CEO commercetools Hands Baton to Andrew Burton For sprint to IPO

This week, Dirk Hoerig and commercetools announced that Dirk would be stepping down from the CEO role and into an Innovation Officer role. This is the second major eCommerce platform (the first was BigCommerce) to make major leadership changes in the last year.

Now, Andrew Burton is the new CEO of commercetools. But who is Andrew Burton?

* He is a first-time CEO, so this is an expansion/step-up role.

* Interesting to note he has a Product Management background, for the PMs in the room.

* Served as President and COO of Rapid7 in a significant growth period from 2015 to 2024.

* Andrew is based in Boston, MA -- not in Europe like previous CEO.

What does this mean to me?

* Rapid7 completed and integrated several acquistions during Andrew’s time there, and I expect this was a gap in commercetool's skillset, despite its acquisition of frontastic a couple years back.

* While commercetools can continue growing organically, inorganic growth is likely a key part of the strategy going forward. And having another set of product-oriented eyes in the room, combined with the operational experience to integrate those acquisitions was considered important.

* Rapid7 has a reasonable history as a public company - not fantastic (it is no Amazon or Shopify), not terrible (BigC started at an $6-8B market cap and is now ~560m). It's current market cap of $2.4B is above its IPO market cap of ~$900M in July 2015, but clearly off its COVID high (like many) of ~$7B.

* The United States is the clear priority market for the company.

* Given that commercetools has been expanding into other verticals like Telco, Automotive, Healthcare, I would expect this kind of expansion to continue given the choice of a non-retail eCommerce oriented leader.

This continues to be a smart and comparatively blue ocean direction for commercetools, in comparison to the other 10 (and growing it seems) eCommerce platforms chasing the same deals at a perceived up-market position of Shopify.

But the risks, always the risks.

* Changing a CEO is fraught with challenges. You can just as easily pick a Steve Ballmer or John Sculley as a Satya Nadella (or dare I say too early - Andy Jassy?). It's hard.

Usually you know within 60 days if it's going to work out. (hello Flexport, Dave Clark's education tour)

* Blending European and American cultures is famously difficult (while moving swifly in the American direction), but commercetools is not new to this and has been navigating this transition for several years.

* Acquiring the right company is hard, integrating any company is harder, and delivering value from any acquisition is nigh impossible. The company needs to place significant needle-moving bets to move from $150M ARR today to the next major milestone of $500M ARR. I do expect commercetools to use its investors to place some bets.

All in, I wish commercetools the best on the next journey chapter!