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
Coates Executed a 'Code Red' Fix on Shopify's Checkout in 2020
“So that was a year in which there was some really fundamental things in the checkout that needed to be fixed, like rather promptly. And so Toby asked me to move over and basically like run a, what's called a code red on checkout.”
Glen Coates: Product principles must resolve close 51-49 decisions
“Principles are probably the most difficult and counterintuitive, but principles are basically how are we going to make the very hard decisions, the 51 49 decisions, that reasonable people could take either side of in this project.”
Coates: Shopify was first major SaaS platform to run secure third-party code
“And I, as far as I'm aware of Shopify was the first at scale SaaS platform to do that.”
Lemkin: Shopify ended 2022 with stronger numbers than it started
“Shopify at the end of 2022 was not the rocket ship. It was at peak COVID, but Shopify has stronger numbers at the end of 20 22 than it did at the start.”
Levesque: Six months is the right timeframe to evaluate growth projects
“So projects when you run out of like six months is a good chunk of time. If you're not exiting six months with a sense of, okay, we have some levers. We see line of sight into some levers that could move the needle for an individual product or project. If you …”
Levesque: Ideal growth teams directly own all key product surfaces
“I think ideally you want the growth team to own all of the services. That matter the most to growth. That's the ideal state. Senior leader, multi disciplined. They know how to do engineering. They know how to do growth. They know how to do product, and they ha…”
Levesque: Relational breakdown is more fatal to growth teams than slow speed
“You know, speed and velocity can be improved. A relationship falling apart can be completely dysfunctional and just cause the whole thing to fall apart.”
Levesque: Root Knowledge of Growth Experiments Is More Transportable Than Results
“So if an experiment worked, that's just knowing that experiment worked is interesting, but may not be repeatable. The most important thing is understanding the why behind it. Why did it actually work? It goes back to some of my interview questions. It'd be, I …”
Levesque: Requiring interview tests risks losing top-tier growth candidates
“So I'd say in a smaller percentage of times I get somebody to do a test, but also growth people are in a very high demand. So You know, many times candidates, if they're not really interested in the role may just choose not to do the test.”
Senkut: Shopify and Canva grew 10 to 20 times larger than expected
“But what I have seen with all the great companies we had, whether it be like Shopify or Canva or Adyen, it ended up being like 20 to 10 to 20 times bigger than what we expected.”
Senkut: Felicis's $41M debut fund backed Rovio, Shopify, and Fitbit
“The very first fund we had was only forty one million, and we invested in Rovio in Finland from that. The whole round was bigger than our whole firm. Shopify's A round and Fitbit's B round”
Shopify starts all new employees with a 50% trust battery rating
“Everyone that comes to Shopify starts at a 50% trust battery.”
Shopify raised its 2010 Series A at a $25M post-money valuation
“He was in our Series A, first market in our Series A back in, in 20, 20, 10. It was actually, it was a seven million Series A, I think on a twenty-five million dollar post valuation.”
Finkelstein: Great founding teams have non-overlapping skill sets
“I think that a lot of people start businesses with people that are just like them. People that they would be friends in high school with. But if you look at some of the best teams out there that have built incredible companies they are really different. I mean…”
Shopify's platform powers two million merchant stores
“It's great that Shopify has two million stores.”
Shopify processes 10% of all e-commerce in the United States
“10% of all e-commerce in the United States is done via Shopify.”
Tisch: VCs selling Shopify at IPO missed 100x post-public upside
“If you had sold Shopify when they went public, you left like a hundred X on the table. So don't sell Shopify. If you own Shopify as a VC, when they go public that you missed the actual bigger set of upside in that company.”
Wilkinson: MetaLab designed Slack and worked with Shopify, Coinbase, and Pinterest
“Also worked with a lot of startups really early on, Shopify, Tumblr, Coinbase, Pinterest. We designed Slack.”
Accessible manufacturing will drive a surge of challenger brands across all categories
“If you democratize access to the best manufacturing and make supply chain easier to manage, what that leads to is it becomes easier, kind of in the same way Shopify made it so much easier for us all to launch our ideas on a whim. It becomes easier for fantasti…”
Acquired employees should have a better job on day one post-acquisition
“We want the individuals on the company joining Shopify to have a better job day one than they did at their last day as an independent company”
Acquired startup founders make the best long-term leaders post-acquisition
“We find that founders make the best long-term leaders within the company, and what we want to have is, is all founders who have opportunities and distinct paths to go down, an opportunity to join Shopify to become incredible leaders.”
Shopify acquired Oberlo based on merchant product-sourcing data and cultural fit
“The most recent acquisition is a company called Oberlo that does product sourcing, and so the reasons we said yes were, number one, data. We're a heavily data-driven company, and we understand that one of the biggest challenges for our merchants and their path…”
Shopify uses M&A primarily to accelerate its product roadmap
“I spend the majority of my time working with our product team and understanding what that roadmap looks like for the next one, two, three, five, 10 years, and we have an opportunity to look at each area and find out which of those specifically can be great can…”
Finkelstein: Bundling point solutions for retail creates an inefficient 'Frankenstein' system
“If you don't use Shopify and you don't want to use our platform to sell in all these different places, you can bundle up a bunch of different single point solutions. You can do just e-commerce plus just point of sale plus, you know, maybe a card reader from li…”
Harley Finkelstein: Physical retail stores must add value beyond location
“These physical retailers fundamentally need to understand that they have to add value and just being there, just having a store on its own is not enough.”
