Bigcommerce Adds Tech Industry Veteran Chris Fry to Board of Advisors

Bigcommerce, the fastest-growing e-commerce platform, today announced that Chris Fry, former head of engineering at Twitter and Salesforce.com, has joined the company’s board of advisors. In this role, Fry will work closely with Bigcommerce product and development teams to accelerate the company’s roadmap and mission to deliver high-impact, scalable ecommerce capabilities to businesses around the world.

At Twitter, Fry scaled the engineering team from 500 to 1,000 engineers and led the team credited with killing the “fail whale.” Fry’s team greatly improved Twitter’s infrastructure – including the uptime and performance of core services – during a period of massive growth before, during and after the company’s IPO. During his seven-year tenure at Salesforce.com, Fry was responsible for all platform software development and played a key role in the development of Chatter during a time when Salesforce.com grew its customer base from 12,500 to more than 100,000 with more than 3 million individual users.

Bigcommerce, which announced its latest round of funding two weeks ago, is investing heavily in product and engineering and is looking to aggressively grow its engineering teams in San Francisco, Austin and Sydney.

“I see parallels in the growth that Salesforce.com experienced in the late 2000s to what Bigcommerce is seeing right now,” said Fry. “Bigcommerce is another example of a great, cloud-based software company that small and medium businesses can utilize to grow in ways that previously weren’t accessible to them. I look forward to working with the Bigcommerce engineering team to make this happen.”

“Chris is a brilliant engineer and someone who, through his experiences at Twitter and Salesforce, has led teams developing revolutionary products that have changed the world,” said Eddie Machaalani, Bigcommerce co-founder and CEO. “As we double the size of our engineering team worldwide, Chris will be a phenomenal resource to help us continue executing at a high level and delivering a platform that enables merchants of all sizes to sell and compete effectively online.”

Fry holds more than 10 patents and has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of California San Diego.