbook this year. We anticipate that's going to help the three main components of what drives ARR, at the top line: gross retention, cross-sell upsell of existing customers, and gross new. You know, historically, we had an over-indexed focus on gross new, and we're under-focused on gross retention and cross-sell upsell. Even our gross new focus wasn't utilizing the best practices from enterprise B2B software. Well, we've now implemented many of those and are implementing the remaining best practices. We anticipate that that will be a fundamental driver on how, with an efficient cost structure, we can, you know, in essence, bend the revenue growth curve and get to 15% or 20% in the years ahead. Yeah. Yep. Makes sense. It's a good recap of what was covered. Maybe we could just step back and talk about kind of the foundational value prop of BigCommerce. Let's talk about, like, the open SaaS model, why it's so powerful, what makes you well-suited to kind of capitalize on the secular trends in the space, stuff like, you know, omnichannel, omnichannel selling, headless, B2B, that sort of stuff. Right. We believe we now have the world's best SaaS platform for mid-market and enterprise merchants who have complexity. Historically, those businesses relied on legacy platforms, oftentimes on-prem, or very outdated versions of SaaS. Like, on-prem would be Adobe's Magento or SAP Hybris. Outdated versions of SaaS would be something like, Salesforce, which bought Demandware. Historic competitors like Oracle ATG and IBM WebSphere are basically out of the market today. And then custom design would be a historical one. All of those are really bad choices that most companies don't want to make because the tech and the approach is so outdated. What we have with our open SaaS, which includes, you know, basically the whole platform being, modular and accessible via APIs for extension, for enhancement, for modification to meet the complex needs of businesses, that lets us solve those use cases. And the extreme example that I think will surprise a lot of folks in the market, we're even starting to win great use cases of very large store-based retailers who historically, they're the most complex because they have to be omnichannel. They have very old legacy systems. We're showing that not only can they toss their old tech, they can do it in record time and with very modern technology, whether you look at the transformations of store-based retailers in the U.S., like Francesca's, or White Stuff out of the U.K., Harvey Nichols, the luxury department store in the U.K. We've got a bunch of those examples, and I can't wait for the market to really pick up and recognize that. As recognition of our capabilities, IDC is just coming out with their annual report this year. We're in the leader quadrant. Forrester a year ago basically ranked us top of our competitive set. Everest has ranked us top of our competitive set on one dimension. That's for enterprise B2C. We're also, I think, now the best platform in the world for mid-market B2B. And that's being recognized by IDC, by the world's merchants, where on G2 they're rating us the top for mid-market B2C. Sorry, B2B. Paradigm, which is the top evaluator every year of B2B platforms. We're crushing it there. We have a subsidiary that is an omnichannel enabler called Feedonomics. It in and of itself is a fantastic business. It's the global leader in enabling brands and retailers to basically sync their catalog and optimize their performance through the leading online advertising channels and the leading, like, Google Search, social networks, affiliates, display ads, and the leading online marketplaces: Amazon Marketplace, Walmart Marketplace, Target, more than 200 others. They have about 30% share of the top 1,000 U.S. B2C retailers. They really are, sort of unrivaled in their capabilities to not just sync data, but transform it to optimize its performance. So, and then finally, there's the whole composable area, which I won't go into those weeds on, but we just made a major product announcement called Catalyst about a month ago, which I think positions us to be the real leader in composable going forward. You know, so so in summary, it's mid-market and enterprise B2C. It is mid-market today B2B. It is, omnichannel enablement through Feedonomics. And it is composable. Those are the things we think we're best at. Yep. Yep. Makes sense. And it, you know, clearly that's an advantage versus kind of on-premise or legacy dated, cloud companies out there. But the one we didn't talk about was Shopify, who's talking more about success with larger merchants and composable and B2B. But you guys also pretty explicitly called out their price increases, on the Q4 call is maybe creating a wedge for BigCommerce into their base or into future opportunities there. Maybe you could just unpack some of that message and what you're trying to convey to investors there. Yeah. So Shopify is our strongest competitor by far. They're a world-class company. Their strength and their proposition is increasingly as an all-in-one suite where you use Shopify for e-commerce, but you also need to use their payments. You also need to