YouSaid · the spoken record

Kaz Nejatian

lines on the record: 73
first: 2024-08-14
most recent: 2024-08-14
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

“Oh, yeah, yes 100%. Not just Cam before it's worth. Like the way Canber builds is to be admired. The product is just beautiful. My third one would be Figma. Not that many company can survive what happened to Figma. Companies that usually mergers that fall apart are acquisitions that fall apart end up with in a really bad place because companies just typically have checked out by time the acquisition happens. Figma is thriving. And I think they're thriving because when the acquisition happened, they decided that they were going to pretend as though it had not happened. They kept the pace of innovation and they kept shipping product, which I think is actually a very risky thing to do as a company because usually the acquisition happens. You have to undo all of it, but it worked out well for them.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you two. Everyone will say Microsoft and OpenAI because that's just like what they have done to search is just admirable. But I'll give you a different one outside software. I think what ExxonMobil has done is just to be admired from the outside. There's an old traditional company that business isn't that complicated theoretically. I think their profits are up about one hundred sixty percent unheard of in this world, right? Like it's a real thing. They've essentially done it by like getting up buying production. They're getting a lot more adder assets than people think they would. And they place themselves in a position to benefit from surge and travel post-COVID that I think everyone kind of underappreciated. Like it's actually real. So if you think about the US produced more crude oil in 2023 than it had ever before.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not really, to be honest. I find, I follow a bunch of think tanks from across the political spectrum. And I'm a capitalist at heart and love the free market and liberty for all. I find that you are better off following political news as though it is not a horse race. So check in once a week rather than once a day. Because if you check once a day, it just becomes kind of like useless”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Optimize for bats, optimize your first few years in your career for shipping as many things as possible rather than career progression.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a hacker. I'm a hackers hacker. Like I grew up hacking things. And my five year old son the other day found a way to get his password for his iPad for his timeless iPad. At first, I'm like, I'm so proud of him for hacking this system, but like about 30 seconds, oh no, my son has unlimited access to an iPad. So that has been hard.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's actually interesting. I have found that hiring people from Meta generally has worked out very well for most people because just as a training program is just exceptionally good. Worst, I don't know if there is one generic horse, but industry switching is very difficult. Hiring marketers who are not from software into software generally doesn't work out. Hiring firing people who are not in software into software generally doesn't work out. So industry switching is very difficult.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really good question. It's a wonderful question. That when you are married, there are three parties you need to care about, not two. It's you, your wife, and a marriage. Like there's three entities that you need to care about. And all of them need to be independently cared about. You take care of yourself. You take care of your wife, and you take care of your marriage. And those are three different things. And if you think about that, what ends up happening is that every once in a while you realize that you're taking care of yourself and your wife, but not the marriage. And that's incredibly important. Like my wife and I, like, look, we have four kids. We have four young kids. We have date nights almost every week because we value taking care to marriage.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, but it takes time to work out. Doesn't mean working out is bad for you, like it takes time to work. I mean, work is bad for you. There's a real thing here is, first of all, there's two things. One, there are lots of things people believe that turn out to be not true. In fact, Most human progress has happened because the thing that lots of people believe is true turns out to be not true. So that lots of people believe it is not an appeal to majority opinion is not a good sign that anything is true or not. Second, I think this is a place where popular culture has misled us greatly. Where, look, I admit it is just, it is funny to talk about, you know, oh, my wife has gone. I can finally have fun. It's just funny. But I'm telling you, the most fun I have in my days.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got married relatively late. I got married when I was, I got engaged when I was 29, married when I was, I think, 30. So layered in, I think, most people in the US would. I'm not American, but most people in North America would have gotten married earlier. So I'm not saying, look, bad marriages are incredibly bad, but are things you can do early in life and there are things you can do to make to prepare yourself for a good marriage. And those things are worth doing regardless of getting married or not. And that once you do those things, like a good marriage is incredibly useful on every metric we can measure. Like there are very few”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a The data behind this is better. I mean, I wrote a book about this, but you don't have to read my book. You can academic research. The data behind this is undeniable for men specifically. Graduated from high school getting some job experience and getting married in that order is more indicative of success, including health, wealth and happiness than we can't do something that is more indicative of future happiness. The odds bankruptcies go down, the odds of down, cancer. Married men is significantly higher than a single man. Like there's a real thing about gangruption rates are lower for married man than a single man. There's a real thing here that is not true.