Shopify

“So the ideas behind Stripe Connect came from working with companies like Lyft and Shopify in the very early days. They were using Stripe for pay-ins, but we realized, oh, these companies are operating in these multi-sided marketplaces, and there's a ton of hea…”

“The experiments are great, but they're also, they can be slow. You have to look at the results. You have to analyze how things went. You have to learn what's going on. You have to build the experiment. So there's a cost to an experiment and not everything need…”

“Involving somebody's spouse and family, I think is a really good idea because it's a very personal decision to change company. It involves more than just that person you're talking to. It involves their whole family. So that was something that I think is an im…”

“Even if you bring on an advisor, some advice to founders would be, you want to surround your team or at least one person that you've identified, who's just a amazing world-class doer, even if they don't know growth with a set of growth advisors so that they're…”

“I have a dashboard on all the areas that I'm focusing on with red, yellow, green, and just constantly revving on What am I working on improving? What am I doing? What experiments am I running? And where am I doing well? And where am I not doing well? And how c…”

“The second example is Shopify, where their customer service teams are in groups of 10. And Toby Shannon, who was the chief operating officer of Shopify modeled this on sports teams... And what was interesting that emerged from this is, you know, although, you …”

“Historically people when they have said paid growth have been fully focused on just online. But I would argue in the last couple of years, you could definitely roll offline into that conversation as well.”

“Next quarter it's red again. All right. Now maybe we need to start having the conversation of what this new hire will take over. What they will be responsible for and how much work they'll be taking on and doing to replace some of this red that is going on. An…”

“So the first thing like we said, someone data driven that can get into the platforms. The next is going to be creative because I need those two now working hand in hand making sure the creative is matching the tone. And also the performance that we're trying t…”

“This is not what I do, but I think it's the easiest place to start. Spin up a Google doc or a notion page, just call it daily log and then bullet point out like the date of today. And then as you're going through your day, you have a meeting, just type in the …”

“So the analogy I use is like Uber is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify, if that makes sense, right? Amazon has been more consumer focused. Shopify is obviously very merchant focused.”

“Collecting the right information, and you usually want to collect more information than most people think you do in your signup flow. If you can then leverage that to personalize the guidance, and this is for a SaaS product, the guidance that someone can get w…”

“If something is showing lift up funnel, still ship it. And it's probably not going to hurt you, but don't overestimate the amount of impact that this is having.”

“There's three major product groups at Shopify. There's core product, which is basically building the hundred year, the right things for commerce, a hundred years from now. There's merchant services, which is building things like payments, shipping, kind of the…”

“We have very specific no wizard principle, but I think that sometimes the tension is Wizards do serve a, can serve a purpose in certain circumstances, and so we've, but we've avoided doing that, but we've always worked to try to make the principles of what a w…”

“I think if it's just subjective, let's just ship what we want without kind of a couple of people really holding that, that quality and that taste bar, that's where things go really sideways.”

“We rant against KPIs are basically banned as a, and OKRs are banned and all that.”

“Orienting every team to think about the total number of people, not the rate, but the total number of people Who got to the end of their kind of part of the journey is a very powerful way to incentivize people to do the right thing in terms of getting people s…”

“Every single project that goes out has a few minute video with figmas and everything and everything that shipped needs to be okay to, so approved by the group. There's nothing that can ship without that okay to approval. And that okay to approval has to be Gle…”

“We have two layers of holdouts. So one is the, like more of the holdouts of like every change in a quarter hold out five percent across the board. Second is for changes that only affect new merchants, what we'll do is We'll take that group of folks, let's call…”

“Globally, we did about two hundred thirty five billion in GMV in 2023, which is roughly the size of the economy of Finland.”

“In our experimentation tools, all experimenters are pinged at three months, six months, nine months, 12 months with your, the updated results. So you can't really get hide from What did this really result in over a longer term horizon?”

“If you think about in a business case, if I give you A little less, a little monetary boost and reduce that monetary friction. I can actually causally change your ability to become successful. Cause I've given you a little bit more time to try that idea a litt…”

“We were doing much better alerting, reminding people, sending them a million emails about it. Cool. We got some pretty major lift. You look back six, 12 months. There was really no long-term left.”

“I think it only works because Toby, Harley have such amazing Intuition on what the brand is, needs to be, and all of that, that some of what the CMO does of kind of creating the cohesive story of Shopify, It's kind of held in, in their heads and they kind of, …”

“If the intuition is right, that this probably is helping merchants, Why do we start with that? The original control is better if it's neutral. Let's start with like, what would we have shipped if we were a blank slate? And if it's neutral, actually neither is …”

“So overall we're about 10% of e-commerce in the United States.”

“And the way the Shopify business model works is we do charge a subscription, but most of our revenue comes from payments, which is tied to directly to a merchant's success.”

“Yeah, it's right. It's in the 30 to 40% range.”

“GMV is a power law based metric, and so it's really that power law that drives the success of each cohort.”

“Every six weeks, we, all the kind of R and D group leads, we get together and we sit with Toby and each other and review every single project across the company every six weeks. Every single R and D, pull up the dashboard and look at it.”

“We tested, okay, if we give you a pre-configured block of like, you should have an image up top, then a text banner, and then a collage with your products that should help folks understand what to do when they're building the online store. It actually had no l…”

“There's growth marketing who sits in, in growth. There's revenue marketing who sits over closer to sales. There's a brand team under Harley. He does amazing work, our president. There's marketing embedded in core and PMM sit with product managers there. There'…”

“Look at some of the experiments that you thought were your biggest winners. Look at the downstream metrics for a year, two years on that experiment, and I'll bet you'd be surprised how many times the metric is different than what you thought it would be after …”

“And a lot of teams get very nervous. Their retention rate went down. Their LTV went down. Oh my goodness. This is going to affect our ability to pay. No, your CAC also went down by probably more. And so now you have the ability to likely spend more. And you ha…”

“What we did was we moved all announcement information. So like anytime you're sending a status update or large group announcement, we moved all of that to like Facebook meta workplace, like Facebook for work, basically which is now being deprecated. So we'll h…”

“There's one, I would say one or two big differences with our intern program. One is we're making them come in three days a week. Versus full remote. And the reason for that is early, and we're doing it just in three offices right now, Montreal, Toronto, and Ot…”

“And now we do six week reviews. So teams have this notion of like every six weeks actually coming together and walking through the roadmap, the resourcing and what they're working on with their immediate leadership, but then also with Toby. And so what's cool …”

“I think if you don't have like two or three big projects that are on fire, you're probably not pushing hard enough because you're not really trying things that are outside of your, like, if everything's going well, are you really trying, are you really taking …”

“In engineering you should have between eight and, like, 20. There are definitely people who have more and people who have less, but we do try to keep things as flat as possible, because we do believe that, like, it doesn't make sense to have, like, three peopl…”

“You know, Toby famously built a lot of Shopify pair programming, and what he would do is he would actually set a timer And him and his, the CTO, Cody, would pair program for one hour, and if they did not finish the problem in one hour, they would delete all th…”

“I've seen people use it as a, like, I'm pretty sure Toby says he starts everyone at 50% and then he gets to know you.”

“So we're at something like three hours of meetings per week for an individual contributor at Shopify, which is Phenomenal. Three hours a week is amazing. I think managers is not that bad. I think it's, I think I tweeted this. I think it's six or seven hours pe…”

“So I like to call it like 90% remote or 95% remote because we have these intentionals, intentional IRL experiences. So every summer we just started last year, like, sorry, this year, we're doing this thing called Shopify summit, where we bring the whole compan…”

“Once a year at a random time, we will delete All recurring meetings that have more than two people, so not one-on-ones, and are internal people only, so not interviews or external partner meetings. And then we have a two-week moratorium where you're not allowe…”

“I think I burned. 18 months of time for like a hundred engineers, like literally from the decision I made in the first week of joining Shopify”

“Last year I tweeted out you know, maybe a tangent, but I tweeted out that GitHub Copilot has written over one million lines of code for Shopify”

“The farther you are from Toby, the, like we can see things in like the survey results, like the alignment gets out of whack. And so you do actually see that you want to be closer. You want to have a flatter org in general, and that can be achieved by just havi…”

“Like, 25, we're gonna hire a thousand interns, and, like, that is gonna give me a thousand job trials to pick, like, the top, you know, x percent of those to come to Shopify full-time.”

“Shopify is much more of like a four to eight hour a week pair programming culture where you're gathering together on a problem and saying, hey, let's pair for half a day or let's pair every Wednesday.”

“We routinely, we have like a, we have a delete code club. We have hack days, which happens two or three times a year where there's always one team that is focused on deleting code. They even have like a manual. Here's how to find things to delete. And it's ama…”

“We're all on React Native, and even the shop green app is on React Native. Everything's React Native, and we're, like, core contributors.”

“So if you're doing something monumental, like, I don't know, you're doing like a reorg or something, right? You can do it the slow way. Let's like sit down and plan and roll it out. And it's probably like six months in most companies. Shopify, this is like a w…”

“So it's true that we don't have KPIs and we don't have like at least okay us in the sort of Silicon Valley sense, but we are extremely data informed.”

“Everything that you encounter that like every solution, every product, everything that exists is path dependent, highly, highly, highly path dependent and often path dependent based on having to make compromises based on things that were true at the time and d…”

“Most of the time you end up in a bad part of a tree in a bad, in a local maxima of a path dependent environment by only making good choices. People think that like making a good choice inoculates you from ending, from making mistakes or that the presence of a …”

“A better set of trade-offs for the future is to accept the vast additional difficulty of building a remote company. It's way harder. Like it's, Like, it's not something you should recommend to anyone to do this because you, it's the same as trying to run a wor…”

“Anyone who runs this optimization function I'm talking about here about a location strategy for a new startup will come like to the conclusion, if I do it right, that everyone should be sitting around the same table. Only if you can't do that, do you say, okay…”

“I will play devil's advocate actively if everyone agrees on something. And again, especially if you have, if a proposal is something that feels like I could have predicted would be a proposal before I got into the meeting and there was nothing surprising in it…”

“Monorepo now is like for companies is like a very much one of those door A door B kind of things. It's a very consequential choice that is incorrect to go say yes to at a certain size, and then it becomes very correct in my mind to say yes to. But at that poin…”

“Once I imagine something might be not the right thing to work on, I'm either incorrect at which point this is super important that I understand why, or I'm correct at which point it's super unfair for letting people work on something that isn't going to make i…”

“All the startups anyone's ever heard of have people who are injecting heat, because if no one would inject heat into the business at room temperature, you cannot outperform anyone else. You can't be hotter than everyone else if no one's injecting heat into con…”

“We found people who are like got PhDs in dynamic language garbage collection, dynamic language just in time compilation and to make Ruby fast. And they were having delightful time at Shopify and like Shopify is now very fast and it's very good. And we, everyon…”

“We want our product to feel like something that a single person made, like in the same way how any author tries to write a book that clearly reads as that it came from one mind, because people can see and spot this if this doesn't happen. It's like, it's, you …”

“Enterprise software is Overfit to the sales process which is that it wins the RFPs because it has every feature ever, or at least a way of putting a checkbox next to every RFP line ever, but they don't, they're not good, right? Like, it's a great, an RFP is a …”

“The best companies, I believe are sort of virtually resemble, like, I mean, from, at least from the perspective of the leader, resemble some kind of cockpit or maybe like a room full of dials, right? Like full of dials or levers for you know, monetization. Lik…”

“What we have determined is that every single time we make a complex thing simpler. It is actually that more businesses will exist on a platform.”

“Stripe and Shopify had, had potentially the most valuable partnership in a, in, or at least one of the top ones in, in, in, in history of technology.”

“Now WordPress has grown to be, yeah, over 40% of all websites in the world, which is 10 x to number two, which right now is Shopify.”

“And proprietary services can create platforms. You know, Shopify has a third party ecosystem and things like that. But it's never a true platform. And not a true platform. It's when your ecosystem makes more money than the core does. And so many times, whether…”

“We on growth team launched integration with Shopify to enable e-commerce use case because we're like, Hey, there's already people trying to come in and do it. Shopify was open for integration with us. Let's go lean into it so people can vibe code their storefr…”

“When we launched our Shopify integration, most of the, if not all the templates that users were remixing were built by me, right? So stuff like that, or like the merch store, because we wanted to obviously prove the concept that, hey, lovable and Shopify just …”

“Cloudflare and Shopify, both said they were hiring a thousand interns over the course of 20, 25. Because the intern onboarding costs, it used to be takes a month before you enter and can do anything useful. Now they're doing something useful within like a week…”

“They have not let PMs provide like PowerPoint or keynote presentations on product for like two years. Every presentation on product has to be a workable demo, and they just expect the PMs to create the products, and the execs just refuse to look at static, you…”

“I really think that the model for now is going to be a super agent, like one agent for the entire company.”