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Travis Hess, CEO of Bigcommerce, discusses providing software for retail and e-commerce platforms. Gordon Sanghera, Co-Founder and CEO of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, talks about opportunities for DNA and RNA sequencing from the JPM Health Conference.
Hosts: Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. Producer: Paul Brennan.
This is Bloomberg Business Week, insight from the reporters and editors that bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business, finance and tech news as it happens. Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
It is Bloomberg Business Week. Some news in the world of retail today Carol Macy's issuing a downbeat outlook for sales in the current quarter. It was a sign that executives might have been too optimistic about their expectations for the holiday shopping season. Abercrombie and Fitch announced better than expected sales for the holidays, but at share price tumbled this after its sales growth target fell short of some analyst expectations. They closed out the day lower by more than fifteen percent, close to sixteen percent. I do know that Travis has watches this stuff closely, the CEO of Big Commerce. It's an e commerce platform that works with businesses around the world to help them sell you their stuff. Companies such as Yetti Cycles, Johnny Walker, Uplift Desk are among Big Commerces customers. It's publicly traded on the NASDAK it's a small cap market value just shy of five hundred million dollars. Travis joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Travis, good to see you doing some research on this, and you probably hate this comparison, but it's the world we know. I'm looking at the website, I'm understanding your business. Are you competitor Shopify?
Of course, yeah, I certainly have come out of that ecosystem as well. I think our approach philosophically is different. So composibility is at the core of what we're doing, and if you want to draw an analogy, it's more open versus closed. I think our perspective on this is we believe more disruption and innovation will come by way of third party ISVs and software providers, and as a result, our focus is really about the ingestion of those capabilities now and in the future, as opposed to building them innately into the platform themselves.
Would you say they are the biggest competitor out there?
It depends on the market, certainly for traditional D two C and certainly digital native vertical brands. Unquestioned. I think if you look at the meaning director direct.
To consumer correct go ahead, it's finish your point.
Yeah.
I think if you look at different markets, different geographies, you're certainly going to have a different types of competitors, but certainly they're the most outward and vocal about it and certainly the one most obvious to understand.
So tell us a company comes to you a retail and tell us what you do for them.
Yeah. I think for retailers, brand manufacturers, manufacturers and distributors, we are optimizing revenue for them while driving profitability independent of channel. I think the name of the game now is to go where customers want to interface with you as a brand, regardless of where they may buy your product or service. And I think the key challenges organizational agility at the organizational level to be able to go, experiment, drive value exchange through those different channels with speed agility at scale.
So this means potentially building out an e commerce platform, but also then helping them with what back office maybe at actual retail operations, and making it all work together one hundred percent.
So whether it's an own channel or a non owned channel that could be sitting brick and mortar with an own brick and mortar retail, it could be non owned marketplace. It could be a social channel or those that made it come in the future.
I want to talk about cart abandoned mint because this is an issue for retailers.
Yeah time, Yeah, you put all the time. Well, what causes you to do it?
Because I'm just not quite sure I really want something? Or I'm thinking about do I really need this? And it's so easy when you're just going through like yeah, and then I'm just like I'm done. So you know when I get those annoying emails like you left something in your car and I'm like, nope, I meant to.
You got to return the card, Carrol.
What causes me for card abandonment is maybe more lazy than Carol. It's the payment part. And one thing that I love seeing when.
I'm checking out is Apple pay right there.
Of course, all I have to do is put my face in my phone and press the button twice.
It's bought.
I don't have to pull out my credit card, enter the info, put in my eyes, wait to your.
Two little ones can do.
That they're allowed to do. No, that's not going to be good. What's the what's the check thought process? How do you make sure it's standardized? So it's so easy to part with your money.
Well, to exactly your point, I mean, we take an agnostic approach to check out, so as far as ingestion of payment providers, whether that's Apple pay or PayPal or Stripe or whomever, obviously whatever fits the best use cases for a particular brand and size and business logic. But yes, it's to remove friction. It's to make that decision very quick, very easy, very seamless, so less steps.
Along the PROCEMCE.
Do you have your your own equivalent of shop pay, Like, if I'm buying something I don't even know if it's a Shopify powered site, I put in my phone number, they send me a text message boom.
My information is already there. I don't need a password or anything. I got my stuff.
We do that today. PayPal just lost fast Lane launched fast Lane, which is an alternative that with a much deeper install basis. Certainly, if you're anonymous coming to a site and you begin to check out and you're not logged in, the fact that they have your account information will prepopulate that and again remove friction and make it more accelerated.
You don't have a native one for your company Historically, we've not gone to mart with native We've certainly talked about it, we've considered it that maybe something we explore in the future, but the business model for us has not been We are not a bank.
We have not monetized and commercialized a business model based on a payment capacity. We've believed in very much, you know, and ingesting that agnostically.
You know, it's so funny that you say that, Tim, that I do. I agree that, Like, you know, it's just sometimes been its Apple Page's just so easy. But sometimes with like shop pay and like the information comes up and I'm like, oh, yeah, somebody else has all my information, and like sometimes that freaks me out. How do you like continue to think about security of shoppers information?