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that's also a good measure. I think this. First of all, divorce rates are a little thick they are. What divorce rates count is a number. And it is just true that people who get divorced frequently get so there's distributions. Like most first-time marriages do not... Although a significant number of second time”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, generally speaking, it's really terrible to model your life after people who are worth over $100 billion because they're just like their circumstances, your circumstances. I'm not saying you shouldn't desire to be a”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly 100%. Yeah, it's dumb. Values need to be a reasonable person can take both. So it works for us and for me here. Information openly shared from many other sources, people publicly disagreeing or agreeing. It's allowing sunshine to fix best thing. And people being okay saying, hey, you want to build that. I'm not a, I'm not an athlete, but if you look great. You will see the players are literally all each other. They're always giving each other feedback. You should be there, like always happening. And that can just happen if they're all secretive about where they are. This is more than what you build. If every one of the companies knows more or less what is building, you will never have two. You will always say cool, let's you and I work together and build this difference with.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone, this is one of the benefits of values that you only have a value if the opposite of it can also be true. Like Apple is a company that's very on the opposite side of the spectrum from Shopify on information flow, and Apple is an exceptionally good company, right? Most people at Apple don't know what other people at Apple are working on.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To work out doesn't mean working out is bad for you. It takes time to work. I mean, work is bad for you. There's a real thing here is, first of all, there's two things. One, there are lots of things people believe that turn out to be not true. In fact, most human progress has happened because the thing that lots of people believe is true turns out to be not true. So that lots of people believe it is not an appeal to majority opinion is not a good sign that anything is true or not. Second, I think this is a place where popular culture has misled us greatly. It is funny to talk about, sure, sometimes information needs to be managed, but no, no, the default should be that all information should be shared publicly such that people in the company never think, oh, these people are just bullshitting me when things are going well. People need to see the ups and downs, need to see the decision making, need to build in the open so that they can benefit from information from”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got married relatively late. I got married when I was. I got engaged when I was 29, married when I was, I think, 30. So layered in, I think, most people in the US would. I'm not American, but most people in North America would have gotten married earlier. Look, bad marriages are incredibly bad, but are things you can do early in life and are things you can do to make to prepare yourself for a good marriage? And those things are worth doing regardless of getting married or not. Once you do those things a good marriage is incredibly useful on every metric we can measure.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a real thing. Second, the data behind this is undeniable for men, specifically for men, graduate from high school getting some job experience and getting married in that order as soon as possible of success, including health, wealth, and happiness than any other thing. But we can't find something that is more indicative of future happiness. The odds bankruptcies go down, the odds of health events go down, cancer survival rates for married men is significantly higher than single men. Like there's a real thing about like bankruptcy rates are lower for married men than single men. There's a real thing here that is not.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that's also a good measure. I think what matters is this first of all, divorce rates are lower than people think they are. What divorce rates count is the number of divorces. It is just true that people who get divorced frequently get divorced more than once. So there's a distribution. Like most first time marriages do not end in divorce, although a significant number of second-time marriages end up in divorce.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, generally speaking, it's really terrible to model your life after people who are worth over $100 billion because they're just such, they're rare, right? Their circumstances will almost never be your circumstances. I'm not saying you shouldn't desire to be a billionaire if you want to be.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly 100%. Yeah, it's dumb. Values need to be things that a reasonable person can take both the other side of. But the way it works for us and for me, that's why I work here. Information openly shared from many other sources. People publicly disagreeing or publicly agreeing. It's allowing sunshine to fix things is the best thing. And people being okay saying, hey, I was wrong. Hey, I was right. Hey, you want to build that collegiality? This is a real thing. I'm not a, I'm not an athlete, but if you look at great watch basketball like if you watch a basketball game, you'll see the players are literally always talking to each other. They're always giving each other feedback. You should be here. You weren't there. That's always happening. And that can just not happen if they're all secretive about where they intend to be on the court. This is a very similar thing to companies. And this is like more or less what everyone else is building. You will never have two versions of one thing. You will always say, cool, let's you and I work together and build.