20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux

21:57Like it's crazy. So we've got like 21 years indoctrinated and getting a homework assignment, going away and coming back. And then we're like, we throw you into the workforce and we're like, by the way, now your job is to cheat as much as you can. I'm gonna give you assignment and you could cheat, you better cheat, right? You better be looking at shortcuts, trying to find other ways of doing it and cheating, right? And I think as we're building companies, just getting people in the mode of like, these aren't homework assignments where you get it perfect and you go, wait, you've got to cheat, right?

22:23You've got to build prototypes, You've got to look at other people. You've got to get feedback. You've got to put it in the wild and see if it doesn't break right away. There's like so many things that we've got to do when we actually build things in the real world and real companies that we've got an unprogrammed from all these people who are in school doing homework assignments and trying to get an A -plus and not cheating. So you know, that's something that we've got to really almost beat out of people and our education system to get people to actually build things. And especially like, you know, technically and engineering and product of just like that rhythm of building things I think is different.

22:50And that's why I think swinging the pendulum here is really interesting. I'm just get kids to like, let's write the code, let's build it. Have you know it's going to work? And I think we're going to get velocity out of doing that versus just talking about things. With less process, people monitoring becomes difficult. You hire someone and you don't know the first three months you're getting to know each other. But with less process, is it not harder to understand new team member quality than before? I think it's easier. You know, the only thing we should judge ourselves by is is that output that people are going to see, right?

23:23Like our customers never see the sausage factory of how many meetings we have and what process we use. They're only going to see the output. So let's evaluate ourselves on how good we see the output. And when I do performance for you for executives and managers that work for me, like the first question I ask is cool. What did your team ship? Can you just rank for me? What was good versus what was great? I want their opinion. That's a really good way. I need everyone in the company to understand what we're shipping. How do we build some shared understanding of what grade is and what good is? I want to see an organization where we have the most amount of people possible asking themselves that question.

23:56You need everyone in the company who has that internal barometer of looking at things that we're shipping and going, like, how would I know if that was great? How would I know if that email I sent to the customer was great? You should know that, right? So when you're writing it, and you should be building it and getting better all the time. And I think if you build an organization where you don't reward yourself by what process use but you reward yourself by a shared understanding of what great looks like and building towards that. I think that's how you get better. I'm thinking to something that you've actually said before though when it comes to people and talent management which is the worst advice is hire great people and get out of the way.

24:31I've always believed that and so can you help me understand why is that such bad advice? The context here is everyone's heard of that phrase. It must be written in like a bazillion Harvard management books, right? Like, high -grade people to get out of the way. You know, like, and I believed it, I was like, holy shit, like, that makes so much sense, right? Because everyone loves autonomy. Just give people autonomy. And what I realize building companies is, if you're trying to get a bunch of people together and have a shared understanding of what great looks like, it's messy. Like, there's no way you do that by letting people go in their own direction, right?

25:01Like, the Steve Jobs analogy, there's a rock tumbler that you're gonna be in together to figure out how you're gonna polish things, how you get a shared alignment. So for me, you know, hiring great people in any other way is like assuming that everyone is magically going to have the same understanding of the world is magically going to have the same quality bars magically going to be aligned on how they do things like is impossible to happen. So it's not only do I think it's about I've seen the biggest train wrecks and companies happen because bosses do that or VPs or CEOs, they hire people and they let them run.

25:32and my thesis here is why it's absolutely terrible is, and why I'm very strongly saying that is because I think people believe it's really good. And the second thing is the only way you get that level of autonomy is when you actually align a lot of things together. So I'll give you a really concrete example. When I would onboard new VP's that would work for me, I would very clearly say, and this is, I'm not smart, I just, I learned this over many, many years, is I would go, listen, we're going to spend a lot of time together. We're going to spend time together like we were pair programming, like we used to do when and we are programming all day.

26:03We're gonna pair program on leadership. And the reason we're gonna pair program is, it is as complex as programming. Like there's typos, there's bugs, it's hard. And the only way we can get to know each other is we're gonna have to pair program on leadership. And the way we do that is, there's a couple of things that I've noticed in the org that I really want you to ship. There's three things in the next six months that, listen, I'm gonna make it easy. You don't have to find these, there's three things we have to ship that I'd like you to lead. And I'd like you, during that time, I'd like you to find three other things that we should do that are really important and then what's really cool is we're like I'm not going here's exactly all the things you're gonna do for the next year I'm just I'm helping the kind of the onboarding.

26:40I'm like let's get let's get aligned on on have you ship things So I'll go for example like really great guy his name is Farhan I think he runs engineering at shop point now. I hard far hunt. He's almost too smart He knows he's looking at everything and I'm like I'm like dude Farhan. I know you have all the ideas Here's three things we're gonna do we have to become we want to become the best company for react native on the planet We're making a bet on React Native and I need you to publish a blog post and do some research on what we're doing internally in React Native I'd love you to lead the mobile team to get us reoriented around React Native and come up with we're redoing POS blah blah cool those three things and then cool I'm like can I review your blog post and then we probably went back and forth on it five six times together And I was like cool.

