Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify)

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 North Star. 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 active. 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 outside.

Today my guest is Archie Abrams. Archie is VP of 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 roadmap are driven by a hundred year vision that comes from Tobi, 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 Churn, 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, two years later and three 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 growth team, how they run experiments, how the growth 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 growth teams. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it 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 Archie 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 living archeology 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 has gotten, to maybe surprise them about the scale of this company at this point. Could you share some stats about the scale of the business at this point?

Yeah, absolutely. So Overall, we're about 10% 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 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've got a big, big economy and big impact happening from Shopify.

Wow. 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 has gotten.

100%.

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The way we think about Churn 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 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 of those folks will maybe on their first attempt not be as successful. But we're going to have a set of merchants who go on to become extremely big businesses, the Alberts of the world, figs, et cetera. And the way the Shopify business model works is we do charge a subscription, but most of our revenue comes from payments which is tied to directly to a merchant's success. So in a given cohort of merchants, a lot of people will start some of those people on their first attempt. It's 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 that's really kind of a different insight than most SaaS companies that you know, they get a 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 churn 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 SaaS companies they're making from a subscription, right. They're paying, 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 or the revenue the merchant is producing in the form of payments and other services. It allows us to grow with the merchant and those really successful merchants make the whole system work well.

Got it. So you're 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 try it and haven't been for successful. And you can 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 kind of portfolio successful with.

Retention 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, every year. How do you think about progress and achieving and success basically for growth this.

Way is thinking about a cohort of users we acquire in a given time period, say a quarter and then over the next year, two years, three years, four years, five years. How much GMV 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 then 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 is a fund. And it's really driven by the few really successful outliers.

So this begs the question, that sounds like a very long feedback loop and I don't know what I do with that information if 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 interesting, I think with 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 at Shopify. There's core product which is basically building the hundred year the right things for commerce a hundred years from now. There's merchant services, which is building things like payments, shipping, kind of the 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 that's 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 hundred years? And with that it allows you to run these long holdout kind of holdout experiments to see is something we're doing impacting the business broadly. 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 having to drive a certain metric every quarter, every year.

Correct. And I mean on growth we're definitely in the, we want to drive metrics on a short term basis and we can do that obviously, but we have the luxury and just the way Toby kind of thinks about the world and the way we operate and 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 about that. But because we take that long horizon, it allows us to be better in the short term and just get a lot smarter 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 downstream metrics for a year, two years on that experiment and I'll bet you'd be surprised how many times the metric is different than what you thought it would be after a year.

Because where people just make a call at a certain point in time. Here's the, here's the left experience. I love this because very few people have experiences running a long term experiment. And so this is a really interesting insight that you're sharing that I guess how often do you find this to be true in your long term holdouts 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 shale in Shopify's 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 pull forward 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 it's 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 kind of normal short term 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 are.

Is there an example in that second bucket of what you mean when you say there's a pocket of valuable merchants?

Yeah, I think a lot of this has to do with we call it monetary friction.

Right.

So one of 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 you're kind of bootstrapping, which in Shopify'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, 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 have a sense of how often you find no effect after a year that you saw early impact? Just to ballpark?

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 or you're saying potentially a third of the experiments they're running today that are showing lift probably don't have that same. Don't have any impact down the road.

Yes, unfortunately I think that's brutal. More common than we like to like to believe.

Yes. And that's gonna. Nobody wants to hear this. Except, except people that you know, you should want to hear this because if you want to build a business that grows and continues to grow, it's better.

To, to learn that now.

Yeah. Okay. So for people that can't run ho long holdout experiments, I guess is there anything that you find is 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 hundred years.

I mean I think end of the day that is going to be the most effective and you actually learn the most. I think it is though even in shorter term horizons, really being as specific as you can be about what are 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 probably like two things here is like don't. My recommendation folks is don't think oh my goodness, I have to wait all this time. Is that because you're. 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 you're. 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, there's some cases of that, but it's rarely. I've seen neutral be positive, but I haven't seen negative.

Got it. Okay.

So this is resulted positive.

Got it. Okay, that's so that's reassuring. It's not, you're not harming the business.

You know, in the business.

But you're probably getting a lot more credit than you deserve as a growth team. Shipping things that likely. Likely, yes, great.

