# Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke

Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies · The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today · What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify

20VC · Aug 14, 2024 · 63 min · 12,356 words
Speakers: Harry Stebbings, Kaz Nejatian
Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-05141ab1/

## Cold open

**Harry Stebbings** [0:00]:

We say the job of PM at Shopify is to build the right thing, the right way at the right time. I think the book Lean Startup may have done more damage unintentionally to software than any other book. And as a result of it, we have a crap ton of bad software that should not be in production in the hands of people. I think being remote is an exceptionally bad idea for most companies. I encourage almost everyone to not do it. People overestimate the importance of what and massively underestimate the importance of how. I'm not saying all PMs need to write code, but all PMs need to understand how code is written. That's, like, an incredibly important thing.

**Kaz Nejatian** [0:38]:

This is 20 VC

## Intro

**Kaz Nejatian** [0:39]:

with me, Harry Stebbings, and joining me in the hot seat today, we have Kaz Nejatian, COO and VP of Product at Shopify. Now before Shopify, Kaz founded Kash, a payment technology company, which was acquired in 2017 by one of the largest fintech companies in The US. Kaz then served as product lead for payments and billing at Facebook, and this is an incredible discussion. You can watch it all

**Unknown** [1:00]:

on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. That's two zero VC.

## Sponsor read

**Unknown** [1:03]:

But before we dive in, ever wondered what your customers actually do? The team over at They Do have been living it for decades, and they have recently built a product that is frankly enabling the world's biggest businesses to literally know what they do. Harnessing journey mining with AI, you can turn unstructured data into structured customer journeys in minutes, saving weeks of work and months of analysis. They do journey management platform is already helping over 100 leading businesses, including Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Royal London, and Home Depot to know what they do. Don't waste another step. Check out theydo.com. But before we continue, let me tell you about OneSchema. OneSchema is the embeddable CSV importer that will save your team months of development time. While building a basic CSV importer may seem simple, product teams typically spend over three to six months building and rebuilding their CSV import experiences. Why? Customer files are full of unexpected formats for dates, numbers, and addresses, and your first pass at building an importer never has all the edge cases handled. Failed imports lead to unhappy customers and endless emails and tickets for your support and engineering teams. Enter OneSchema with the largest library of prebuilt validations and intelligent transforms. OneSchema helps you launch a guided CSV import experience in just thirty minutes. Get your customers to the value of your product in minutes and say goodbye to frustrating messages like import error online 53 with over four x faster performance compared with alternatives. It's clear why OneSchema is choice for top startups like Ramp, Scale AI, and Pave to streamline their CSV import process. Importing clean customer data into your product is easier than ever. Learn more by visiting oneschema.com/twenty. And finally, we need to talk about Pendo. A really simple way to describe Pendo's value is to simply say, get your users to do what you want them to do. What is Pendo? The only all in one product experience platform for any type of application. What are the features that make Pendo so awesome? Pendo's differentiation is in its platform. Every capability from analytics to in app guidance to session replay, mobile feedback management, and road mapping are all purpose built to work together. What is the social validity? 10,000 companies use Pendo, and also we manage Mind the Product, the world's largest community of product management professionals. Where do we want to drive people? Give it a try and visit pendo.io/20product-podcast to learn how your team can use Pendo to start building better digital experiences. There, you can also check out Pendo's lineup of free certification courses, twelve hours of in-depth training for your product management teams on topics from AI to product analytics to product led growth.

**Kaz Nejatian** [3:45]:

You have now arrived at your destination.

## Conversation

**Kaz Nejatian** [3:48]:

Kaz, I am so excited for this. I heard so many good things. I spoke to Max Levchin before. I spoke to Harley. This is gonna be a great one. So thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, man. Not at all. But listen, you've worked with some incredible people, and I wanted to start almost with, like, a quick fire on the people that you've worked with. If we start with Keith Rabois, I love Keith. What was your biggest takeaway from working with Keith?

**Harry Stebbings** [4:10]:

I work a lot with both Keith and Max as partners because they both are in the Shopify ecosystem. And one of the things you realize about both of them, it's actually true about both of them, and I think it may come out of how they grew in tech, is that they are, and I say this with admiration, more aggressive than anyone you can imagine being. They're incredibly kind but very aggressive in their execution and their ambition. Like, I have learned from both of them to be perpetually hungry, and it's very impressive watching them do that.

**Kaz Nejatian** [4:42]:

We mentioned the show with Dalian before this, and Dalian's biggest takeaway was Keith's view of company building as like a Hollywood movie, where there's a director who sets the script, recruits the actors, and executes against that vision. That's one way to do it, and then the other way is test, iterate, talk to customers. How do you think about those two very opposing views of company building?

**Harry Stebbings** [5:04]:

Yeah. I I am a possibly more extreme than Keith on this topic. I have written a note internally to our product managers about this at Shopify. I think the book Lean Startup may have done more damage unintentionally to software than any other book. I think it's a well written book, but it's a misunderstood by everyone who's read it. And as a result of it, we have a crap ton of bad software that should not be in production in the hands of people. And this is just a really good way to churn everyone off from these products. Look, people don't want to be tested upon. This culture we've developed of ship things that you're not proud of that you know are bad just to like get some people to react to it. It's just really bad. We would never do it this way anywhere else. Well, I am not saying everyone should spend three years building something before shipping, but the goal is to ship things that you are proud of being in the world. Can I just interject

**Kaz Nejatian** [5:59]:

that? Sure. I get you and agree, but if we apply that to content, my first episodes were shit. Was I was terrible. Content, you grow, you learn, you develop. What I tell people now is don't be afraid to do v one. Just get it out because v two will be better and v three will be better. I

**Harry Stebbings** [6:16]:

wanna so, Harry, there's a difference here. When you look back at your work, you will always be ashamed of it. You'll always say, I was terrible back then. I'm not super happy with past versions of Shopify that we have shipped. That's different. When we shipped it, they were complete products. You listen to your first podcast from start to finish. You can actually listen to it, enjoy it as an audience member, but much of what software is being shipped today cannot be used or enjoyed because it is so incomplete. Like, there's a there's a difference here. Right? There's a and you had a vision, it is totally okay to ship a V1 of something which is constrained version of your final vision. 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. And it's not how good things are built. Like software is a much more similar to woodwork than people appreciate. It's much more about building something complete that someone can enjoy. Imagine if someone shipped you a chair with three chairs just to test how it would work. A chair with three legs just wouldn't work. And that's that's the difference between complete and incomplete. And I think this is what Keith is saying. Good software is like a good movie. It requires the whole thing to work.