27:21I was like hey, I'd say that different thing. Why oh that's super interesting We got to know each other in this super fun way of just shipping stuff together Right, instead of talking about it, I was like, can you write that thing? Let's, oh, I hadn't thought about doing that. That's really smart. That's cool. I learned something from Farhan. And then the flip side, he's like, oh, Jarba Shah, I didn't see things that way. So we got into this like pairing mode of really getting to know each other. And then by year two and three, I'm like, Farhan, what do you want to work out? Like, we kind of know each other at that point, right?

27:46But that's very different onboarding and very different philosophy. Then I think a lot of companies, they feel that any premise of command and control is like a religious faux pas now, right? Like if you don't like pray to the autonomy, pulpit, and church, you're almost burnt at the stake these days, right? Like what do you mean autonomy? Everyone wants autonomy. I swing the pendulum. I think that you've got to have a lot of high alignment. And I don't, you don't do alignment by meetings necessarily. Like alignment's not this. We have to talk all the time. Alignment is like sending your boss a slack message every day, going, hey, here's two decisions that I saw.

28:19I did ABC. What do you think? Bam. Okay, cool. Let's align on decisions. Let's align on what did you see? And what do I think? like that, you can do these micro -alive events all the time that are really amazing, you know, to the point where we would hire new executives at Shopfire at Alassian, and one of the questions I'd asked after, you know, this new CFO or the new CMO had been onboarded for three months, I'd go, hey, how often do you talk to our CEO? And they'd go, well, we have our one -in -ones every week. I'm like, oh, wow, that's not a lot. And they'd be like, what do you mean it's not a lot?

28:49I was like, well, I do at least one slack a day, and they're like, what do you mean? And like, I don't want to bother them. What do you mean? you mean bother the CEO? Like, let me tell you something. The only thing on the CEO's mind right now is everyone running off in different directions and not be able to kind of understand what kind of decisions we're making. So I'm like, I share a decision every day with the CEO by Slack or by email, like the penning. And I'm like, they don't have to respond to me. I'm just doing these micro -alignments of like, hey, I saw this thing, what do you think? Or, hey, do you see this demo?

29:17That's cool. Or it's like, hey, I need to hand with this. So I'm like, I'm such a fan of like these micro -alignments that you've got to build into your habits. And I feel that if you... I'm on a show on Michelle. You know, I manage now. Lots of people across media, companies, across funds. Yep. I don't want... I honestly... If you have... No, I respectfully, I trust you. That's why I have you as a team member who I respect immensely. I'm full trust battery. I think Toby says the trust battery. I'm up here. I hired you. I pay you really well. Do not send me a message saying you made that decision.

29:50Just make the decision and move on. It's interesting, I think that the world is so complex. Why would I build a company where I can't use everyone's brain? It's always the thing I'm thinking about, right? So it's like, for me, I'm like, I have to tap into my boss's brain in the most effective way possible, because that'd be stupid to not tap into everyone's brain. So for me, I see it less as bothering, right? And more as I need to tap someone's brain. So we have so many operators that listen. What can they do to action that very specifically? Do they sit down with their team and say, to hey, I would like a slack every morning with a decision, a update.

30:25How can they action this and make that tangible? It has to be a bit more natural than that. And I think there's a book by Susan Scott where she introduces the decision tree. And the decision tree is basically how you talk to your team about this. And you go, Hey, listen, there's roughly three types of decisions that we're all going to make, right? There's root decisions, there's trunk decisions, and there's a leaf decisions. root decisions are kind of really important. There, there might be one way doors, they're hard to undo, right? Trunk decisions are medium size, and then Leafs are, they don't matter, right?

30:56So like, let's talk about the roots together. Don't surprise me, right? Make sure that the trunks, if you wanna brainstorm, I'm always available for that. Like I always wanna learn something from you, and maybe I can bring some input, and Leafs, as you said, don't bug me about that, right? So I think your approach of like, I hired you big bucks, go away. I think is a bit naive in a sense, and maybe naive is not to work, but it's simplistic, right? where I think building companies where there's a lot going on, there's a lot of micro -decision to be made that make a difference. Sometimes we're going to put the code there versus there.

31:27Sounds like I just trust you versus that's a root decision because that's going to lead on to a lot of other things. There's no bad reason in getting a couple of points of feedback. So that Susan Scottbook and at Framework, I think it's a great way to sit down with your team going, hey, there's three types of decision we're going to be making. These ones I care a lot about, these ones I don't, versus I don't care about them all, which is I think is going to be a train wreck. Show Michelle, I like you. You turn questions back on me and then call me naive. I was like, I'm just going to blame my English as my first language.