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So sometimes yes, but those times almost always involve a lawyer. Sure. Sometimes information needs to be managed. But no, no, the default should be that all information should be shared publicly such that people in the company never think, oh, these people are just bullshitting me when think things are going well. People need to see the ups and downs, need to see the decision making, need to build in the open such that they can benefit from information from everyone. This is one of the benefits of values is that you only have a value if the opposite of it can also be true. Apple is a company that's very on the opposite side of the spectrum from Shopify on information flow. And Apple is an exceptionally good company, right? Most people at Apple don't know what other people at Apple are working on.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest mistakes I have made in my career have all been of the same shape, unfortunately. I have limited the information flow and made it go through the org chart. All my biggest mistakes are of that shape. The information that someone needed to have didn't get to them because the org chart, like it went up the org chart rather than dynamically. At most companies, the way it works is I have an idea. I write a note. I tell my boss about it. My boss likes it or doesn't like it and tells his boss about it. And up the chain the information goes till someone says yes and it comes back down and I do it. That tree. That's a very common pattern. It's true to every company. It's true even at Shopify sometimes. That's incredibly terrible. Like one of the things I tell my team is to share information publicly and it's perfectly okay for your boss to find out about something at the same time as the whole company. But my biggest mistake have essentially been when an information”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, not that nervous about saying anything, I believe, because I'm perfectly happy saying Caz was wrong. I do a post very frequently internally to the whole company saying Caz's biggest mistakes over the last few months”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think people underappreciate how broad the product is, like the surface area of the product is very, very, very big and people underappreciate how massive it is. In that way, Shopify is much more similar to an operating system than an application. People underappreciate how Shopify is not really a point solution. And this is part of the reason why analysts have a hard time modeling it. It's hard to model that because you want to build a bottom-up model of something. It's really hard. The use cases of Shopify are incredibly diverse. This is perfectly good for us. We are toolmakers. We are not application builders.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very real thing because I think I am wrong so goddamn often, I don't actually attach that much value to my opinion. What ends up happening is I don't really keep track of whose opinion was right at the end of the day.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're very, very glad that Shopify type of software won over to Yahoo stores, type of soft software, right? Thanks to Shopify and companies like Shopify, commerce on the internet is slightly more weird than it would be if Yahoo Stores had one, which is like the Paul Graham product. That was more of like a conflict of visions than it was like a conflict of companies. You know what I mean?”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But hydro companies grow up in a very zero-sum world. They are incredibly jealous of their adjacencies. Most software executives will spend their time thinking which adjacencies can I go to? And that means that most software companies pick fights they don't need to pick. Like they're incredibly complementary Shopify Stripe, Shopify and a firm, Shopify and Meta, Shopify and Google, Shopify and Apple. These are incredibly powerful partnerships. We have very deep partnerships with many tech companies and it's not because we're like Switzerland. It's because we are very incredibly aware of what our job is and what other people's job is. Talking to banks we don't think is our job. We think that's Stripe's job.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exceptionally well, except we're incredibly opinionated about what good software looks like, and therefore can only partner best with people who also have similar opinions.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, sure, yes. If Stripe and Shopify ever get to a point where we don't think about the world the same way, then we'll have a conversation. But Shopify has over 700 payment providers integrated into it, right? So we have like lots of them. Stripe is just by far our biggest partner. We have more payment integration on Shopify than any other software platform in the world. Strike is just our biggest partner. This Stripe Shopify relationship is likely the most value creating relationship in the history of software. It would have been Intel Microsoft before Intel and Microsoft had divorces too hard a word, but had like the thing they did. Right now it's Stripe and Shopify. These companies were both started when they were both worth single digit millions of dollars they started working together and now they're worth more than that. That combined value is very, very high and it's because of each other, right? We like them, they like us. We're very happy to be their partners. It is not that we can't partner.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like many of them. But I'm telling you to them, it just looks different than an ERP would. It just looks like good software. And I think that's not that different. Like, look, enterprises use Windows small business merchants use Windows. Like how you build the operating system matters.