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 impact. Right.

A hundred percent.

Okay. This is awesome. Okay. For people that want to run long term hold that experiments, I imagine you've built your own experimentation system internally. Yeah, we have.

Yeah.

And is it basically 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 approaching it?

Two things we, we have two layers of, of holdouts. So one is the like more of 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, what's called 50, 50 split and then run that for you know, a few weeks. And then what we're doing, look at the long term effects is we actually ship the winner to 100%. But we're looking at the, the cohort of folks who was in assigned to the experiment. We're going back and looking at those people who are 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 allows us to see those, those long term effects just for the cohort that was exposed. That only works if you're doing it on new users. For existing it's a little more complicated. That's okay. And then in our experimentation tools all experimenters are pinged at 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months with here are the updated results. So you can't really get hide from what did this really result in over a longer term horizon.

So your tool emails everyone that's involved in 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 obviously gross profit, but those, But GMV is kind of like the, you know, a key, key determinant of long term 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. And there's, there's a retention in profit and then really like the absolute number of merchants who are on the platform and then reaching certain gmv.

Got it. Okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna not 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 and 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 kind of monetary friction as I mentioned. Like that's always going to be something to explore. Trial dynamics, different types of incentives. All of those things are very kind of impactful, I'd say on things that are maybe more practical 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 most people think you do in your signup flow. If you can then leverage that to personalize the guidance. And this is the first SaaS product, the guidance that someone can get when they onboard into Shopify. So whether you're coming on Shopify is a very diverse product in person, 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 on 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 amaze me. And setting up that person for long term success. So kind of monitoring friction and then just really good onboarding personalization a well 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. Interesting that even for a company that doesn't look at retention that's a big opportunity.

Yes. Yeah it's really because it's setting people up for Shopify's case. I think the big thing about 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 signup to activated thing is just make it harder to sign up. Right. Like nuts and bolts 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 is 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 of merchants who 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. 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 explicitly do when they, when they get too focused on rates as a way to.

Think about the world. What a power incentive.

What a power. What a leverage.

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 value and need in order to be successful? So in Shopify's case that might be like App store credits or things like that. But those are the two forms of monetary friction we talk about. And then of course, actual price point. But that's what the kind of the larger bucket of monetary friction is.

So let's follow this thread of metrics. You're big on absolute numbers 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 metrics.

Yeah, I think one of the things that I think happens particularly in a large and Shopify's growth Authority is 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 North Star over a longer time period. I'm going to try to move my conversion rate from 10 to 12% or what have you. But in practice, you know, 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 who made it through are higher intent. And so I see teams get really stuck when they are 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 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 is 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. Is this gonna 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 getting to each point in the activation or 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.

This is a good segue to. I want to hear how you structure your growth team at Shopify. Like essentially what's the broad 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 groups within within growth. So one is what we call growth R and D. So this might be you traditionally consider like product design, engineering data, your traditional product teams. Then we have growth marketing, which in Shopify's case is paid acquisition, media buying, affiliate marketing, email content and SEO. So that's kind of like growth R and D growth marketing within growth R&D, 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 of the full life cycle there. Second is what we call our enable pillar. And this pillar is building tools for both growth and the rest of Shopify. So things like experimentation platform, our communication platform of our business intelligence tooling that that powers a lot of what we're doing, our martech 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, multibillion dollar business on Shopify. So those are like the three big growth product buckets. And then within growth marketing, it's a more traditional channel set up, paid, all the different channels, online, offline SEO, email and affiliates.

Super cool. Okay, so within growth R and D, I just took notes. I'm going to summarize what you shared, which is awesome. So there's kind of three big buckets. One is growth product which essentially is like onboarding. It feels like it's like the top of funnel. Get people in. Well, okay, so growth marketing feels like that super top funnel. Bring that super top funnel. Yeah, correct. Got it. So growth marketing drive people to shopify.com, then growth within our D team, Growth product takes that user and tries to get them to activate it. Enable Helps it feels like that's like internal tooling and ways to make the teams internally more efficient.

Correct. Both growth and outside growth.

