Bold moves

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This article was published 19/11/2022 (1234 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bold Commerce went through an awful lot of change during the pandemic and coming out the other end it has a new strategy, a brand new website and logo… and a new CEO.

It’s still bold, but now it’s BOLD-er, (it’s logo changed from all lower case to all upper case lettering).

Three of the four founders who started the company in a small office in Ile des Chenes making apps for Shopify’s e-commerce platform are still there, but the company has hired outside professionals to the positions they had previously held.

Peter Karpas, a Silicon Valley based tech executive who’s spent time with PayPal, Intuit and other fin-tech companies is Bold’s new CEO taking over from Yvan Boisjoli.

In a March a new chief technology officer was hired, replacing Eric Boisjoli, and Jay Myers relinquished his role as chief marketing officer at the end of 2019. (Stefan Maynard, the fourth founder, continues to be an owner, but left day-to-day duties in 2021.)

While the company still supports its e-commerce apps that allow the 90,000 retailers in 170 countires that use them to do things like upsell at check-out, or sell subscriptions and memberships, but its focus now is on building out its industry-leading check-out technologies that allow for a more seamless check-out experience.

After boot-strapping the company to Silicon Valley-type growth, the company raised about $57 million in two rounds of venture capital financing in 2019 and 2021.

And while there are many stories of VCs pushing aside founders and installing profession management, both Karpas and the Bold founders say the moves are about making the company better.

“I think it was Eric who said it first, that he can’t wait until someone replaces him as CTO,” said Myers. “We all felt that way.

“There is always the chance that as a founder you are the perfect person for a role, but it’s pretty rare,” he said, “Lots of founders put themselves in a role because they think it’s their God-given right because they founded the company. But doing what is right for the company at the right time and putting people in positions of strength for the good of the company is the best way to go.”

Karpas, who will split his time between California and Winnipeg, said he will “lean into” the fact that he’ll be running a company with an established corporate culture with a group of founders who have been very hands-on from the start.

“The set of principles and values that shape how everyone at Bold Commerce works is one of the primary things that attracted me to the company,” Karpas said in an email exchange with the Free Press. “I think it’s also one of the keys to both Bold’s current success as well as its future success.”

For his part, Boisjoli the co-founder and foremer CEO, said, “I’m looking forward to working side-by-side with him as we lead Bold into this next chapter bringing a new era of checkout experiences to the industry.”

Bold has been at the vanguard of the concept of headless commerce and composable checkout — making the checkout function work from anywhere regardless of the e-commerce platform that is being used.

After talking about it for three years, Myers said large brands are now starting to recognize the significance and are reaching out to Bold to build solutions for them.

A recent pilot project with an Alaska seafood company called Sitka Salmon, found that Bold’s composable checkout solution — for instance, a one click purchase off Instagram ads — increased sales by 30 per cent.

Research has shown that nearly half of shoppers that start the checkout process in a traditional e-commerce platform drop off before completing their purchase and it’s even worse on mobile.

Karpas said, “You don’t need to be a tech expert to know that Bold has the best checkout product in the world. There are always other players who do somewhat similar things that you could hack into a solution, but nobody focuses the way we do on checkout and the checkout experience.”

Like every other e-commerce company Bold grew even more than usual through the pandemic, but consumers have gone back to the stores quicker than people thought and the company — which was on an unrelenting search for employees almost since it began in 2012 — had to lay off about 45 people earlier this year putting its staff count at about 250.

Myers said the company is still looking to fill specific positions, but believes it is in good shape to start the process of addressing this new market and expects that by next spring traction will be even more evident.

“Our pipeline is as strong as it’s ever been,” Myers said. “I’m more excited than ever about the company.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca