YouSaid · the spoken record

Glen Coates

lines on the record: 45
first: 2024-01-31
most recent: 2024-01-31
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

“Right, but even within commerce there's so many different, like the way people search for clothes and the way they search for industrial parts are like not the same thing at all, right? So it's even within that world, there's so much nuance of the way that people express what they're looking for.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and then that's when you get into the world of like things that are like matters of fact and things that are matters of opinion, right? Like, is this Shu and Nike is not a matter of opinion, right? Whereas, is this book great for a six-year-old girl? That's a matter of opinion. And how do you construct search systems that can actually sit correctly at the midpoint of the world of facts and the world of opinions, right?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as an experiment, I would go to Google and I would like say classic children's book for six-year-old girl. And like the search results you get back on Google shopping would just be like terrible, like absolute disaster, right? And then you would go to Amazon type, same thing and you would get like nonsense back, right? You went to ChatGPT and you said, give me 10 great children's books for a six-year-old girl. What would come back would actually be amazing? Like it would be like really like the best 10 recommendations, right? And so I was like, huh, there's something here, right? Now, like ChatGPT, terrible if you ask it for, hey, I want a pair of Nike AF1s in size 10.5 in a store in New York City. But really, really, really good at the general knowledge question of like great children's books, you know?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's funny when, like, I mean, some searches are so specific, but some are almost like shared knowledge of humanity. One thing I found myself doing a lot like a year ago when I was looking at, okay, how can we improve search at Shopify, both on the storefronts, but also on the Shop app? And just kind of playing with this idea. One of the tests that I found myself running over and over again. So at the time, I actually had this happen. I had a friend's daughter was her birthday. And I was like, she was, I think she was six at the time. And I was like, I want to buy a great classic book for a six-year-old girl.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“order to get the compression of the LLM took 10 search results and summarized them for me, but maybe they hallucinated the summarization. It's a really interesting place. What do people actually want?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The triangle of perplexity, Google, ChatGPT, of like, it's basically LLM native search and chat GPT really good at the LLM interface thing, not amazing at search yet. Google Amazing at Search not really figured out the LLM thing yet, perplexity is kind of squarely in the middle and saying like we think LLM native search is a really interesting hill in the middle of this thing. I'm sort of watching this from the sidelines and kind of interested to see where it plays out. I think embedded in that strategic tussle is the question of What do people actually want from search? Do they want hard facts? Do they want opinions? How much lossiness are they willing to tolerate”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Button that just appeared today, right? So, yeah, I think it's an interesting approach. We'll wait and see what actually happens. I also know people in the industry who are like, yeah, yeah, it's a cool idea. It's going to be insanely hard to pull off. But who knows? Again, this thing changes every week. The other thing I think is kind of interesting, which is actually like Shopify relevant, is I guess I think I'm curious what you guys think about this, but the sort of...”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's even philosophically and from first principles, it sort of rings true to me, right? Because, you know, a lot of these experiences are, especially with, like, when I actually think about the sidekick UI, the sidekick actually runs sidecar in the admin next to you, right? Even the name sidekick is like, hey, I'm here with you. You know, we're both here together and we're both using this Shopify thing to try and build your business, right? And so the idea that sidekick would literally be interacting with the pixels in the same way that you are, it's sort of almost like smells right in a weird way. And I mean, obviously the nice thing about it is as long as the model can actually learn the UI, then every time you ship updates to the UI, if the model's smart enough, like it's just like, oh, yeah, my smart buddy keeps, also can use this new.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought the really interesting part of the rabbit presentation was that they decided to treat the actual GUI as the interface and to try and have a model that became very good at interacting with essentially web apps. If it actually works, the strategic brilliance of that is they instantly have the world's largest app store because the world's largest app store is just the web, right? Now, who knows if it'll actually work, but it's an incredibly interesting strategy.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is literally every single person has probably said this, but I think the rabbit thing at CES was pretty interesting. I mean, I'm literally wearing the shirt right now. Like I'm a teenage engineering nerd. So I was hyped on the hardware. But I think one of the interesting problems with LLM-based applications and agents in particular is what's the actual interface they're interacting with, right? Like in the case of sidekick, right? There's a couple different places. Like what is sidekick using, right? Is sidekick actually using the admin API under the hood or is sidekick actually reaching into the pixels of the web app and clicking around in the web app and doing stuff, right? Like that's a pretty important question. Like what is the interface that the agent is actually learning and interacting with?