Glen Coates quit business school after one day to focus on coding
Glen Coates · Glen Coates: Why Shopify Will Dominate Amazon; How Microsoft Made Smartest Move of 2023 | E986 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 8, 2023 · at 2:02
Glen Coates, VP of Product at Shopify and founder of Handshake, recalls quitting business school on his first day to code his startup instead.
0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I basically applied to go to business school, went to business school, went for one day. And then I was like, actually, this is kind of not what I want to be doing. I'd actually rather be coding 12 hours a day. And so I quit business school”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Glen Coates
Coates: Bottom-up management destroys product cohesion across multi-product software suites
“The problem with power to the edges and bottoms up decision making Is that the value of a product like Shopify, or the value of, not even a product, like a product suite, like, because Shopify has many products, right? And look at Apple, right? Like Apple is l…”
Coates: Shopify competes directly with Amazon today
“Well, I mean, Shafak meets with Amazon today. Oh, absolutely. Hundred percent. Hundred percent.”
Coates: Product founders who hire a Head of Product are quitting
“The minute that person says this other person is the head of product, they've done one of two things. They've either quit their job, or they have given that other person a title that everyone knows is bullshit, and they've basically given that person a death s…”
Coates: Competing with Shopify in e-commerce is terrifying due to its buyer aggregator engine
“These days I'm like, I'd be fucking terrified to be competing with Shopify in commerce. Not, we have a great platform, but like, we've got it joined at the hip to an incredible buyer aggregation engine, which is just hard to, it's hard to overcome how powerful…”
Coates: Shopify's key strategic weakness is lacking top-of-funnel control
“I think one of Shopify's challenges today is that we fundamentally do not control the top of the funnel, right? Like the top of the funnel for shopping on is something else, right? It's a social media site. It's a news site. It's an ad on Google. It's somewher…”
Coates: Microsoft's AI Bing launch is an asymmetric attack on Google
“Search is like a non-part of their business, but search is everything to Google. Like if search ads stop working, Google doesn't, is not a thing anymore. And so they are swinging for the fences with a completely novel approach, which might not work, but if it …”