YouSaid · the spoken record

Carl Rivera

lines on the record: 88
first: 2025-11-14
most recent: 2025-11-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“How long term he is. You know, companies and startups like to have these words they use. They all use the same words. And it's like we're mission led and we're long term and we're building a generational company and blah, blah. And I said those words and I actually believed them, but then you come into an environment like Shopify and you realize they mean something else to Toby or is acting on them in a different way. He is so long term and so faithful to the mission and he is so willing to ignore short-term gains to drive towards this global summit that he has in sight. And the ability to think in those time frames just makes him make decisions differently.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The trade-off of disagreeing to the remaining 20% is so worth it in that I get to be part of a mission that I've been pursuing since 2011 in a company that is so well positioned and so poised to go after it and that is going after it in such a high conviction way. But I also always say that like Toby Stereis and I here, this I probably shouldn't say on a podcast, but he's the reason I'm here and he's the reason that I one day leave. And I say that in a very loving way in that I also appreciate that at some point there might be a rift where we think so differently about the future that it's hard for me to do the best job that I can do supporting that vision.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not even a question of whether we agree with it or not. This is as close to a fact as we can possibly get on anything. I came to Shopify and I thought that I would be here through my original earnout three years. I'm a startup founder, an entrepreneur. I want to like go through this thing, land the team, make sure that they're after a great start, launch this thing that turned out to be shop, and then just take another swing at it. And I'm going now, I'm getting close to seven years at Shopify and I'm not going anywhere. And the reason I'm here is Toby, because like what excites me about Shopify is that we get the distribution, we get the consumer network effects, but it doesn't seem to come at the cost of pace or conviction. And we're allowed to take these big leaps and take these bold bets. I don't agree with every bet. In short, at some points, I would have broadly seen the company go in a different direction. But the trade-off of saying, hey, I am actually aligned to 80% of his thinking.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or is it someone that's hungry and paranoid and looking to reimagine and transform the company to live for another chapter?”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I think it's a case by case thing here. Like when you say incumbents, there's a lot built into that word. I think we've for years have been trained to no unincumbent as a shit company that's large. That's basically like the definition. And I just don't know that that's the case right now because you have a bunch of companies that came up in an era of modern company building. I'll use Shopify as an example, but you can pick others like Stripe is a great example. They actually have like management teams that are on it. They have founders that are super active leaders of the businesses. They're hungry. They're paranoid. These are starting to be the incumbents of the market, but they're not sleeping at the wheel. And so I think it largely comes down to like, okay, so which industry are you trying to disrupt? And who's the category leader of that industry? Is it like a sleepy CEO who's like trying to figure out how to make it another five years?”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I believe that distribution matters a great deal. We're all building on largely the same models, the areas where you actually can have true network effects is access to unavailable data or consumer network effects. Both of these typically sit inside of incumbents sooner than startups. And so really the ability then is that startups are able to go after more narrow problems that incumbents are too slow to act on. And I just find that there's enough high quality incumbents in the market right now that there are fewer of those opportunities. Not to say there aren't any, just fewer. And I think that as a general kind of market trend, I believe that the incumbents are favored right now.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At creating new products that bring into life new experiences. And I find that to still be the thing, right? Where product discovery has been expensive for a while and it's created an environment, I think, where it's been harder for startups to cut through and most of them get picked up earlier and just integrate it into larger platforms that already own the distribution.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have for a while before AI worried that the distribution has largely settled and innovation is favored by the larger companies again. Like when I started Ticktail, so like we launched in 2012, we really had our moment like 2014. It still felt like this time in the market where there was a lot of free distribution to be had for social, through advertising, through different viral mechanics. A lot of it using existing networks like Facebook to tap into them and accelerate growth. Most of those avenues got shut down or became way more expensive. And I think this shift happened where the companies that held and owned distribution, companies like Meta, like Google, but also companies like Shopify started to favor where they were already established. They already had a huge user base. And they started to become just better at innovating.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI will multiply the amount of products that exist. And as part of that, there will be more shit products. I will also give superpowers to companies with greater ambitions, with the interest and appetite to dial in outstanding experiences and create better products, more magical experiences than what we can even fathom right now. And so I think it's like any kind of power curve is just going to split it in two where you get more shit, but also more magical and amazing experiences. And I choose to focus on the latter.