The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 198 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 8 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: Shopify destroyed low-end e-commerce competitors like Wix and BigCommerce
“Shopify destroyed them all. There's no reason to use. This is another category where the low end was destroyed by Shopify, who amazingly went up market and down market successfully at the same time. And there's just, it's not worth it. You can't save enough mo…”
Tobi Lütke: Great leaders must be exothermic heat sources for innovation
“It's very hard to forge anything new at room temperature. So like, I think great leaders must be exothermic and must be a heat source for the company. It's very different opinion than the custodial idea of leadership, which is also a valid position to take.”
Tobi Lütke: 10 million people work daily on Shopify
“There's probably ten million people working day to day on Shopify.”
Rajaram: Shopify will not build a competing product to Klaviyo
“I don't think Shopify will build it. Shopify is an investor, and Shopify, I think, has decided, at least in my opinion, that this is, Shopify has these things called missions, and I think they've decided this is not part of their mission to build this product.…”
Lemkin: Growth momentum is software's only defense in the AI age
“I'm betting on momentum is the only thing that's going to save us. Save us in the age of AI. So I'm betting on overpriced Palantir, Cloudflare, which is re-accelerating and benefiting from AI, and Shopify which is gaining market share.”
Lemkin: Shopify grew revenue 50% to $12B with zero net hiring
“And I think Shopify is on top of these things. It has the same number of employees it did three years ago. It has not added a single net headcount in three years and has grown 50% at twelve billion in revenue.”
Jason Lemkin Sees No Valuation Floor for Shopify Stock
“And I love Shopify. It's because I just, I don't see the floor.”
O'Driscoll: Shopify's Core Infrastructure Safe From Near-Term AI Displacement
“I don't think there is a credible near-end story that replaces a shopping, a website for shopping, and a payments mechanism, which is, you know, 60, 70% of their business, with some kind of AI arm wave in a way that there is for many of the workflow automation…”
Cannon-Brookes: Only four public CEOs remain from 2020 SaaS peer group
“In COVID in 2020, we formed a group of SaaS CEOs. I think there were 16 of us that got together, we'd meet on Zoom every single week, right? At one stage, 10, 11 of us were public, maybe more, we all had earnings calls, and you know, it was a really good thera…”
Rivera: Shopify over-focused on GMV when developing the Shop app
“For a long time, we were very, very focused on GMV being the primary metric. That's total amount of sales being the primary metric that we were driving the experience to. And of course, it's an important metric. We want to create a service that is ultimately l…”
Rivera: Mid-level specialist tech roles will disappear in favor of generalists
“I think the general shape of the job market will move people towards being more generalists than specialists. You basically have like specialization. If you become like the best in the world, you'll always have a job market, but specialization Any point toward…”
Rivera: Industry average for software interface design quality is 6/10
“Even inside of the existing form factors and what companies understand to be good interface today, we're basically like batting an average six out of 10.”
Carl Rivera: Shopify operates as an unapologetically top-down company
“And so there is that sort of like organizational structure, but Shopify is An unapologetically top-down company.”
Rivera: Over half of Shopify design reviews feature vibe-coded prototypes
“And we're seeing at Shopify more than half of all of the design reviews I'm in are now vibe coded prototypes. They've been entirely constructed and built using our Polaris components to build it into a real prototype using real data and all of that.”
Shopify's design depth increased 5x with AI, while pace remained flat
“On the design side, I would say that we're probably moving at the same pace still as before, but the conversations and level of detail that we're able to get into is far higher, five X the difference.”
Rivera: Deliberate design friction is valuable for high-intent user actions
“Sometimes I think deliberate friction can be a good thing. It slows things down. It allows you to actually experience what's going on, understand that this is like a high intent action, or this is part of the experience that you're meant to pay extra attention…”
Tobi Lütke reviews every Shopify project on a two-month cadence
“Shopify has a product review cadence that's very special and different in that Toby reviews actually all of the projects every month, or so every month he reviews half of them, and then the next month he reviews the other half, such that on a two-month rolling…”
Shopify dropped 'UX' from designer titles under Chief Design Officer Rivera
“I announced when I took on the chief design officer role in Shopify that we're dropping UX from the designer title, and we're only going to be designers working at Shopify.”
Lemkin: Kaz Nejatian left over $270M behind at Shopify to join Opendoor
“You know, leaving two hundred million behind at Shopify and another 70 something million in grants and what he might still get, you could only do that if you're post-economic, right?”
Lemkin: Shopify Cut Staff to 8,100 While Revenue Rose 91%
“From peak employee was 20, 22, 11,600 employees at Shopify. Since then, revenue has grown 91%. Pretty impressive for a company at eleven billion in revenue. And employees have gone down from 11,600 to 8100. Gone down while revenue's up 91%.”
Halligan: Silicon Valley has a wrongheaded bias against building for SMBs
“There's a big echo chamber in Silicon Valley and big negative bias towards SMB, but you can make it work in SMB. HubSpot and Shopify have shown it. Block has shown it.”
Nejatian: Shopify calculates and displays the cost of every meeting
“We have this thing in Shopify where we calculate the cost of every meeting and put it in the meeting invite.”
