BigCommerce is trading below its own ARR and will be taken private in 18 mos. Let’s be the ones to do it.

+ Deep work is dead.

Deep work is dead. If you want to win right now, you have to master context switching. It is by far the most productive stretch of my career.

Every day I kick off 5 projects in Claude and cycle through them all day. Usually 2-3 related tasks in 2 different areas I’m tackling. 

Instead of dedicating a 2-3 hour block to solely focus on 1 thing I kick my 5 projects off in the morning and work through them all day when I’m not on calls.

I’m shipping 3-4 major projects a week.

5 is the sweet spot where I found that I can kick off a group of projects and while Claude is working on the others I can push 1 along then cycle through while the others are working. (I stole this model from how Boris writes code (Head of Claude Code).

You have to relearn how to work, but once you do the amount you can get done is game changing.

Note: As always, none of what follows is legal, tax, investing, financial, or any other sort of advice. And I was never here 😉. I am currently trading the stock and recommend you do your own research before making any decisions with your money.

BigCommerce ($CMRC), the Shopify alternative eCom platform that died on that hill, now trades below its revenues and has been left for dead.

A $258m market cap on $342m in revenue is the perfect floor price for PE to take it private.

Link to their Earnings

Competitive Benchmarking (GAAP)

*Brightcove, commercetools, SAP Commerce estimated from public filings and market data.

**Brightcove acquired by Bending Spoons 2023.

This ain’t it chief.

And yet: 

Let’s go get the diamonds in the rough.

Founded:

Aha Moment:

Growth:

Model:

Collapse:

Here are the 3 moves that turn BigC into a real agentic company worth $1B+.

Stop cosplaying as a holding company and make this 1 truly integrated platform. It's not complicated, but it is hard:

$342M in revenue. $56M in G&A. 16 cents of every dollar going to administration.

It should be half that. Full stop.

250+ employees in G&A out of ~1,000 total. 

No wonder they've gone nowhere in 3 years w/ $157M in debt piling up.

BigCommerce has 3 separate P&Ls for a $342M biz. The CEO needs to channel their inner Jack Dorsey and consolidate this to 1 org and shed the unnecessary OPEX that comes with this much bloat.

Flatten the structure.

This alone gets them to EBITDA positive and boost the stock to 2x ARR (~700m Cap).

Takeaway: Fix G&A. 3x the FCF. 2x the Cap.

CMRC fails at serving 3 customers simultaneously. 

That is not a go-to-market. It’s an identity crisis.

The only segment growing at CMRC: ENT plans.

Every $$$ CMRC spends on SMB acquisition is wasted not going toward the $50K enterprise contract.

Also the marketing and sales motion to a $200/mo just trying it out brand vs. an Ent B2B is no where similar.

The answer: 

That changes the sales cycle. You close 3x as many $50K contracts when delivery takes 6 weeks instead of a year.

Marketing & Sales are significantly more efficient with focus and you need less people to support the same number of customers.

You grow faster and more profitably serving fewer segments. And CLEARLY only 1 segment is working.

Takeaway: 1 customer. 1 product. 1 story. ENT Deals.

Gartner predicts the “Agentic Procurement” market hits $15T by 2028.

In English Agentic Procurement:

Let’s say you work Ops at Pepsi. You process all orders for every grocery store across the country.

Today: a human reviews every order form and invoice for every location.

In the Agentic world: an AI agent from the grocery store submits the order. An AI agent on Pepsi's side processes & fulfills it.

That requires:

The boring stuff that makes commerce actually work.

BigC already built 80% of this stack. No one knows about it because it’s buried under “We want to be like Shopify but can’t”. Their integrations here have been prescient an they’re VERY well positioned to win this market.

Feedonomics alone is worth more than the entire market cap. 

Data feed businesses are hard, unsexy, and boring. Especially when you're syncing real-world inventory against live digital channels. ERPs, OMS, GMS, WMS, IMS are a PAIN to integrate and manage.(1 of those acronyms isn't real. Have fun figuring out which one.)

Anthropic and OpenAI don't want to do this grunt work. Connecting every manufacturer's ERP/crazy Ops stack → AI procurement rails isn’t where they or the hyperscalers will become Trillion dollar bizs.

But CMRC's should. 

Agents need to request quotes w/ dynamic pricing inside pre-set parameters. A $200K PO needs to route through four levels of sign-off before an agent commits. This is not a vibe-coded prototype. This is ENT software.

This alone will return the investment.

SAP, Oracle, Coupa, Ariba, Workday all want this but haven’t built it yet. The value of CMRC's stack to any of those acquirers is north of $1B.

Takeaway: Chase the largest TAM. That’s the north star.

Gartner says 2028 is the age of AI procurement and that market will explode to $15T. I'm skeptical of the timeline.

Not because the technology isn't ready. Because humans aren't.

The first 50% of AI procurement spend will be automating replenishment flows. Essentially have AI reorder the Pepsi instead of a team of people checking invoices.

That is valuable but basically AI masquerading as automation flows. It will automate out Ops & data-entry jobs, freeing teams to focus on higher-value work, but that’s like making a waygu taco.

The more interesting question (what I spend a lot of time thinking about) is True procurement: can my agent source → buy a new vendor for me?

For that to work, the agent needs full context on the org's problems, requirements, and intended outcomes. 

Most humans don't even have that level of context when they start looking for new tools. 

And I’m not even talking about the real meat and potatoes of procurement validating the vendor actually delivers ROI. Which let’s be honest most human run processes don’t do either.

I see again and again humans hit the limits of what they can do with AI because they don’t have a clear enough vision on what they need.

I’m all for AI being smarter, but I struggle to believe in 2 years it will have that level of predictive powers to know what you want when you don’t.

Everyone is hyping AI to points that are frankly unrealistic because humans don’t move that fast.

Will this stuff eventually happen? Of course. Will it happen at these insane timelines?