Building a bank customers love fanatically. Bringing it everywhere. @nubank
New York, NY
- Tweets 477
- Following 1,887
- Followers 16,046
- Likes 1,178
We just dropped UX as a title at @Shopify. Same for Content Design. If you design, you're a Designer. If you write, you're now a Writer. Simpler. Better. (1/3)
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Most design reviews at Shopify now showcase a fully vibe coded prototype, using our design system Polaris to create a true view of what we’re building — we’re fully embracing AI; both in how we work and in the products we create.
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Should I quit @Shopify , divorce my wife, leave my kids and start over somewhere else or try to get 8 hours of sleep tonight?
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Don't let logos fool you. A FAANG stamp on a resume often just proves someone can survive company politics. I once interviewed a Director from FB who proudly told me they spent 6 months “aligning stakeholders” for a tiny feature. They were proud to share their achievement (and I was reassured they could never last at Shopify). The real question isn’t “are they good?” but “can they be good here?”
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Big news! Shopify has acquired molly.studio, to launch Shopify Product Design Studio. Their mission is simple: work together with our teams to deliver 10/10 product experiences. Thread (1/6)
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The new bar for software: "can I vibecode this?"
We’re heading into a world of personal software — built for one person and their needs — and premium software, designed with such depth that you’re buying a solution, not a tool.
Most software today sits in the middle. And the middle is death.
As the market catches up to our new reality, it won’t just be the ai bubble popping — it’ll be a lot of traditional SaaS getting wiped out
(From my recent Kinference talk.)
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Just shared this video with the Shopify design team
TL;DR
1. No slides or presentations; show the work
2. Bring me along in your explorations; a successful review is one full of debate, not the ones that just get to a yes or a no
3. Overshoot the opportunity; let's walk back design that is too ambitious rather than trying to one-shot the right scope
4. Don't be careful or considerate about my time; the job is literally for us to work together. Let's get into the room and roll up our sleeves
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The Browser Company acquisition is a massive win for design. Arc is one of the most thoughtfully built products of the last decade, and @joshm’s team is world-class. I love using Dia and have nothing but praise for them.
That said: Atlassian paying $610M—all cash—for a pre-revenue, early-stage company? It's really hard to understand deal dynamics from the outside, but for me, this feels like the most official bubble event so far.
The question isn’t if it bursts, but what triggers the collapse:
• Escalation in global conflict
• A macro datapoint cracks (e.g. U.S. slips back into recession)
• An AI giant IPOs or fails to raise, exposing weak margins
• A WeWork-style implosion—like an OpenAI governance crisis or a liability-driven regulatory event
If I had to bet, I’d put more weight on 3 or 4. And it’s worth noting: AI isn’t one monolith. Infra (NVIDIA, cloud) could stay strong while the shell/UI layer (Browser Company, Perplexity, Vibe coder tools, copilots) proves overpriced. Atlassian is betting on the shell—and that’s where valuations may be most fragile, esp for companies without network effects.
Feels a lot like Uber Black days, when New Yorkers could limo to the gym for yellow-cab prices, backed by unit economics that never penciled out. (sent from Dia)
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We hire for taste. For aestethics. For a point-of-view. It's the difference between utility and affinity. Anyone can generate a good baseline: designers reach for the ceiling (3/3)
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I want to get away from terms that make our craft more science than art. AI enables anyone to make things usable: our job is to make them unforgetable (2/3)
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Every time I try to hire someone, I start by telling them why they should NOT work at Shopify:
1. Shopify is an unapologetically top-down company;
2. We will put vision and conviction over data
▶️ don't-join-shopify..mov
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We run an internal dribbble where work in flight, northstar concepts, and everything in between gets shared daily between designers at Shopify. Just a super simple and fun way to get everyone excited about the future we're building. This stuff is fun
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I swear I will not become a life hacker / longevity - person. But hear me out:
I have started leaving my phone in my office and bought family iPads that only have the boring apps (thermostat, groceries, Sonos) that I keep around the house.
I’ll work until dinner. Eat with family, put kids to sleep. Get another hour at the office. And then sauna + read for an hour.
To nobody’s surprise: not looking at Slack minutes before you try to sleep improves … sleep
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Shopify and Lovable share a goal of lowering the cost of entrepreneurship – making it easier to turn ideas into businesses. As a Lovable investor I couldn't be more excited about what will be achieved together
Introducing the Lovable Shopify integration.
Today, we're making it possible to build online stores by chatting with AI.
To show how it works, we built and launched our first merch store:
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The holy fecta of Product, Engineering, Design (and often Data) is outdated. The assumption that every team should hold every craft calcifies orgs and sets a dumb expectation that design needs to move at the rate of engineering (it can be much faster). (1/3)
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Being an angel investor is just a different way of subscribing to extremely expensive email newsletters
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You don’t just wake up a world-class designer. It takes reps, mentors, and environments that raise your bar.
Those opportunities have been disappearing — so we’re bringing them back. Introducing DAP: Shopify’s new
Design Apprenticeship Program. Apply Oct 20 – 27 → link in reply
🎩 @katarinabatina
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5 min from last week’s Shopify Townhall that captures the crazy momentum of Generative Design at Shopify.
① you’ve never been more empowered as a designer to make your ideas real
② the workflows involves multiple tools, stitched together, to create new experiences
③ increasingly designers are building out their own tools to accelerate these new workflows
🚀
@katarinabatina @kazdenc @lukedupont @ryancreatescopy
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Design systems have never been more important. If you’re on the design team, your job isn’t just to design—it’s to enable others to do it well. If you want great vibe-design outputs, the demands on the inputs have never been higher.
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That call where I thought @Tobi was firing me? We finally talked about it...
Shopify’s internal podcast, Context, usually stays internal. But, this one hit differently—we unpacked @shop's origin story, *that* call, and how design defines every new era of technology.
I loved the conversation because it captures @Shopify’s long design history and how obsessing over the right details can reshape industries.
Timestamps:
2:06 - Why Chief Design Officer Now
8:30 - The Fateful Phone Call
11:39 - Tictail Acquisition Story
18:08 - Defining the Design Role
21:37 - AI Interface Design Patterns
29:24 - Path Dependence & Cookie Banners
35:18 - From Tools to Team Members
41:36 - Long Term vs Short Term
46:27 - Design System Strategy
51:02 - Designing for Ambition
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How lucky are we? To belong to the generation that got the before and after for personal computing, internet, smart phones, social media, and now AI. Can you fully understand something without knowing what was there before? How will these decades be remembered?
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We’ve talked about Conversational Commerce for years. Many tried (myself included) but the future always felt just out of reach. With OpenAI × Shopify, it’s finally here—and it’s about to change how people shop every day
Shopify merchants will be able to sell directly in ChatGPT.
We’ve been working with @OpenAI for quite some time so people can search and buy products in chat, and it’s something we’ve had a hard time keeping quiet.
Rollout is coming very very soon.
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Went to visit our upcoming New York office today. Some ways to go before opening late September but man the light! The views! That last corner photo will become our design studio - a destination for designers to go and build together. Will start a monthly event series here too!
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Everyone will soon be a 7/10 at every job
• Lawyer
• Engineer
• Designer
• Financial analyst
List goes on... General competence will be universal.
What matters next? Mastery, point-of-view, and systems thinking.
(1/3)
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Shopify is for you, whatever you sell.
Love this AI generated ad concept by Qiuzao Zhang (not on X).
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This 1,000%.
We’re heading into the most disruptive and expansive period of all times — but most of us will build on top of the same models, differentiating in how we bring them to life and give them a UI.
Second to research, expression will define this period
People are finally starting to realise how few truly great designers there are, and how disproportionately valuable they are.
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X takes the price for the worst design. Funny it’s where all designers seems to have decided to hangout. Kind of like your favorite dive bar — the shit interior makes for better conversation
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Remote work brings a ton of efficiencies and advantages but teams should be in the same timezone. Having just come back from Sweden travels: working 6 hours apart slows down collaboration, AND is a huge personal tax. You go to bed late, straight off work with a billion thoughts swirling around. You wake up to a billion more things that now had to wait for your response until the next day. You never really feel like you’re off, but you also don’t really feel like you’re super productive.
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The first thing I establish when taking on a new team is that I will not tolerate presentations in product reviews.
The closer to the work we can get is always better.
The furthest away you get is a slide with words.
The closest you get is a live prototype with real data.
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My late night complaint turned into a free for all to air grievances to the only PM at X. Class act to invite the feedback 🙏🏻. Focused on structure - not buggy features or UI finish. The vision to become a super-app has perhaps become a permission-slip to add anything, anywhere?
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Having been secular my whole life I’ve come to consider “signing up for religion”. If not for me then for my kids. I now believe the grounding of religion might be the best way to establish that we’re all part of something bigger, something greater
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"Checkout" looks deceptively easy to implement: a few address forms and the ability to accept payments. Underneath it hides effectively all business logic a company wants to implement. As such, to build Checkout, you basically need to build all of Shopify AND get merchants to employ a second business system. This is especially painful for the larger brands who also happen to be the whale advertisers. We try to explain this to every partner, and in each case they have decided they must figure this out on their own.
Social commerce seems to be struggling: Meta eliminated Checkout on Instagram and Facebook three weeks ago, and now TikTok is restructuring its Shop initiative, including a reduction in workforce.
It's interesting to consider why this approach hasn't been successful. I have three theories:
- Retailers (advertisers) are reluctant to use these tools, since they'd rather own the customer relationship
- Western audiences haven't adapted to the Social Commerce phenomenon from the product discovery process of more traditional e-Commerce
- Traditional e-Commerce platforms (including Shopify) offer better storefront management and optimization tools.
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Timeframe Theory for Product Design Work
Get out of the middle! It’s the hardest timeframe to predict. Too far to be tactical. Too close to be strategic.
Design works best at the extremes:
• Long term, North Star vision
• Short term immediately shippable work
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All problems are people problems. Yet most time is spent on trying to correct the process
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Acquiring Molly Studio is about building a team that can anticipate the future, and in doing so, help shape it. From @jaytel in March molly.studio/thesis/openai-e…
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Playing in Cursor brings back a curiosity I don't remember having since early days of trying to figure out how to build websites. The "what happens if I press this button" -thing
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Shared my goals for design at Shopify with the team last week;
1. To build the place where best designers in the world choose to work;
2. to produce the best work of their careers;
3. defining the future interaction patterns on AI in Commerce
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I'm doing a designer dinner in Brooklyn next week on Wednesday. I kept two spots open. Who should I invite?
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Happy 4th 🇺🇸 ! After a decade in the US, I became an American last year. This country changed my life. Now I get to raise my four daughters here—a privilege I don’t take for granted. America’s ambition is unmatched. Yes, it’s easy to see the flaws—especially right now... But ambition, more than anything, defines what’s possible here. I keep my naturalization letter on the wall so my daughters know: coming here was a choice. It took work. We had other good options. We chose this. Maybe that’s why, among my American friends, I’m the loudest patriot. When you’re born here, it’s perhaps easier to forget what that choice means
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Yeah. We use Cursor as MCP client and have an internal environment called Admin Playground that will run a copy of admin. You can also configure Polaris rules in Cursor and build against a branch of what's in production
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That em-dash became synonymous with AI writing is very problematic for me — I use it extensively even when I shouldn’t
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Here to address the confidence issue in design: stop chasing KPIs that explain what “great” looks like. Trust your aesthetics. Trust your POV. That’s what you were hired to bring. Create something beautiful!
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This is very true. I always love seeing agency years in designers; the number of reps you get in and the breadth you have to cover working across multiple clients is so much more valuable than having been stuck on [Instagram sharing settings] for 2 years…
some of the most versatile designers I've worked with come from digital agencies, not big tech.
they're hungrier, scrappier and less expensive. they can jump between product design, branding, motion and illustration. big tech usually boxes you into one specialty.
there's something about the agency grind that creates these swiss army knife designers who just get it done.
if you're hiring, skip the FAANG talent wars. the real gems are grinding it out at smaller studios.
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Today's controversial take.
Everyone hates meetings so you make the meetings shorter. Now you never get to a conclusion so you need a follow-up meeting. Let's just take the time to close it out and move on.
I want more 1-hour meetings.
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Bringing over people like Derek isn’t ”hiring” —> it’s strategy. As we head into the age of AI, there’s not better way to imagine the future than through design
Headed home after spending my first few days with some of the team in my new role @Shopify!
I’ve noticed what @carlrivera has been doing with Shopify Design since taking over, and the opportunity to support he and the teams on this mission is an incredibly exciting one 😄
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Change how you work and it changes what you build.
At Shopify, AI isn’t a thin wrapper to our products—it defines our entire process. If you want to build for the AI-era of commerce, there’s no better place. shopify.com/careers
The AI memo has been extremely successful inside of Shopify. People all over the company have built remarkable things in response to it. One of my favorite is Scout, built by a small team outside of R&D!
Scout has indexed hundreds of millions of merchant feedback items from Social posts, video feedback, and all our customer support channels. Then it makes it available (via MCP) in our internal librechat tool for deep research. I use it all the time. Asked the team to do a demo:
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“If AI had existed ten years ago, products would not look the way they do today. We need to move beyond chat and create experiences where AI feels native, invisible, and context-aware. This is our role: to imagine the future, and to bring it into the present.”
The Molly team has joined @Shopify, bringing a culture of experimentation, craft, and code.
We spoke with CDO @carlrivera about why design has never been more important in shaping AI's future: tympanus.net/codrops/?p=9989…
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Observations from being back home in Sweden 🇸🇪, after 2 years away:
• There is definitely something happening here again: a level of ambition and confidence I remember from the early Spotify days. @antonosika / @lovable is the new engine for this change. Access to capital and local talent networks is much higher this time around
• “Taste” runs in the culture: it’s wild how much higher the baseline outlook is on design and great experiences here vs even New York or anywhere else
• Everyone here seems to think the US is f’d but that SF will still be leading tech forward. There’s a sense that Europe has become more united as a result. Personally I would question if “more meetings” = “more united”
• Stock options / equity based compensation is still a mess and hasn’t been figured out. You either expose the company to massive tax liabilities or the employee to very direct financial risk. As a result: I get the impression employees don’t care much about equity, or work because of hopes for upside. They work because they want a good job and enjoy the lifestyle. Everyone takes a long vacation, things kind of shut down for the summer, and working at a startup is a job like any other
• There’s no AC anywhere and the summers are getting hotter 🥵
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Couldn't be more excited to welcome onboard;
@jaytel
@MSchwaibold
@YaelBienenstock
@johnnycartelle
McLane Teitel
@me____likex
@jesper_vos
I truly love this crew (5/6)
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A monetization platform to empower one-person unicorns 🚀. My previous co-founder (and always close friend) @birk is building for the entrepreneurs of the AI era, and they're cooking
Announcing our $10M Seed Round led by @Accel alongside incredible angels 💫
It's never been easier to build & ship software.
But it's also never been harder to monetize it.
We’re building the open-source monetization platform to empower future one-developer unicorns. How? 🧵
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design have been compressing for a long time: before IA, UX, UI, prototyping were all different jobs. tools got better and work moved faster and designers increasingly were able to hold the entire story, from vision to execution. Good UX is the expectation, taste is the differentiation
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The thesis behind the molly.studio acquisition:
1. We’re entering the most disruptive era yet—everyone will use the same AI models, but design is what differentiates how they come to life
2. Build the highest density of design talent anywhere
3. Create a more fluid org that can flex with quickly shifting priorities
4. Double down on NYC, the design capital, while staying remote-first
(2/6)
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Totally agree. Why I wrote: The real question isn’t “are they good?” but “can they be good here?”
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When I was a kid, the internet didn't exist.
That. is. crazy.
Spent a few minutes reflecting on the insane amount of leaps that have happened inside of a single generation...
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The “as long as he is getting his job done” shit take misunderstands what doing something fulltime in tech means. (1/3)
I am going to get canceled once this hits the socialists who will ignore the fraud part to defend having multiple jobs. It was good knowing you all. 🫡
Didn’t expect it to leave tech.
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Often, the greatest growth starts in the hardest moments. That’s the theme of Rock Bottom, a beautiful new podcast from @mayssa_c.
This first episode is with @babbarivera - my wife. I was really moved by this episode that tells her story in a very personal and beautiful way
open.spotify.com/episode/3Sp…
ILYSM
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The human desire to peter principle themselves into a position just to have a bigger title or more people to manage is how many promising careers go from thriving to surviving. Ironically the promo you so badly want might be the worst thing for your career.
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You can't stay 7/10 at what you were hired to do.
Mastery still matters. Push to be the 9/10. AI raised the baseline and so you're already within reach.
Go beyond your job description. Build what wasn't possible before.
If you don't, the market will move on without you.
(3/3)
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The goals of design at Shopify:
1. To create the place where the world's best designers choose to work;
2. To produce the best work of their careers;
3. Defining the future interaction patterns of AI in commerce
This is a great milestone, but we're only just getting started (6/6)
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Covering more breadth actually leads to a sharper experience – it leads to fewer hand-offs and a flatter org. It also provides more exposure of the product and create experiences that carry over (3/3)
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I get to have a team that ONLY thinks about future of commerce experiences... This time we designed a magic mirror that compliments you, recommends a blush shade, and redeems instantly at Retail PoS.
Over one weekend at @rarebeauty's LA pop-up:
🪩 2,000+ Magic Mirror scans
📸 700+ UGC posts → ~4M earned impressions
All powered by @Shopify, and made real by our Tech Flexes and Brand teams
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I really don’t care how you vote but if you put it on your car I’ll think you’re an idiot
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More of design can be centralized. With design leaders that airdrop into problems and work across teams and surface areas to front-run product (2/3)
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This is the internal announcement for the molly.studio acquisition that I shared to my team yesterday, along with this article describing the agency model nitter.app/postcarl/status/196068…
(4/6)
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I am extremely lucky to have been born a happy person.
I was born into good circumstances and I have had the opportunity to build a very blessed life.
But over time I’ve come to see that the state of happiness - the felt experience of contentment - has less to do with my situation and more to do with my wiring.
It’s something innate. A cocktail mixed at birth.
Some of the most fortunate people I’ve met are quietly miserable. Others who have endured unimaginable hardship radiate peace. You never really know what someone’s carrying - and it can feel confusing to wrestle with grief or darkness when, by every external measure, you’re supposed to be happy.
Mental wellness is a lot like physique - we can all become strong but we can’t all become world-class athletes and we have to work different amounts for our gains
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My Oura ring overall health score from before and after our Sweden trip. Vacations used to mean something else...
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Be careful around companies that obsess about their "company culture". It happens when the thing a company is supposed to do is not going well or is no longer the main thing. Companies that are winning don't do this because "winning" defines what it feels like to work there.
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Time to lean in! The future is ours to imagine
Had the opportunity to share some thinking about building products at Kinference earlier this year
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"There's no customer in the history of customers that got the pre-read, so neither should we"
After ~9 years I returned to @20vcFund with my favorite @HarryStebbings to discuss my career as a Japanese lifestyle photographer, running startups and building product at scale
Links in reply
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Just celebrated Swedish Midsummer and America’s 4th of July back-to-back, and they perfectly capture the togetherness and individualism that set these countries culturally apart.
In Sweden, gatherings are all about shared experiences. You arrive on time. You sit down together. There are toasts, multiple ones - after each everyone locks eyes before putting the glasses back down. You sing, even if you can’t carry a tune (or even know the words). Everyone joins the synchronized dance around the maypole - pretending to be frogs or other animals.
In the U.S., it’s more like: show up whenever, crank the music to 9, unlimited BBQ buffet and cold beers, and end the night blowing something up. Everybody is together but and everyone is doing their own thing.
That’s the difference, really. One assumes you want to be part of something. The other assumes you’ll figure it out for yourself—and if not, that’s on you.
I love both, but one is probably better for the soul, the other for business
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My favorite hot take: context is overrated! What’s actually scarce is fresh perspective, courage and curiosity —people who haven’t absorbed all the priors and can imagine a different way. High rotation org FTW
From @joindiveclub w. @ridd_design
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In this 7/10 world, standing out means pushing to be an 8, 9, or 10 at the thing you were hired to do.
• Own the full arc from vision to execution
• Understand the system, not just your part
• Have a strong POV, and use it to build the unexpected but correct
(2/3)
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The Shopify Product Design Studio operates like an internal agency:
– The product design lead acts as the client.
– Projects are tightly framed and typically last 2–3 months.
Their role isn’t to replace or backfill teams, but to work alongside them—injecting a burst of energy, creativity, and momentum – driving towards 10/10 experiences (3/6)
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For those that can think past the SF maximalist theme: EST is by far the best timezone for a global company, for which NYC is clearly the best city for business. Runner-up is CDMX: CST is close enough and Mexico City is cooler, cheaper and generally just feels more happening
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Saying “it’s only 1% of market cap” makes the deal sound trivial, but % of market cap isn’t a good measure. It certainly isn't grounded in strong operating discipline.
The real question is: what is the objective and is this the most effective way to achieve it?
But more importantly on the point of a bubble, this might very well turn out great for them (I certainly hope so!) but they would have not been compelled to pay this much to amp up design talent or to enter into the browser wars if the market was properly pricing fundamentals and execution risk
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All I’m saying is to not take the logo as a checkmark for skill or impact. Why I ended on “The real question isn’t “are they good?” but “can they be good here?””. I’ve hired great people from FAANG too — some of the best and some of the worst people both exist there.
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You're hired to think. It's not about deliverables or 40 hours per week: it’s about mindshare, company integrity, and the opportunity to get more than what the job demands (in exchange for the risk that you might get less). (2/3)
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Incorrect in all the ways. The incentive here is to make Shopify a company known for an incredible design culture
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It's wild that Google will figure out AGI before they have video conferencing software that gets the basics right, or a slide presentation tool that doesn't work against you
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It just emphasizes what we expect out of the role. As I mentioned in the thread: for me it’s a shift from science towards art, from ”what’s right” to ”what’s beautiful”. I think that’s how _designers_ differentiate in a world where anyone can generate a good baseline UX
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Polar is changing online billing. If you’re in Europe and excited about a new challenge, you would be dumb not to try and land a job there
Polar has grown 18,000% in 10 months 🤯
Zero ad spend. Just word of mouth.
Time to look into rewarding our amazing community with some referral perks.
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