**Kaz Nejatian** [7:30]:

Can I ask you a rather divisive question, which is do you think visions are also dangerous? And the reason I say that is because when I actually started the show, my vision was actually to have become an associate at a venture fund in London. In the time that I allocated for that, I actually raised a $150,000,000 on my own. And it but if I'd succumb to my vision, I would have accepted that. And so visions can constrain you. Is vision always gonna

**Harry Stebbings** [7:54]:

I I don't think so, Harry. Like, let's let's let's look at Shopify. Toby's original vision was to build a snowboard store. I mean, he built one, and now Shopify exists. It is very true that people learn and change their final goal. People learn and change their vision. But everything good ever created started with someone saying, hold on a second, the world is wrong about X, I will fix it. The initial thing of saying, have to create a thing to fix a problem for me or for someone else requires you to know what you want at the end. Now you may be wrong about that. You can change that obviously. Microsoft's first product was a bootloader for basic. Microsoft is not a company that makes bootloaders anymore. Right? That's a real thing. But Microsoft first product wasn't, let me ship two lines of code and see what the third one looks like. Like, there is a difference between beautiful things are created with a vision. It is okay for that vision to change over time.

**Kaz Nejatian** [8:51]:

You you mentioned kind of Tobi there and building the snowboard store as the first vision. You've worked with Toby now for several years. If we do the quick fire on your lesson from Toby, what's your biggest lesson from Toby? Two

**Harry Stebbings** [9:03]:

things that Toby is exceptional in. The first is Tobi has ingrained in the company a prioritization order that is very meaningful to Shopify. 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 two. That is actually incredibly hard to hold as a publicly traded company of our size. That idea of like, hey, just never change those priorities and spend most of your time on the first one. This is a real thing. The second thing is because of that prioritization stack, Shopify has a quality bar that is higher than most other software companies. We hold things back that almost everyone else would have shipped. And this was actually a jarring thing when I first got to Shopify, but I realized how much Shopify overbuilt before it shipped. Is that an effective use of resources? Depends on your timeframe, depending on what timeframe you're thinking of, right? 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. But if thinking the thing you're building will be around for a hundred years, then for sure it was effective use of your resources, right? It's just a matter of like what discount factor you apply to value of time, right?

**Kaz Nejatian** [10:26]:

I really couldn't get over it when you said about internal building of tools and how you said like, hey, we built everything in compliance, HR, payroll. You know, you don't have linear or Jira. You have everything built internally. Oh my I was walking around the park and I was like, oh my god. Then you have to maintain it. You have to update it. You have to infuse AI into it to make sure. I I still do not get my head around this argument of how across the whole stack of software tools, it is better. I think the best way to I

**Harry Stebbings** [10:54]:

know it's actually really good. The best way to explain this, I'll give it to you two ways. Tesla spends a shocking amount of time building robots that build Tesla cars. They could buy those robots off the shelf. Like, they could actually go and buy off the shelf robots that everyone else buys to build those cars, But they spend a lot of time building those robots rather than buying off the shelf ones. Right? Why? Our tools shape us more than we realize. First, build our tools, then our tools build us. I think there's nothing wrong with using off the shelf software. Software. In fact, we build off the shelf software for people to use. But if you're in the business of building software that people use for building things, which we are, it's incredibly important to know where your opinions are coming from. Right? There is no such a thing as opinion free software. The fact that Google Sheets is built the way it is changes how you write, how you think, how you like imagine the world. Our tools shape us in ways that we don't appreciate. We have a tool called the GST, which is our sense for get shit done, which is our internal stakeholder management and prioritization of project management tool. I've shown it to people and people are always amazed by how feature rich it is. Now building it for us isn't that big a deal because this is what we do this all the time. We have an internal tool built for HR management. People look at it and they're like, woah. Most companies, let me give you an example, headcount planning. A lot of companies spend to do headcount planning once a year. They go into some Excel sheet, but I'm pretty sure Excel has done more damage to the world than any other software. They go into Excel sheet or they treat some false certainty because Excel doesn't have a column for certainty level. So they model the world and they come up with a headcount plan. And the only thing I am sure of about that headcount plan is that it is wrong. Like, I'm very sure the second it hits in, it is wrong. At Shopify, we've built software that imagines a company and runs continuously based on a 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, like, Excel sheets.

**Kaz Nejatian** [12:56]:

So it's like rippling, but for internal tooling, which is, like, the benefits that come from having the synchronicity between all the tools on one platform means that you can run simulations and models easily between your own tools.

**Harry Stebbings** [13:09]:

Yeah.

**Kaz Nejatian** [13:09]:

But

**Harry Stebbings** [13:09]:

I think

**Kaz Nejatian** [13:10]:

rippling actually

**Harry Stebbings** [13:10]:

is probably the best software for startups to kind of like gets across the same thing. Like the fundamental problem of business software is that it is under premise because it is under dated. Like the data you need to run the business doesn't really exist. So like you have to do these like very weird like duct taping of different tools together to make your world work. Or in real world, what happens is a CSV export from here into an Excel sheet there to make decisions. So everyone's decisions, regardless of how big you are as a company ends up being made in an Excel sheet.

**Kaz Nejatian** [13:43]:

We're

**Harry Stebbings** [13:43]:

incredibly opinionated about this. We think this is a bad way to run a company and everyone who comes to Shopify, their first instinct is what the heck you guys have built to what internally? And within three months they are converted to why this is the way we do things.

**Kaz Nejatian** [13:59]:

Have you ever questioned the approach that you've taken? And if so, what moment led you to question it?

**Harry Stebbings** [14:06]:

I had a internal conversations where I said this idea is dumb as a back of hammers.

**Kaz Nejatian** [14:10]:

That would count as questioning. Yeah. That was

**Harry Stebbings** [14:13]:

like, we were starting to build internal software. Shopify is a remote company. We're starting to build software to manage our culture remotely. I thought this was just the nuttiest thing to do. This is just like a total waste of code, like, which this is a bad idea. Six months after we started luckily, Tobi overruled me. Six months after that, you could not rip this thing out of my hand. Like I have found it is incredibly valuable. Look, I think the most important thing is, and it's a really true thing about how we work at Shopify. We are together on the search for truth. Like our goal is to find what truth is and we are not that offended about telling someone the wrong. I actually once looked at my Slack history with Tobi and the most common set of phrase I had told him was I disagree over the course of the past, it was like a thirty day period. I'm generally person like, if you can do these tests to figure out how disagreeable you are, I'm generally very disagreeable. I think I'm pleasant. I'm just disagreeable. So, like, there's a lot that happens inside the company where people genuinely honestly disagree with each other, and our job is

**Kaz Nejatian** [15:19]:

to find out the truth. I too am disagreeable. And I was listening to you speak before, and you said about a learner's mindset being core to Shopify is kind of culture and one of your core values. And I think value is something that you can either argue for or against. Mhmm. No one's gonna argue against having a learner in the team, are they?

**Harry Stebbings** [15:38]:

No. I think I think they are. This is a real thing. In fact, every job posting that says you require ten years of experience is arguing against a learner's mindset. Because the way the world works usually is one of two things, When you are young, your intelligence is fluid. You are learning things. When you get older in your career, are now experienced through less learning things, you're now applying your experience. This is a real thing. It is actually perfectly reasonable to say, I do not want learners. I want experienced people who have done things to do it again. I think that's a real and actually actually think in most companies, I think the word learner is a good word, so people use it like free and more freely. But what we mean by learner is we want people who replace experience with the ability to learn a thing from scratch, which means that Shopify on average tends to do things differently than what experienced people would have done.

**Kaz Nejatian** [16:34]:

Are they incompatible? So, like, when I hire for my investing team, I say everyone needs to have invested for five years. Mhmm. Yeah. But I still want someone with a learner's mind. I am forever learning. I don't think they're incompatible.

**Harry Stebbings** [16:46]:

I think it's actually are businesses in which it is easier to make them and not incompatible. Investing is actually one of those businesses. Poker is not one of those businesses. Businesses where when you what your experience gives you is at bats that help you learn better. Like, there are lots of businesses that are that.

**Kaz Nejatian** [17:04]:

I'm sorry. Is is every business that say product management, you release a product. It's a

**Harry Stebbings** [17:08]:

could be like that, but software isn't mostly like that. Like, if you look at like the very large enterprise software companies, they are mostly not about that. Like the thing they value mostly, this is this is a thing I actually used to do. I used to I don't like I no longer do it, but used to literally go on the career page of these companies and search for COBOL, which is an old programming language and like see how many people with COBOL experience they were hiring. And there was always, always like dozens each of them. And you're like, okay, cool. Like, that's okay. It's totally okay to hire people with ten years of experience in X, but you can't tell me someone who has ten years of experience only coding in COBOL is a learner. This is just like a decades old language at this point. I think it's actually very profitable to build a business based on experience rather than learning. In fact, most businesses in the world are based on experience, not 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. But let's be honest, most even growth companies just cosplay as learners. They have a whole bunch of things you're not allowed to say. The whole bunch of companies have, like, these these religious things they believe that you're not allowed to question. And once that exists, we're not learning anymore because the thing you're supposed to learn about, you can't question. And, like, questioning things is how you learn about them.

**Kaz Nejatian** [18:30]:

What about the way or the type of people that Shopify hires would you like to change? So it could be the people yourself. It could be the process. What would you like to change about the way you do it?

**Harry Stebbings** [18:41]:

I mean, I've gone through a few days, Harry, in my life, Shopify. In my first year, I tried to convince our recruiting team to put Shopify's career page behind API. Like, I e, it would not have a UX. Like, you could not go to shopify.com/careers. You just have to literally, like, use the API. My argument back then was if you can't figure out how to do that, you probably shouldn't work in software. It's actually a thing I actually still do a great deal of. Do you think that's an arrogant stance? Sure, man. Of course. I'm glad we didn't do it in hindsight, but to be clear, our goal is not to make it easier for people to work at Shopify. That's not the goal. The goal is to find people who are incredibly mission aligned and care about the thing we do and the way we do it and make sure they have the career of their lives here. It's different. This is a professional sports team. It's not PV soccer. My goal isn't for everyone to play. That's not the goal. Like, I don't want it to make it easy to register and show up and play. I want exceptionally good people who care about this thing to spend their time here, and it's different. Let me give you I mean, we didn't do the API thing, but there's a real thing that is true. Most companies end up with content management systems, right? So their marketers end up with these templates, they create, they type the words in, put the pictures in, like this WYSIWYG thing and then creates a website for them. We don't have that at Shopify. At Shopify, if a marketer wants to create a new landing page, they have to go into GitHub. They have to know how to write some code. They have like, this is a real thing. So our marketers learn how to write some code. We expect people here to be able to be able to do SQL queries. Like, this is a real thing. Like, many of our salespeople write SQL, and this is a real thing. We actually care about this part of the job. Like, we care about the people being here who are the type of people that want to learn new things. Now we'll gladly teach you SQL. We'll gladly teach you how to code, but you need to be able to want to do these things. I I do

**Kaz Nejatian** [20:37]:

wanna touch on on one final important figure, and that is Zuck. You obviously spend time at Facebook or Meta now. What was your biggest takeaway from Zuck, Kaz? Meta

**Harry Stebbings** [20:47]:

and Mark are both underappreciated, like incredibly underappreciated. Mark's ability to understand risk adequately is just probably unparalleled in business history. The guy's ability to like understand what it means take risks is just incredible. And for because of that Meta, have a much higher risk tolerance than most companies. What's the best risk he's taken and what's the worst? I mean, newsfeed. But there's no such thing as like, when you take risks, sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't, and you don't judge the outcome. You judge the process by which you take risks because the outcome doesn't really matter. Like, if the process is good, on average, you'll be right or not in average risk adjusted, you'll be right. But think about News Feed, which is the thing that people think of as Facebook. It did not exist when Facebook launched. Paul Buckeye built it as like Friend Feed and they just bought it and just rebuilt the entire thing. The like button didn't exist. Like, these are substantial changes in a young product that people would never think of doing today. Like, most founders cannot imagine saying, I'm going to change my product by this much. Like, it's just like and this is like very early on. Like, ignore everything else that they've done that has just been amazing. Like, ignore the incredible bet they're taking on ARVR, which I think people mocked and are starting to realize they were wrong about mocking. Ignore what they're doing with Why are they wrong about mocking it? I mean, I think if you have used the new Ray Ban classes, you have seen what the future will look like. It is very clearly how it's going. I think Ray Ban glasses are just like not quite the iPhone moment, but they're like almost the iPhone moment. I think when the next quest comes out, the promise of AR will be real. Imagine the amount of backbone it took to keep investing in this thing and build a new paradigm of computing when everyone was shitting on it. What do you think was the worst bet that he took? The worst decision Meta probably made was not being more publicly celebratory of Mark personally and Meta generally. Because the company was so focused on execution internally, it didn't spend that much time worrying about its reputation externally and essentially allowed a lie to spread about it that has caused it significant pain. I don't think that will matter in the long run to be honest, but in the short run, it's clearly been painful. Right? This has been a real part of like what's happening in much of the world regulatorily is just clearly very misguided, And it's misguided because Meta didn't spend time educating people. And another thing about Meta that is is important to appreciate, more founders have come out of Meta than any other tech company. There was a point at which actually like PayPal asked, but at much bigger scale. There was a point at which you I compared this a few years ago of the number of $100,000,000 companies that have started by x Facebook employees versus x employees of other major tech companies. All of them combined was less than Meta. Wow. Meta's impact on the world will be hard to quantify.