31:56So can I? No, I think it's fantastic. I love the discussion. God, it's so boring when everyone says I agree. Fuck, that's terrible. So no, I wonder. My question to you is then, if we think about these brilliant town to people who we want to give us these updates, you're going to get them in the door first. You've hired unbelievable teams. You know, Holly Ann Scott told me about your hiring abilities and skating teams. How do you structure the hiring process? And what are the stages for you? Because it's really hard to know and do. Man, hiring is really hard. Three things I think are important.

32:26The first thing is I call it the snowboard test, which is premise around the snowboard test is I can't get another human to do something they don't really naturally want to do. Right? So I mean, just generally like with my kids and my dog and cat, like if they don't want to do something, like it's not going to happen. So the snowboard test is it's the way that you find out if someone is a left is goofy or not goofy on a snowboard, right? So goofy depending on what foot you put forward. So the snowboard test is you push something from behind without them noticing and you look at what foot they put forward.

32:54That's their natural instinct, right? So I'm always thinking about it in an interview process. I'm like, how do I give you a snowboard test where it's completely unbiased, but I learn the most about what drives you? So one question for that would be I was like, listen, I'm interviewing, you know, some exec role or something or someone senior and I'm like, Like, listen, their question would be, tell me about the job. I'm like, listen, let's not get into that right away. I'm like, you kinda know what we do as a company. I assume you've done a bit of research. I've got so many jobs open, you could do anything here.

33:23What's your dream job at, that last thing, at Shopify? What is it? Talk to me about why that is for 10 minutes, right? So, that question for me is like, the ultimate snowboard test, I wanna know what people care about the most. Like, viscerally care about, because that's when you're not talking together, when you're not with them, that's exactly what they're gonna do. That's step one and you get to know and often I'm hiring for X and I'm like, oh shit They're instincts are always on Y and then you have a decision You're like well, can they do X and what you need Y or just like you'll see that and you know typically for example I'll see instincts on like I really care about the culture and cool I really care about the process.

33:55I really care about the people. I really care about the tech I really I really want to do this and and so that that first alignment that you have with whoever you're interviewing for me That snowboard test is is great. It's super over op -rended like but it works really well like you get to know kind of visibly what you want to work on. So that's step one. I'm going to I'm going to pop you with questions off to it. So I'm going to let you guys through these steps because this is too good. Step two. Okay. So step one is is you kind of know what their instincts are, what they really like to do. Step two is I want to know how are you going to do X?

34:23So then I'm going to and make show me how you've done X in the past. So there I'm basically I want them to go into teacher mode to me, which is cool. You want to do X? Can you entertain me and teach me something about X for like hour? You know, so I'll just geek out for an hour like talk about X like oh, I'd love to you know build a system That could do this and then like cool like how would you start it out if you've done this before? What do you do like then? I'm trying to figure out the layers because I think I think great skills for any human is a Deep appreciation of all the layers that come into problem solving right?

34:54So like if someone wants to be a great like I'd love to build a team and I'm like cool Like you know psychology if you read any books on human motivation like how do you do that? I want to understand someone's playbook in terms of what what depth they have in that area. I gave them the snowboard test. They told me they like it. Cool. Like, how much do you really like that? I want to know someone's depth. Again, there's no right or wrong answer here. It's just discovering like what some... Do you even like the conversation? Is it fun? I hope after talking to someone about the thing that they really love, that you come away with that, come away out of that chat, super energized, and maybe learn one or two things.

35:26Like, that's great. I want to work with people like that, right? So that's step two for me, is that kind of deep dive understanding depth. Go step three. Sorry. I'm writing down so I don't forget This is how you do it when you're a true pro show Michelle I'm like please get ready on your hand Yeah, yeah because I don't want to forget my points But I want you to finish the three step process first so Tease step three and then we'll go in yeah, so you know step three then is is gonna be obviously like talking about okay Well here's kind of what the job is I'd like to understand how they how they they'd approach that what they've done in the past And I love this one question, which is what's the hardest thing you've built before but why did you love that question so much?

36:01and what do the best dances of this it will show? Because I want to know if someone's got an internal quality bar. Again, I want to know what they would put on their life trophy of what they're proud of. And it both gives me an idea of their level of difficulty. Because you've got this job and you're like, I think it's a difficulty 9 .5 and then they give you, oh, the hardest thing I did was X. I'm like, ooh, that's a 7 .2. I was like, okay, well, I think they can stretch, right? Like, are they going to be able to stretch that? That's cool. But and then and then that leaves you down a lot of things but going, well why do you think it was hard?