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always relearn to challenge the conventional truths. And I think a conventional truth in e-commerce is that whenever you can cut the funnel, cut the funnel. Like whenever you can remove a step, remove it. And so we did that and we kind of go from like, you know, you have discovery, show the right things and you click in on the product and you convert. And that's like a shorter journey. But for the role that we play in the minds of consumers and the role that we want to be playing in the world of e-commerce, the extra step, which is a long step, by the way, of getting to know the merchant and really like getting to understand not just the product that hooked you, but their entire collection of products, their merchandising, their story was the step that made shop be special. And that was the thing that like we could never optimize away, even if it shortened the funnel.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lean startup, ship fast and fix things. And it was just not the right thing. We alienated users. We didn't understand what the core proposition of our product was. And you had to dial it in and come back to the point that shop is a mall, not a marketplace. And the curation of the feed, though it should be algorithmic, should be merchant first. And we shifted from having these product tiles to these beautiful curated merchant cards that show brands, not products, and invited you into their stores rather than trying to get you to a quick conversion on a product that was relevant to you.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The transition to the current form factor of shop, we had many, many misses. We really tried to find the balance between being a marketplace and having a discovery engine without losing our core of being a customer utility and a shopping companion. I tend to think that everything in the world, companies, products, people are kind of like pendulums. You swing to hard in one way and you kind of miss the green zone and you go way off to the edge and you have to swing it all the way back. And hopefully it starts to like sway closer to the green zone, but it's still always swaying. And it was like that, you know, like the first attempt at marketplace, we downgraded the tracking experience, the order management experience way too much. We put a bunch of products, but we didn't have the recommendation system to back it up on the first page. So it became like this hodgepodge experience of like a yard sale. No one cared about. And it was sort of that thing of like.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sign absolutely often goes counter utility. Sometimes I think deliberate friction can be a good thing. It slows things down. It allows you to actually experience what's going on, understand that this is like a high intent action, or this is part of the experience that you're meant to pay extra attention to. And I think that's good. But sometimes design just gets in the way that we try too hard. You're putting too much weight on the user to overcome the interface and completely learn a new pattern.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the emotional experience that you take away from using that product and how it makes you feel like you're not just using a utility, you're using something that gets you, that like adapts to you and your behaviors. That's personalized. And it's all of those things”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know there's a great Paul Rand quote, which is don't try to be different, just try to be good. I think it's Paul Rand. And I do think there's a lot to that, that like even inside of the existing form factors and what companies understand to be good interface today, we're basically like batting an average six out of ten. There's so much more to do without having to reinvent fundamentally how a nav structure works or so forth. And then I think there's like really exciting to look at concept car concepts like ammo and other things where like you're really turning things upside down. And I'm open to that and I'm into that, but I don't think it's the goal. Like that, that is not the goal of like we're on a design forward company. The goal of a design forward company is to think of each of the things that you want to achieve as an app, as an experience, and dial it up to a 10. Everything, how fast it is, how easy it is, how emotive it is.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that much. I have always been of the belief that good design means all of the things. Like it's not just like, oh, it's a great information architecture or UX. Like it's that and it's phenomenal finish. And it's that and it's really, really, really like low latency. Products that just are snappy to move that have motion that makes it feel more like a journey than kind of a reload. You don't feel like you belong to any certain screen that you land on. You're like just always in motion. down to the like the small, delightful moments that you don't even count on the feedback on touch or how a button animates after you click it. And I think having that sort of like, hey, it's everything. Like there are no speed limits. We can just go further has always been kind of part of my design philosophy. And now technology allows you to push it further.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, you do, right? And you just have to find a way to be comfortable with that. And you can nudge it in the right direction by having good design systems and guidelines and so forth. But you have to give up control or else you're withholding creativity.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my God. Well, over the shop years, I think we had many points of like kind of like finding alignment of what felt like the most important and exciting future for us. I've learned a lot from Toby and Toby's point of view and outlook is very much to build platforms and to build into the ecosystem. And I think I came from a place where I wanted to have much more managed and controlled experiences. So just the amount that we open up to merchants and to developers of taking shop and building other things on top of it or turning it into their own were areas where I felt way more uncomfortable.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really want to see happen. And we are going to all be heading in this direction. And then we have these like rituals and processes where we check in on all of the teams and all of our progress to make sure that that's actually what's happening. That's actually what's being kind of carried out throughout the company.