Rivera: Founder-led incumbents like Shopify and Stripe are not sleeping
Carl Rivera · 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify · Nov 14, 2025 · at 27:21
Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify, reframes the term incumbent, arguing modern tech leaders operate with paranoid, startup-like intensity.
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“I think we've like for years have been trained to know an incumbent as a shit company that's large. That's basically like the definition. And I just don't know that that's the case right now because you have a bunch of companies that came up in an era of modern company building. I'll use Shopify as an example, but you can pick others like Stripe is a great example. And they actually have like management teams that are on it. They have founders that are super active leaders of the businesses. They're hungry. They're paranoid. These are starting to be the incumbents of the market, but they're not sleeping at the wheel.”
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