when you have teams naturally break up the world into different finnal stages or different points in the journey it gets very seductive to look at my part of the funnel and what's my conversion rate through that part of the funnel right and then the team starts to optimize for that conversion rate as
their Northstar but in practice it's actually almost always easier to just make it harder to do the thing right before your step in the funnel to increase your conversion rate instead of I'm trying to convert a bunch of people I just want more people to get activated and then once you start thinking that
way you realize actually the best way to get more people to get to a step is just get more people in the door in the first place that will always hurt your conversion rate but it may actually give you more people on the [Music] outside today my guest is Archie Abrams Archie is vpf product and head of growth
at Shopify where he leads an org of over 600 people across product design engineering data Ops and growth marketing Shopify is both an incredibly unique and also an incredibly successful business and they do things very differently and as a result there's a lot that we can learn from how they
approach Building Product and driving growth some examples include their priorities and product road map are driven by a hundred-year vision that comes from Toby the CEO and the core product teams don't have metrics or kpis they're essentially banned and instead decisions are made based on taste and
intuition and building towards this long-term vision also the growth team optimizes for turn which is unlike any other company I've ever come across and once you hear why this will make a lot of sense also they keep long-term holdouts for every experiment they run and they automatically look at the
impact these experiments have had on the business a year later 2 years later and 3 years later and then revisit these decisions down the road and in our conversation we dig into all of this plus how Shopify organizes their grow team how they run experiments how the grow team collaborates with the product
team how they measure impact plus Archie shares a bunch of very specific and interesting examples of changes that have driven growth for the business and so much more this is such a fascinating conversation and I know this will give you a lot to think about in terms of how you run and organize your own product
and grow teams if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you our Abrams Archie thank you so much for
being here welcome to the podcast thanks Lenny excited to be here okay so what I want to do with our time together is to basically do kind of a a living archaeology of how Shopify grows and what you specifically have learned about growing a company like Shopify into this just Juggernaut of a business that it's
turned into to give people a little bit of a sense of just like how large Shopify is gten to maybe surprise them about the scale of this company at this point can you share some stats that uh about the scale of the business at this point yeah absolutely so overall we're about 10% of of e-commerce in the United
States so basically if you're not buying you know on Amazon or Walmart you're probably buying on a a Shopify powered store and behind the scenes globally we did about 235 billion in gmv in 2023 which is roughly the size of the economy of Finland so we got a big big economy and big impact happening from
Shopify wow uh I think interestingly with Shopify it's kind of this behind the scenes tool and so I imagine many people have no idea they're using Shopify a lot of the time when they're buying stuff online and I think some of these numbers kind of creep up on people just how large a company like Shopify is
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been the go-to tool for teams who want to find insights in customer calls user interviews or documents now they've stepped it up with the release of dovetail 3.0 that's three new products and a ton of AI features that make it faster and easier than ever before to truly get at the heart of what your
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participants directly in duvail all this is just the tip of the iceberg duvail wants to give everyone in the organization instant access to their customers at any time from road maps to Discovery to strategy sessions and more it's never been easier to make customer Centric decisions the good news is
Lenny's listeners can try dovetails Pro Plan along with their newest products and features free for 30 days just go to Dov tale.com Lenny I want to start with something that I think is most unique from what I've heard and I think there's going to be a lot of really unique approaches to
how you all think about growth uh one of the most interesting things I've heard is that how you think about ch and retention to most companies the most important thing is to increase retention reduce turn my sense or my understanding is you guys are kind of the opposite you one don't think tons about churn you almost
optimize for churn talk about that how does that work the way we think about CH is really going back to Shopify as a kind of our mission and what we want to do which is to increase the amount of Entrepreneurship on the on the internet and so as a business we want to make it as easy as possible to get started with
with your online store with your business but most businesses do do ultimately fail and so the way we we look at it is can we lower the barriers to getting started and get as many people in the door trying their hand at entrepreneurship if we do that again many of those businesses many those
folks will maybe on their first attempt not be as successful but we're going to have a set of merch Merchants who go on to become extremely big businesses the Alberts of the world figs Etc 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 success so in a given cohort of merchants a lot of people will start some of those people on their first attempt as entrepreneurship might not succeed but the folks who do go on to be successful will kind of make that entire cohort of
merchants who started something that makes Shopify as a business extremely successful that's why we lower the barriers to get started and help folks grow and those winners make the whole thing work I love that so kind of what I'm hearing is it's it's not that you don't want people to stick around you
don't want people it's not that you don't want people to succeed it's that you're not optimizing every new shop for sticking around long term it's basically make it as easy as possible for people to try it and all you need is a few big wins for it to all work out correct and and that's really kind of a different
Insight than most SAS companies that you know they get a comp customer they really never want that person to leave and we want to lower that barriers to get started and be successful one of the main reasons companies Focus so much on turn and retention is because it costs them a lot of money to drive new
customers and users I imagine there's an almost an implied it's really cheap for you all to find new customers because of maybe the brand and word of mouth is that is that true I think that definitely has some Dynamics I think the bigger factor is the monetization model for most SAS companies they're making
from a subscription right they're pay you know 29 bucks a month is the only way that they're going to really monetize whereas our business works you have a folks who are paying a subscription but as folks get bigger because we're monetizing on that gmv that that Merchant is producing the
revenue the merchant is producing in the form of payments and other services it allows us to grow with the merchant in those really successful Merchants make the whole system work well got it so basically your net dollar retention or net revenue retention is just absurd for the winners and it makes
up for all the losers slash not losers people that have tried to build an online try triy and haven't been first discussed and you think of the the other parallel is you know an Angel Investing right most of Angel Investments are not going to work out but the couple that do make that entire investment uh kind a
portfolio successful with retention uh not being the primary goal and the metric you guys focus on optimizing how do you know if you're doing well is it some number of these winners have to come out every quarter of a year how do you think about progress and and achieving and and
success basically for for growth just let us thinking about a cord of users we we we acquire in a given time period say a quarter and then over the next year two years three years four years 5 years how much gmv has have those Merchants produced in total not on a per Merchant
basis that's but in total did that cohort generate gmv and if they generate gmv that will translate into revenue and gross profit and all of those things that we can use to reinvest in growing the business so it's really looking at the total value but on that gmv basis and gmv is a power law-based metric and