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, two things first, luckily because of the way Shopify has worked is we have billion dollar public companies that start on Shopify on day one, right? Those are massive, massive companies that just start on Shopify. Fashion Nova is a multi-billion dollar retailer. Fix is a public. Like these are like very large companies that start on Shopify. So we've been able to model the business as they've grown up. So we needed Sock2 for Figs to go public. What most people end up doing is doing this the wrong way, right? They go to Sock2 saying, what can I build? And then they build the things SockTwo says you shall build, which is why all enterprise software ends up being shit, right? Whereas what we had to do is we had to do a first principle protector. We have this piece of software. We have merchants who need Sarbanes Oxy compliant because they're going public. How do we, from a first principle, make that work for them? And that means a different software experience. There are many, many, many, many public companies that use Shopify.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because the software is now very ready, the product is now very ready for them. Shopify is not an enterprise software company. We build software that enterprises use. And I think most enterprises that use Shopify appreciate this. We don't build bespoke software. There's no if enterprise line anywhere in Shopify's code base.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think we did it in a very different way than most people think. So I was here at Shopify. I was a person who used to tell enterprises away. Like one of the top 10 retailers in the world asked us to use Shopify a few years ago and I said, no, you may not. We don't sell PowerPoint wear at Shopify. Like we don't show up at PowerPoint presentations that say like, look at all the stuff we have and then none of it works. We have a product rule called no party tricks, i.e. we don't show you a thing and it's that can work only in very specific instances. If we show you a thing, it can just generally work. So we don't do the party trick thing of, look at me doing this one thing, but as soon as you try to do it again, it just fails. So what we take great pride in selling the type of software we do. Over the last couple years, it's not like we went up market at Shopify. We just kind of like stopped saying no to all the enterprises that wanted to use Shopify.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not hard to understand where our growth comes from. Our growth comes from people starting businesses and those businesses succeeding and making lots of money and we share that upside. That's basically where Shopify's growth comes from. It's not hard to say those words, but it's very hard to model those words. It's very hard for analysts to say, hey, this cohort of Shopify merchants will have next allbirds. In the same way, it's actually difficult for analysts to model VCs, because what Shopify is essentially, we invest in cohorts of startups, tens of thousands of merchants try to start a business on Shopify, and they grow up and some of them become very big, and many of them don't. Many of them die. Some of them become very good lifestyle businesses, which is what people want, or side hustles.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Shopify is insanely difficult to model for analysts. First of all, our business is not a common one, right? We don't want a CPG, we don't want a traditional SaaS business. Our business is hard to model. Our growth is hard to understand. It's very hard to understand where Shopify's growth comes from and how it shows up for analysts outside, whereas it's not that hard for me.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we burnt the bridges relatively well behind us because we knew it would be painful. I think if we knew how painful it would be, I don't know if we would have done it. But once we committed to it, we burnt the bridges pretty well behind us. Like we encouraged people to move, gave up our leases and a bunch of places, took the write-downs. Like a lot of companies that went remote during COVID kept their offices pristine, did not give up the leases, did the whole thing so they had the optionality to go back. We hired people in places that were nowhere near our offices on purpose. So we made it very difficult for ourselves to go back.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or RSUs, or like pick between them was just very, it actually ended up with Toby personally writing a crap ton of code to actually make this thing work because it was very painful. Now that we are through it during time was just very painful because people were reasonably worried that like what the hell is happening here. But now that we're through it, I don't think any company does this as well as we do. But it was very painful.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People just seem like Shopifai went from being incredibly in person. Shopify did not even have co located teams. All teams had to be in the same pod. We went from that to fully remote, like that. And none of the cultural things that had made Shopify worked translated. So that changed. It was very difficult. It was just incredibly painful. That was real. And then, I mean, there's been other ones that have been, we made a change where Shopify pays people differently than most companies. Like most companies you go to say, hey, here's your salary, here's your equity, here's your bonus, structure, whatever. At Shopify, we say, here's a pile of money. Here's a software you can use to allocate that pile to salary, equity, a bunch of other things. That change was a very weird change. That change required Shopify to change its equity process because like literally what we wanted to do was illegal in most of Europe. The ability to give people the ability to take options.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two things going remote was incredibly difficult for Shopify. It took us a very long time to get right. Honestly tell you for the first six to twelve months it just strip wasn't working.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This works for us, really, but for most companies, that amount of ownership would be really hard for people to understand, right?”