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 18 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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: 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 …”
Coates: Employees who 'disagree and commit' execute at 80% speed
“They don't move down the field quite as fast, but there is a difference between moving down field at 80% speed and, like, literally digging your heels in.”
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.”
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: Only progressive disclosure and app ecosystems let software scale from SMBs to enterprise
“The only two pieces of leverage you really have to allow that stretch is one is extremely good execution of progressive disclosure in the core product. So like features that appear at the right time only when you need them. A good example of this is something …”
Coates: Platform ecosystems fail if third-party apps cannot match first-party quality
“One is you need you need an app platform that allows apps to be built that are of equal quality to the core features of the platform. That is absolutely critical. And like, look at iOS. IOS is like a great example of this. Like when I open up a first party app…”
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.”
Shopify's previous org structure required product escalations to go directly to CEO Tobi Lütke
“In the old org structure, the first point in the org chart where all those 14 teams actually, like, joined at the top was Tobii. So anytime someone has an escalation, the first point in the escalation tree was Toby”
Coates: Audiences only retain three words at a time in communication
“You only get to lodge, like, a few words in someone's brain before, like, every word you add pops one out their other ear, and you only get to choose, like, maybe three words you can lodge in someone's brain at any given point in time, and you really need to c…”
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…”
Coates: Shopify Core has 2,500 employees divided into 10 teams
“Core is about two and a half thousand people, right? And there's now 10 of these teams inside core, so there are about 200 people each, which is about the Dunbar number, which is not a coincidence.”
Glen Coates quit business school after one day to focus on coding
“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”