**Kaz Nejatian** [23:40]:

You mentioned there that potential comms challenge that they let slip and let permeate. One thing I thought was fascinating that you said the best PMs have inherent within them is you have to blame yourself for everything. Why do you have to blame yourself for everything, Kaz? And is there ever a time when it's not applicable? I haven't found one yet.

**Harry Stebbings** [23:59]:

What essentially the job is, is to understand and represent the user and the user's best outcome, not best wishes, best outcome for the user given the market you're in. If the user is not better off, only one person could have made the mistake. 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 have the right thing part, but we care about all three. If you were to trade off on one of them, what would you trade off? The right thing, for sure the right thing. People overestimate the importance of what and massively underestimate the importance of importance of how. The people just massively underestimate the importance of how in ways that are just like shocking still. Most people and most software companies spend their time arguing what should we build, but if they really should be arguing where should we build it? Like where in the stack should this thing be built rather than what we should build. Because that's like, if you get that decision, right, you actually can end up building a lot more. This is why by the way, more PMs need to be more technical. I'm not saying all PMs need to write code, but all PMs need to understand how code is written. That's an incredibly important thing in, like, the stack of priorities.

**Kaz Nejatian** [25:18]:

It's funny you said there about kind of most companies spend a lot of time talking about what. I had Gustav, the CPO of Spotify on the show. And he said, you know, talk is cheap, so we should do a lot more of it. And I I still disagree. I believe in dictatorial regimes. I believe in someone having a vision and then executing against it. I think most of the debates, brainstorming, fucking retreats that we do today are not right, actually, and ineffective. Do you agree with me, or do you actually agree that talk is cheap and we should do more of it and communication amongst teams is the best way to build

**Harry Stebbings** [25:54]:

So I actually disagree talk is cheap. Because most people actually miss an like, when they talk about talk is cheap, what they mean is I can say things without that much consequence to me. What they miss is people have to listen to you. So their time spent listening to you is very not cheap. In fact, we have this thing in Shopify where we calculate the cost of every meeting and put it in the meeting invite. I can tell you Talk is very, very not cheap. It's incredibly expensive.

**Kaz Nejatian** [26:20]:

Were you worried when you implemented that that you would then disincentivize meetings that could create moments of magic? Because I agree with you totally, but it almost reminds me of calories on menu, which is like, I get you. If you continuously show me there's 1,200 calories in the apple pie, I'm not gonna eat But that apple pie might have been fucking sensational, and I just missed the moment to be happy.

**Harry Stebbings** [26:41]:

I don't think so, man. I think it's like, obviously, everything has risks. It's plausible we did that, but the way you do things matters more than the outcome. But I actually think it's actually we've been the world is tilting more in our direction. So Shopify, like the thing we want to do is for more things in Shopify to be communicated via words and code written down rather than in live meetings. That's what we want, want tilt the word more that way. Are you sure that the world is going back to what going to your way of thinking? Well, I'm not sure if everyone's doing it, but I'm very sure that the outcome will be more favorable to us. Like if you think about how LLMs work, you need something to train the machine on. And the fact that we are we we had this discussion in paper, we wrote our thoughts down and made an outcome. It's a very good thing for training the machine.

**Kaz Nejatian** [27:30]:

Unbelievable. I totally agree with you. The lost data and, you know, the future of AI is how you work. You know, show you're working at school, and we don't have any of that in in data within companies. I'm just speaking to 10 CEOs a week of billion dollar plus public companies, and they're all saying, dude, it's so much better in person. It's so much better. We're we're all back. I'm trying to

**Harry Stebbings** [27:50]:

I I for what I I think I think being remote is an exceptionally bad idea for most companies. It is really I encourage almost everyone to not do it. The reason it works for Shopify is because we have spent so much time and so much effort building systems and tools and software to make this work. If you go YOLO remote without all the tools we have built, all the teams we have focused on this thing, you will 100 for sure fail. For most companies, they should not do it. It's a bad idea. But, anyway, that's a structurally true Shopify. Like, if you go back and read the early memos on, like, investors in Shopify, they were all like, no one should do this. It's a really bad idea. Serving ecommerce, which everyone thought was a small bit a small TAM opportunity. For small businesses, which everyone thought was, again, gonna decline, insanely high churned. It's a definition when you read zero to one, Peter Thiel's book to, like, have a restaurant. It's very churny. Shopify dedicate its core mission to serving people who are the most churny. They're like a million times more churny than restaurants out of pros. Shopify is very good at this thing where, like, it would be a really bad idea for everyone else, but it's an exceptionally good idea for Shopify. What makes that though? The process with which you approach it? Yeah. I mean, I think I I I honestly think this goes back to Shopify has two core values that are different than most companies, and I know this is like a but think they're actually also embodiment of Tobi, our founder who like is very much like this. The first is like thrive on change. Now thrive on change sounds good, but most companies actually don't wanna thrive on change. Most companies are built such that they do incredibly well in times where there are no change. That's what most companies are. Like, if there's change, most companies are not handled, not built to handle it. Shopify is built such it does better when there's change. When there's dramatic change, Shopify just does better. It's just that's how companies built. So we're like very thrive on changey. The second is this is learner's thing we talked about, whereas like Shopify is built such a normal things take us longer at Shopify than it would take most companies. Let me give you like an example. If you wanna hire a person at a regular company, you go to HR, you give them a like, hey, I have an empty headcount. Please go hire this person for me. As a process, they run through that works. When I got to Shopify, there was no such process. So hiring someone was just a very weird idea to discover, like if from the first time, how do we hire people? It took us longer to hire people than most companies, which means our headcount grew far more slowly than most companies. That's a real downside. Right? If you're if you're optimizing for speed in something, best tax

**Kaz Nejatian** [30:22]:

I don't know. It it reminds me actually of Founders Fund's investment decision making process where they actually say you want to increase the friction to an investment decision being made because it increases the requirements on the decision maker's side to get it done. If you don't have an HR team, you can just throw it over the fence like, oh, shit. I've gotta do it. I've got a source candidates. I've got it. This

**Harry Stebbings** [30:39]:

works for us, really. But for most companies, that amount of ownership would be really hard for people to understand. Right? What

**Kaz Nejatian** [30:45]:

change did Shopify find hardest and what did you learn from that? You said that Shopify actually thrives in change. What change did you not thrive from and what did you learn from that? Two things, going

**Harry Stebbings** [30:55]:

remote was incredibly difficult for Shopify. It took us a very long time to get it right. Honestly, I'll you for the first six to twelve months, it just strip wasn't working.

**Kaz Nejatian** [31:05]:

How so just kept comms breaking down?