Awesome. Okay. And then the 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 choi to make those support advisors kind of superheroes and then on the help center all of our AI stuff to make kind of a great customer experience for people who are just engaging in a self serve. So it's the tooling and the experience 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 is that set of merchants worth 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 guardrails and, and all of that. So that's kind of like the, the macro growth perspective, cohort value over kind of cost and, and payback. So that, that's the macro point of view. And then within growth marketing now each channel operates with certain guardrails around their LTV to 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 also a combination of total GP kind of incremental cohort value that's produced from those teams. So everything is basically going to be measured on from an experiment, ideally measured over a very long time period. What was the incremental core value lift that this generated? And that's how we think about and 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 measured 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 that we're trying to produce from perform merchants.

And the way you come up with this goal I imagine is you have a forecast of where things would go over organically and then like here's the lift we want to see from the work this team does this quarter this year.

Correct. And and then we're going to measure against for each experiment. Did it actually get to where we we expect that lift to be and.

Those experiments again are those all long term hold that experiments where you look wait a year or some you we.

Call, we call, we call the experiment after three weeks. But in all cases you still watch loop is held, we watch them and that's where that ping comes back. Every experiment is watched and that ping comes back 3, 6 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? It's like oh, then we can learn from that and get better.

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30. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So, so it's still like roughly. Yeah.

And it's great learning and that's why we take it is like, wow, okay, now we, we really uncovered something and it's like such a successful discovery. Wow. Okay, we thought this thing, but now we, 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.

That'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 shipped this thing.

Correct.

Awesome. Is there an example by any chance that comes to mind if 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 not go through a 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 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 612 months, there was really no long term left. And why is that? Because 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, you know, a bunch of this stuff around kind of payments, even quote, preventing churn where you look like it's 6 12, 18 months on a GMV metric. Not a lot of lift over that long term 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 and woo hoo, this team's 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 lot of time kind of okay, what else can we do here? It's like no, actually bigger fish 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, that were good. You know another one that, that went the other way which was really interesting was in our online store and this might be the Shopify. You have sections and blocks that come pre configured and so we tested. Okay, if we give you a pre configured block of like you should have an image up top, then a text banner and then a collage with your products that should help folks understand what to do when they're building the online store. It actually had no lift in people converting to 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. That'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 in 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 is better if it's neutral. Let's start with like what would we have shipped if we were a blank slate and if it's neutral, actually neither is 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 and 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 Shopify is so oriented around. We are here to build a hundred year company and so the decisions we're going to make are really oriented towards the long term success of merchants of Shopify. 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 Shopify, you've probably seen that slide 10,000 times. But it's an important reminder jobs to build the best product for merchants over the long period of time. And then all of kind of the metrics and kind of the make money part of it secondary to that. So we care about is that that long term 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 seductive I think in kind of most companies including in Shopify because we, we want to we can support large enterprise businesses today, right? Big brands who want to get off 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 long term a hundred years from now, guess what? All of 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 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 short term even more concrete things.

Is there an example that comes to mind where you did that where something short term looked like oh, we should definitely do this. But we're thinking long term, we're thinking 100 years out. So we're going to approach it this.

Way it's kind of very much just imbued 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 and D group leads, we get together and we sit with Toby and each other and review every single project across the company. Every six weeks, every single R and D, pull up the dashboard and look at it. 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'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 feature. It means we will not chase kind of certain deals or what have you. But we're going to kind of make that an 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 the 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 are we using an open source library, doing it internally, are we doing it in the core code base, are 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 of infrastructure. In most companies it'd be okay what you're going to make it easier for people to migrate their data over. Cool. Team go figure out the how. And team does figure out the how. 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 possible because CVS importing is not our core differentiator. Let's just build something good enough, we'll ship it, we'll move on to the opposite. That is fascinating. What's also really interesting about this is I think about Brian Chesky at Airbnb where I worked for a while, and his SO one. He also had this idea of the hundred year vision and thinking for the future way out in a hundred 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, he's still building things. So I could see why his brain goes there and why he's really strong in the how. Brian on the other hand, is very focused on the experience and making sure the design is amazing and 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 and 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 engineering 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 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 which surprised a lot of people. Most people are like, every team needs a metric and a KPI and this is how we measure progress and this is how we know if they're doing well. Talk about just how that works, how companies, how most of the company doesn't have a metric.