I think securities front and center obviously, and I think that the more personalized we get, it's kind of threading the needle. You want to serve up a very relevant, personalized experience, but not so much where it feels intrusive, where people are hesitant to obviously share information, because the more information they share, the more relevant immersive experience we can kind of deliver to them at scale. And so it is a fine balance for brands obviously wanting to capture consumer informational leverage it in a way that would be you know, viable and meaningful and driving efficacy, but not so much so it feels intrusive.
You are shopping platforms, so you see, right, you see a lot of information, A lot of data goes through like you have access we know or like like I am curious about someone like you? Guys that what it tells us about what's going on with consumers and like the retail environment.
Yeah, we certainly can see consumer behavior as far as what's being added to col I.
Wasn't trying to get you to tell me what tim last spot. But anyway, God, it's all good.
Yes, of course we're I mean, and there's many companies that have access to these sorts of things that they want us to. Of course, we're going to see behavior of what's being added the car, where people are browsing, how often they're browsing, and what they're clicking on, what they're abandoning, and how that's facilitating abandoned card emails and things like that. And of course we're leveraging those capabilities and serving it back to organizations, and they're also using their own algorithms and analytics and insights internally to get better at what it is that they're doing.
Well, what does it tell you about the consumers that you do have that access? Just big broad strokes here.
I think consumers most recently become more promotionally oriented. I think a lot of people are abandoning carts because they're testing the waters on could I get a better deal if I wait to.
Look at the un copons all the time? Yep, like wherever?
And you've seen this trend through the holiday traffic. I think brands that have historically weren't promotional have gotten very promotional. I think you've seen a promotionally oriented economy in many capacities, certainly in traditional segments like fashion and health and beauty and things like that. I think most folks want some semblance of a recurring revenue models or anything that's subscriptively oriented becomes a bit easier to predict and a bit stickier, and those that aren't, again, especially with fast fashion and other industries where they're constantly turning over, it's all about velocity of skew volume. It does tend to be promotional, but it's also eroding margins. And again it's a fine line, especially with potentially looming tariffs. What impact is that going to have on profitability? If those tariffs negatively in fact a supply chain and cost of goods.
Do you see the tariffs being implemented, Does that happen?
Well?
Is that something that I think that's I think it's been signal letting, you know, lover hate the incoming administration. I think arguably you can judge past behavior that tariffs are a real thing. It's been certainly socialized, and depending on someone's supply chain and how oriented they are and producing things in areas that may be impacted by tariffs, it's certainly going to impact their business.
Your customer is getting ready for it.
Yeah, I think everyone's getting ready for it, and I think you're seeing people hedge, certainly in industries that would be heavily impacted by manufacturing in China, maybe looking at alternatives in region or maybe bringing things more domestic. Depends on the industry, depends on the margin, but certainly it's it's front and center, all.
Right, Travis Hess really cool stuff, Thanks so much for joining us. Congrats on the new job too.
Thank you guys.
Having CEO of a big commerce joining us here in the bloom we're gonnact to Brokers Studio Well. The forty third annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco is underway. It brings together healthcare executives and pharmaceutical industry leaders and tech innovators to discuss the latest in the sector. One of those companies is Oxford Nanoport Technologies. It's the one point six billion dollar market cap company that has devices that sequence DNA and RNA to offer real time analysis. We got with us right now. Doctor Gordon Sangarra, the co founder and CEO of Oxford Nanoport Technologies, joins us from the JP Morgan Health Conference. Shares surging today as much as twenty five percent. It's the steepest gain going back to September of twenty twenty one. So you guys had some news out a trading update that analysts certainly found reassuring. We're going to get to that a minute, but let's take a big step back here, because I'm interested in for the lay person understanding exactly what your device does, what your technology does.
Sure, I'm afternoon, everybody from sunny San Francisco, warmer than London, so we have a genetic analyzer that is analogous to what happened in the computer industry. So today the incumbents that do genomic analysis are like mainframe computer providers. They're large, complex machines, multimillion dollar in multimillion dollar infrastructures. We are able to provide cheap, small devices, very similar to the change in computing from mainframe to desktop to handheld. Here's a sequencer I brought with me. This is our minion.
So look it's like the size of a smartphone for people who are listening.
It really is, yes, and that was critically important in distributed sequencing and understanding all the variants during the COVID epidemic.
How much is one of these devices?
Couple of thousand dollars, so very cheap, very affordable. It's that's orders of magnitude cheaper than an existing centralized machine where you're batching everything to get economies of scale. These things are pay as you go. So it's really the step change in the way that we saw democratization and access of compute. The same for DNA and information. As we know from the last pandemic, distributed access to DNR and information is going to be important to stamp that out quickly.
Doctor Sinker. From our understanding the presentation you did, are doing or planning to do at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, there's four core end markets for you guys. The biggest one is research. So by enabling researchers and R and d AT, I guess companies at academic universities and so on, and institutions, I guess tell us what that will be used for and what that enables these institutions and companies to do that they might not be able to do today so easily or so cheaply.