**Harry Stebbings** [31:07]:

Yeah. People just Shopify because you know, Shopify went from being incredibly in person. Shopify did not even have co located teams. All teams had to be in the same pod. We went from that to fully remote like that, and none of the cultural things that had made Shopify worked translated. So that change was very difficult. It was just incredibly painful. That was real. And then I mean, there's been other ones that have been, we made a change where Shopify pays people differently than most companies. Like most companies you go to say, hey, here's your salary, here's your equity, here's your bonus structure, whatever. At Shopify, we say, here's a pile of money. Here's a software you can use to allocate that pile to salary, equity, bunch of other things. That change was a very weird change. That change required Shopify to change its equity process because, like, literally, what we wanted to do was illegal in most of Europe. The ability to give people the ability to take options or RSUs or, like, pick between them was just, like, very it actually ended up with Tobi personally writing a crap ton of code to actually make this thing work because it was very painful. Now now that we are through it, you know, at the time was just very painful because it was just people were reasonably worried that like, what the hell is happening here? But now that we're through it, I don't think any company does this as well as we do, but it was very painful.

**Kaz Nejatian** [32:26]:

What are those discussions you have when it's not working? Did you talk about going back to fully in person? Because there's got to be a moment six to nine months in where you're going, shit, did we made the wrong decision? I

**Harry Stebbings** [32:36]:

mean, we

**Kaz Nejatian** [32:36]:

broke the bridges

**Harry Stebbings** [32:37]:

relatively well behind us cause we knew it would be painful. I think if we knew how painful it would be, I don't know if we would have done it. But once we committed to it, we burnt the bridges pretty well behind us. Like we encouraged people to move, gave up our leases in a bunch of places, took the write downs. Like, a lot of companies that went remote during COVID kept their offices pristine, did not give up the leases, did the whole thing so that you had the optionality to go back. We hired people in places that we do nowhere near our offices on purpose. So we made it very difficult for ourselves to go back.

**Kaz Nejatian** [33:10]:

Do you think you make it difficult for yourselves with public markets because of your contrarian stance on remote Yeah. On how you thrive in change, on the way you hire? It's not an easy story for analysts to get their heads around. I think Shopify

**Harry Stebbings** [33:24]:

is insanely difficult to model for analysts. Why? First of all, our business is not a common one. Right? We don't want a CPG. We don't want a traditional SaaS business. Our business is hard to model. Our growth is hard to understand. It's very hard to understand where Shopify's growth comes from and how it shows up for analysts outside, whereas

**Kaz Nejatian** [33:41]:

it's not that hard for me. I'm sorry to be naive, but the show thrives on basic questions. Why is it hard to understand your growth and how do you simply explain your growth to your children or a 10 year old or someone Well, it's not hard

**Harry Stebbings** [33:53]:

to understand where our growth comes from. Our growth comes from people starting businesses and those business succeeding and making lots of money and we share that upside. That's like basically where Shopify's growth comes from. It's not hard to say those words, but it's very hard to model those words. It's very hard for analysts to say, hey, this cohort of Shopify merchants will have an x all birds. In the same way, it's actually difficult for analysts to model VCs. Cause what Shopify is essentially is like we invest in cohorts of startups. Tens of thousands of merchants try to start a business on Shopify and they grow up and some of them become very big and many of them don't, many of them die, some of them become very good lifestyle businesses, which is what

**Kaz Nejatian** [34:29]:

people want or side hustles. And you still make money from them, and it's kind of the portfolio approach. And eventually, get there, you're kinda ones and two axes. I totally get you there. But what you've done is you've realized, hang on a minute. Allbirds is kinda great, but supreme is probably better. And, actually, the older, bigger commerce enterprises are great. And there's been a very clear shift in Shopify's strategy to enterprise into the core existing brands.

**Harry Stebbings** [34:53]:

And we Am I wrong with that? No. I think I think we did it in a very different way than most people think. So I was here at Shopify. I was a person who used to tell enterprises away. 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. We don't sell PowerPoint wear at Shopify. Like, we don't show up at PowerPoint presentations that say, like, look at all the stuff we have, and then not if it works. But we have a product rule called no party tricks. I we don't show you a thing and it's that can work only in very specific instances. If we show you a thing, it can just generally work. So we don't do the party trick thing of look at me doing this one thing, but as soon as you try to do it again, it just fails. So what we take great pride is in selling the type of software we do. But over the last couple of years, it's not like we went upmarket at Shopify. We just kinda like stopped saying no to all the enterprises that wanted to use Shopify. Why? Because the software is now very ready. The product is now very ready for them. Shopify is not a enterprise software company. We build software that enterprises use. And then I think most enterprises that use Shopify appreciate this. We don't build bespoke software. There's no if enterprise line anywhere in Shopify's code base.

**Kaz Nejatian** [36:05]:

But when you have enterprise clients, and again, I'm naive here, so correct me, but you need SOC two, you need levels of compliance, you need permissioning, you need a ton of different product features, which are a pain in the ass and normal smaller businesses wouldn't have. You need customer service, you need customer success at different levels. Uh-huh. And enterprise, it's a different company now. So two

**Harry Stebbings** [36:25]:

things. First, luckily, because the way Shopify has worked is we have billion dollar public companies that start on Shopify on day one. Right? These are massive, massive companies that just start on Shopify. Fashion Nova is a multi billion dollar retailer. Figs is a public, like these are like very large companies that start on Shopify. So we've been able to model the business as they've grown up. So we needed SOC two for Figs to go public. What most people end up doing is doing this the wrong way. They go to SOC two saying, what can I build? And then they build the thing SOC two says you shall build, which is why all enterprise software ends up being shit. Whereas what we had to do, we had to do a first principle, pretend we have this piece of software, we have merchants who needs Sarbanes Oxley compliant because they're going public. How do we, from a first principle, make that work for them? And that means a different software experience. There are many, many, many, many public companies that use Shopify, like many of them. But I'm telling you to them, it just looks different than like an ERP would. It just looks like good software. And I think that's not that that different. Like, look, enterprises use Windows, small business merchants use Windows. Like how you build the operating system matters.

**Kaz Nejatian** [37:36]:

I agree. How you build the operating system matters, which makes me wonder, kind of going back to our core conversation of, like, the internal tools you build, why do you still use Stripe? Because they're exceptionally good at what they do. But it's the one tool that you will take from someone else. No. No. That's not true. And it and it's probably one of the core, the movement of

**Harry Stebbings** [37:55]:

No. No. No. The reason we built internal tooling is because no one has built internal tooling this good and this opinionated that why Shopify wants it to be. Shopify's opinion about how companies should build be built. There's no one else that shares those opinions that can build

**Kaz Nejatian** [38:09]:

external tooling for us. I get you, but by outsourcing that decision making on the future, they could change that perspective. Oh, sure. Yes.

**Harry Stebbings** [38:16]:

And if Stripe and Shopify ever get to a point where like, we don't think about the world the same way, then we'll have a conversation. But Shopify has over 700 payment providers integrated into it. Right? So we have, like, lots of them. Stripe is just by far our biggest partner. We have more payment integration on Shopify than any other software platform in the world. Stripe is just our biggest partner. The Stripe Shopify relationship is likely the most value creating relationship in the history of software. It would have been Intel Microsoft before Intel and Microsoft had divorces too hard a word, but had like the thing they did. Right now it's Stripe and Shopify. These companies were both started when they were both worth single digit millions of dollars. So they started working together and now they're worth more than that. Like that combined value is very, very high. And it's because of each other, We like them, they like us, we're very happy to be their partners. It is not that we can't partner, we partner exceptionally well. It's that we're incredibly opinionated about what good software looks like. And therefore can only partner best with people who also have similar opinions.

**Kaz Nejatian** [39:20]:

I get you. I just when you hear, you know, building for a hundred years Yeah. There is an unknown future from an external party that they could change their perspectives or opinions on the world that is very likely. And then you

**Harry Stebbings** [39:32]:

would do it. But like like, me out, Harry, like, is like the alternative here. Like most software companies grow up in a very zero sum world. Like, they are incredibly jealous of their adjacencies. Most software executives will spend their time thinking which adjacencies can I go to? And that means that like most software companies pick fights they don't need to pick. Like they're incredibly complimentary Shopify, Stripe, Shopify and Affirm, Shopify and Meta, Shopify and Google, Shopify and Apple, like these are incredibly powerful partnerships. We have very deep partnerships with many tech companies and it's not because we're like Switzerland. It's because we are very incredibly aware of what our job is and what other people's job is. Talking to banks, we don't think it's our job. We think it's Stripe's job. What fight do you think you did need to take? We're very, very glad that Shopify type of software won over the Yahoo stores top of shop software. Right? Thanks to Shopify and companies like Shopify. Commerce on the Internet is slightly more weird than it would be if Yahoo stores had one which is like the Paul Graham product. But that was more of like a conflict of visions than it was like a conflict of companies. You know what I mean?

**Kaz Nejatian** [40:40]:

What was the most serious disagreement you and Tobi had? Probably going over remote. He wanted to, you didn't? I mean, he was 100% right. He was 100% right.

**Harry Stebbings** [40:49]:

When was Tobi wrong? It's a very real thing because I think I am wrong so goddamn often, I don't actually attach that much value to my opinion. What ends up happening is I don't really keep track of whose opinion was right at the

**Kaz Nejatian** [41:04]:

end of the day. What is the most underappreciated element of Shopify's product roadmap vision today?

**Harry Stebbings** [41:12]:

I think people under appreciate how broad the product is. Like the surface area of the product is very, very, very big and people under appreciate how massive it is. In that way, is much more similar to an operating system than an application. People under appreciate how Shopify is not really a point solution. And this is part reason of why analysts have a hard time modeling it. It's hard to model that because like you wanna build a bottom up model of something, it's really hard. The use cases of Shopify are incredibly diverse. This is perfectly good for us. Like, we are we we are toolmakers. We are not application builders.

**Kaz Nejatian** [41:48]:

I always remember Tobi talking about companies being worse run than World of Warcraft clans and, you know, the importance of toolmakers in the world. And I always remember that. I do wanna ask, you know, on a more personal side, I've heard you say before you have a hard time not saying things you think are true. I'm actually

**Harry Stebbings** [42:06]:

not

**Kaz Nejatian** [42:06]:

that

**Harry Stebbings** [42:06]:

nervous about saying anything, I believe, because I'm perfectly happy saying Kaz was wrong. I do a post very frequently internally to to whole company saying Kaz's biggest mistakes over the last few months. What was the biggest mistake you posted internally that you did? The biggest mistakes I have made in my career have all been of the same shape unfortunately. I have limited the information flow and made it go through the org chart. All my biggest mistakes are of that shape. The information that someone needed to have didn't get to them because the org chart, like it went up the org chart rather than like dynamically. At most companies, the way it works is I have an idea, I write a note, I tell my boss about it, my boss likes it or doesn't like it and tells his boss about it. And up the chain, the information goes till someone says yes and it comes back down and I do it. That tree, that's a very common pattern. It's true at every company. It's true even at Shopify sometimes. But that's incredibly terrible. Like one of the things I tell my team is to share information publicly and it's perfectly okay for your boss to find out about something at the same time as the whole company. But my biggest mistakes have essentially been when information has gotten to me without being publicly shared, such opposing views haven't gotten their hands on it. Do you really think it is

**Kaz Nejatian** [43:24]:

okay for bosses to find out at the same time as all company? For most information. Yeah. Of course. Sometimes morale needs to be managed. Sometimes you need to control messaging. Sometimes, actually, it could piss off sales to hear that and see. I I I think, actually, you need a lot more control. No. No. This

**Harry Stebbings** [43:40]:

is so some sometimes yes, but those times almost always involve a lawyer. Sure. Sometimes information needs to be managed, but no, no, 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 say things are going well. They people need to see the ups and downs, need to see a decision making, need to build in the open such that they can benefit from information from everyone. This is one of benefits of values is that you only have a value if the opposite of it can also be true. Apple is a company that's very on the opposite side of the spectrum from Shopify on information flow, and Apple is an exceptionally good company. Right? Most people at Apple don't know what other people at Apple are working on.

**Kaz Nejatian** [44:22]:

And so you agree with me when you say you can't have like integrity as a value. Because no one would want a low integrity person.

**Harry Stebbings** [44:29]:

Exactly. 100%. Yeah. It's dumb. Like values need to be things that a reasonable person can take both the other side of. But the way it works for us and for me, that's why I work here, information openly shared from many other sources, people publicly disagreeing or publicly agreeing. It's allowing sunshine to fix things is the best thing. And people being okay saying, hey, I was wrong. Hey, I was right. Hey, that you want to build that collegiality. This is a real thing. I'm I'm not a I'm not an athlete, but if you look at great watch basketball, like if you watch a basketball game, you will see the players are literally always talking to each other. They're always giving each other feedback. You should be here. You weren't there. That's always happening. And that can just not happen if they're all secretive about where they intend to be on the court. This is a very similar thing to companies, and this is like a more or less what everyone else is building. You will never have two versions of one thing. You will always say cool. Let's you and I work together and build this different faith with sits both of us.

**Kaz Nejatian** [45:26]:

Kaz, speaking about alignment, you you write a lot about marriage, which is a Mhmm. Which is a different type of alignment. Again, we're of addressing the the element of disagreement. But when we look at Google, when we look at Amazon, when we look at Microsoft, when we look at Elon Musk and, you know, x and Tesla. And when we then extrapolate that out across everyone worth over a $100,000,000,000, there's a terrible stat that basically, I think it's, like, eighty four percent are divorced. You espouse the value of marriage. The world seems to point the opposite.