Kaz Nejatian: Companies should default to sharing all internal information publicly
“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.”
Kaz Nejatian: Making key business decisions in spreadsheets is a bad approach
“So everyone's decisions, regardless of how big you are as a company, ends up being made in an Excel sheet. And like, we're incredibly opinionated about this. We think this is a bad way to run a company.”
Nejatian: V1 products must be constrained visions, not visionless experiments
“It is totally okay to ship a V one of something which is constrained version of your final vision, right? That'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.…”
Nejatian: Overbuilding software is effective only on a 100-year horizon
“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 overbuilding. If you're thinking the thing you're building will be around for a hundred years, then for sure it was effective use o…”
Kaz Nejatian: Growth software companies fail if they value experience over learning
“Now, I think if you're a growth company and a software company, that's your death. I think it is totally your death if you go that way.”
Nejatian: Most software shipped today is unusable because it is incomplete
“Much of what software is being shipped today cannot be used or enjoyed because it is so incomplete.”
Nejatian: Shopify built continuous internal planning software to replace Excel
“At Shopify, we've built software that imagines a company and runs continuously. Based on our 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 l…”
Nejatian: Shopify's three priorities are products, money, and more products
“We say at Shopify we only have three priorities. Build great products, make money, Use money to build more great products and never reverse one and two, right? Priority one is build products. Priority two is make money. Priority three is never reverse one and …”
Nejatian: Shopify previously turned away a top-10 global retailer
“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.”
Nejatian: Shopify functions like a venture capital firm backing merchant cohorts
“Cause what Shopify is essentially is like, we invest in cohorts of startups.”
Nejatian: Requiring ten years of experience argues against a learner mindset
“Every job posting that says you require 10 years of experience Is arguing against a learner's mindset”
Nejatian: Most companies only care about building the right thing
“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, …”
Lemkin: Shopify's Tobi Lütke is the ideal board member over founder-friendly VCs
“I think I'd pick Toby from Shopify. Cause I think he'd frigging kick my ass. We have too many founder friendly Yahoo. Great job. Harry's on boards. I I'm just so sick of it. Toby just seems like he just doesn't suffer fools. And maybe you don't want to work. M…”
Aaron Levie: AI agents will lower startup barriers like AWS and Stripe
“If Shopify caused businesses to get started because it lowered the barrier to being able to sell online, if AWS caused applications to get started because I was like, oh, I could just build an app and run it in the cloud. I don't have to think about servers an…”
Stebbings: Webflow and Shopify are extremely hard for non-technical users
“Webflow is a bit like Shopify. They're like fucking hard. Like, I'm really sorry. I know I'm seeing your part, but Jesus, it's like not that easy.”
Lemieux: Tobi Lütke is actively cutting process overhead at Shopify
“If you look at, I believe Toby at Shopify is implementing this exact same thing. I think we're doing it in parallel universes and we will have beer every summer and compare notes. But I just trying to believe that some of the shift at Toby and Harley have been…”
Lemieux: Small and high-volume merchants share 80% platform requirements at Shopify
“We found some commonalities in the platform regarding these small merchants and large merchants have an 80% overlap.”
Lemieux: Shopify measured engineering progress strictly by pull requests and shipped code
“And I literally just look at the PRs and the code that we ship and how, how, You know, how much time we spend on that. And that's literally all the progress. And that's the exact same measure I had at Shopify, by the way.”
Lemieux: As Shopify CTO, I managed the 800-person sales team
“I took over sales at Shopify for a year. To remove. So I had 800 people at Shopify that were in sales and they reported to the CTO for one year because we had a lot of tension and we had to realign.”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify would have gone fully remote even without COVID-19
“I think within a year or two, I would have transferred Shopify to remote entirely.”
Tobi Lütke: The optimal team size for fast execution is six people
“The best team in the world, the fastest moving team in the world is one person that has all the skills needed. The second best is a team of six people that are very, like intellectually diverse and can bring a lot of new different information together, but, li…”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify caps prototype projects at three people and six weeks
“In Shopify, like every project goes to multiple phases. There's a prototype phase, there's like there's a proposal phase before that. If proposal is accepted, you go to prototype phase, build, and then releasing. The prototype phase Is ideally time constraints…”
Coates: Tobi Lütke is and will always be Shopify's head of product
“Toby, like all great CEO founders, is actually the head of product at Shopify, and will always be. I think the day that Toby's not running a product at Shopify is the day that he's not at Shopify.”
Levesque: Elite growth hires deliver 10x to 100x performance increases
“Spaces growth is one of those things where if you make the right hire, it's not a, you know.5% increase. It's literally a 10 or a hundred X increase.”
Levesque: Rapid promotion in growth roles can be a counter-signal
“In most professions, if somebody's at a company and they're promoted very quickly, that would be a good sign that this person is you know, exceptional. And in growth, because there's so few people in the space, It could suggest that they're exceptional, but it…”
Levesque: A new hire's success should be obvious within 30 to 60 days
“We like to say that, you know, the best people come in and leave an impact greater when they land. So they get hired. So everything around them gets better. So within frankly, 30 to 60 days, you should have a sense of whether you made a good hire and they've e…”