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think that's been the challenge for us. Like, it's even in the name, right? Like Sidekick is supposed to feel like your companion on the journey, like your coach, your assistant, you're the person who's maybe seen this movie before a little bit, getting it from 75% to 95% is the process we're working through. And it's so exciting because we're doing stuff on our side where we improve the training sets. We're building more and more conversations with feedback from users that help us dial it in more. But then every five seconds you look around and like there's a new model that you can take all your training set and all your evals and then it might be another step function. So it's kind of innovation really rapidly happening both inside and outside our R&D team. And you really know, you never know what we.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the irony is like, you know, people talk about they're like, oh yeah, this LLM's hallucinating right now. And you're like, yeah, yeah, you know that's its job, right? You know that every time it emits a token, it's hallucinating, right? It's just that you like some of the hallucinations more than the others, right?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I mean, I think the exciting and frustrating thing about LLMs right now is that you can get an LLM agent thing, like a sidekick-esque thing. You can get it to like 75% in like 10 minutes. And then it's like this brutal hill climb to get it to like 95% like over time, right? It's just like it's like catnip for like hackers because they're like, oh my God, I just in 10 minutes I got to a thing that's like pretty good And then you're like, yeah, yeah, wait, buddy, wait, wait for the next bit. The next bit's real interesting.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's an amazing thing for the buyer experience. I mean, like, to your point, like the buyer experience is really cool when you search for things to wear to a wedding and it does the right thing. But actually think about it from a motion experience point of view. If you're like, hey, I've been running a store for five years and I've got like 10,000 products in there and now you want me to go back and backfill like 10,000 products worth of five attributes for product like Jesus Christ being able to actually apply the models to do something that turns out to be like a 90% correct guess is an amazing way to help bootstrap people into like the current moment, you know?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of what we have to do is. Figure out what the right embeddings are to use, how to fine tune the models. Like, obviously, there's categories in Shopify that are more like apparel fashion, gift, homewares. So spending the time to assemble the data sets and do the fine-tunings and pick the right embedding models that are best for this category. It's also been really interesting with especially some of the multimodal models that have emerged in the last, I don't know, two, three months, experimenting with how much weight to give the text descriptions versus the images versus the taxonomy attributes and figuring out what mix of those things generates the best results. I mean, we're still working on it, honestly, but it's a pretty cool and exciting space.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one of those things where it's like, how can this search experience on someone's tiny little storefront actually be as smart as what you would get on Google?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not LBD. I searched for a sweater, and because that store only lists their thing as sweatshirt, I got like zero search results. I was like, this cannot still be true in 2023. Like, this is insane that this is happening. So that's a really easy example, but if you go to a store now and they haven't put little black dress in any of their keywords, if you search for LBD, it'll actually do the right thing. You can even do things like I saw a crazy example from the team yesterday. They were like Christmas themed shoes. And it would actually correctly go and find all the red and green shoes in the store. So that's kind of an edge case example, but it's like, you know, searching for things like something to wear to a wedding, something to wear to the beach will actually do the right thing. Whereas before would never do the right thing unless those keywords happen to be in the product descriptions, which will never happen. So that's, I think, again.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I didn't know what LBD meant until recently. But very soon, Shopify stores will actually understand the meanings of things as you. So today's Shopify search is very, very literal keyword searchy. There's a video of me going around internally being like infuriated when I go to, there's a store that I actually buy things from. And I went on there and searched for”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's really cool. We are also releasing the first version of our image editing with AI thing. So you can take product images, you can replace backgrounds. Basically, you can take Product imagery and get to a very, very, very professional standard on it without having to go through like very expensive photo shoots. Basically, a lot of what we do is like, how do you help someone who's actually just my mom at home trying to start a business? How do you help that person look like as professional as the world's largest companies? And then, yeah, what else am I really excited about in the edition? I think you just mentioned something, Sarah. Now I'm having a mental blank.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Uploaded seems like it's made out of cotton based on the description you had. And the great thing about that is when that motion takes those products out to their own storefront, all of that data is going to make the search experience better. But more importantly, when they take those products out to like Google and Facebook and Amazon and all those places, having that structured metadata around their products makes them way, way, way more discoverable, which is going to lead to them ranking higher in search results and basically making more money. So this is one of those weird things where like getting the data model right and having the data quality be very high actually causes these very like important effects up funnel for the business.