Last Day (Kinda) at BigCommerce
So because I was part of the layoffs in November, it’s not *really* my last day at BigCommerce. That was November 8, 2023. My last “official” day was December 2, 2023, but I was disconnected from everything and they wiped my MacBook Pro at 5am on Nov. 8 (neat trick, they did it while I was still asleep and it was in my backpack). That was the day they announced Q3 earnings, and 7% layoffs. It was a blindside, but probably shouldn’t have been. They did the same thing exactly one year earlier, which was the company’s first-ever layoff.
What’s the rule, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me? Once is an anomoly, twice is a pattern? Both of those work, or maybe there’s another one even better.
They laid us off to improve financials to show profitability on their Q4 2023 earnings, which was a promise they made during the layoffs in 2022. I’m no business expert, but it seems to me that shedding salaries is not a great way to become profitable. I thought building things that people want to pay for and producing growth was the way, and that’s what I was all about at BigCommerce.
In addition to managing two teams I built from scratch, a highly-productive Mobile Apps team, and a stellar Engineering Brand team designed to not just elevate BigCommerce’s global profile and thought leadership but also its product and engineering personnel, I worked on the AI/ML Strategy Team developing the roadmap for 2024. AKA the most important development in technology since mobile, and the internet before it. I was the most active engineering leader in that team of directors, VPs, and the CTO, and based on my R&D designed a developer-focused strategy that leveraged the resources BigCommerce has, and was a decidedly different strategy than anything Shopify, Salesforce, Adobe, or anyone else in the sector is doing. If implemented, it would allow all of the AI expertise to be concentrated in a small domain team, while enabling all developers on the BigCommerce platform, internal and external, to implement powerful AI features with minimum technical AI expertise. If you know how to write prompts and what data you want to use them on, you could build AI features. It was well-received, until it wasn’t. And then the layoff followed shortly after.
So for the last four months, I’ve been applying to roles, both manager and individual contributor, and having a tough time getting anywhere. I’ve been close, and I currently have a promising opportunity, but over that time my severance, savings, and some of my remaining equity has evaporated. A lot of that is on me – I took them at their word that they never wanted to do another layoff again, and I wasn’t as prepared as I probably should have been.
I’m not gonna lie. I’m a little salty about it. I did the best work of my career there, but both it and my near future were so easily discarded over money that they actually do still have in the bank. And it was done ambush-style, while people slept. The only other time I’ve ever been laid off, in 2018 at Mutual Mobile, was done in person, to my face. It wasn’t fun, but I understood that. MM was a bootstrapped company at the time, and it couldn’t sustain itself when contracts wrapped up and they didn’t have enough work cued up. It definitely sucked and was embarrassing to be escorted out the door, but I respect how they did it way more than I do the way tech companies, especially public ones, handle it today. And it seems like they don’t even pay a penalty for it, either.
Except maybe BigCommerce. They weren’t rewarded by the market at all, not by the layoffs, and the Q4 earnings did nothing for them either. The stock drifted downward even further in the last week after earnings.
So not only did they eliminate my job (but not the position itself, they kept my team and moved someone else onto it), but also all my not yet vested equity, and put a timer on what was vested that expires at 3pm today. Whatever options I had vested, I can still do something with, but the rest was just gone. The *vast* majority of my options are underwater right now, by $1.50. This is the part that is heartbreaking to me – that was my retirement one day, and unless some miracle happens in the next few hours, it’s completely worthless. Until the layoff, I had until 2030 to act on them, so I thought there was still plenty of time. I thought that especially with what we were wanting to do with technologies like AI and Catalyst, they would be worth something by then.
I do still have a small number of options that aren’t underwater, and today is my last opportunity to sell those for whatever I can get. And then I’ll be done with BigCommerce for good. (I do have a small number of stock too, but I’ll be looking to unload those eventually, once they all pass through to long term gains territory. But mentally, I check out today.)
Enough with the past. The future looks a lot more interesting.