**Harry Stebbings** [45:57]:

So first gen generally speaking, it's really terrible to model your life after people who are worth over a $100,000,000,000 because they're just such they're rare. Right? Their circumstances will almost never be your circumstances. I'm not saying you shouldn't desire to be a billionaire if you wanna be. Do you think those divorce rates will be lower in the billionaire range? I don't think that's also a good measure. I think what matters is this. First of all, divorce rates are lower than people think they are. What divorce rates count is a number of divorces. It is just true that people who get divorced frequently get divorced more than once. So there's a there's a there's a distribution, like most first time marriages do not end in divorce, although significant number of second time marriages end up in divorce. Yep. That's true. That's a real thing. Second, the data behind this is undeniable for men, specifically for men, graduate from high school, getting some job experience and getting married in that order as soon as possible of success, including health, wealth, and happiness than any other thing. But we can't find something that is more indicative of future happiness. The odds of bankruptcies go down, the odds of health events goes down. Cancer survival rates for married men is significantly higher than single men. Like there's a real thing about like bankruptcy rates are lower for married men than single men. There's a real thing here that is not You that

**Kaz Nejatian** [47:22]:

marriage is good for downside protection, but a cap for upside maximization.

**Harry Stebbings** [47:27]:

No. I think at any given point in your life, you have to think about When did you get married, Kaz? What age? I got married relatively late. I got married when I was I got engaged when I was 29, married when I was I think 30. It's like layered in like, I think most people in The US would, I'm not American, but most people in North America have gotten married earlier. Look, bad marriages are incredibly bad, but there are things you can do early in life and there are things you can do to make to prepare yourself for a good marriage. And those things are worth doing regardless of getting married or not. And that once you do those things, a good marriage is incredibly useful on every metric we can measure.

**Kaz Nejatian** [48:05]:

Why is it then everyone says, oh God, it's so good when my wife's away or my husband's away because I have time to work and I can focus on myself and I can really concentrate and oh, I sit back and I mean, dude, we're we're both humans. It takes time being in a relationship.

**Harry Stebbings** [48:23]:

Sure. But it takes time to work out. Doesn't mean working out is bad for you. Like it takes time to like work. I mean, is bad for you. There's a real thing here that is for sure there's two things. One, there are lots of things people believe that turn out to be not true. In fact, most human progress has happened because the thing that lots of people believe is true turns out to be not true. So that that lots of people believe it is not an appeal to majority opinion is not a good sign that anything is true or not. Second, I think this is a place where popular culture has misled us greatly. Like it is funny to talk about sure, sometimes information needs to be managed, but no, no, 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. They people need to see the ups and downs, need to see a decision making, need to build in the open such that they can benefit from information from everyone. This is one of benefits of values is that you only have a value if the opposite of it can also be true. Like Apple is a company that's very on the opposite side of the spectrum from Shopify on information flow, and Apple is an exceptionally good company. Right? Most people at Apple don't know what other people at Apple are working on.

**Kaz Nejatian** [49:36]:

And so you agree with me when you say you can't have integrity as a value? Exactly, 100%.

**Harry Stebbings** [49:42]:

It's dumb. Values need to be a seasonal person can take both. It works for us and for me here. Information openly shared from many other sources, people publicly disagreeing or agreeing, like it's allowing sunshine to fix the best thing. And people being okay saying, hey, like that you want to build that. I'm I'm not a I'm not an athlete, but if you look great, you'll see the players are literally all with each other. They're always giving each other feedback. You should be there, like always happening. And that can just happen if they're all secretive about where they Right? Like this is this is a matters more than what you build. If everyone in the company knows more or less what is building, you will never have to think. You will always say, Let's you and I work together and build this different faith.

**Kaz Nejatian** [50:36]:

Kaz, speaking about alignment, you you write a lot about marriage Mhmm. Which is a different type of alignment. Again, we're of addressing the element of disagreement. But when we look at Google, when we look at Amazon, when we look at Microsoft, when we look at Elon Musk and, you know, x and Tesla, and when we then extrapolate that out across everyone worth over a $100,000,000,000, There's a terrible stat that basically, I think it's like eighty four percent are divorced. You espouse the value of marriage, the world seems to point the opposite actually.

**Harry Stebbings** [51:08]:

Also, gen speaking, it's really terrible to model your life after people who are worth over a $100,000,000,000. It's because they're just like what their circumstances will almost be your circumstances. I'm not saying you shouldn't desire to be. Do you think those divorce rates will be lower in the billionaire range? I I I don't think that's also a good measure. I think there's is this. First of all, divorce rates are a little thick they are. What divorce rates count is a numb And it is just true that people who get divorced frequently gets. So there's distributions like most first time marriages do not have a significant number of second time marriage. Yep. That's true. So that's that's a rum. The data behind this is this is this is better for me. I wrote a book about this, but you don't have to read my book. You can academic research. The data behind this is undeniable for men specific graduate from high school, getting some job experience and getting married in that order is more indicative of success, including health, wealth, and happiness than anything. We can't do something that is more indicative of future happiness. The odds of bankruptcies go down, the odds of Ach go down. Cancer for married men is significantly higher than single men. Like there's a real thing about like bankruptcy rates are lower for married men than single men. There's a real thing here that is not You argue that

**Kaz Nejatian** [52:43]:

marriage is good for downside protection, you know, a cap for upside maximization.

**Harry Stebbings** [52:50]:

No. No, I wouldn't. Look, I think at any given point in your life, you have to think about When did you get married, Kaz? What age? I got married relatively late. I got married when I was, I got engaged when I was 29, married when I was I think 30. So like layered in like, I think most people in The US would, I'm not American, but most people in North America have gotten married earlier. So I'm not saying, look, bad marriages are incredibly bad, but there are things you can do early in life and there are things you can do to make to prepare yourself for a good marriage. And those things are worth doing regardless of getting married or not. And that once you do those things, like a good marriage is incredibly useful on every metric we can measure. Like there are very few.

**Kaz Nejatian** [53:45]:

Why why is it then everyone says, oh, gosh. It's so good when my wife's away or my husband's away because I have time to work and I can focus on myself and I can really concentrate. And oh, I think back and I mean, dude, we're both humans. It takes time being in a relationship. Sure,

**Harry Stebbings** [54:05]:

but it takes time to work out. Doesn't mean working out is bad for you. Like it takes time to like work. I mean, work is bad for you. There's a real thing here that is for sure, there's two things. One, there are lots of things people believe that turn out to be not true. In fact, most human progress has happened because the thing that lots of people believe is true turns out to be not true. So that lots of people believe it is not like an appeal to majority opinion is not a good sign that anything is true or not. That's all. Second, I think this is a place where popular culture has misled us greatly where, look, I admit it is just like, it is funny to talk about, you know, oh, my wife is gone, I can finally have fun. It's just funny, but I'm telling you the most fun I have in my days.