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is because it forces you to go from unpaginated to paginated APIs when you start making the variant counts very large. And it's just a breaking change for like the entire app ecosystem and it's just breaking changes are hard, right? So I'm really excited about just the fact that we're unlocking that data model. We've actually also embedded in not just like, hey, you can have more variance and more options, but there's also now a standard product taxonomy that comes with standard categories and standard attributes so that like when a merchant creates a t-shirt, we're going to auto recognize, okay, this is in the standard category t-shirts. And that category comes with all of these standard attributes. And we're going to use AI to, one, detect what category it should be in two, detect what the values should be. So we're going to auto, we're going to try and guess, okay, seems like the colors here are green and yellow based on the images.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. The data model that is the most, most, most central to Shopify is the products data model, right? Like how do you represent the products that you're selling? And Shopify has for, you know, basically like 10, 15 years, had the products data model hasn't changed that much. It's like fairly simplistic. It's actually an amazing testament to how big of a company and how big of a, you know, the fact that you can get to like 10% of all US e-commerce on like a fairly simplistic data model is actually kind of amazing. But, you know, like Shopify has been a little bit on the weak side for dealing with like very large and complex products. So products that have a lot of options, a lot of colors, a lot of sizes. When it gets complex, we don't do as well. And so we're updating our data model with support for just a much larger number of variants. And again, this is the nerdy part. This is one of these crazy things about tech. The reason this is so hard.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The foundation's work is the thing that I'm most excited about, but I'm a commerce nerd. So, this is going to seem like very boring to the audience, but like just humor me for a sec.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Full auto mode, like maybe we get there eventually. We're not there yet, but like you can sort of see that the hill climbing will eventually take us somewhere close to that, right?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. Yeah. I think Toby and Kaz and myself were all like fairly risk hungry people. I mean, I think that's just a little bit of founder culture is like you want to take risks. Like you don't really want to be safe. You get bored. You get annoyed when things get too safe. But there's always this balance of like, we like taking risks that are risks to us. We don't like taking risks that could break someone's business. And so if there's a way to do a thing that's like very risky for us, but is the risk is mitigated for the actual merchant, like we're very for that. And I think that's where that kind of human in the loop, human must click save thing is part of that, right? And who knows? Like maybe a year from now, maybe two years from now, like we get to, you know, hey, you seem to be accepting our suggestions without edits 99% of the time. Do you want to just go into like?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suggestions were outright rejected, and that's an amazing loop to be able to improve things through. So we're always getting better, but that sort of human in the loop, human must click save thing is a big part of strategy”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the principles that we currently hold, this might change in the future if confidence intervals go high enough, but one of the principles that we have for all of the Shopify magic features today is that they're allowed to propose changes but not commit changes, right? So they can like generate text, but they're not going to save it without you actually reading it and saving it. We might suggest a reply for the user that's someone writes in like, hey, what's your shipping policy? We can suggest the reply based on us knowing what's in store and like running that through an LLM, but you have to hit enter, right? And so one of the things that like human is in the loop, essentially, right now is one of the ways that we're kind of mitigating risk here. And obviously human in the loop is great because it gives you the feedback cycle. You actually get a three-part signal. You get which suggestions are accepted clean, which suggestions were accepted, but then with minor edits and then which”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How many people get stumped just writing the descriptions of their products because they're not good copywriters? And they're like, oh, this is embarrassing. I can't write a good description for my candle. I'm not going to launch my store. And there's so many instances like this where it's like, okay, well, can you give someone that extra bit of skill that gets them over the hump where they're ready to hit the big green launch button, you know?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the best switches, right? And AI brings us into the world of like, okay, well, what if we can give you the driver in the car who knows how all these switches work and can help you along without having to learn all the switches? It's probably one of the most powerful opportunities for more people who would otherwise be daunted by having to learn the switches, even though we try to make the switches as good as possible. There's all these people who can't quite figure out the switches, but they could talk to they could talk to the co-pilot and they could explain what switches they want hit, but they just can't do it themselves. And so I think we have an amazing opportunity to increase the amount of entrepreneurs in the world who actually get a shot, right? And so that's the kind of headline. And then from there, you go into, okay, well, which models do we apply to which problems? You know, you look at individual problems like.