Yeah, it's funny, we, we rant against KPIs are basically banned as a. An okrs are banned 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 core, 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 overriding. And when we go to ship a feature in core, 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. Could be some of that could be data qualitative, just our own kind of product sense 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 forward facing inability. We take more risk. I think to acknowledge some of the downside of it though is sometimes conversations get extremely subjective about what is the right thing to do. And so that, that requires kind of a, the right way 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 has its 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 touched on 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 wins and driving some 4 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. 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 eye 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 a bunch of folks. Toby. Obviously that kind of can, can enforce that. So it creates object. 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 and 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 what is good. And so it sounds like basically Toby above. 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.

Yes.

Or he's very involved in everything.

Yeah. And I think, I think this is the fun thing about Shopify. Literally like we have our own internal project management system that's been kind of crafted just for Shopify and every shit.

What is that called by the way? It's got like a cool name, right?

Gsd?

Gsdf. Get something. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I remember. So get shit done. And every project. So you got a core project, you got merge service, you got a growth project. And the expectation is that the group leaves. Every single project that goes out has a few minute video with figmas and everything and everything that shipped needs to be okay to so approved by the group lead. There's nothing that can ship without that. Ok 2 approval and that okay 2 approval has to be Glenn, Carl or 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 but it is kind of that. That's how 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.

Got it.

Just Carl reviews the Ms. Okay too. So it's interesting.

It's basically Glenn as founder mode and not as a founder where he's involved in all the details. Yes, has final say. So this is a really cool example of founder mode, but not as a founder and correct in the way you guys operate. And I imagine sometimes Toby disagrees with Glenn and then they talk about it and things get ironed out totally.

And that's why we come together every six weeks, kind of everyone in person to review every project so we can hash out those disagreements. We go through all the core projects, all the merch service projects, all the growth projects and it's a great forum to say hey, here's where we disagree really on the how and 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 twice a year releases, is that right or is that 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 bang, 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 going to build this because we think this is right and we're not driving a specific goal we're building for a hundred years in the future. Let's just build it. And basically you build it. He's like, this is great. Not great. Iterate until it's the this good and then ship and great. Okay, this is great. Okay, so then there's 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? 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 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 how you want to work. 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 got to handle that conflict. And so a lot. There's no magic bullet. It wasn't like these are the surfaces that growth can touch. These are not. It was 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 moving this button over here is going to drive so much growth. And then Glenn's like, no, this is not acceptable. We don't want a button here. This looks terrible. Everyone's going to hate it. So it's so that's the healthy tension like I'm describing totally.

And it's like okay, so how are we going to, how are we going to work to figure this out? It might be hey, we're going to move the button. Hey, let's run that. Let's run the test. But 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. And 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. And it's very. That trust that's very, that's very important. Any of these I think growth with other teams is like there's no replacement for. That's the human trust. And then following through on commitments of we are 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, I don't know about this. And then either you iterated or you just like forget it. This isn't right for the platform. Even that's going to drive some meaningful growth.

The place that we, we often come back to is and this is with you know think Toby is great. Toby and Glenn is on wizards. So wizards.

Yeah.

Onboarding 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 and we have very specific no wizard principle. But I think that sometimes the tension is wizards do serve a. Can serve a purpose in certain circumstances. And so we've. But we've avoided doing that. But we've always worked to try to make the principles of 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 pre generated 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 creating actual wizard. So that, that's been some of the like, how do we work together to get the intent of what the growth ideas, but in a way that's consistent with the, the way we want to build in core.

Got it. And I get why that 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, long term thinking, 100 years. This is inspiring, I think to a lot of companies because this 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, God 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 really 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 think 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, a few 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 two, you can make it work. But the worst case is let's just go build a bunch of cool stuff in kind of a haphazard 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. And like I imagine every founder is going 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 a Toby or Brian Jesky or Elon. Yeah, these are. 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 have layered on sales and a sales motion that's an increasing part of your business. What have you learned about your team, the growth team, working with sales and making that a successful relationship?

Yeah, no, it has been great over the last couple years as built out the sales orders because it's added a whole new kind of motion to Shopify. Shopify's product got better. It can serve the biggest companies in the world. It was like the natural evolution. Well, let's. We're going to do that for people to grow up on shopifying to be the biggest companies. But we're also going to take folks another platform, bring them over for growth in sales. I think the biggest learning from the kind of the R and D side at least has been the scale is very different with sales. And so it's really hard to use as much kind of quantitative data to make missing growth, to make some of those decisions. And so a lot of it has been building 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 it's just been like very much empathy building with sales about what that merchant journey looks like and quite frankly challenging ourselves to think differently. Let's do one thing. And then second, we kind of built two very distinct funnels for a, for a little bit there was like a sales funnel. You come in, you contact us. That's it. There's no mention of self service. There's no this, there'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 to 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 has 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 in the process? And transparently it's something we're still getting better at, but it's really important 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 to drive someone to, 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 self service 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. 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 it is in rebuilding a lot of 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 originally because we had built all of these systems with a much more.

Yeah, makes sense.

Siloed view.

Yeah. Basically attribution gets a lot more complicated. 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 multi touch attribution has its, has its place. I think ideally what we want to get through is what we really care about is incrementality. And so incrementality is kind of the, the Gold standards of people who are less like, you know, attribution measures like how do you assign value to a given touch point, right click a view, et cetera. It 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 SU people, show it to the other set, see what the lift is in the outcome. And so a lot of what we're doing is trying to get a lot is continuing 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 of 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. 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 benefit is so there's there's growth marketing who sits in growth. There's revenue marketing who sits over closer to sales. There's a brand team under Harley who does amazing work, our president. There's marketing embedded in core and PMM sit with product managers there. There's shop marketing on a consumer side. So marketing is truly everywhere in the org 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's an amazing communicator. So brand sits with with him. So it can be he can have a lot of influence over that. And so I think it sits with the people its 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 their heads and 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 hiring, don't hire. Okay, one last question. Totally different topic. Discounting. So you worked 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 Udemy is a very. Udemy is an online marketplace for online courses. So come on. Of course. And I think what was happening in, you know, I started and we were there 2012, ish, was people were like, 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 willing 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 may seem like. Of course that's, that's, that's obvious. But in online courses, what was important is the list price would be high at a hundred bucks. It was 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 was 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 see 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 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 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 discounting 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 love to go back to like marketers who wrote in like the 1920s. And so one that I love is Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. So basically one of the first kind of direct marketers that came out and 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. Can 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. 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. It's 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 complicate it. And just going back to the original is often really useful.

Totally. And the Perfect Mile, about the chase for sub 4 minute mile by Roger Bannister and a few other 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 under four minutes in a mile.

Awesome. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

You know, 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.

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. It's a nice, smart workout show.

That's a good motivator to just work out as I gotta watch the next episode. The Wire is like, it's like hour long episodes and five seasons times 20. I think it's 22 episodes per season, right?

Yeah.

Oh, geez. 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. We got a lot of episodes to watch, but incredible. Okay. It's funny 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 you've recently discovered that you really love?

So the AI music creator. My kids and I, I'm the least musical person in the world and 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 be able to have a musical experience for a non musical person and have that creative experience for them. And it's been. It's been really awesome to use.

Suno is insane. I think it's Suno. AI folks. Want to check it out? It's just. It'll 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 work or in life?

Yeah, I often come back to. The plan is to plan until it's not. And it's basically like, we have a plan. It's the plan. It's our best. Let's commit to it, but acknowledge it might change and we'll deal with it then. But it's kind of a 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 of focus. Plan with we got to be able to react in an effective way.

Reminds me of strong opinions loosely held as a concept. Totally awesome. Okay, final question. So I asked your wife what to ask you when you came on this podcast, and she suggested that I 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 wanted my dad a lot as like a father and he was 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 he showed and everything. And I hope and some of the stories that of you know him, no matter who anyone was like curious, love 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 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. Where can 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 on social media, but on LinkedIn. Check me out, send me a message 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 fully remote. So you'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.

To office.

Much work.

Yes, yes.

Amazing. And sounds like basically you're hiring across all functions.

All functions.

So perfect. Archie, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you Lei. It was fun.

Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, 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 listen. Learn more about the show at lennyspodcast. Com. See you in the next episode.