**Kaz Nejatian** [54:59]:

What do you know about marriage now that you wish you'd known when you got married? That's a really good question. It's a wonderful question

**Harry Stebbings** [55:05]:

that when you are married, there are three parties you need to care about, not two. It's you, your wife, and the marriage. Like there's three entities that you need to care about, and all of them need to be independently cared about. You take care of yourself, you take care of your wife, and take care of your marriage. And those are three different things. And if you think about that, what ends up happening is that every once in a while, you realize that you're taking care of yourself and your wife, but not the marriage. And that's incredibly important. Like my wife and I, like, look, we have four kids. We have four young kids. We have date nights almost every week because we value taking care of the marriage.

**Kaz Nejatian** [55:41]:

Listen, I've loved doing this. Should we do a quick fire round? Sure, man. What is the best and the worst incumbent to hire leaders from? The reason I say this, I was walking around the park with a public company CEO, and he said, never hire leaders from Google. They're terrible to ingest into your company. Who are the best and who are the worst to hire from? That's

**Harry Stebbings** [55:59]:

actually interesting. I have found that hiring people from Meta generally has worked out very well for most people because just as a training program, it's just exceptionally good. Worst, I don't know if there is one generic horse, but industry switching is very difficult. Hiring marketers who are not from software into software generally doesn't work out. Hiring hiring finance people who are not in software and software generally doesn't work out. So industry switching is very difficult. Okay. What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months? I changed my mind about the gold standard. Like, I used to be I used to mock it openly, and I now think I was wrong.

**Kaz Nejatian** [56:38]:

What character trait do you like in yourself, but you wouldn't want your kids to have it?

**Harry Stebbings** [56:43]:

I'm a hacker. I'm a hacker's hacker. Like, I grew up hacking things. And my five year old son the other day found a way to get his password for his iPad, for his time on his iPad. At first, I'm like, I'm so proud of him for hacking the system. But like about thirty seconds ago, I'm like, oh no, my son has unlimited access to an iPad. So that

**Kaz Nejatian** [57:05]:

that has been hard. What one piece of advice would you give to a product leader starting a new role?

**Harry Stebbings** [57:10]:

Optimize for at bats. Optimize your first few years in your career for shipping as many things as possible rather than career progression. Will Camilla win? I'm not American, so I don't spend that much of my time caring, to be honest. Do you not get absorbed in the politics and the Twitter? No. Not not really, to be honest. I I find I follow a bunch of like like think tanks from across the political spectrum. And I'm like a capitalist at heart and love the free market and liberty for all. I find that you are better off following political news as though it is not a horse race. So check-in once a week rather than once a day. Because if you check once a day, it just becomes kinda like useless.

**Kaz Nejatian** [57:54]:

The final one for you. What recent company product strategy have you been most impressed by?

**Harry Stebbings** [57:58]:

I'll give you two. Everyone will say Microsoft Microsoft and OpenAI because that's just like what they have done to search is just like scrap admirable. But I'll give you a different one, outside software. I think what ExxonMobil has done is just to be admired from the outside. This old traditional company, their business isn't that complicated theoretically. I think their profits were up about a 160. Unheard of in this world, right? Like it's a real thing. They've essentially done it by like getting off by the production. They're getting a lot more at our assets than people think they would. And they placed themselves in a position to benefit from surge in travel post COVID that I think everyone kind of underappreciated. It's actually real. So if you think about The US produced more crude oil in 2023 than it had ever before. These companies have gotten very good optimizing for production in ways that it's just like very impressive. I think Canva's is incredible. Oh yeah, yes, 100%. Not just Canva for its worth, the way Canva builds is to be admired. The product is just beautiful. My third one would be Figma. Not that many company can survive what happened to Figma. Companies that usually like usually mergers that fall apart or acquisitions that fall apart end up with in a really bad place because companies just typically have checked out by the time the acquisition happens. Figma is thriving. And I think they're thriving because when the acquisition happened, they decided that they were going to pretend as though it had not happened. They kept the pace of innovation and they kept shipping product, which I think is actually a very risky thing to do as a company because usually the acquisition happens, you have to undo all of it, but it worked out well for them.

**Kaz Nejatian** [59:52]:

Kaz, listen, I so appreciate you putting up with my roaming between conversations on children, product, and org design. And so you've been a fantastic guest, and thank you so much for doing this, man. Dude, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. That was so much fun to do. I absolutely loved having Kaz on the show, and you can watch that full episode on

**Unknown** [60:10]:

YouTube by searching for 20 VC. That's two zero VC. But before we leave you today,

## Sponsor read

**Unknown** [60:15]:

ever wondered what your customers actually do? The team over at They Do have been living it for decades, and they have recently built a product that is frankly enabling the world's biggest businesses to literally know what they do. Harnessing journey mining with AI, you can turn unstructured data into structured customer journeys in minutes, saving weeks of work and months of analysis. They do journey management platform is already helping over 100 leading businesses, including Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Royal London, and Home Depot to know what they do. Don't waste another step. Check out theydo.com. But before we continue, let me tell you about OneSchema. OneSchema is the embeddable CSV importer that will save your team months of development time. While building a basic CSV importer may seem simple, product teams typically spend over three to six months building and rebuilding their CSV import experiences. Why? Customer files are full of unexpected formats for dates, numbers, and addresses, and your first pass at building an importer never has all the edge cases handled. Failed imports lead to unhappy customers and endless emails and tickets for your support and engineering teams. Enter OneSchema with the largest library of prebuilt validations and intelligent transforms. OneSchema helps you launch a guided CSV import experience in just thirty minutes. Get your customers to the value of your product in minutes and say goodbye to frustrating messages like import error online 53. With over four x faster performance compared with alternatives, it's clear why OneSchema is the choice for top startups like Ramp, Scale AI, and Pave to streamline their CSV import process. Importing clean customer data into your product is easier than ever. Learn more by visiting 1schema.com/twenty. And finally, we need to talk about Pendo. A really simple way to describe Pendo's value is to simply say, get your users to do what you want them to do. What is Pendo? The only all in one product experience platform for any type of application. What are the features that make Pendo so awesome? Pendo's differentiation is in its platform. Every capability from analytics to in app guidance to session replay, mobile feedback management, and road mapping are all purpose built to work together. What is the social validity? 10,000 companies use Pendo, and we also manage Mind the Product, the world's largest community of product management professionals. Where do we want to drive people? Give it a try and visit pendo.io/20product-podcast to learn how your team can use Pendo to start building better digital experiences. There, you can also check out Pendo's lineup of free certification courses, twelve hours of in-depth training for your product management teams on topics from AI to product analytics to product led growth.

**Kaz Nejatian** [62:55]:

As always, I so appreciate all your support, and stay tuned for an incredible 20 VC with Capital g's managing partner, Layla Sturdy, this coming Friday.