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI is this really interesting moment where it's like, okay, well, Shopify built its position in the market largely by being the easiest to use thing as you build a business and scale, but in imperative mode, right? It's the, I'm going to give you all these switches. And we're going to give you the best switches. And we're going to show you the switches at the right moment in time.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And like the historical strategy for that Shopify was build really easy to use software. Use software that is super simple when you start and it kind of reveals complexity as you need it, like as you business grows and you have harder problems, like the tools sort of like appear at the right time. I mean, the world is littered with the corpses of, you know, the companies that tried to serve SMB and enterprise at the same time. And this is kind of the hard problem of Shopify. How do you be simple but also powerful and scale up?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, yes, this is obviously the space where everything's moving the fastest, right? Like the world of invoicing is not moving at the pace of the world of AI. Yeah, it's been an extremely interesting last 12 months of like looking at where can we apply different models to parts of Shopify. I think the high-level idea is, you know, Shopify's real focus and real mission is enabling entrepreneurs, right? The meta strategy of everything we do is how do you simplify the process of starting and running a business so that more people who would otherwise not get over the hump get over the hump and have an opportunity to try building whatever that business is?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Problem is, it's not even just your RD teams that pay the cost. The saddest thing is that usually it's a combination of your R&D teams and your customers paying the cost because the reality is that not everyone will do the thing of building the five versions. They'll probably build like the top two or three most important ones. And then all the customers who depend on numbers four and five will go to use the thing and they'll be like, oh, this is super weird. This thing doesn't work. Why doesn't Why is this thing so different to the other thing? I thought they were the same thing. And then they look under the covers and they're like, oh, I know why it's different because actually this part of the stack is all fucked up.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For when you are accidentally creating duplicates at the same layer of the stack. So you just never get into the problem in the first place. And then the second part is being willing to actually notice when you have created the duplication and eat the vegetables of saying like, oh shit, whoops, we did it. Okay, now it's time to eat the vegetables and collapse these things together because if we don't every team that exists above us in the stack is going to pay this duplication cost like in perpetuity.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then that team is like, oh shit, I have to build it into the checkout, but I also have to build it into that order editing thing. Oh my God. And I also have to build it into that invoicing thing. And now it's like, to your point, it's like, okay, now the thing that should have taken a month to build is now taking six months to build because the layer of the stack that's underneath me has five things where there should just be one, right? And so sometimes it's hard to know what to do, right? Because sometimes the right answer is let's collapse those five things in the stack into a single thing, which is it sounds like what Google tried to do. But then you're like, oh my God, it's like trying to take the foundations of a house and like rearrange them while the house is still on top. And like that's, oh, God, this is going to be really hard because I can't just make everyone move out of the house, right? The real answer to how do you solve this problem is one is developing extremely good intuition.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A discount to an order after it's already been placed because someone calls up and says, Hey, I forgot to put the discount code on. Can you please enter it, right? And so someone starts a project over here, which is, oh, we're just going to support editing discounts onto orders. And you don't realize that what you're actually doing is creating a second version of the negotiation engine, right? It's just that you started with a very, very small part of it. And then that thing kind of grows for a few years. And you're like, oh, it's not just editing discounts in, it's also editing the shipping costs. It's also editing another product onto the order that they forgot to add. And before you realize it, you're like, oh my God, we're reinventing the checkout over here, right? And by the way, in the meantime, all the teams that work at Shopify are finding themselves having to build to support both of these things, right? So someone builds a new feature and they're like, I'm going to add, I don't know, international pricing.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the funny thing about this is sometimes you actually don't notice that two things are in fact at the same layer of the stack until much later on, right? So as an example, inside of Shopify there is the checkout, which takes someone's shopping cart and says, okay, let's take the business rules of the store and convert that to an agreement for a sale with taxes and duties and shipping and all that stuff. So that's one engine. And then at different points in Shopify's history, other things that have been built that are sort of like adjacent to that, but not quite the same thing, right? So like a thing for creating like an invoice or a thing for like even editing an order after it's been placed. And a lot of these things kind of get built because you start with a small problem example. I just need to be able to add.