so it's really that power law that drives the success of each cohort again going back to investing same thing there each vintage from a fund how much that return kind of as a fund and it's really driven by the few the few really uh successful outliners so this begs the question that sounds like a very long
feedback loop and I don't know what I do with that information five years from now oh okay that was a really good idea we did five years ago correct comment on that because it touches on something you said about how metrics aren't actually a driver of how you all think at Shopify
so take that wherever you want to go yeah so it's it's interesting on I think Shopify we kind of very purposely set up different parts of the org to think on very different time Horizons and with very different ways of thinking about how to build product and the like very different than a lot of companies that
typically have maybe one kind of unified there's one North Star that the entire company is rallying around and so there's three major product groups that Shopify there's core product which is basically building the hundred-year the right things for Commerce 100 years from now there is merchant services which is
building things like payments shipping kind of the tools that entrepreneurs need to be successful with a more kind of shorter medium-term Horizon and then growth is really thinking about kind of that end to end customer Journey how can we bring folks on and make sure they're successful and then from a metric
standpoint we do have some obviously some leading indicators and growth that we're looking at on a given experiment or or what have you but the key and what we tried to instrument in our experimentation is the ability to really look at long-term effects of of experiments so we've constantly will
relook at an experiment a year later see that the way the gmv curve for the distribution was different than we might have originally thought and that actually change what we do with from that previous experiment and so there's a lot of long-term monitoring of experiments over these very long time Horizons to
both inform what those input metrics are more importantly hold ourselves accountable to did we actually move what we cared about which is that long-term gmv in the right way wow okay I want to spend more time here so you the way you're describing it is the way the business operates is you think what is
our hundred-year plan how do we think where does this need to be in a 100 years and with that it allows you to run these long hold out kind of hold that experiments to see is something we're doing impacting the business broadly and and because you think so long term you can take a year
or two or three to see if there's an impact and then make adjustments versus you know having to drive a certain metric every quarter every a year correct and I mean on on growth we're definitely in the you know we want to drive metrics on a short-term basis and we can do that obviously um but we we we
have the the luxury and just the way kind of Toby kind of thinks about the world the way we operate to really think about these long-term effects and make sure that we're holding ourselves accountable with these long-term holdouts and then constantly refining the input metrics that we're using and
getting a lot smarter uh about that but because we take that long Horizon it allows us to be better in the short term and and just get a lot smaller and a lot of counterintuitive things and I would encourage everyone if you can look at some of the experiments that you thought were your biggest winners look at the
down tree 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 a year because where people just make a call at a certain point in time here's the left and it's here's experience I love this because very few
people have experiences running a a long-term experiment and so this is a really interesting Insight that you're sharing that I guess uh how often do you find this to be true in your long-term hold thats where things end up being very different down down Downstream I think there's there's probably two
things that have been very common and I would say in quite a few cases you get a short you get a lift on the a metric up front a more short-term metric number of people who become a paying shop or number of people make their first sale in Shopify and then you look a year later and there's actually no
incremental lift on gmv from that cohort and so I think it like actually trains a lot of us in in growth are looking at these short-term metrics like a lot of the time it is actually more P for effect than you fully fully realize or an incremental user that's just really not worth that much so that's one and
then two the so this effect size goes away there are cases where the experiment has flipped the other way and then there are cases and these are the most interesting ones where you realize that you uncovered a pocket of merchants that are actually extremely valuable entrepreneurs who go on to be
successful that you missed in your your kind of normal short-term uh measurement techniques and so kind of all across the board we see that but actually the most common is it actually isn't a long-term lift from a lot of things that you might think in the short term R is there an
example in that second bucket of what you mean when you say there's like a pocket of valuable Merchants yeah I think a lot of this has to do with um we call monetary friction right so one of the the hardest things to do with the business is when you're getting started is you might not have any Revenue coming
in right and and you're kind of bootstrapping which in Shy's case might be 39 bucks a month but it's still it's a real expense and so typically when you can lower the barriers to monetary friction in some form that could be all sorts of monetary friction early the common belief is that we'll usually get
lower quality folks coming in the door because usually discounts are associated with lower quality 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 because I've given you a little bit more time to try that idea a little bit longer I've given you that opportunity to move your business over to Shopify and so often in those types of experiments you see that you've basically unlocked a class of people who might have given up without that
monetary reducing that monetary friction interesting and giving them time to actually make it work to make it work okay so uh just roughly do you you have a sense of how often you find no effect after a year that you saw early impact just to ball yeah it's probably in the it's it's in the 30 to 40% range okay
like I think you're tearing the heart out of so many growth people right now and nobody wants to hear this that works on growth where you're saying potentially a third of the experiments they're running today that are showing lft probably don't have that same don't have any impact down the road yes
unfortunately I think that's brutal probably more common than we like to we like to believe yes and that's gonna nobody wants to hear this uh except except people that you know you should want to hear this because if you want to build a business that grows and correct continues to grow it's better to to
learn that now yeah okay uh so for people that can't run long hold out experiments I guess is there anything that you find as a good early indicator that that might be the case because most people don't have time to sit around and wait a year or two or three they're not thinking a 100 years I
mean I think end of the day that is going to be the most effective and you actually lure the most I I think it is though even in shorter term Horizons um really being as specific as you can be about what are the the early signs of of success in your product and making sure you instrument those and then
making sure particularly kind of up funnel experiments you are actually looking at those the further Downstream metrics to make sure you have some understanding of of what's moving down so as deep as you can go in the funnel for as long as you can wait do that and if you can't you know what I would say
still you should just bet on 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 so it's like two things here is like don't like my recommendation to folks is don't think oh my goodness I have to
wait all this time is that is your if you didn't move the upper the short-term impact you're not going to have the long-term lift so still ship if it's short-term lift just be reasonable that if you can do measure it longer term you'll get better about identifying what things are that are really impactful got
it and so so it may be positive initially but often neutral rarely is it neutral initially and then positive down the road we've seen we've seen there are some EV there are some cases of that but it's rarely I've seen neutral be positive but I haven't seen negative got it okay so result in positive got it
okay that's so that's reassuring it's not you're not harming the business you're not harming the business but you're probably getting a lot more credit than you deserve as a grow team shipping things that likely likely yes likely and there's there's also just like trade-offs to like moving on you
