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 75 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Mullenweg: Shopify and Facebook are not true platforms, will rug-pull developers
“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…”
Tobi Lütke: Building a remote company is vastly harder and not recommended
“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…”
Shopify Has Banned Traditional KPIs and OKRs
“We rant against KPIs are basically banned as a, and OKRs are banned and all that.”
Shipper: Near-term enterprise AI will center around company super agents
“I really think that the model for now is going to be a super agent, like one agent for the entire company.”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify operates without KPIs or traditional Silicon Valley OKRs
“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.”
Lütke: Making only good choices often leads to bad local maxima
“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 …”
Tobi Lütke: Winning enterprise RFPs reveals nothing about actual software quality
“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 …”
Tobi Lütke: A CEO's job is building monetization levers, not pulling them
“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…”
Thawar: Companies without multiple projects on fire are not pushing hard enough
“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 …”
Shopify randomly deletes all recurring internal meetings with over two people annually
“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…”
Shopify executes company reorgs in two weeks without formal change management
“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…”
Shopify Enforces a Strict 'No Wizard' Onboarding Product Principle
“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…”
Growth Teams Should Optimize for Absolute Volume Over Conversion Rates
“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…”
Reducing Upfront Monetary Friction Causally Improves Merchant Success
“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…”
30% to 40% of Short-Term Experiment Wins Have Zero Long-Term Impact
“Yeah, it's right. It's in the 30 to 40% range.”
Long-Term Growth Experiment Results Frequently Diverge From Initial Wins
“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 …”
Reducing Top-of-Funnel Friction Drops CAC Faster Than It Hurts LTV
“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…”
Rabois: Shopify bans PMs from using static slides, requires working demos
“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…”
Mullenweg: WordPress powers over 40% of websites, ten times second-place Shopify
“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.”
Tobi Lütke: Monorepos are incorrect for small startups but necessary at scale
“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…”
Lütke: Letting teams work on doomed projects abdicates CEO responsibility
“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…”
Lütke: Simplifying complex software directly increases the number of businesses created
“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.”
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke reviews every project in-person every six weeks
“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 …”
Shopify founders deleted incomplete code after one hour of pair programming
“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…”
Shopify individual contributors average just three hours of meetings per week
“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…”
Thawar's first-week architectural decision at Shopify burned 18 months for 100 engineers
“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”
GitHub Copilot generated over one million lines of code at 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”
Internal data shows employee alignment degrades with distance from Shopify's CEO
“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…”
Shopify will hire one thousand interns in 2025 as full-time job trials
“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.”
SaaS Products Should Collect More Onboarding Info to Personalize Guidance
“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…”
Metric-Free Product Development Requires Strict Central Gatekeepers of Taste
“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.”
Shopify Skips a CMO Because Its Founders Drive the Brand Story
“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, …”
Shopify Ships Neutral A/B Tests if Product Intuition is Positive
“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 …”
Power-Law Merchant GMV Drives Shopify Cohort Returns
“GMV is a power law based metric, and so it's really that power law that drives the success of each cohort.”
Nickels: Uber is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify
“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.”
Luc Levesque: Shipping directly often creates more value than slow A/B testing
“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…”
Lovable's growth team built the Shopify integration and voice mode
“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…”
Lütke: Existing products are path-dependent on outdated compromises
“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…”
Lütke: Startups should keep everyone at one table until constraints force expansion
“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…”
Lütke: I act as devil's advocate 'end boss' when proposals lack surprise
“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…”
Lütke: Startups cannot outperform others without leaders injecting heat
“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…”
Lütke: Products must feel designed by one mind to avoid remote-control sprawl
“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 …”
Lütke: Stripe and Shopify partnership is among the most valuable in tech history
“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.”
Shopify moved all large group announcements off Slack to Meta Workplace
“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…”
Shopify requires its interns to work in-office three days a week
“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…”
Shopify engineering managers target 8 to 20 direct reports for flat hierarchy
“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…”
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke starts every new employee at fifty percent trust
“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.”
Shopify operates 95 percent remote with intentional in-person annual summits
“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…”