Absolutely so, if we do it in the context of human genomes, that's three billion letters on what continuous chain for bases GTAC, And for twenty years people have taken that DNA, breaking it down into two hundred base bit of chains, made a copy. So I've gone from full high definition color to black and white, and then you get some interesting insights in biology, but you're really losing a lot. We're able to read the native DNA as it's presented from, for example, a patient sample, which means we can look at that DNA in full high definition in color in a very simple device in real time with affordable, accessible equipment. So those researchers, whether it's a PhD student in academia or you know, big biofarmers, they're able to illuminate what is often referred to as parts of the dark genome, which code for some of the most difficult disorders that we cannot get at today, mental health, neuroad generation, early early onset cancer, Alzheimer's, things like this, And they're now beginning and there are the foothills of that journey to understanding the biology that underpins these diseases that we've not really moved the needle on fifty years.
So is this to help not only in treatment of individuals, but also to create better modalities.
For treatment, absolutely, both accelerating biomarket discovery by moving to so people we all talk about the genome. So twenty years ago the genome was published, and that's really just looking at single point mutations. There is now a movement to multi omic genomes. What does that mean, Well, we have four bases GTAC. There is actually a fifth base, which is chemical corruption of your c base and that chemical change is methylation, and methylation is the smoking gun in all cancers. And that's been known for twenty years, but this technology really allows you to get comprehensive maps of methylation which are then having a huge impact immediately. So, for example, acute milue leukemia needs treatment immediately. Diagnosis today takes three to four days, maybe a week. By looking at methylation in those patient samples, so this chemical corruption, they can determine the type of leukemia AML in four to six hours and that is game changing in terms of treatment. So rapid insights in acute and critical care is something that this technology allows because it's distributed point of care, it's real time, and it's giving you content that you do not get with existing tech.
Who help us underst stand who has the devices versus who doesn't have these devices?
I e.
What is the market opportunity that you have left at this point? Because if it is indeed something that offers a service at such a lower cost, then is everybody who wanted one do they have one yet?
Not yet?
It's a great question, and it's about the evolution of a disruptive new technology. We are in the foothills of that journey. So who has them today? These are the sort of forward thinking academic nissons by a farmer companies, particularly you know, the newer waive of synthetic biology, gene editing, bella, gene therapy companies. All of these people are creating momentum around the use cases and just sort of two to three up year outlook, you will see that then moving towards routine nical practice. And that's why, in what is an incredibly tough market, with all our peer groups either posting no growth or negative growth, we have continued to hit our year on year growth twenty three percent and half two to half two thirty four percent because there is that unmet need is being met and at breakneck speed on a weekly basis, we see game changing opportunities. The next phase of turning that into routine clinical workflows is something that will be big for us in twenty five and then twenty six, twenty seven you will start to see that market penetration too much broader routine use.
So doctor Sinkara, So I don't know fast forward then is it five years from now, seven years from now? How might this product that you guys have developed, how might it change our worlds? To think about from our audience, a Bloomberg audience, from you know, financial perspective and an investing perspective. You know what opportunities that that potentially could open up as well, or your device could open up as well.
Absolutely so in the last three or four years five years, early detection of cancer become a thing liquid biopsy, so where you're looking at short fragments of cancer cells before there's a tumor, and if you can pick that cancer up early, there's a real opportunity that your treatment outcomes can be much, much, incredibly improved. So I m visied your world three four or five years out where if you've had cancer, you're in remission. Instead of going for a six monthly check up, you'll do a monthly blood test and if you see that cancer reoccur, you pick it up immediately and it gets treated. But ultimately, if you come from a high risk grouping, because your whole genome has been sequenced and we know that you'll then be routinely surveyed and distributed, healthcare will become a big thing. But let me take that a step further. I'm Punjabi heritage, so I have a high propensity tocodiovascular disease and I should and probably should be on statins, but it turns out that if you were to eat tomato that are rich in something called beta licopene, you can get the same benefit of a drug statin. Wow, and so I envisited your world where through gene editing, I have a custom diet that would allow me to not have to take a drug but a nutraceutical, in this case a tomato that's been cross spread to have high licopene, which would have the same benefit of the statin. But it's natural. So I think there's just going to be I'm just kind of picturing two bookends of where and how ubiquitous us The ability to be able to do things with genetics and do it at a personalized level will really impact us.
Hey, before we let you go, we only have about forty five seconds left, but we have a viewer listener getting in touch and curious about what you think on about GLP ones. Given that over the last couple of years, Uh, this is probably the medical technology that we've talked about the most.
It is an interesting one. I'm looking forward to seeing the large cohorts of patients on GLP one being sequenced so we can really get that multiomic view and look at the cause and effect and better understand the mode of action which will be beneficial for everybody.
So you don't you see a lot you see learning. We need to learn a lot more about them.
I think so we own it's a great start, but there are already people talking about side effects and you know, not being as impactful as it needs to be. And understanding the biology source code of an individual who's taken these medicines is where the future lies. That individualized, personalized approach will be game changing well, and I think we make GLPS more.
Efficient, interesting, fascinating conversation. I hope we can get you back real soon, Doctor Gordon Senghera. He's co founder and chief executive officer of Oxford Nanopore Technologies. As we said in the London trade soaring about twenty five percent