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not at all. It's really this notion that we actually believe, or I believe I should say, that we can go much faster as a company if we all go in the same direction. And that's what you get from being top down. It's like when your 10,000 people, if you're a bottoms-up company, which by the way is the popular way to run startups for most companies, every company comes into work and they kind of figure out what would be the best thing for us to do today. And they start going that direction. But if you have hundreds of team doing that, it's going to go like this. It's going to be a star that's pulling in every direction. And what ultimately will end up happening is that you have this strange bifurcation of experiences where one company will have three different chat services. And it's hard for them to really kind of like take big steps forward in a unified aligned way. What we have instead is that we kind of have Toby, our founder and CEO, who can come in and say, for this year, these are the themes that are most important to us. And within those themes, these are projects.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's also a much bigger push towards sort of like company-wide missions and company-wide mandates that will be pulling these different areas together in different ways at different times and having them form sort of virtual teams to go after certain objectives that are important to us at any given moment.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at the highest level, we have areas you would call them. And the areas are kind of like the businesses of Shopify. So think of areas being like financial services holds all of our banking, our lending products. You have POS, which is how we sell in person. You have Commerce Loop, which is like checkout and online store. You have shipping and taxes, which is how you fulfill and pay taxes with all taxes for the products that you sell. As you have these areas, and they're really like large scaled up companies in their own right. And each of these areas have leadership teams that kind of consider what's the future of my area, where are we going, and of course inside of these areas, there are multiple teams that then kind of like oversee kind of the different problems that come up in those areas. And so there is that sort of like organizational structure. But Shopify is an unapologetically top-down company. And so while these areas sort of have their own mandates and they have autonomy to go after their own objectives,”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is one of the things that makes Shop a little bit unique in that we're not quite a marketplace. A marketplace you go and you have merchants everywhere and they're all competing for your attention. We think of ourselves much more like a mall. You know, when you go into a mall, there's a certain kind of managed experience, the mall smells a certain way, the temperature is dialed in, it's like they're catered a little bit of like what you see. But when you go into a store inside of a mall, the merchant takes over. They have their own merchandising, they have their own staff, they speak their own language, it looks just the way they want it to look. And that's the difference, right? Like shop is a mall where like you can go into each of these stores and it becomes the merchant's experience.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for us it's sort of like understanding what the job that we're employed to do depending on the surface and having a strong kind of point of view on that.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's important for companies to have principles that they adhere to when it comes to those types of considerations. And I think it's important to realize that you'll need a little bit of both. So, for example, if you browse Gymshark and you browse a Gymshark store inside of Shop, we're pretty hardcore about not promoting other competing any other brands on that surface. We think of their store inside of Shop App as sort of like they had their own app in the app store. It just kind of packed with like hundreds of millions of buyers. And so there are surfaces that we think of as like merchant-owned surfaces inside of the shop app. But if you're browsing the feed and you're kind of like just going through like this feed of like merchandise and product recommendations, then you really shopping a shop surface and the job of shop there is really to just adhere to your interest and figure out what do you need right now and what based on what we know about you, what's the best thing that we can recommend to you.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one such area for shop might have been in developing the shop app for a long time. We were very, very focused on GMV being the primary metric that's total amount of sales, being the primary metric that we were driving the experience to. And of course it's an important metric. We want to create a service that is ultimately like a net gain for our merchants. But I think it made us miss steps around the juicer journey and the engagement of Shopba, where in fact Shopapp is as much a shopping companion as it is a discovery service and a marketplace. And it kind of made us move so much towards the discovery side that we perhaps underinvested in the customer utility and the stickiness of the product itself.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we're putting out is an e commerce primitive that will literally change how thousands of companies run their day-to-day operations. And the cost of being wrong is really, really high then. You kind of need to be able to say we've landed this in a way that we think we can stick to and stay with for the next decade.