know and on balance this should you're probably doing good things if you continue to ship things that are showing positive right 100% okay this is awesome okay uh for people that want to run long-term hold out experiments I imagine you've built your own experimentation system internally yeah we have yeah and
is it basically you hold out 10% say it was some percentage of users from seeing the new change is that how you approach it or is there a different way of approach two things we to we have two layers of of holdouts so one is the like more the holdouts of like every change in a
quarter hold out 5% across the board second is for changes that only affect new Merchants what we'll do is we'll take that group of folks that's called 50-50 split and then run that for you know a few weeks and then what we're doing at the long-term effects is we actually ship the winner to 100% but
we're looking at the uh the cohort of folks who was in assigned to the experiment were going back and looking at those people who were assigned a year later so it allows us to still ship get stuff out but we've kind of held the experiment in a way that um allows us to see those those longterm respects just
for the cohort that was exposed Now it only works if you're doing it on new users for existing it's a little more complicated um that's okay and then in our experimentation tools all experimenters are paying at three months months 9 months 12 months with here the updated results so you can't really get hide
from what did this really result in over a longer term Horizon so tool emails everyone that's involved with the experiment of like here's what this cohort is doing now correct I love that okay that's awesome it's interesting they use kind of these cohort curves for gmv and is that the core metric you look
at to see there's a few gmv um obviously gross profit um but those but gmv is kind of like the you know a key key determinant of longterm success so it's interesting most people use cohort retention curves you're using cohort because you don't look at retention you're looking at for gmv over time so
that's really interesting gmv over time which correlates better there there's a retention and profit and then really like the absolute um number of merchants who are on the platform and then reaching certain G got it okay uh I'm going to I'm going to knock keep following this path because there's we
can go on and on while we're in the topic of just experiments and what you've done I'm curious if there's just any examples of big wins that your team has shipped that might inspire people as they're thinking about launching experiments I know there's probably some trade secret stuff
you don't want competitors to know and I know this is particular to Shopify and a platform in e-commerce but I guess is there anything that would be worth sharing of like oh here's a huge win that maybe we didn't expect going back there's there's always a lot of value in thinking through um kind of monetary friction as I
mentioned like that's always going to be something to to explore trial Dynamics different types of incentives all those things are are very kind of impactful I would say on things that are maybe more like practical and and for everyone there's an enormous amount and we do see
these with long-term effects but just the nuts and bolts of sign up collecting the right information and you usually want to collect more information than than most people think you do in your signup flow if you can then leverage that to personalize the guidance and this is for SAS product the guidance
that someone can get when they onboard into Shopify so whether you're coming on Shopify is a very diverse product iners selling online selling different channels there's the nuts and bolts of get more information from folks build trust in there give them right amount of guidance when they come out in a
personalized way and that may sound like okay that's kind of obvious but the amount of impact by just nailing those flows has never ceased to to amaze me and setting up that person for long-term success um so kind of Mt friction and then just really good onboarding personalization a well of of
opportunities there I love that onboarding comes up every time I ask anyone where they've seen ongoing success and opportunities particularly in actually surprisingly driving retention like it's interesting that that's not what you look at but turns out that's one of the biggest levers for
increasing retention uh interesting that even for a company doesn't look at retention that's a big opportunity yes yeah it's really because it's setting people up for shi's case I think the big thing about um all of our metrics is what we get very nervous about is the easiest way to increase retention is
always to constrict the funnel stage one above the retention metric you're trying to optimize for the simplest way to increase my sign up to activate thing is just make it harder to sign up right like nothing and both that will always happen is when you have teams on that kind of like local conversion rates you
kind of get all these weird team incentives because they're optimizing to basically implicitly make it harder to do the step before them and because we focus on that long-term gmv number emergency are successful 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 the right thing in terms of getting people set up versus do the I'm going to constrict the top the funnel step right before me to make my local conversion rate look
better which is the bane of my existence but something I I see a lot of teams like implicitly or or explicit do when they when they get too focused on rates as a way to the world what a power incentiv what a power what a lever I definitely want to chat a little bit more about metrics I know you have a
really interesting take that's kind of built on what you're just talking about but first of all you mentioned this term monetary friction as one of the levers that you've seen success with can you just describe what that actually means totally so things like trial trial Dynamics trial length trial amount it
means you know incentives so what is in your product what do people um value and need in order to be successful so in Shop's case that might be like app store credits or things like that um but those are the two forms of monetary friction we we talk about and then of course
actual price point but that's what kind of the larger bucket monetary friction is so let's follow as thread of metrics you're big on absolute numbers you've and you've been talking about this already versus like percentages and ratios talk about that and how you encourage your teams to think about met
yeah I think one of the things that I think happens particularly in a large sh scories about 600 folks like when you have teams naturally break up the world into different funnel stages or different points in the journey it gets very seductive to look at my part of the funnel and what's my conversion rate
through that part of the funnel right and then the team starts to optimize for that conversion rate as their Northstar over a longer time period I'm going to try to move my conversion rate from 10 to 12% or or what have you but in practice you talked about like it's actually almost always easier to just
make it harder to do the thing right before your step in the funnel to increase your conversion rate if I make it harder to sign up it's going to be very easy to increase sign up to activated rate because I just have fewer people and the people made it through are higher intent and so I see teams get
really stuck when they like are trying trying to optimize conversion rate but they just make it harder to do the previous Thing versus everyone is thinking about absolute number of people who made it through their quote stage of the funnel so instead of I'm trying to convert a bunch of people uh a
conversion rate I just want more people to get activated and then once you start thinking that way you realize actually the best way to get more people to get to a step sometimes and often it just get more people in the door in the first place so make it easier to sign up or reduce friction it's the opposite right
and so like because that will that will always hurt your conversion rate but it may actually give you more people on the outside 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 have more people through the door um getting to each point in the activation or the the immersion Journey what I'm hearing is essentially teams are gold not on increase lift lift this conversion step by some percentage it's Drive some
incremental absolute number of new Merchants potentially Merchants exactly um this a good segue to I want to hear how you structure your growth team at Shopify like essentially what's the r structure what are the different teams and what do they focus on and then what are like the functions within each teams
we have two big uh groups within within growth so one is we call growth R&D so this might be you're traditionally consider like product design engineering data your traditional product teams then we have growth marketing which in shopi cases paid acquisition kind media buying