36:34Have you seen other people who do in this? What do you like it just I just want to get to know someone about what they built like there's so many Twists and turns around just asking someone what they built and and how proud they are about it So that's kind of the three questions and then I I for someone senior I'll have them have lunch with other folks I think it's important that like can they get other people to do care if they've had experience in the industry Oh, well, you know, you've got experience building developer tools before. I've got experience in, you know, e -commerce and fulfillment or whatever, maybe, the kind of chosen field.

37:06Do you care about experience where you go, no, it doesn't matter. I'd say generally not. I think the three -step process for questioning is really about getting to know that human. You're putting humans on like a growth trajectory of things and matching that with what your company is. Now, there are some, you know, you're building a logistics company, like it'd be good to someone who's been in a warehouse before. Like there is some advantage of doing that, but I'd say there's a lot of people who can just throw into the depend into anything and they're gonna learn it, right? I want people who can grow quickly and people who can understand that problems are multi -layered and see that and fix it.

37:38I think that's more important. What do you think of the biggest mistakes that found us make when you review those three steps? And then you look at how found us high of a product and engineering today? Like they're in that order. At the top one is a snowboard disc. Like I don't know how many times I've done it. like, you know, on the interview panel, I'm like, my feedback is I don't think they want to do this job. They maybe want the money or they prestige, but I don't think like deep down they're going to do what we think you want them to do. Like, what do you mean? And it happens a lot, right?

38:06So I think the, like, the alignment on what people want in their life is a big one because I think if you, and if you fake one it, like it's, you get like a 70 % real person, but not like full on. And I think the second one is, I think someone who doesn't have the depth because, again, and we're building multi -billion dollar companies where everything's hard and it's like eating glass. It's hard, right? That you need someone who has the ability to see and address things at every layer of your company, right? From the code to the emotions and seeing that, like you're basically hiring people who are full stack debuggers of things.

38:39And I think people don't interview, like they're like, they're really, really good. I'd like these two layers, or they're really, really good. And it's not that you'd have to be good at all of them and there's no perfect people. but actually out of the interview process knowing that, going, I think they're really good here versus there. Like, versus people just getting so in love with, like, we spent three hours talking about this one layer of things, right? And like, yeah, but when you throw them in the thing, there's other things you're gonna have to see. At least know that before you say yes to the hiring process.

39:05So for me, those are kind of the two biggest mistakes I've seen. What's been your biggest hiring mistakes? Personally, when you're like, oh, I can't believe I did that. And you would have done something different in hiring. Dude, I've done it so often. Like for me, it's always when I'm rushed. It's always when I'm rushed. I tell you what, you're rushed a lot when companies are going in, but in gangbusters, right? Or you've got pain. So I've, so one of the things I've tried to do to remove the rush, is that why does it happen when you're rushed? Because you skip pulse of the process, because you, I skip, I don't, I don't do my three steps for all the time.

39:38I get rushed, right? And for me, like to get to know someone, like it takes a while. When I talk about the snowboard test, like it's not one chat, it's a couple, and I do really wanna dig that. I'll skip it and I'll like, oh shit, I saw that. So what I do to not rush hiring is when someone leaves, I try to take the monkey off my back. And I always felt a huge amount of responsibility that when someone left on my team, especially a manager that was like, I told their team, I've got it, don't worry, I'll hire someone new, they were always like, there's always a bit of unknowns and people don't like that.

40:07And at some point, either it's because I got older, I didn't give a shit or I just was in so much pain that I remember sitting in a team in a room once and they're manager left, the VP, whatever. And I was like, you guys are all adults. You all are doing great work. Keep it up. What can I do to help? I have no idea if we're it's gonna take me one week or six months to hire a replacement, but what are we shipping in the next six months that I can help with? Like everyone got super pumped about it. I just brought it back to like, what are we here for again, right? You guys are all adults, right?

40:35You can drink, you can vote, you have kids, all that shit, like, what are we shipping together? And I always bring it back to customers. I was like, what are our customers need for us right now? It did not change. Yesterday that person was there now they're not there nothing nothing's changed But what we have to ship how can I help do that right and they're going oh well maybe we should do this and that I was like cool Yes, no that let's do some stuff sounds good And then I would also I go listen Let's get ready that we might not have someone in here for six months So I took that stress off me.

40:59I lay on take some my time a bit the second thing it happened is everyone just steps up They they get jazz about what we're doing right there here like they're still getting jazz about doing this and they get they get jazz I see their face light up when we start talking about what they're shipping and what they're working on and I think that connects me with them It gives me a bit of time and I think I make higher better at least personally make better hiring decisions when I get a bit of time to get to know people better Founders always say I get it. I get it But I need to hire now. I've got X.

