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

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“I think if you have used the new Rayband classes, you have seen what the future will look like. It is very clearly how it's going. I think Rayband glasses are just not quite the iPhone moment, but they're almost the iPhone moment. I think when the next quest comes out, the promise of AR will be real. Imagine the amount of backbone it took to keep investing in this thing and build a new paradigm of computing when everyone was shitting on it.”
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, news feed. Like, there's no such thing as when you take risks, sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't, and you don't judge the outcome, you judge the process by which you take risks because the outcome doesn't really matter. Like if the process is good on average, you'll be right, or not risk adjusted, you'll be right. But think about a news feed, which is the thing that people think of as Facebook. It did not exist when Facebook launched. Paul McKay built it as friend feed and they just bought it and they rebuilt the entire thing. The like button didn't exist. There are substantial changes in a young product that people would never think of doing today. Like most founders cannot imagine saying, I'm going to change my product by this much. And this is like very early on. Ignore everything else that they've done that has just been amazing, like ignore the incredible bet day taking on ARVR, which I think people mocked and are starting to realize they were wrong about mocking, ignored what they're doing 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
“Meta and mark are both underappreciated, like incredibly underappreciated. Mark's ability to understand risk adequately is just probably unparalleled in business history. The guy's ability to like understand what it means to take risks is just incredible. And because of that, Meta had a much higher risk tolerance than most companies.”
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
“Wants to create a new landing page, they have to go into GitHub, they have to know how to write some code. This is a real thing. So our marketers learn how to write some code. We expect people here to be able to be able to do SQL queries. Like this is a real thing. Like many of our salespeople write SQL. And this is a real thing. We actually care about this part of the job. Like we care about the people being here who are the type of people that want to learn new things. Now we'll gladly teach you SQL. We'll gladly teach you how to code. But you need to be able to want to do these things.”
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, man, of course. I'm glad we didn't do it in hindsight, but to be clear, our goal is not to make it easier for people to work at Shopify. That's not the goal. The goal is to find people who are incredibly mission aligned and care about the thing we do and the way we do it and make sure they have the career of their lives here. It's different. This is a professional sports team. It's not PV soccer. My goal isn't for everyone to play. That's not the goal. I don't want it to make it easy to register and show up and play. I want exceptionally good people who care about this thing to spend their time here. And it's different. Let me give you, I mean, we didn't do the API thing, but there's a real thing that is true. Most companies end up with content management systems, right? So their marketers end up with these templates. They create, they type the words in, put the pictures in, like there's WYSIWYG thing, and then creates a website for them. We don't have that at Shopify. At Shopify, if a market”
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 have gone through a few days, Harry, in my life, Shopify. In my first year, I tried to convince our recruiting team to put Shopify's career page behind API. Like, i.e., it would not have a UX. Like, you could not go to Shopify.com forward slash careers. You just have to literally use the API. My argument back then was if you can't figure out how to do that, you probably shouldn't work in software. There's actually a thing I actually still do a great deal of.”
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
“Company and our software company, that's your death. I think it is totally your death if you go that way. But let's be honest, most even growth companies just cause play as learners. They have a whole bunch of things you're not allowed to say. A whole bunch of companies have these religious things they believe that you're not allowed to question. And once that exists, we're not learning anymore because the thing you're supposed to learn about you can't question. And like questioning things is how you learn about 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
“Be like that, but software isn't mostly like that. If you look at the very large enterprise software companies, they are mostly not about that. Like the thing they value mostly, this is a thing I actually used to do. I used to, I don't longer do it, but I used to literally go on a career page of these companies and search for Cobal, which is an old programming language and see how many people with Kobal experience they were hiring. And there was always, always dozens each of them. And you're like, okay, cool. That's okay. It's totally okay to hire people with 10 years of experience in X, but you can't tell me someone who has 10 years of experience only coding in Cobal is a learner. This is just like a decades old language at this point. I think it's actually very profitable to build a business based on experience rather than learning. In fact, most businesses in the world are based on experience, not learning. Now, I think if you're a growth”
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 it's actually there are businesses in which it is easier to make them not incompatible. Investing is actually one of those businesses. Poker is not one of those businesses. Businesses where what your experience gives you is at bats that help you learn better. Like there are lots of businesses that are that.”
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 they are. This is a real thing. In fact, every job a posting that says you require 10 years of experience is arguing against a learner's mindset. Because the way the world works usually is one of two things, right? When you are young, you're intelligence is fluid. You are learning things. When you get older in your career, you are now experienced through less learning things, you're now applying your experience. This is a real thing. It is actually perfectly reasonable to say, I do not want learners, I want experienced people who have done things to do it again. I think that's a real, and I actually think most companies, I think the word learner is a good word. But what we mean by learner is we want people who replace experience with the ability to learn a thing from scratch, which means that Shopify on average tends to do things differently than what experienced people do.”
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
“Generally, very disagreeable. I think I'm pleasant, just disagreeable. So there's a lot that happens inside the company where people genuinely honestly disagree with each other. And our job is to find out the truth.”
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 were starting to build internal software. Shopify is a remote company. We're starting to build software to manage our culture remotely. I thought this was just a nuttiest thing to do. This is just like a total waste of code. This is a bad idea. Six months after we started luckily, Toby overruled me. Six months after that, you could not rip this thing out of my hand. I have found it is incredibly valuable. Look, I think the most important thing is, and this is a really true thing about how we work at Shopify. We are together on the search for truth. Like our goal is to find what truth is, and we are not that offended about telling someone the wrong. I actually once looked at my Slack history with Toby, and the most common set of phrase I had told him was, I disagree over the course of the past, like we're in a 30-day period. I'm generally a person who can do these tests and figure how disagreeable you are.”
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 I think Rippling actually is probably the best software for startups to kind of like gets across the same thing. The fundamental problem of business software is that it is under premise because it is underdated. Like the data you need to run the business doesn't really exist. So you have to do these very weird duct taping of different tools together to make your world work or in real world what happens is a CSV export from here into an Excel sheet there to make a decision so everyone's decisions regardless of how big you are as a company ends up being made in an Excel sheet we're incredibly opinionated about this. We think this is a bad way to run a company and everyone who comes to Shopify their first instinct is what the heck you guys have built internally and within three months they are converted to why this is the way we do things.”
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
“Built for HR management. People look at it and they're like, whoa, most companies, let me give you an example, headcount planning. A lot of companies do headcount planning once a year. They go into some Excel sheet, but I'm pretty sure Excel has done more damage to the world than any other software. They go into Excel sheet or they create some false certainty because Excel doesn't have a column for certainty level. So they model the world and they come up with a headcount plan. And the only thing I am sure of about that headcount plan is that it is wrong. Like I'm very sure the second the headcent it is wrong. At Shopify, we've built software that imagines the company and runs continuously based on a prioritization stack, based on what we're working on, based on the APIs we have built ourselves into our data systems so we don't have to have people building these Excel sheets.”
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
“Our tools shape us more than we realize. First, we build our tools that our tools build us. I think there's nothing wrong with using off-the-shelf software. In fact, we built off-the-shelf software for people to use. But if you're in the business of building software that people use for building things, which we are, there's incredibly important to know where your opinions are coming from, right? There is no such a thing as opinion-free software. The fact that Google Sheets is built the way it is changes how you write. how you think, how you like imagine the world are tools shape us in ways that we don't appreciate. We have a tool called GSD, which is our stands for Get Shut Done, which is our internal stakeholder management and prioritization and project management tool. I've shown it to people and people are always amazed by how feature rich it is. Now, building it for us isn't that big a deal because this is what we do this all the time. We have an internal tool.”
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 it's actually really good. The best way to explain this, I'll give it to you two ways Tesla spends a shocking amount of time building robots that build Tesla cars. They could buy those robots off the shelf. Like they could actually go and buy off the shelf robots that everyone else buys to build those cars. But they spend a lot of their time building those robots rather than buying off the shelf ones, 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
“Depends on your time frame, depending on what time frame you're thinking of, right? If you're thinking about a year, hell no. It's a really bad idea if you're optimizing for one year to spend so much of your time over building. But if you're thinking the thing you're building will be around for 100 years, then for sure it was effective use of your resources, right? It's just a matter of what discount factor you apply to value of time, 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
“Two things that Toby is exceptional in. The first is Toby has ingrained in the company a prioritization order that is very meaningful to Shopify. We say at Shopify we only have three priorities, build great products, make money, use the money to build more great products, and never reverse one and two, right? Priority one is build products prior to make money. Priority three is never reverse one and two. That is actually incredibly hard to hold as a publicly traded company of our size. That idea of like, hey, just never change those priorities and spend most of your time on the first one. This is a real thing. The second thing is because of that prioritization stack, Shopify has a quality bar that is higher than most other software companies. We hold things back that almost everyone else would have shipped. And this was actually a jarring thing when I first got to Shopify, but I realized how much Shopify over.”
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
“Something complete that someone can enjoy. Imagine if someone shipped you a chair with three chairs just to test how it would work, a chair with three legs just wouldn't work. And that's the difference between complete and incomplete. And I think this is what Keith is saying. Good software is like a good movie. It requires the whole thing to work.”
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, there's a difference here. When you look back at your work, you will always be ashamed of it. You'll always say, I was terrible back then. I'm not super happy with past versions of Shopify that we have shipped. But that's different. When we shipped it, there were complete products. You listen to your first podcast from start to finish. You can actually listen to it, enjoy it as an audience member. But much of what software is being shipped today cannot be used or enjoyed because it is so incomplete. Like there's a difference here, right? And you had a vision. It is totally okay to ship a vibe one of something, which is a constrained version of your final vision. It's totally okay. In fact, everyone should do that. But what a lot of people do is have zero vision. They just ship something to see what happens next. And that's not how good things are built. Like software is a much more similar to woodwork than people appreciate. It's much more about building.”
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 am a possibly more extreme than Keith on this topic. I have written a note internally to our product managers about Shopify. I think the book Lean Startup may have done more damage unintentionally to software than any other book. I think it's a well-written book, but it's misunderstood by everyone who's read it. And as a result of it, we have a crap ton of bad software that should not be in production in the hands of people. And this is just a really good way to churn everyone off from these products. Look, people don't want to be tested upon. This culture we've developed of ship things that you're not proud of that you know are bad just to like get some people to react to it is just really bad we would never do it this way anywhere else I am not saying everyone should spend three years building something before shipping but the goal is to ship things that you are proud of being in the world”
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 work a lot with both Keith and Max as partners because they both are in the Shopify ecosystem. And one of the things you realize about both of them, it's actually true about both of them. And I think it may come out of how they grew in tech, is that they are, and I see this with admiration, more aggressive than anyone you can imagine being. They're incredibly kind but very aggressive in their execution, in their ambition. I have learned from both of them to be perpetually hungry. And it's very impressive watching them do that.”
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 say the Java PM at Shopify is to build the right thing the right way at the right time. I think the book Lean Startup may have done more damage unintentionally to software than any other book. And as a result of it, we have a crap ton of bad software that should not be in production in the hands of people. I think being remote is an exceptionally bad idea for most companies. I encourage almost everyone to not do it. People overestimate the importance of what and massively underestimate the importance of how. I'm not saying all PMs need to write code, but all PMs need to understand how code is written. That's incredibly important thing.”
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