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hired this person for me. And as a process, they run through at works. When I got to Shopify, there was no such process. So hiring someone was just very weird that you had to discover from the first time, how did we hire people? So it took us longer to hire people than most companies, which bands our headcount grew far more slowly than most companies. That's a real downside, right? If you're optimizing for speed in something best practice.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I honestly think this goes back to Shafi has two core values that are different than most companies. And I know this is like a, but I think they're actually also embodiment of Toby, our founder, who is very much like this. The first is thrive on change. Now, Thrive on Change sounds good, but most companies actually don't want to thrive on change. Most companies are built such that they do incredibly well in times where there are no change. That's what most companies are. Like if there's change, most companies are not handled, not built to handle it. Shopify is built such it does better when there is change. When there's dramatic change, Shopify just does better. It's just that's how companies built. So we're like very thrive on changey. The second is this is a learners thing we talked about. Where it's like Shopify is built such a normal thing take us longer at Shopify than it would take most companies. Let me give you like an example. If you want to hire a person at a regular company, you go to a HR, you give them like, hey, I have an empty headcount. Please go hire.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very churny. Shopify dedicated its core mission to serving people who are the most churny. They're like a million times more churny than restaurant entrepreneurs. Shopify is very good at this thing where it would be a really bad idea for everyone else, but it's an exceptionally good idea for Shopify.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think being remote is an exceptionally bad idea for most companies. It is really, I encourage almost everyone to not do it. The reason it works for Shopify is because we have spent so much time and so much effort building systems and tools and software to make this work. If you go YOLO remote without all the tools we have built, all the teams we have focused on this thing, you will 100% for sure fail. For most companies, they should not do it. It's a bad idea. By the way, that's a structurally true of Shopify. If you go back and read the early memos on investors in Shopify, they were all like, no one should do this. It's a really bad idea. Serving e-commerce, which everyone thought was a small bit, a small TAM opportunity. For small businesses, which everyone thought was, again, going to decline, insanely high churn. It's a definition when you read 0 to 1 peer TL's book. They're like, don't properly.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure if everyone's doing it, but I'm very sure that the outcome will be more favorable to us. If you think about how LLMs work, you need something to train the machine on. And the fact that we had this discussion in paper, we wrote our thoughts down and made an outcome is a very good thing for training the machine.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so, man. I think it's obviously everything has risks. It's plausible we did that, but the way you do things matters more than the outcome. But I actually think it's actually we've been, the world is tilting more on our direction. So Shopify, the thing we want to do is for more things in Shopify to be communicated via words and code written down rather than in live meetings, right? That's what we want. We want to tilt the word more that way.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I actually disagree talk is cheap because most people actually, when they talk about talk is cheap, what they mean is I can say things without that much consequence to me. What they miss is people have to listen to you. So their time spent listening to you is very not cheap. In fact, we have this thing in Shopify where we calculate the cost of every meeting and put it in the meeting invite. I can tell you talk is very, very not cheap. It's incredibly expensive.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right thing, for sure the right thing. People overestimate the importance of what an massively underestimate importance of how. The people just massively underestimate the importance of how in ways that are just like shocking still. Most people at most software companies spend their time arguing what should be willed, whereas they really should be arguing where should we build it, like where in the stack should this thing be built rather than what we should build? Because that's like, if you get that decision right, you actually can end up building a lot more. This is why, by the way, more PMs need to be more technical. I'm not saying all PMs need to write code, but all PMs need to understand how code is written. That's an incredibly important thing in the stack of priorities.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't found one yet. What essentially the job is, is to understand and represent the user and the user's best outcome, not best wishes, best outcome for the user given the market you're in. If the user is not better off, only one person could have made mistake. If the user is not better off, it's because we say the job of PM at Shopify is to build the right thing the right way at the right time. Most companies don't actually care about the right way part or the right time part. They care about the right thing part, but we care about all three.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The worst decision meta probably made was not being more publicly celebratory of Mark personally and meta generally because the company was so focused on execution internally, it didn't spend that much time worrying about its reputation externally and essentially allowed a lie to spread about it that has caused it significant pain. I don't think that will matter in the long run, to be honest. Meadows impact on the world will be hard to quantify.”
2024-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source