41:27I've got why I need to hire now What do you say to them and to people you say hey a good hard today is better than a perfect one in six months time? The right answer is buy yourself some time. One of the favorite books that I've read about leadership is, I think it's called How to Negotiate like your life depends on it. In the first chapter, I tell my kids about this because it taught me so much. I've just, you know, someone has your kid as a hostage. They want a million bucks and you're on a phone with them. And the first thing you do is you've got a monkey on your back because the hostage of negotiator says, I need a million bucks tomorrow.

41:58And you're like, you have all these things you can say. And then like the thing you should do is buy yourself some time. So you throw the question back and you go, So how do I get a million bucks in a day? Like that's a lot. And then the hustling negotiator has to think about that. They're like, oh yeah, that's a lot. Okay, I give you a week, right? So that's, I just remember that's the first example which is buy yourself some time all the time, right? So how do you buy yourself some time in a company as a manager as an exec? I'm like, take some monkeys off your back and get some people involved.

42:23Like, you know, like for me getting people in the room and going, hey, that VP's not here anymore. Cool, but we still have customers, let's keep going, is buying some time and get people, let's get refocused on what we're here to do. That's a buying times import now this flip side of hey, we got all these companies and I'm sure as VCs and investors are like You have to hire great talent absolutely So the other thing that I thought was really important was like if I did not talk to a candidate every week And I don't even call them candidate if I did not talk to someone that I'd love to work with every week as part of like my ongoing networking I was not doing my job right so I had this buzz flow of like let's just talk to interesting people all the time I'm like, I'd ping, you know, like, CTO of Microsoft.

43:02Like, hey, Kevin Scott, like, I'd love to talk about some things. And I'm, you know, like, cool, let's have a chat, right? Where I talk to some, I'd see some really good blog posts. I talk to people, right? So I think as a, as a leader, like, there's no hiring process where you just started and stop it. It's always, always going. So I think a lot of the, the CEOs that I work with in some of the smaller companies, I'm just always asking them, like, have you talked to one person a week that at some point you want to, you want to work with? And then what happens, if you do that one year, two years, three years, four years, you'll realize that when it's time, you're just going to know so many people that you want to work with.

43:33That one is like, it's going to be super amazing. And then you can start to figure out when you have time. You can look at your role of the act and you can go, cool, let me go back to talk to those three people and figure out where they're at. And so you end up basically having an ongoing, continuous networking of cool people that you want to learn from, that you can hire from. And then you buy yourself some time internally by just realizing, let's just not negotiate against myself and not be rushed. And for me those two things have been magical. It's interesting that we're talking about this adding to the team because the thing that is so cool to you is doing so much with little and actually the benefits of smaller teams and we see everywhere all over social, AI will create the rise of billion dollar companies with one person, whatever you want to call as that, you know, headline grabber.

44:16I know it's a really shitty question so forgive me for it. But how do you think about the future of code and the future of product when so much can be done with such little teams. I absolutely love where we're at with AI and coding because it brings you back to 1988 when I told our band leader that we didn't need the band to do a musical. So I've seen this playbook happen 30 some years ago where I fired the band to do some music. I've seen the power of like the computers, it's your co -pilot for doing things, right? And right now I literally feel giddy and excited about programming because I've got a co -pilot in my IDE and I think it'd be crazy not to use those tools, right?

44:55Like there's no musician now that does not have a computer in the music studio. I think we're just catching up now with a bunch of other trades where it's going to help us. And the way it helps me personally is, you know, it writes 80 % of my code. It doesn't write my architecture, but the programming AI tools now let me work on the hard stuff, which is phenomenal. And that's going to keep going. And you know what's going to happen is we have a lot more software to write. And that's what people don't realize. Like is there jobs in software development? holy shit like healthcare, agriculture, etc.

45:23like educate like all these places that need technology have been completely under -invested. We've got a distributor programmers more than we have before. I think AI is going to make that completely more possible. And I've never been as excited about being a programmer in a developer. What's been the single biggest game changer in the last two years? The writing code. I think having the AI co -pilot that I talk to nonstop. It's blown my mind. It does 80 % of what you do. How far does it go up? Is there a point when it just becomes 99 %? It's good, I'm not sure. It's kind of like music, right?

45:54In the music studio, it would give me my tempo. I can do a lot of tweaking with sounds, I can invent new sounds, but I've got to tune in my head. That's kind of where we're gonna be at with computers. So do you think teams get incredibly small? Does they just ship more ship faster? How does that change? I think teams are gonna get, honestly, I love it. I think companies are gonna unblote And we're going to distribute programmers. We've got a global lack of procreation happening. We're going to have less and less people who can build technology where we need it. Like we need more efficiencies in agriculture and health care, in education, in renewable energy.

46:29Like I think we're going to distribute these programmers that we're making tweets boost on Twitter and Facebook and we're going to distribute them more because we are going to need less. But I tell you, I think the pie is going to grow in terms of the kinds of problems we can throw technologists to. And I think that's kind of what's going to happen. I'm just free -wheeling here, but I'm enjoying this too much. I look forward and I, for the first time, I'm uncertain of where to place bats. Because the size, speed, and cash flow capabilities of incumbents is so strong that I don't think we've ever seen an incumbent set so strong.

47:00And move so fast before they've always been laggards, they haven't had day -catcher avansias. They're fucking brilliant now. Adobe, Microsoft, and video are moving faster than never. How do you think about this? and am I right to be worried as an investor looking to invest in innovation? I mean, if you go back in the past, is there a time where there hasn't been the five incumbents that scared the crap out of you? No, you're always scared by the incumbents by nature, but they don't have the inherent capabilities and speed that they do today. They don't have the data advantages, which ties their products together so strongly.

47:32They don't have the cash flow capabilities of Microsoft doing $350 million a day in free cash flow, and they don't move as fast as they do say with people like Scott Balsky, dominating the helm of Adobe. They scared me more than Nokia did in 2007. Yeah, maybe. And this is where I think you and I spend time in different places. So I look at things more as opportunities to build new things and I've never seen as many. And I always get frustrated. I go to every government's website. Like, actually, you know what, the coolest thing to build right now, and this is where maybe from a VC, we might be at a point where we're actually building human infrastructure a lot more now.

48:06Which maybe the VC model might be busted. But you know what I need is a company. I need a country operating system I bet you like if someone could come up with a country operating system It's probably the next biggest multi planet Well, be the richest company on the planet is a company operating system Which is how do you run a country right now? Like how do you run a country like website taxes bought like all that stuff like we were being it's crazy How much crap software and technology we have out there so so for me that's opportunity You're seeing how do we make money out of it? I kind of don't care I just think I want to make you know everything we touch better right better better customer experience, better product experience.

48:40So if I look at an opportunity, I'd love a company to build a country operating system. Request for stalled ups. Why are the big questions you have? But it's not, it's like, but how do you think about that, right? Like we might be at a point where we need more infrastructure than ever, right? We build, we've been building started ups and things here and there, but how do we, like how do we do the rest, right? How do I electrify our roads? How do we do better intake system in hospitals, data sharing, I see a lot of opportunity there. Well, I think that's what you were saying with the shift to hot tech investing, which is I think embodiment of that in funding markets.

49:10So is that a word? You guys use that hard tech? Yeah, hard tech. It's exactly as you said, like electrification of transport roads, improvements in hospital facilities and everything, hard physical infrastructure in many ways, within countries. But honestly, I fear that this is a different ball game. Having software investors invest in hard tech is a very different game. It is like, wouldn't have your sales team write code. It's the same thing. It's a very different mindset. So I think a lot of people will get burnt there But I agree with you in terms of the excitement around it one thing that I'm always just really troubled by honestly It's I've missed investing in a lot of the foundational model companies always believing that that would be just a layer of commoditization That do you agree that the foundational model air will be commoditized?

49:55What do you think? How do you see that playing out? I think they are like obviously it's hard to build a it's like almost a platform company You're building a foundational layer of that thing, right? The internet, hospitals, etc. It's actually a lot harder and you've got two exits, right? Someone's going to buy you because you're going to build a layer and someone else wants it or it's going to take you 20 years before you scale. But for me, I see it de -risk because I do, I've been on the buying side of being in a bigger company going that small company really, they push that platform in a cool, little direction.

50:24Let's acquire them. So I see some, there's always two exits for platform companies that I think is useful to think about, right? as you start looking at risks and it's harder, but I think that's a hard tech. We have to get better at doing harder things. Final question before we do a quick five, but I'm really interested by this one, sorry, and going back to it, we saw we were scaling teams earlier and you talked about trajectory and growth. What are the reasons that great product teams and engineering teams go average? Why does that happen? And how do you think about that? Wow, that is such an interesting question.

50:55How do you, how does every team get pulled down and not do to the best of their ability? I think one of the hard things about teams and building companies is it's really hard to pace yourself You know, it's kind of like you're running a marathon You know like I don't know if you've done any half marathon. It's like there's always a pace bunny I run a marathon a weekend and have done the two a year and a half Well, there you go. Okay, so you know all about the pace bunny There's it's really hard to have a pace bunny for a company in the team, right? I'm a big fan of pace bunny myself. I'm like as a leader of a company You should always be looking for your pace bunny So looking at what other people are shipping, looking at, velocity of other teams, and a lot of the people that I talk to where I'm like I'm building my hiring pipeline or I'm learning something.

51:36I'm always going outside to like no CTO it's Spotify I'm like hey, can you talk about how you do infertileness and do you talk about your last couple of incidents? What were they? You know like always trying to like pace myself. I'm like and often you know I'd be really hard on myself. I got oh actually we're all doing this shitty thing and then sometimes I'd be embarrassed going Oh my god, we can be so much better. So I think a really good tool for, I think, leaders is build a pace -bunny process of some sort where you can talk to enough people where you build kind of an internal model of what great looks like, and then you bring that to your team.

52:06And then you can obviously making sure you're surrounded by people who care about that. What's been the hardest thing about Zero to one with the new company? You know, I think it's so, maybe you'll tell me I'm wrong, but I think it's so different, you know, moving from the scale that you were at with Atlassian and Shopify to Zero to one, it's a completely different game. What was the hardest or most surprising element about that transition? I think that a lot of it's the same. I think the hardest part was it is a bit more lonely. There's two of us and we're grinding and grinding and there's a lot of friends that Shopify and people like to shoot the shit with and people who are in the same bucket and I felt they was a bit lonely and it was a year grind that if you see some of my tweets I had some pretty pretty low lows and pretty high highs and I forgot huge respect for you know that first year or so when you're just you're trying to pull the pieces together you're trying to figure out what to build, what not to build, and how did you get through those hard times?

52:54I've had low lows in high highs. It's part of life, but what's the internal voice that gets you through them? My wife just pulls a little bit, she's my counselor and my cheerleader. Honestly, like she, you know, some people don't bring their work to their spouses, but I do a lot, and she's my life partner, and honestly she's my biggest cheerleader. The fun part about building 0 -1 -2 is it did let me try out a lot of cool companies new products now. You know, like you read about them on Twitter and you see, but now I'm like actually, hey, let me use. You think that your new thing is really cool?

53:27Let me use it. So I've met a lot of really good people by just, I'm going to use your product and I'm going to give you some feedback. And it's been fun. Like I'll give you one example. One of the products that I'm really pumped about now is called equals .com. So get equals .com. They're doing something that's super subtle, but actually the more you use it, the more you see the value in it. It's kind of like, I'd never invest in this if I didn't use it day in day out. And because I think there's some innovation that comes out that's not deep tech, but that's changing how you use something completely.

53:57So get equals is basically taking the SQLers and the exsellers and giving them a shared data warehouse with thing work together. Zero investment, I'm not getting paid for this. I just love using new things. Really holy shit, this changes how I work. I do know that my, I think I sold that first round, but it was some egregious price because they're out of income. And I mean, obviously, very time -to -seeable. It was like a 30 or 35 million start. Tough price to digest at that stage. But the building a hard product, and this is, you know, I think, to your question, Harry, right, about, you know, there's some startups who are solving some really hard problems where it might take 50 million bucks to get a one -o -odd, right?

54:34And how do we build a VC culture where that's well, I actually think that I think that how the problems product marketing, as you said that, it kind of takes a couple of unravelings to see the beauty in the product. A lot of people don't have the patience to see it. A lot of people don't have the willingness to spend the time to see it. And then it's also in a very messy market where a lot of people say, hey, we'll turn you into a data wizard, hey, we give you data skills that no one else does. It's a messy product marketing challenge. And that's why you're a much better investor than I am. I'm a happy customer and I see how it changed my life.

55:07But I have no idea if this is a business or I listen is why actually you know be an interesting partnership as an investing partnership because you learn from each other and the question That is like well is that viral spread within the loving customers? And what's the net you for me to existing? So yes, maybe I should ping boobish. Yeah, and you're right like customer acquisition is is hard I think that's something I learned from Shopify and it lasts in is it's hard So my my zero to one the first thing I did is you know my co -founders are YouTube celebrities So I'm like, okay, I've got that I've got that part nailed so I can go to market quickly So what's the price point as well because the ACV is important.

55:41Yeah, I think they're marketing it as a business tool So pricing is kind of you know, it's not a 499 pricing It's it's it's gonna be the day of data layer for your company If you're not willing to pay 49 bucks a month to like see everything that's happening in your company You're like you're probably not the right tool. So there I think their position themselves as a pro tool right again Is there a pro tool market? I think there's some really good pro tools you talk about Adobe right some pro tools that have been been successful but I wouldn't do a quick fire on with e -jama shells so if we start with what's the biggest problem you CCOs make and what's the fix?

56:14I think CEOs underestimate go -to -market a lot. I think you talked about that like how are they gonna acquire customers and are they gonna be able to create a movement around what they're building and I CCOs think they can do it but don't realize the grind it's gonna take over a year over a year and I think they see the outcome of companies like a lasting shop by who've been doing it for 15 to 20 years and assume it just happens but it's daily, daily grind to get people to care about what you care about. There's a saying which I said, no one cares about where you're building. Literally no one gives a shit about it as much as you do.