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a really good question. The answer is it depends like most problems. Usually when you encounter these problems, you sort of have to look at the stack. You usually don't want duplicates at the same layer of the stack, right?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this domain, at least for Toby, in this domain of the internet and commerce, I'm right more often than I'm not. Like I have a higher batting average than usual. Therefore, if I can help accelerate this company through being decisive, that's going to be good. And so He sort of sets the example, and a lot of us see that and we're like, hey, we remember being founders. We remember what it's like to have all bucks stop with you. And if there's a way that we can apply that level of decisiveness here and accelerate teams through like the otherwise design by committee bullshit that kills a lot of companies, then like that's a net positive, right?”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has extremely strong opinions and has, I think, learned for the better to no longer be shy about like saying I want to aim in this direction, right? I think there was like a big culture of bottoms up decision making, power to the edges, like whatever you want to call that school of management philosophy, which is like, you know, delegate and empower. I think a lot of former founders are actually coming back to the place where they say, hey, what makes, what am I uniquely good at? I'm uniquely good at like having a point of view, being willing to smash my head against a wall and do whatever it takes to manifest that point of view in the world through building things, building teams, you know, saying the hard thing at the right moment. And I think Toby has kind of reembraced that, right? In the past few years of saying like, hey, if I'm good at one thing, it's being extremely opinionated and it seems that.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. It's really notable. So, like, when I look at the, so the sort of exec team of Shopify contains a number of founders, some of whom are required in and some of whom just were founders. And when I look at my management team, the people who report to me, who each of these sort of nine or ten people run R&D orgs that are like a couple hundred people each and almost like a very high percentage of those people are also founders, right? And so you ask, okay, well, why are all these people ending up essentially running the main parts of the product of Shopify and Shopify's a product first company? So that's sort of the same thing as saying running Shopify. I think a lot of this comes from Toby himself who”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To fix those issues. But then at the end of that year, Toby took a step back and said, okay, well, why did that happen? Like, how did we get to the point where those problems even happened in the first place? And then that led to some of the reorganization of the company around less, like there used to be 12 to 15 of these kind of fairly small fractured business units. And now there is actually only like three or four which is actually truer to what the product is. But of course each of those units is bigger than the ones that were before, so it actually requires you to lead in a slightly different way once you start grouping that many much of the product and the people together.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A code red is when Toby sends an email to the entire company saying this thing is the number one priority and he means it from an actual operational perspective what that really means is if the team that's working on this code red asks you to help please drop what you're doing and help this is the number one priority so that's how they work but usually a code read is a symptom of some other much more systemic problem that's gotten you to that point, at least in my case, check out code red in 2020 was, hey, the checkout is failing in, I don't know, three, four, five different ways and the checkout is a pretty important part of Shopify, obviously. So let's go fix that. So we me and somewhere between, I think at its peak, it was probably two, 300 people working on various parts of the problem. So we all like scrambled for a year and did what it.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Forces with Shopify, and then I've been at Shopify for almost five, it'll be five years in May. I started out very much focused on B2B and wholesale, which was obviously the point of the acquisition. I spent about a year doing that. I then moved on to focus. I ran a code red on checkout in 2020, which is the first year of the pandemic. And then since the end of that, I've been leading the kind of core product group at Shopify, which is, you could think of it as all of the built-ins of Shopify, the online store, the checkout, the back office, the developer platform, the app store. And yeah, that's what I do at Shopify.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a compsy grad. I spent the early part of my career in video games and then I had a weird left step in my career where I moved to San Diego in 2008 to run the US operations of an eco-friendly shopping bag company. You know, like you take your own bags to the store, that whole thing. Anyway, this company did a whole bunch of wholesale. They sold a lot of bags through stores. And through that, I ended up getting to the idea for handshake. And Handshake was initially a very sales rep focused B2B e-commerce product, but then became both for sales reps and for customers to buy online. So Handshake eventually became basically a B2B only version of Shopify, like a wholesale only version of Shopify. So it's not hard to join the dots from there to after building handshake for a better part of nine years here in New York. The opportunity came up to join.”
2024-01-31 · No Priors · The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT