Joining Shopify
I could not be more excited to join Shopify. In my mind this is the most exciting company in the world to be at right now for reasons spanning macro market direction, product, and team / culture. If the thought of joining us excites you, fill out this Google Form (EDIT: old form, not monitored anymore) that goes directly to me and I'll help you find the right fit here!
What I'm doing at Shopify
I'm joining as a Product Lead on the Growth team. My role will primarily be to help Merchants get their start on Shopify: understanding all that the platform has to offer them, setting up their store, and getting their first several sales.
The Growth team at Shopify is insanely early. The company and product reach has grown manyfold over the past several years, despite not having as robust of an intentional Growth operation as we could have. We have a long way to go still to build up Growth systems and processes to rival the tech giants. Which to me is the most promising thing I could ever hear! There's only more upside looking forward, tons of low hanging fruit, and opportunities to take big bold bets that propel Shopify leagues from where we are today. I'm excited to help build out the team that will see to this future.
Why I'm joining Shopify
Mission and strategy:
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Commerce is one of the most powerful and uniting forces in society, and has been since the early development of human civilization. Even the development of language is believed by some to have been largely motivated by accelerating humans' ability to trade. The internet has accelerated commerce like nothing we've ever seen. Anything that can be done to make it as simple as possible for everyone to participate in commerce, both online and offline, has huge and broadly-spanning benefit to humanity.
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Now that we're in the late innings of the era of mobile and cloud computing, much of commerce has been centralized in the hands of a couple aggregators - in particular Amazon for commerce. Amazon disintermediates and exploits merchants, and over-commodifies commerce for consumers. Shopify is an antidote to this by enabling merchants to develop their own brand and audience and then sell directly to them with minimal capital expenses. And by making shopping fun again for consumers - opting into well-thought-out experiences designed by merchants themselves beats a transactional search on Amazon any day!
Product and impact:
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The bold and far-reaching mission of Shopify is working! Just check our (public) growth numbers and you'll see that we're reaching more and more merchants and facilitating more and more transactions over time. And talk to merchants, there are millions of them, and see for yourself how big of an impact Shopify makes in their lives 🙂
Team and culture, from the top all the way to the bottom:
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Shopify is one of the most ambitious companies I've come across. We're building a trillion-dollar company that will last hundreds of years, and this is evident every time you hear executives and individual contributors alike talk about Shopify's future.
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Everyone I've met at Shopify is incredibly kind and merchant-obsessed. This culture is like nothing I've ever seen before. While other companies I've worked at obsessed over metric optimization and not much else, I can already tell this team cares deeply about affecting change in the human beings our product serves, as well as in supporting one another on the team.
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I'm especially excited to be working together again with an old manager and mentor, Archie Abrams. He's an exceptional leader and product thinker who I've already learned a ton from, and as soon as he mentioned to me that he was joining Shopify I knew I had to leave whatever else I was doing and work with him again. I cannot stress enough how important it is in one's career to work closely with people who you trust, who trust you too and will empower you.