Finkelstein: Shopify warned IPO investors against expecting short-term revenue chasing
“In fact, if you read our Toby's letter to shareholders when we filed our IPO, we made it very clear that if you're looking for sort of quick wins, and you're looking for a company that is going to chase revenue, we're probably not the right company. To invest …”
Rovio became Shopify's top store out of 10,000 within a week
“In seven days, the Rovio store was up and running on Shopify. Instantly, it became the top store in Shopify among 10,000 stores. They sold out their whole inventory in a week”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify IPO'd at $1.67B valuation and grew 100x
“The point was we went out at, I believe, 1.67 billion dollar valuation. And I think, yeah, I mean, at various times, not right now, I think, but like, I don't know. I don't check. It's like a hundred times higher now.”
Tobi Lütke: The investment banker who led Shopify's IPO is now CFO
“In fact, the banker who took me in public as my CFO right now, so like 10 years later, which is really funny.”
Cursor is the most widely used AI tool among Shopify designers
“Inside of Shopify, the cursor is by far the most used tool in the design group.”
Shopify mandates only one internal tool company-wide, named GSD
“The only tool that we mandate is the internal tooling of Shopify, which is called GSD, which is how we account for time, projects, tie them into missions, make sure that everyone's moving in the same direction. That's the only mandated tool of the company.”
Kaz Nejatian: Citron claimed Shopify wouldn't last two years when he joined
“Citron wrote in a short report the day I joined Shopify about how terrible business it was and how it wouldn't last two years.”
Wang: Sequoia missed Shopify in private markets and first invested post-IPO
“Shopify was not a Sequoia portfolio company. It's a company that we admired in the private markets, but we did not invest in the private markets. And our first chance to invest is when they go public, right?”
Lemkin: 70% of Shopify's revenue comes from payments, not SaaS
“I mean, 70% of Spotify, Shopify's revenue is from payments and merchant services, not from SaaS, 70%.”
Klaviyo expands its Shopify partnership template into new industry verticals
“And we've actually started to take that to, you know, other verticals and other industries and use a little bit of the template.”
Lemieux: Shopify intentionally positioned itself as a movement, not a product
“Shopify wasn't about the product. It was about a movement of like, let's build this thing around entrepreneurship. And it's not like that was accidental. We had meetings about, you know, I think, you know, we have to create a movement around entrepreneurship a…”
Lemkin: Box, HubSpot, and Shopify IPO'd under $1B valuations
“Box IPO did eight hundred million. HubSpot IPO did eight hundred million valuation. Shopify IPO did a seven hundred and fifty million dollar valuation.”
Grimshaw: Tobi Lütke divested a Shopify acquisition within 18 months
“For Toby at Shopify to make an acquisition and then divest it With, I don't, I think within a year, maybe it was a year and a half, like not very long for an organization to say, to make a big move and say, nope, we made the wrong decision that fast and not ge…”
Salguero: ButcherBox is migrating its e-commerce platform to Shopify in 2023
“We're actually moving this year, we're moving to Shopify”
Tobi Lütke tests new ideas in a single afternoon before committing
“So this is usually when I'm, when my objective is to find out if something is of value, I try to figure out with everything I already got, and an afternoon of time, how can I get basically a scorecard for this before, before, before you go deeper into this.”
Coates: Core products represent about half of Shopify's total R&D headcount
“Core is now about half of R&D in Shopify, right? And core is what the outside world would think of as like the built-in bits when you first, when you sign up for Shopify. So like the stuff you get in the box, it's like the online store, the checkout, all of th…”
Levesque: Merchant recommendations are a top driver of Shopify's growth
“So we're always iterating on making it easier for merchants to do that, but it's because we have such a great product and one of the highest cited reasons for joining Shopify is that somebody had recommended them in that it's, again, it's kind of part of the c…”
Levesque: Shopify embeds dedicated product and engineering teams inside its growth org
“We have a product org and an engineering org inside the Shopify growth org”
A new entrepreneur makes their first Shopify sale every 28 seconds
“Every 28 seconds, a new entrepreneur gets there for sale on Shopify.”
Tobi Lütke launched Shopify when his software outgrew his snowboard business
“By 2005, it became clear to him that the software behind the snowboard business was more valuable Than the snowboard business itself. And so he launched Shopify.”
Finkelstein was one of Shopify's earliest e-commerce merchants
“And so I became one of the first merchants to use Shopify.”
Felicis Ventures backs an average of two unicorns per year
“Backing, and I cannot believe I'm saying this, Dad, but an incredible two unicorns per year since founding, including Shopify, Opendoor, Flexport, Adyen, Twitch, Fitbit, and many more incredible companies.”
Shopify's M&A approval process mirrors VC investment committees
“Having come from the VC background, so it's structured in a very similar way. We have an individual who I work with who would sort of be the partner on the transaction, really pushing and championing what we call a champion of the deal, pushing it through the …”