56:45And how do you get people to give a shit about it? And it's not something you layer on. I see 70 people like, yeah Harry, I know your content or your community or all that. We'll do it after the A. It's not how it's not like, build it where you want to. No, no, no, this will get you to the A. Tell me, what's the biggest mistake founders make when hiring products and engineering teams? They hire too quickly. As a result, they don't know what the capacity of their team actually is on paper. So I always wait till things break a couple of times before I add people. If you go back to the night before, you know, your first day at Shopify or Atlassian, what do you wish you could cool yourself up and tell yourself?

57:22I started on the support team at Shopify and that was the best thing that I've ever done. And it's the only time I did it. I spent one month and I said, If I can't take customer phone calls for the product that I'm leading and I'm building I should be fired So I thought that was one of the best things ever did I learned so much about the product I learned about the team I learned about customers. I turned out to be an expert user of Shopify and I would recommend that Everyone's starting a new job would literally start on the phones What function has the most tension with engineering? I think the function has the most tension is the design product and engineering like that try it right that tension there No sales, because sales is often the one that's said to.

58:02They demand things, they won't cost them a change, or they won't blah, blah, blah. That's interesting. Okay, so you've got two companies. I think there's some companies that are very sales driven, where absolutely there's some tension around sales. I think there's a whole hour podcast we can talk about, engineering leaders and how to manage that. It's not removed attention, but how do you use attention for good and not for bad, right? Because that's useful. And you can talk to Harley about this, but one of the things he did, well, he encouraged is I took over sales at Shopify for a year to remove.

58:32So I had 800 people at Shopify that were in sales and they reported CTO for one year because we had a lot of tension and we had to realign. We had to decide on, you know, what customers are saying, yes, to and no based on not just what we want money -wise, but what we want product market -fit -wise. And it got me really involved in helping with that tension, actually accelerating it, right? And one of the things I did is I love sales, which is like bring us the right customers at the right time. And I think one of the biggest problems with misalignment of sales is sales bringing you the wrong customers at the wrong time.

59:06So if you can realign that, and then you're like, well, what are the right customers at the right time? Cool, let's talk about that. And I think that's one of the things that I did for the one year when I was running sales. And Harley was nice enough to hand me the keys for a year and then take them back, but was really realigning on that. And for us, it was deciding Shopify is going to be the biggest hype platform on the planet. We want to land all the celebrities. We want to land the biggest retailers that are having pain points. And we kind of listed, and then we went ahead and built for that.

59:35We said, we don't want to land these kind of customers. And we went through and kind of redesigned who we want to land, focused the roadmaps on deliding the ones we want to land this year. Is it a bit of being everything to everyone? landing the biggest brands in the world, landing Kim Kardashian, landing X and Y, but then also wanting mum and pop shop who's got a bakery. Absolutely. Okay, let's peek into Shopify's product strategy was exactly that, right? So if you take all the retailers on the planet, right? You organize them maybe as a bit more like a triangle, right? So there's complexity and there's volume.

1:00:08Okay, actually, if you draw a line and you don't, you just look at complexity and volume, right? What you realize is that high volume and low volume merchant are often low complexity. Oh, holy shit, they've got something in common. They're low complexity. What does low complexity for retail looks like? It's low skew count. They're catalogs, not a million things. They've got one website. So a mom and pop shop and Kardashian have a lot in common. So what are the differences? Holy shit, Kardashians are gonna do 70 ,000, 70 ,000 checkouts a minute. Okay, let's solve that. So that was our sales strategy.

1:00:40It was like, we found some commonalities in the platform We're going these small merchants and large merchants have an 80 % overlap. Let's fix the gap so that the super, super large ones don't crash. We've got highest volume. Let's go after supreme, supreme again, like a fairly simple business. High volume, let's solve that. And I'm like, I was like, hey, I think we have five years of revenue in this bucket where we've got really good product alignment. Why are you trying to go close like FDD flowers? They've got the most complicated business on the planet that I'd love to get them. But if I can buy you some time by just getting the right customers at the right time, we have time to evolve the platform We have time to do that.

1:01:15So I think that was for me was the biggest wave It wasn't even removing tension It was just put at the right place and that once we had that I was like, why aren't you bringing us more customers? You know then I can I can put the gas on the sales team and and get up there where you're in and go I told you what our product market fit. I want them all on the planet yesterday and then they get busy Sean Michelle, I've loved doing this. This has gone in so many different twists and turns, which is always a sign of a great discussion. I always hate it when you step schedule, it's a sign of a crap show.

1:01:41This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me, and I've loved doing this. It was a pleasure. We waited too long, and again, sorry for the 20 million directions, but I hope it comes out good, so thanks Harry. That was such a fantastic discussion with Sean Michelle. If you want to see more, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC to see the full interview in video there, but before we leave each day, your website is the front door of your business. The way teams build and optimize it is broken, start between inflexible templates, and cumbersome code dependent solutions.

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