Lightspeed hires Google executive as head of product and technology

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Lightspeed Commerce Inc. LSPD-T has hired the former general manager of Google Pay to be its new chief product and technology officer as the Montreal company tries to broaden the services it offers to its restaurant and retail clients.

Ryan Tabone spent 15 years with the California giant, spearheading a number of new products and projects that Google undertook as it moved beyond the world of search, ads and e-mail, and reframed itself as a broad asset for navigating the digital world.

Within its own market of assisting retailers and restaurateurs, Lightspeed is trying to handle an ever-increasing proportion of the service industry’s many tasks.

“Every small and medium business in the world has pretty much the same amount of overhead and friction,” Mr. Tabone said in an interview Monday. “... If I can remove inefficiencies to make them more effective, that allows these business owners to focus on their unique values, things they’re passionate about – and not just the overhead of running businesses.”

Mr. Tabone’s hiring comes as Lightspeed, like many of the growth-at-all-costs tech companies that benefitted from the low interest rates of the 2010s, is turning its focus toward profitability in the midst of a sector-wide downturn.

Lightspeed’s Toronto-listed shares are down nearly 80 per cent over the past year as it faced the double whammy of both the downturn and a short-seller report in the fall of 2021 that cast doubts about its customer count, revenue growth and competitive position.

Since then, founding chief executive Dax Dasilva stepped down to become executive chair and president JP Chauvet took over the role. In the months since, Mr. Chauvet has put a greater emphasis on Lightspeed’s profitability in his public comments. Most recently, he has said he hopes to bring the company to profit on an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA, basis in its next fiscal year.

In an interview this past summer, Mr. Chauvet said one key to that plan will be cross-selling Lightspeed’s payment-processing services to its broader customer base of restaurants and merchants that use its digital management tools and point-of-sale products.

Mr. Tabone’s job description, however, stipulates a focus on “innovation” that goes beyond Lightspeed’s historical growth strategies of acquisition, product integration and cross-selling. But the new chief product and technology officer insists that the role is complementary to what his chief executive has planned for the company.

“You can have an end goal which is one unified stack,” Mr. Tabone said, using engineer jargon for a unified suite of front- and back-end services. His work to that end will begin by studying Lightspeed’s customer needs. He’s already identified cash flow and supply chain management as two potential areas where Lightspeed could boost its brand.

Mr. Tabone said he was something of an outlier in his family for spending so long at Google, one of the world’s biggest companies, as many of his relatives run small or medium-sized businesses. “My sister-in-law has a furniture store, and the pain of setting up to just be able to sell furniture and her design services was so painful, I couldn’t understand why,” he said.

The engineer helped develop or expand Google products ranging from its quick search box to its Chrome operating system and laptops to its mobile payment service, spending additional time as technical assistant to CEO Sundar Pichai.

The retail-tech space is highly competitive, especially so in Canada, where Shopify Inc. has long held the spot as one of the country’s biggest tech companies. Shopify also offers payment processing, and recently redoubled its efforts to expand in the point-of-sale hardware space – encroaching on a Lightspeed specialty.

That competition, Mr. Tabone said, is “validation that this is actually a growing space, and a space that people want to be in. But I would want to be in a company that’s in the leadership position, that actually has the full stack.”

Despite its share-price sluggishness, some analysts have remained optimistic about Lightspeed’s prospects.

“Lightspeed is well-positioned to meet its growth and EBITDA break-even targets, despite the adverse macro environment,” Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce analyst Todd Coupland wrote in a research note last week. When Lightspeed released its most recent financial results in August, meanwhile, the Bank of Montreal’s Thanos Moschopoulos said that Lightspeed’s growth is “compelling” versus its peers.