use their point of sale. You also need to use their cherry-picked, invested partners in various categories. If your needs are simple, even if your size is very large, then they are clearly the market leader today. If your needs are complex, meaning your catalog is complex, you need to do multi-storefront, which they cannot do. By the way, that is just basically a requirement of being an enterprise platform. If you don't have multi-storefront, meaning a customer can have a single account, but lots of individual storefronts for selling into different geographies, different brands, and/or different segments like B2C, B2B simultaneously, leveraging one account, one set of integrations, or multiple sets, you're not really an enterprise platform. So that's, you know, that's an example of what they can't do. In In B2B, even though they have started getting into that, really all they have done is wholesale selling. They're helping brands do wholesale selling to retailers, but B2B is massively bigger than that. It's industrials. It's CPQ. It's, you know, and we're true B2B. We can serve all the and do serve all these different true enterprise, industrial, B2B use categories in addition to retail brand wholesaling, which they can't do. They don't really have an answer for Feedonomics. Composable is always something that they have underemphasized or dismissed in favor of, saying, "Hey, look, buy a theme and manage it on Shopify using our page builder." They've got a great theme library and a great page editor. But for businesses that are really either customer experience-driven or multi-geography-driven, then true composable or headless e-commerce is a priority. And they're, you know, far behind us and, one other relevant competitor in that sort of real MACH Alliance type approaches. So this is not to diminish them. I'm just saying here are the segments of the market which we have been targeting consistently over the last eight years and do indeed have differentiated capabilities relative to them that they're unlikely to, match anytime soon, if ever. On the pricing side of things, indeed, it was sort of a gift of them to announce, a month or two ago, that across the board, their Shopify Plus and Payments pricing was going up. So the biggest fee that larger merchants get is the variable percentage of GMV fee. Shopify Plus raised that by 60%. It's one of the biggest price increases I've ever observed. The fixed monthly fee went up by 20%. The payment penalty fee, if you don't use Shopify Payments, went up by a third. And they introduced a very punitive 18 basis point new fee on B2B transactions, including ones that happen offline. So we love that because it really creates opportunities on two fronts for BigCommerce. One is in head-to-head competitions with them. They've just become 60% more competitive. Anybody who either wants to save money, and is on Shopify or is unhappy with Shopify for various product limitations, you know, we encourage them, please come talk to us. We have, you know, sort of bold marketing and offerings and sales offerings in market to try to encourage that. In head-to-head competitions, our TCO advantage has just gone up enormously against them. Then finally, in those many situations where we don't compete head-to-head with Shopify, but we are against legacy providers who tend to be multiples more expensive than us, the expectations of those companies and sort of what sort of a, you know, a much better TCO they can get from us. Well, Shopify is the transparent benchmark, and it's just gone up by 60%, which helps in those pricing and revenue-generating opportunities as well. We're very excited about that new dynamic and how it positions us because our TCO is all that much better for a platform that, you know, built-in has already more enterprise capabilities. Yep. Yep. Okay. Helpful to flesh all that out. Let's talk a little bit about the current environment. I mean, obviously, enterprise buying continues to be relatively subdued, but I'd love to get your thoughts on two things. One, like, where do you think we are more broadly in the replatforming upgrade cycle? And then two is maybe the consumer spending backdrop. Is that improving? Is it staying the same? Like, how are you feeling about that? Yeah, I'll give crisp answers on both. So for B2B software and replatform buying, there are two things that have hurt it for the last couple of years. One is that a fair amount was pushed forward into 2020, 2021, when offline was shut down and a lot of companies rushed to get online or replatform online. And then secondly, in the current market environment for profitability, well, the easiest way to achieve short-term profitability goals is to not engage in very expensive projects like a replatform or a new launch. And so, both of those have led to a cycle of business replatforming and investment in e-commerce today and over the last, I'd say, year and a half, that's well below what it had been pre-pandemic. Inevitably, this is going to come around, and that's going to be a tailwind, but it's been a headwind for the last year and a half. On the consumer side, we have been for the last 8 quarters or so, just