affiliate marketing email content and SEO so that's kind of like growth R&D growth marketing within growth R&D three uh three pillars one is what we call growth products and so this is basically everything from kind of landing pages sign up onboarding monetization so trial incentives the like all the way through to home our
what we call our home feed our engagement to basically get more Merchants again to retain but to give keep giving entrepreneurship a try to become bigger and bigger businesses so that's growth product kind have the full life cycle there second is what we call our ad pillar and this pillar is
building tools for both growth and the rest of Shopify so things like experimentation platform or communication platform of our business intelligence tooling that that powers a lot of what we're doing our mtech work to support our growth marketing team and then our third bucket which is maybe a
little different for most growth teams is actually our customer support group sits within growth because we want to think about customer support as part of this Merchant journey of coming on giving entrepreneurship a try all the way through to here's the support I need as I'm becoming a you know multi-billion
Dollar business on Shopify so those are the like the three big growth product buckets and then within growth marketing it's a more traditional Channel setup paid all the different channels online offline SEO email and Affiliates super cool okay so within growth R&D I just took notes I'm going
to summarize what you just Shar which is awesome so there's kind of three big buckets one is growth product which essentially is like onboarding feels like it's like the top of funnel get people uh in well okay so growth marketing feels like that's super top funnel bring super topel yeah cor okay
got it so growth marketing drive people to shopify.com then correct growth within R&D team growth product takes that user and tries to get them to activated enable helps it feels like that's like internal tooling and ways to make the teams internally more efficient correct both growth outside growth
awesome okay and then the uh customer support team that's really interesting so there's a customer support product team that helps new Merchants be successful and does that include like actual customer support agents is that like within that team that's not we build a toing to make those support advisers kind of
superheroes and then on the The Help Center all of our AI stuff uh to make kind of a a great customer experience for people who are just engaging in a self- serve so it's the tooling and the experience for for merchants okay so with these teams is there anything you can share about just like how you think
about metrics goals for these different buckets we don't need to go too deeply but just does everyone basically have like an absolute new Merchants goal or is it a little different so yeah so you know at the the highest level we think about that that total cohort value right we bring in a set of merchants in a
given year how much gmv how much those set of merchants worth um over the next three four years to Shopify right and that's that's the most important thing that we want to focus on and then that of course the for an efficiency standpoint that of course meeting our our payback guard rails and and all that
so that's kind of like the the macro growth perspective cohort value over kind of cost and and payback that that's the macro point of view and then within grow marketing now each Channel operates with certain guard rails around their LTV cacs same thing for content and SEO that operates with
kind of a guardrail model for each piece of content how much is that going to come back and and and down the line for growth products it's a also a combination of total GP incremental uh coort value that's produced from those those teams right so everything is basically going to be measured on from
from an experiment ideally measured over a very long time period what was the incremental coort value lift that this this generated and and that that's how we think about it kind of measure the impact of each of those those sub teams along the way each of those have a specific part of the funnel they play
with but because they're measure on absolutes and they really think about that absolute value we don't get caught into like did your conversion rate over the course of this year go up or down it's kind of irrelevant what was the sum of the impact over a long period on that
total cohort value we're trying to produce from for four merchants and the way you come up with this goal I imagine is you have a forecast of where things would go organically and then like here's the lift we want to see from the work this team does this quarter this year correct um and and then we're going
to measure against for each experiment did it actually get to where we we expect that LIF to be and those experiments again are those all long-term hold that experiments where you look wait a year or some you okay we call We call we call the experiment after 3 weeks but in all cases the group
is held we watch them and that's where that ping comes back every experiment is watched and that ping comes back three six months 12 months to relook at was this actually successful Okay cool so that creates the loop of shipping value quickly but making sure we're holding ourselves accountable to did this
actually produce results over a long period or did it actually just have this neutral effect like go then we can learn from that and get better this episode is brought to you by dovetail the AI first customer insights hub for all teams duvail has always been the go-to tool for teams who want to
find insights in customer calls user interviews or documents now they've stepped it up with the release of dovetail 3.0 that's three new products and a ton of AI features that make it faster and easier than ever before to truly get at the heart of what your customers want you can get a real-time pulse on what your customers are
thinking with Dov Tail's automated feedback analysis platform channels or pull summaries and insights from every customer interaction your team has ever had with their AI chatbot ask duvail you can even recruit from over 3 million participants directly in duvail all this is just the tip of the iceberg duvail
wants to give everyone in the organization instant access to their customers at any time from road maps Discovery to strategy sessions and more it's never been easier to make customer Centric decisions the good news is Lenny's listeners can try duft Tail's Pro Plan along with their newest
products and features free for 30 days just go to Dov tale.com Lenny so maybe just to dig into this again because it's so interesting basically product teams ship stuff they run an experiment they see impact say it's 5% lift on something ha huzzah you did it great work performance review up
year exceeds you're doing great this team's killing it and then a year later you realize oh that didn't that didn't last how often do you find like a team that is shipping wins looks back and ends up seeing like oh that wasn't actually as successful as I I know you said like maybe it's like a third of the
time 30 yeah yeah okay so it's still like roughly yeah and it's great learning and that's why we take it it's like wow okay now we we really uncovered something it's like such a successful Discovery wow okay we thought this thing but now now we learned it actually wasn't as true as we thought cool what
what can we take from that and be smarter next time so we don't just double down on the wrong the wrong things it's so interesting and again and you mentioned most of the reason this is the case when something doesn't show lift down the road is it's pulling forward success that would
have been seen later on its own if you had not even Shi this thing correct awesome is there an example by any chance that comes to mind of something like that that's just like wow that was a big win and then like oh I see we just pulled forward some some revenue from the future yeah so I think one one good
example is something around payment failure notification so one of the things that a lot of teams have or see is called Dunning effects where somebody might have a payment uh not go through credit card that doesn't go through so we we did a bunch of experimentation around hey how can we alert people that
their credit card is failed their payment uh attempt failed and that's a typical kind of growth win usually produces a lot of short-term impact and that's what we saw here 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 6 12 months there was really no long-term LIF and why is that is there's really a little bit of a selection bias there the people who are letting that that payment fail probably weren't actually that dedicated to this entrepreneurship craft they may have updated their credit card
but they they still really weren't in it and so that was a good example of and a bunch of this stuff around kind of payments even quote PR churn where you look like a 6 12 18 months on a gmv metric not a lot of lift um over that longterm Horizon I love this example like I could see so many
people having run experiments like this and like oh we found such a huge win woohoo the seems killing it what a great idea of course this makes sense duh and then turns out it's nothing long term yeah which is great because we were because we were spending you know we were going to spend a a lot of time kind
okay what else can we do here spent it's like no actually bigger frish to fry in some in a lot of other areas so just it helps the team just feel really good that their their work is really the things that um that uh that were good you know another one that that went the other way um which was really
interesting was in our online store and this might be be Shopify have sections and blocks that come come preconfigured um and so we tested okay if we if we give you a preconfigured block of like you should have an image up top then a text banner and then a collage with your phot um products that
should help folks um understand what to do when they're building the online store it actually had no lift in people converting to uh a paying Merchant however when we looked longer term on that six months later it had a pretty massive impact on the number of people who were selling and producing
gmv and why is that because it didn't likely really influence anyone to like buy Shopify or pay for Shopify but the people who who used it created better stores that were higher converting and so they got early sales but they actually converted one of their their visitors and they got momentum and
they stuck with entrepreneurship a little bit longer and we saw that in that opposite way and so this is an example where that neutral it's why we tend to ship neutral it's like it could be positive and so let's like Let It Go if we have good intuition about it and it will turn so we've seen a bunch of
these things go very different directions this is so fascinating I didn't realize that you ship neutral experiments that's an interesting Insight so it's like if you feel good about it and it's neutral you ship it in our in our culture of the kind of like aim kind of aim heavy if the intuition is right that this
probably is helping Merchants why do we start with that the original control was better if it's neutral let start with like what would we have shipped if we were blank slate and if it's neutral actually neither is better so let's just pick the one we feel better about and ship that makes so
much sense oh man okay so let's talk about this a little bit more so this aim heavy concept this idea of thinking a hundred years out can you just share more about just that Insight in that philosophy I know it sounds like it comes from Toby of how he likes to think about the business totally this is all
come you know it's all Toby of really making sure shoply is so oriented around we are here to build a 100-year company and so the decisions we're going to make are really oriented towards the long-term success of of merchants of Shopify you know embedded in all of our principles are make the best product in
the world make money to do more of one never reverse principles two and three and every kind of executive meeting every town hall that slide comes up it's like you've been a shight you've probably seen that slide 10,000 times but as an important reminder like job is to build
the best product for merchants over the long period of time and then all kind of the metrics and kind of the make money part of it secondary to that so what we care about is that that longterm piece it it ties a little bit to that that original conversation about kind of entrepreneurs and being the core of like
why we just want more people to start businesses and go it's very um seductive I think in kind of most companies including in chop F we want to we can support large Enterprise businesses today right big Brands who want to get off a outdated solution and come over to Shopify it's very easy to just say oh
that's very concrete there's an existing business we want to have them come join Shopify and in the short term it feels really good because it brings a lot of Revenue right away but if you're thinking about the longterm 100 years from now guess what all the big brands of today be out of business in many of
them will be out of business in 30 40 50 years the real success of Shopify is getting every business to start with us and go but but making that type of investment and being so focused on that entrepreneur segment and making it easier is how we build kind of a very very long-term oriented company so just
even How We Do capital investment How We Do product decision- making comes back to hey we can't chase kind of the shortterm um even more concrete things is there an example that comes to mind where you did that where something shortterm looked like oh we should definitely do this but we're
thinking longterm and thinking 100 years out so we're going to approach it this way it's kind of very much just imbued in in the culture it's almost even almost everything kind of feels that way and I'll give like practically speaking every six weeks we all the kind of R&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&D pull up the dashboard and look at it and in that conversation so much of the conversation is about both the technical how how are we building this in a way that allows
for Shopify to have optionality in the technical decisions that we are making and I think for Toby one of the things i' I've learned and so is that the how the technical architecture determines strategy in a technology company even more than the kind of what and who we're building for if you build the right kind
of technical how and set yourself up to have a platform that can be adaptable flexible that is incredibly valuable over the long term it means we will sometimes take longer to ship a future it means we will not Chase kind of certain deals or what have you but we're going to kind of make that that
investment and it comes through in all of our reviews and just how we got to do our work together wow that is really unique I've not heard of that where how usually it's the opposite let's not worry about how we're going to build this thing it's why are we building this thing and then when are we building it
and not just like the architecture is the is the most important thing yeah I mean it's like in the last one we had a it was great we had a 30 minute discussion about we are how to build CSV importers for people coming over from different platforms and it was all about using open source Library doing it
internally are we doing it in the core codebase so we building a separate first-party app to do it it was incredible detail this is what's amazing about Toby the technical detail of how we're going to do this was incredibly important to get right to kind of set up this type infrastructure and most
companies would be okay what you're GNA make it easier for people to migrate their data over cool right team go figure out the how and team does figure out the how but we work on it with kind of Toby in the details because the how is so important to how we build for the future that's
fascinating and usually it's how do we do this as quick as POS possible CVS importing is not aord differentiator let's just build something good enough we'll ship it we'll move on totally the opposite that is fascinating what's also really interesting about this is I think about Brian chesy at Airbnb where I
worked for a while and his so one he also had this idea of the hundredy Year vision and thinking for the future way out in 100 years but interestingly since he's a designer he had a very different Focus so Toby he was an engineer he still codes from what I can see on Twitter still uh so I see why his brain goes
there and why he's really strong in the the how Brian on the other hand is very focused on the experience and making sure the design is amazing and uh the app is exactly what he wants it to feel like you know it's very like experience oriented so it's interesting that Founders these Founders lean into the
thing that they're strong at and understand deeply and that ideally connects with the way this business specifically wins and grows and it makes sense a platform I could see why engineer in would be so essential to get right travel Hospitality consumer app I could see why design is so important
100% fascinating one more tidbit that I've heard about how you all think about this is is metrics and you you mentioned before we started recording that a lot of the company doesn't actually have metrics that drive what they build especially within the Core Business which I think would surprise a lot of
people most people are like every team needs a metric and kpi and this how we measure progress and this is how we know if they're doing well talk about just how that works how company how most of the company doesn't have a metric yeah it's funny we we rant against kpis are basically banned as a and okrs are
banned and and all that so you know we and so certainly like in you know in growth you have the metrics but they they take a different form and then in coure it it truly is do we have conviction that this is the right technical Foundation to build the future of Commerce and that is built through
certainly looking at data so it's not that teams are not looking at data and using it as a piece of their puzzle but it's not the overwriting and when we go to ship a feature in court it's not like a team is held accountable for this metric over this six months it's much more did we ship the right
thing and we're going to kind of get at that through a variety of lenses uh could be some of that could be data qualitative just our own kind a product sense uh of what's good or not and so that you know I think the the the upside of that is I think we tend to ship things in core and that are incredibly
um for- facing in if we take more risk I think that to acknowledge some of the the downside of it though is sometimes conversations get extremely subjective uh about what is the right thing to do and so that that requires kind of a um the right way of of having kind of good discussions kind of openness from all
leaders and from teams to debate those things but it does result in some squishiness which again as as pros and cons but kind of taste is kind of what drives a lot of what we're shipping in core yeah I'm glad you're touching that I was going to say okay everyone would love this idea of just build things that
we think are awesome it's going to be great but then you build a whole org with teams and people building stuff how does one know if they're building things that are good and helping versus not and you're pointing out there are pros and cons to that the pros is we're not
optimizing for some short-term winds and driving some cor metric the con is you might ship stuff that like there's a lot of subjectivity and people may not agree and it's a lot of kind of squishy stuff yeah totally uh Glenn who's heads up core product I mean one of the things that's so impressive about Glenn and
kind of that core team is they go incredibly deep into every single release that is shipped and so you have do have a central kind of ion on the quality and how it all fits together and so that I think helps make sure there's a consistent kind of bar for Taste that's that's Glenn bunch of folks Toby
obviously that kind of can can enforce that so it creates OB it's subjective but it's objective in the sense that it's kind of a small number of people who really hold what that that bar is and needs to be I think if it's just subjective let's just ship what we want without kind of a couple people really
holding that that quality in that taste bar that's where things go really sideways awesome that's exactly what I was going to ask is who who's the ultimate decider of taste and and uh what is good and so it sounds like basically Toby Up Pub and then he's kind of deputized Glenn and relies on him to
make a lot of these final calls yes and that yeah okay and then I imagine Glenn has some folks that he kind of deputizes to make smaller decisions along the way or not or he's very involved in everything yeah and I think I think this is the fun thing Shopify literally like we have a our own internal project
management system that's been kind of crafted just for Shopify and every ship what's that called by the way it's got like a cool name right GSD GSD yeah something yeah yeah that's what I remember so get sh done and every project so you got a core project you got mer service you got a growth project
and the expectation is that the group leavs every single project that goes out has a few minute video with figos and everything it everything that shipped needs to be ok toed so approved by the group Le there's nothing that can ship without that -2 approval and then ok2 approval has to be Glenn Carl myself
different groups and so that is kind of how the everything is reviewed now of course there's great amazing teams that do amazing work um but it is kind of that that's how the the system system works and ok2 specifically means someone above reviews it or all you this whole team everyone looks at no just so Glenn
reviews The Core stuff reviews the MS okay to um so it's interesting it's basically Glenn is founder mode and not as a Founder where he's involved in all the details yes has final say so this a really cool example of founder mode but not as a founder and correct and the way
you guys operate and I imagine sometimes Toby disagrees with Glenn and then they talk about it and things get ired out totally and that's thought would come together every six weeks kind of everyone in person to review every project so we can hash out those disagreements go through
all the core projects all the merch service projects all the growth projects and it's a great form to say hey here's where we disagree really on the how and the the tactics of what's happening it's and we can flag those things have good debates about where there might be misalignment amazing what a what a
unique way of working I'm so fascinated by all this so what I'm hearing essentially within core Glenn and his team come up with here's what we're going to build the next quarter you guys have uh twice year releases is that right or is it every season yeah so big kind of additions twice a year obviously
continually shipping but we kind of package them twice a year in a big Yeah Bang Yeah Big launch yep I've seen those okay so he's like here's what we're going to do in the next release we're just GNA build this because we think this is right we're not driving a specific goal we're building for 100
years in the future let's just build it and basically you build it he's like this is great not great itate until it's this good and then ship and and great okay this is great okay so then there that that team and then there's your team which is like Drive some freaking numbers Drive growth hit these
goals how do you collaborate across these two teams what do you have a model for how you work together because these feel like very different ways of working yeah honestly it's been one of the things I'm very proud of like we've built a really great partnership for the last three and a half years because it's
intentionally meant to be almost at odds and that's like part of the structure of of how you want to work um but but it comes from I think a place of of respect on on both sides and I say for anyone it's okay here's what growth is going to do we're going to do it in a way that's
that is high quality that is shipping really good stuff for merchants we're probably going to approach it in a in a faster way we might disagree on things but we're going to have reasonable paths to kind of handle that conflict and so lot there's no magic bullet it wasn't like these are the surfaces that growth
can touch these are not it's like you can go anywhere in the product but let's go figure out how to work together to figure out that quality bar to understand when you're going to be different on it on the quality bar to get something out to learn and just building trust along the way that we're actually going to chip
high quality things when we ship it to 100% and move and so a lot of great work on the team to make that those relationships really strong got it so basically you guys are like uh moving this button over here is going to drive so much growth and then glam's like no this is not acceptable we don't want the
button here this looks Terri everyone's going to hate it so it's that's the healthy tension like I'm describing totally and it's like okay so how we going to how we going to work to figure this out and it might be hey we're going to move the button hey let's run the let's run the test let's see the
short-term lift you know we're going to monitor it long term you know when we ship it it's going to be high quality like high quality polished okay you trust us to like make those those trade-offs and I I wish I had a better answer of like it's very human right it's very that trust that's very uh
that's very important any of these I think growth with other teams is like there's no replacement for just the human trust and then falling through on commitments of no we're actually going to make this thing really good is there an example of that that comes to mind where you had something that was you
thought was going to drive meaningful growth you showed it to Glenn he's like no don't know about this and then either you iterated or you just like forget it this isn't right for the platform even though it's going to drive some meaningful growth the place that we we often come back to is and this is with
you know I think Toby is great Toby and Glenn is on Wizards so Wizards carousels yeah on boarding carousels some way that basically has folks get set up by not using the actual product and so we've we've always kind of danced around we have a very specific no wizard principle but I think the sometimes the
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 wizard does really well which is it it simplifies the product into something that allows
people to have a lower bar to try to work with core to bring that into the actual experience itself so the example of that experiment I mentioned to you of giving pre-filled sections in the online store editor you could have solved that in a wizardy way of like enter a few
things and we're going to generate these sections for you instead we actually took those pregenerated things based on what we know about you and put it into the actual product experience itself so it tried to get at some of the principles or what a wizard can do well without avoiding the the Wizard principle
without creting actual wizard so that that's been some of the like how do we work together to get the intent of what the growth idea is but in a way that's consistent with the the we want to building core got it and I get why you think about this a lot because you talked about one of the biggest
levers is onboarding and helping more people get to activated and so I could see why you spent a lot of time thinking about how do we help more people succeed there yes I want to ask your Insight on this idea that people might be listening to this and feeling like oh we need to build a team that just builds great
product and is not constrained by metrics and driving growth short-term thinking longterm thinking 100 years like this is inspiring I think to a lot of companies because the sounds great what do you think it takes to make something like that work because in a bad case this team just sits around and
builds whatever they want and the rest of the company's like godd damn this sucks I have to show success in metrics and moving a metric and this team over there just build beautiful things is it like you need a Founder like Toby that prioritizes this and values it and has very good taste and intuition like what
do you think are important elements of something like that of this approach working at a company based on what you've seen I yeah I think it it needs to have a very opinionated founder set of people who are driving what good looks like I think if it is and I think Shopify you know years ago before maybe sometimes drifted
into the mode of we are just going to build stuff and each kind of team is just going to build stuff not really accountable for it and that is a very very bad state to end up so I think you either have to use my sense is metrics as accountability which is the most common kind of way to drive
accountability and focus or extremely strong founder or set of folks who have extremely strong opinions on what good is and what taste is if you have one of those too you can make it work but the worst case is let's just go build a bunch of cool stuff and kind of a halfhazard way that I don't think would work yeah
this is great so either you need metrics to tell you you're doing the right thing or really correct and good taste in in your founder correct cool I think that's a really good way to and like I imagine every founder is g to think oh that's me I have this I can do this I think it's
rare in real life like it's rare that you're like aop or Brian Jes or Elon yeah it's hard yeah it's hard to internalize that but I think that's the reality so most people will be more successful building things that are driving metrics they can track in an experiment yes awesome this is very
fascinating I'm so happy we're spending so much time on this okay there's a few other random things I'm going to touch on one is sales so historically Shopify has been very product like growth very organic go check it out sign up shop a store start a store grow and you guys layered on sales and a sales motion
that's an increasing part of your business what have you learned about your team the grow team working with sales and making that a successful relationship yeah know it has been great over the last couple years as built out the sales or because it's it's added a whole new kind of motion to shopi shi's
product got better it wasn't it can it can serve the biggest companies in the world it's like the Natural Evolution well let's we're going to do that for people to grow up on shopy to be the biggest companies but we're also going to take folks another platform bring them over for growth and sales I think
the biggest learning from the kind of the R&D side at least has been the scale is very different with with sales and so it's really hard to use as much kind of quantitative data to make in growth to make some of those decisions and so a lot of it has been building uh much more qualitative insights working with
Merchant success sales about the face the challenges they're facing and onboarding a large customer so how do we build import tools that work for them how do we make sure they have the right guidance in the product for a very different set of use cases so a lot of just been like very much empathy
building with sales about what that Merchant Journey looks like and quite frankly challenging ourselves to think differently it's been one thing and then second we kind of built two very distinct funnels for a for a little bit there's like a sales funnel you come in youa contact us that's it there's no
mention of self-service there's no this it's just like Drive mqls boom then there's the self-service thing there's no mention of sales anywhere and so one of the last thing the year last year we've been really doing is how do we create these hybrid Journeys where there is we shouldn't Force the merchant to
choose do you want to talk to sales you want to do self-service should give them the options whatever path that they want to go on and so a lot of that been building into the self-service Journey over to sales and then from sales into self-service that's broken a lot of metrics in the business that's broken a
lot of ways people have thought about their jobs and so there's been a lot of kind of cultural resetting and just getting smarter from a metric standpoint about how do we measure this thing of hybrid Journey they came in Via self-service they went over to sales how do we value
each of those components um in the process and transparently something we're still getting better at um but it's really important to to get there is there an example of something that broke that would be illustrative of what you're describing yeah yeah so I think that breaks is Drive someone to uh from an ad over
to self-service we typically look at only the self-service LTV of that person but what happens if they come in they sign up via selfservice and then they go talk to sales they get changed to a sales driven Merchant which means that that value of that Merchant which is usually actually
quite large does not get Associated back to that ad campaign oh guess what that makes that means you would probably reduce investment on that ad campaign because you weren't valuing that because our system had two different models for calculating LTV sales-driven one and a self-service one
uh oh we're going to make suboptimal investment decisions Now by kind of moving things around even though it's the right thing to do so a lot of is in rebuilding lot instrumentation How We Do LTV modeling How We Do attribution How We Do incrementality testing across each of those different types of outcomes
because it was not kind of an intuitive thing for us you know originally because we built all of these systems with a much more yeah makes yeah basically attribution gets a lot more complicated uh are you going in like a multi-touch attribution direction or is there something even more clever
you know my my rant is I am a uh multi-touch attribution has its has its place I think ideally what we want to get through is what we really care about incrementality and so incrementality is kind of the the gold standards for people who are less like you know attribution measures like how do you
assign value to a given touch point right click a view Etc but doesn't tell you causally what drove something right that's where incrementality tells you incrementality test is basically don't show ads on meta for certain sum of people show it to the other set see what the lift is and the outcome and so a lot
of what we're doing is trying to get a lot is Contin to get even more sophisticated in incrementality measurement for not just self- serve outcomes but for self-service outcomes that then drive to sales for sales specific outcomes and as soon as we have that kind of incrementality at the channel level we
can get a lot more sophisticated in terms of our our bidding budgeting and all that but that's really the key the key thing we want to get to there's certain topics that alone can be their own podcast conversation to just dive deep into the stuff but I'm going to stop myself and I'll go further down
that track let me touch on a couple more things before we Before I Let You Go uh one is marketing so we talked about sales marketing you guys don't have a CMO there's no Shopify CMO instead you embed marketing leads Within the org for folks that are trying to Grapple with that should we hire CMO should we do
something else what have you learned about maybe the benefits and also maybe some downsides of approaching it the way you guys have approached it the the benefit is so there's there's growth marketing who sits in in growth there's Revenue marketing who sits over closer to sales there's a a brand Team under
Harley who does does amazing work our president um there's marketing embedded in core and pmm sit with product managers there the shop marketing on a consumer side so it's marketing is truly everywhere in the OR and I think the benefit of it is it's closest to the primary kind of goal that those
marketers are trying to do right they sit with growth so we can focus on kind of that self-service motion Harley is an amazing Communicator so brand sits with with him so he can be he can have a lot of influence over that and so I think it sits with the people it's most relevant outcomes are driving
which is great because it allows us to move faster with less kind of coordination 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 is kind of held in in their
their heads and kind of they have the pen on that and so that allows then that piece that cmo's job to not be as important at Shopify but the other pieces are obviously critical but they can be now closer to the the action and where they're kind of going to drive the most most impact the downside is things
are sometimes very messy right so that's the yeah it's another example where the founder can their background and interest and skills can impact significantly the way the work is structured and who you hire and don't hire okay uh one last question totally different topic discounting so you at
udemy for a long time and from what I understand discounting was one of the key reasons udemy succeeded and one of the big differentiators I'm curious what you learned about discounting the power of discounting as a growth lover yeah so so un is a very uh this know you is an
online Marketplace for for online courses so come on course and I think what was happening in you know I started and we were there 2012 is was people were what is this online course thing I don't really understand what it is I don't understand what the value is and what I'm will to pay and so what
discounting has a really powerful effect on is it can signal value with a high list price but then bring something down to an affordable price and that Mak seem like of course that's that's obvious but in online courses what was important is the list price would be high at a 100 bucks so it's associated with like a
college course but what people really value this thing as was a book and so you could signal very high signal quality through price which is very murky at that point in online learning signal value through price discount it to 10 bucks or that was a typical udemy deal and then so 99% off 90% off we
might seem like fire sales but but it it changed the value and willingness to pay and then it tapped into the fact that and still is education is very aspirational and so what a lot of people miss missed in that in education is yes we want people to actually take the course but that's actually in many cases
not the job to be done that there's an emotional job that's even more important which is I'm feeling like I'm making progress in my educational journey and just the act of purchasing a course or the act of buying a book is progress and so if you can make it very enticing very high value thing
cheap urgency you can let people make that emotional journey by the act of purchasing which then allowed us to actually have very good retention because you could keep coming back to that emotional job over and over again which disc cting with urgency allowed us to do amazing well with that we reached
our very exciting lightning round Archie are you ready I'm ready first question what are two or three books that you recommended most to other people so one I I love to go back to like marketers who wrote in like the 1920s and so one that I I love is scientific advertising by Claude Hopkins so it's basically one
of the first kind of direct marketers that came out he kind of innovated on some of the concepts of copywriting and just how you like sell a product around can't make this product can't sell the product and you tell the product will help the customer achieve their goals and so it's really fun I find it really
fun to go back in time because there's a lot of really good first principles thinking that I think we've actually lost in more modern stuff where it's like personalization Bandits optimization all this stuff or it's like no like what how do you actually write and sell things really effectively so
scientific advertising is is a great book just like the name alone it sounds really cool especially for someone in your in your shoes that feels like the perfect book for your your role and I think there's so much wisdom in just like the thing someone figured out many years ago about what convinces people to
buy something is still true and people over complicated and just going back to the original was often really useful totally um and the perfect mile about um the uh the chase for sub four minute mile by Roger banister and a few other um folks is just a wonderful as a runner
it's a really fun book to read about kind of perseverance how these folks really kind of all competed to get to that that really amazing goal of of under four minutes in a while awesome do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed you know I I went back in time
and I watched for the first time actually the entire season or all the episodes of The Sopranos which was quite quite fun highly recommend I did that in the wire in the last like six months it's a lot of watching it's so it's a lot of watching I you know work out in the morning on my my elliptical or bike so
it's a nice that's a nice uh workout show that's a good motivator to just work out as something I gotta watch the next episode The Wire is like it's like hourong episodes and Five Seasons times 20 I think it's 22 Episodes per season right yeah oh gez it's a lot of a lot of watching but and I I did that once and I
was like I've got a lot I've got a lot of episodes to watch but incredible okay it's funny I you should say The Sopranos I feel like a number of people recently told me they're watching the full Sopranos again it's like a trend recently for some reason oh interesting anyway do you have a favorite product
youve recently discovered that you really love so the AI music Creator um my kids and I I'm I'm the least musical person in the world it's been amazing my kids and I will create songs together about our days about what's going on so it's just been been really fun to you to
have a musical experience for a non-m musical person and had that creative experience for them and it's been it's been really awesome to useo is insane I think it's sun. a folks want to check it out it's just it it's just like such a fun party trick too just to like write a song on the spot about something that
you're thinking about awesome two more questions do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to finding helpful in worker in life yeah I I often come back to the plan is the plan until it's not and it's basically like we have a plan it's the plan it's our best let commit to it but
acknowledg it might change and we'll deal with it then but it's kind the combination of like we have a plan stay focused on that with also the acknowledgement that you need to be flexible and try to combine those two sometimes contradictory things things of focus plan with we got to be able to
react in an effective way reminds me of um strong opinions loosely held as a concept totally awesome okay final question uh so I asked your wife what to ask you when you came on this podcast and she suggested that ask you about your late father who had a lot of impact on your leadership style so here's my
question just what did you learn from your dad that impacts the way you work today yeah he L my dad a lot is like a a father and he was he an entrepreneur in technology and I think one of the things that I so appreciate about his leadership style was the empathy and curiosity and kindness that that he he
showed and everything and I hope um and some of the stories that of you know him it's like no matter who anyone was like Curious loved to engage and learn from and I hope that's something I try to take inspiration from is like just be with everyone kind and um and learn from
everyone you're you're with and around um so something I think about a lot that super resonates he sounds like a wonderful human uh as are you Archie this was wonderful we touched on so much we covered so much I feel like we could go on for many more hours maybe we'll do round two as you learn more things at
your time with Shopify two final questions working folks find you online if they want to potentially reach out or follow the stuff you're up to and how can listeners be useful to you yeah so not super uh on social media but on LinkedIn check me out you uh send me a message um and then yeah if folks are
hiring a bunch of folks growth marketers PMS Engineers data folks uxers you want to work at Shopify and growth or other parts um fully remote so we'd love to love to have great people join awesome and that last point I think I'll just highlight one of the few remaining fully remote tech companies that is not
returning to work returning to the office the office yeah much work yes yes amazing and sounds like basically your Hing across all functions all functions so perfect Archie thank you so much for being here thank you Lenny that's fun bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can
subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenp podcast.com see you in the next episode [Music]