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's interesting about Shopify is that once you get to a certain scale, the company stops operating in one way. Like startups need to operate in one way because it's sort of this like you have tens of people working on the product. You're going to align to an operating structure and rhythm that makes sense for those like tens of people. Shopify is 10,000 people. And so we are actually not a company. We're many different companies that are kind of combined into one that are driving towards different objectives that have different maturity levels and need different things. And so at any given time inside of Shopify, you'll find teams that are working in a kind of lean startup, ship daily, just iterate, iterate, iterate until you find the right things, maybe overmarket a few things that don't quite exist and like land the ship, build a flight while it's in flight, sort of. And on the other side, we have other products and teams where we will be working on something for well over a year before we put it into the hands of our users because we know that”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe that there's no right way. Like, I think companies or people and podcasters really are trying to find, what's the right way? What's the truth? And obviously, like if you want to overmarket something on social media before it exists, fake it till you make it, land it, have a few users, and then try to keep up with their user needs. That's certainly a way to go about it. You can certainly do this. And you will probably, some of you will probably figure out that path that makes you successful. I think it comes down to just like, what's the type of company that you want to build? What's the DNA of your business? And what do you want to be known for, recognized for? And I think personally, I just have come to a place where I gravitate towards software that's like highly opinionated, where the builders have high conviction and want to create end-to-end journeys that are just cared for and like really dialed in.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because everyone are doing the bare minimum that it takes to get the learning. And I think the amount of quality software that exists in the world today is kind of strange and kind of depressing in a way. In that world where startups are trying so hard to narrow in on this like really tiny slice of what's going to set them apart. Building a product where the journey is really considered or you have a beautiful end-to-end flow where every interaction is dialed in is actually like a true competitive advantage.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm super torn, to be honest. Obviously, it's great to ship early and ship fast, but I also do find that companies are overemveing products today and being lean to the point where you're no longer learning anything that's real. And I find this if you think about like products that inspire you, it's actually really hard to come up with good.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think being extremely naive and being extremely ambitious are like two of the most essential ingredients in building an exciting startup. And I think having no experience to the certain category that you're approaching can help create like a certain naivety. I will say that's different from having no operating experience or no clue of how you do anything at all whatsoever. And I think we managed to have kind of all of those different things going for us. Like we didn't have category exposure. We also didn't really have any idea of like how to build or run a company. But you kind of figure it out step by step.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It reaches zero. The website's refreshes and boom, like you can now sign up for our service. And then right there on stage, I kind of like go through the sign up flow, go through the onboarding flow, launch TikTail store number one to the world. And that was the start of this incredible startup adventure.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the opposite of what we learn in lean startup and whatever. We were four guys that worked on this product nonstop day and night from early morning to late into the night for a year and a half. But just like a month or a month and a half before we were supposed to launch, we were able to book the largest e-commerce conference in the Nordics, the Nordic e-commerce conference. And we were like, let's launch on the conference. In fact, we know exactly when I'm going to be on stage. Let's turn our website into a timer that ticks down second for second such that it reaches Sierra right when I go on stage and let that just refresh the website and launch the product to the world. And so I was there talking about TikTail. And for those of you who don't remember, which I assume is most, the goal of TikTok was to build the easiest, most fun to use e-commerce platform in the world. Kind of Tumblr for e-commerce. And so I go on to stage and the seconds are ticking down.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you gave me the hint, I was trying to Google this name. I was like, who is this? And then like, Last night you looked at me”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if it did taught me anything, it was just like, just go. Just go with it. Something great will come out. And it's like, I don't know, trust your instincts and take risk. That was always kind of the engine.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't need an event photographer. We're going to document this whole thing ourselves. But the people paying us insisted that we had a professional photographer. So we made up this name, which was my second name, Oliver and Kai's second name, David. And we're like, well, we have this incredible photographer that's coming in Oliver David's going to shoot the whole event. And we had all of these, we had to meet all of the artists in the green room and we had to like get perfect shots of them when they were playing. And then we had to like go around with like this big set of Japanese journalists and show them around and take photos for them. And our photos were published in like these Japanese lifestyle magazines under the name Oliver Davids. So that was my very short stint as a professional photographer.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oliver Davids belongs to the murky parts of my career. I was running an agency together with Kydro Binh. I then started TikTail together with. And we did a bunch of stupid things. But one thing we did was that we landed this job to basically like produce a huge event in Stockholm with a bunch of artists like Swedish House Muffia, a bunch of artists playing. And we were supposed to find like an event photographer to document this whole experience. And we were like 18 and super young and cocky and kind of thought we knew how to do everything. So we were like.”
2025-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source