use the U.S. as an example, consumer is very strong in spending overall, but actual e-commerce B2C spending has only been growing in the, call it, 5%-8% range for the last 8 quarters or so, whereas pre-pandemic, it was consistently in the 12%-15% metronomically year after year. Will we ever get back to double digits? I don't know. But it's not any longer a double-digit consumer growth rate, or at least hasn't been for the last couple of years. Yep. Yep. Okay. Got it. But all that said, the industry is gigantic. And so, you know, roughly 20% of consumer spending is now online. And in time, we could get to 30%-35%. Roughly 20% of all B2B spending is now online. It's behind. Actually, it's probably less than that. It's behind B2C. But that could get to an even higher amount over time. And we're talking about 20% of the entire consumer product retail economy, the entire B2B economy. So it's a colossally big market opportunity for us. And in the long run, you'll never hear us complaining about our TAM or our, you know, limitations on our ability to grow. Yeah. It's certainly a secular growth space. I don't think anyone would debate that. One of the things you and I talked a little bit about kind of coming off of Q4 was the international business, right? It's about a quarter of BigCommerce today. It's growing comparatively fast relative to the rest of the business. What is it that resonates with international merchants? Do you think international continues to lead growth? Is there an opportunity for that gap to close and the U.S. to catch up? Well, the U.S. can certainly catch up and grow faster than it is today. In the long run, international has two advantages in terms of growth. One is just expanding into new geos. Like, we are going to compete and succeed in Latin America. It's in our backyard as a Texas company. We have 100 employees already in Mexico. You know, we're fired up about that region. We're fired up about Asia. We're fired up about Middle East and countries in Europe where we don't have as large a penetration today. So that's one natural advantage. And the second one is almost actually, there are three. Second one is that local country-specific competitors are smaller and well behind us in our capabilities. That gives us a competitive advantage against the legacy platforms abroad. The third is that outside the U.S., there are a lot of companies that are selling multinationally. Think about Europe, right, where you have to. That naturally plays to our strengths with multi-storefront, multi-geography capabilities that, for example, Shopify does not have. All three of those, to me, suggest that if we keep doing a good job running our international operations, it can sustain growth rates even ahead of the U.S., which itself can go up. Yep. Yep. Okay. Maybe we could talk a little bit about AI and ML. I mean, look, you guys have access to a bunch of really rich consumer and business data that you can leverage. How does AI and ML kind of fit into the BigCommerce strategy, and how are you thinking about productizing or commercializing that opportunity? Yeah. I'll start by saying Feedonomics has arguably the most scaled and most successful e-commerce AI in the world. Why do I say that? The anchor capability for so many businesses going to Feedonomics is its AI around Google Shopping and Google Ads and Listings. In essence, on average, when companies sync their catalog to Google Shopping, Google Ads, and listings, their average match rate to the Google schema is about 60%, meaning the products are just going to fail across the board or have horrendously bad search performance and ROAS performance on Google. The Feed AI, because Feedonomics was founded by two brothers and their dad, the Roizens, and the dad's like a legend in e-commerce AI from 15 years ago. The Feed AI basically gets to 60%-95%, and then humans will manage whatever errors or missing things from the 95%-100%. That means the customers basically get optimal performance through Google. And then the great thing there is that most of the other ad channels have copied the Google schema. So if you've done the hard work using feed AI for Google, it's then easy to get and transfer those benefits to Facebook, TikTok, display ads, affiliate ads. That is a killer secret weapon. And at the heart of why Feedonomics is such a powerful, and distinguished, proposition for omnichannel advertising and selling. On the BigCommerce side of things, our approach stands in contrast, as usual, to Shopify's in that we're open, not closed. So, in Shopify's case, all of their AI announcements have been proprietary products using unknown models with unclear ownership of data. In our case, we partner with the leaders in AI, like Google. We bring in our ecosystem of agencies and tech partners, and we all develop things together. So there is a broader range of initiatives around AI happening on BigCommerce because of that open approach. And it also gives more transparency to the merchants who know, okay, here's the model being used, and here's how I have control over what what of my data gets used in this. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. Maybe we could transition to the numbers here a little bit as we're getting towards the end of the presentation. So one of the questions that came in online, you know, I think a skeptic could argue that the decision to optimize for margin in 2023 was kind of catering to the demands of Wall Street and maybe putting kind of what's best for the long-term health of the business at risk. Like, how would you respond to that view? I had that same mindset in 2022 where I was, you know, we had had an analyst day in May, and we said, we've got a two-year path to profitability. And look, we're outgrowing the market. We're hitting our numbers. And so I said, I don't see a need to cut costs and get profitable on a faster timeframe. That was acceptable to investors at the start of 2022. By the end, it was no longer acceptable. Nobody wanted to hold our stock if we weren't making money. So we basically turned around and made the hard decisions in 2023 to show everybody that we could be strongly profitable. The argument behind the question is, you know, would you, on the margin, have cut less costs, become more profitable, less profitable for higher growth? I kind of feel like Wall Street did not give us that choice, even because I tried resisting it in 2022 and managed for the long run, not the shorter term. All right. So now the world sees this as a very profitable business. Can we bend the curve on our growth rate? I think it's straightforward, the answer, to say, of course, we can. Because far larger companies have grown at far faster rates than we are right now in e-commerce. The market is massive. Our capabilities are differentiated. And we're only now going to be getting all the benefits of the change in go-to-marketing approach and sales marketing and service to improve gross retention, cross-sell upsell, and gross new generation. So I'm very optimistic that we can deliver the higher growth with the strong profitability that is already in the rearview mirror. I appreciate the question, for sure. Yeah. It's, and that's a very transparent and thoughtful answer. So I appreciate that. Yeah. It's clear. If we were growing at 15% right now with that profitability, we'd be much more of a darling. Yeah. For sure. If I can earn my way back to that 15% growth, then the investors who bought today and then stuck with us to achieve that, you know, are likely to do well. Yep. That's right. Maybe a final question, which we're asking all of our presenters today, which is, you know, kind of along the lines of expect the unexpected. Like, what's your one prediction about the e-commerce space that might surprise folks over the next 2-3 years? I have a couple, but the one I will, and I'll list two very quickly. One is that I think we will see what's called instant commerce really take off. Instant commerce is basically same-day delivery from brands and retailers, you know, proliferating. Today, you're most likely to get that only from Amazon or maybe from Walmart. But the cool thing is both Amazon and Walmart are now taking their services to third-party brands and retailers, and offering it to them, and we're going to be a big enabler of that. Uber's also trying to get into that, just like they have for food delivery. And we're also partnering with them and have live examples of instant delivery, same-day delivery with Uber. Now, again, the brand or retailer has to have a warehouse or a store, a physical store in market where the consumer is to do that. But those are the firms that are enabling it. And I love that they have opened it up to alternate businesses. The second one is in the payments world, passwordless one-click checkouts, meaning I'm checking out on a merchant, and I don't use a wallet like PayPal or Apple Pay. I type in my email address to go through a guest or check-in flow where the merchant's payment processor recognizes that email address, knows from prior transactions, maybe on other merchants, shipping address, billing address, credit card number, all that kind of stuff, and offers the consumer the option to say, here's a six-digit code in your text box on your phone. Type that in and you bypass the whole checkout, right? You never share the number directly. Type it in on your web browser. You save all that time. To me, that is the most exciting innovation in internet payments since PayPal introduced the wallet. That was, you know, my era at PayPal, 2002 to 2004, when we launched the PayPal wallet. This is the best new innovation. And we're really leading in that area with three different partners, Stripe Link, PayPal Fastlane. PayPal's got a fantastic new product, and Bolt, who's our longest partner, who's been doing this, and they can do it across multiple payment processors. You know, we really want to be the platform leader in offering that capability and choice. Yeah. Both of those would certainly make consumers' lives easier. Brent, thank you very much for doing this. I enjoyed the conversation. Hopefully, when we sit down a year from now, we're going to be talking about a faster growth business. I want that more than anybody else. Let's do it. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Appreciate it. Cheers.