Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify Built a $90BN Business to Last 100 Years | E1189
Kaz Nejatian (guest), Harry Stebbings (host)
In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, featuring Kaz Nejatian and Harry Stebbings, Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify Built a $90BN Business to Last 100 Years | E1189 explores inside Shopify: Building Enduring Software, Culture, And Contrarian Company Practices Kaz Nejatian, COO of Shopify, explains how Shopify aims to be a 100‑year company by prioritizing product quality, deep technical rigor, and long-term thinking over short-term optimization.
Inside Shopify: Building Enduring Software, Culture, And Contrarian Company Practices
Kaz Nejatian, COO of Shopify, explains how Shopify aims to be a 100‑year company by prioritizing product quality, deep technical rigor, and long-term thinking over short-term optimization.
He criticizes misapplied Lean Startup ideas, remote-by-default for most companies, and generic enterprise software, arguing instead for opinionated tools, high standards, and PMs who deeply understand how code is written.
Kaz details Shopify’s unusual practices: building extensive internal tools, radical information transparency, frictionful hiring, and a culture that truly favors learning over experience and thrives on change.
The conversation also explores risk-taking at Meta, the Stripe–Shopify partnership, Shopify’s move upmarket, the personal and economic benefits of marriage, and how contrarian cultural choices influence public-market perception.
Key Takeaways
Ship complete, vision-driven V1s instead of half-baked experiments.
Kaz argues misreading Lean Startup has led to a flood of unusable products; early versions should be constrained but coherent and grounded in a clear vision, not random tests to “see what happens.”
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Optimize for ‘how’ you build, not just ‘what’ you build.
He insists most teams obsess over feature ideas but neglect where in the stack they should live and how they’re implemented—decisions that determine scalability, speed, and long-term leverage.
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Use long-term horizons to justify overbuilding where it compounds.
Shopify overinvests in product quality and internal tools (like its GSD system and HR stack), which is inefficient on a one-year horizon but powerful if you plan to operate for 100 years.
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PMs must understand how code is written, even if they don’t code daily.
To choose the right ‘how’ and ‘where’ for product changes, PMs need enough technical depth to reason about architecture, constraints, and tradeoffs rather than treating engineering as a black box.
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Deliberately design information flows to bypass org-chart bottlenecks.
Kaz’s biggest mistakes stemmed from routing information strictly up and down hierarchy; he now pushes for writing things down, sharing broadly, and accepting that bosses can learn news when everyone else does.
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Culture should truly favor learning over static experience.
Shopify prefers people who can rapidly learn new domains (and even SQL or light coding) over those with narrow, decades-long specialization; most companies, he says, only cosplay as “learner” cultures.
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Contrarian choices (remote, internal tools, equity flexibility) require burning bridges.
On going remote, Shopify gave up leases and hired far from offices to remove the option to revert; Kaz notes such changes are brutally hard in the short term but can create durable structural advantages.
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Notable Quotes
“We say the job of a PM at Shopify is to build the right thing, the right way, at the right time.”
— Kaz Nejatian
“I think the book Lean Startup may have done more damage unintentionally to software than any other book.”
— Kaz Nejatian
“First we build our tools, then our tools build us.”
— Kaz Nejatian
“People overestimate the importance of what, and then massively underestimate the importance of how.”
— Kaz Nejatian
“I think being remote is an exceptionally bad idea for most companies. I encourage almost everyone to not do it.”
— Kaz Nejatian
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can a startup practically balance ‘ship complete products’ with the need to move fast and learn from the market?
Kaz Nejatian, COO of Shopify, explains how Shopify aims to be a 100‑year company by prioritizing product quality, deep technical rigor, and long-term thinking over short-term optimization.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
In what situations is it clearly better to buy tools versus build opinionated internal software, especially for smaller teams?
He criticizes misapplied Lean Startup ideas, remote-by-default for most companies, and generic enterprise software, arguing instead for opinionated tools, high standards, and PMs who deeply understand how code is written.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should a non-technical PM systematically build enough technical understanding to make good ‘where in the stack’ decisions?
Kaz details Shopify’s unusual practices: building extensive internal tools, radical information transparency, frictionful hiring, and a culture that truly favors learning over experience and thrives on change.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What concrete mechanisms can companies use to promote open information flow without causing chaos or demoralizing surprises?
The conversation also explores risk-taking at Meta, the Stripe–Shopify partnership, Shopify’s move upmarket, the personal and economic benefits of marriage, and how contrarian cultural choices influence public-market perception.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can leaders adopt Shopify’s long-term, tool-centric philosophy if they operate under intense short-term public-market pressure?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
(upbeat music plays) We say the job of a PM at Shopify is to build the right thing, the right way, at the right time. I think the book Lean Startup may have done more damage- (explosion) ... unintentionally to software than any other book. And as a result of it, we have a crap ton of bad software that should not be in production, in the hands of people. I think being remote is an exceptionally bad idea for most companies. I encourage almost everyone to not do it. People overestimate the importance of what, and then massively underestimate the importance of how. I'm not saying all PMs need to write code, but all PMs need to understand how code is written. That's an incredibly important thing.
Ready to go? (upbeat music plays) Kaz, I am so excited for this, I heard so many good things. I spoke to Max Levchin before, I spoke to Harley. This is gonna be a great one, so thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me, man.
Not at all. But listen, you've worked with some incredible people, and I wanted to start almost with like a quick-fire on the people that you've worked with. If we start with Keith Rabois. I love Keith. Uh, what was your biggest takeaway from working with Keith?
I work a lot with both Keith and Max as partners, 'cause they both are in the Shopify ecosystem, and one of the things you realize about both of them, it's actually true about both of them, and I think it may come out of how they grew in tech, is that they are, I say this with ad- admiration, more aggressive than anyone you can imagine being. They're incredibly kind, but very aggressive, uh, in their execution and their ambition, but I have learned from both of them to be perpetually hungry, and it's very impressive watching them do that.
(laughs) I'm just, sorry, I'm just thinking of Keith, thinking, "Yep, that's absolutely Keith."
(laughs)
Yeah, it's, we mentioned the show with DeLeon before this, and DeLeon's biggest takeaway was Keith's view of company building as like a Hollywood movie-
Yeah.
... where there's a director who sets the script, recruits the actors-
Mm-hmm.
... and executes against-
Yeah.
... that vision. That's one way to do it, and then the other way is test, iterate, talk to customers.
Yeah.
How do you think about those two very opposing views of company building?
I think I had written a note internally to our product managers about this at Shopify. I think the book Lean Startup may have done more damage unintentionally to software than any other book. I think it's a well-written book, but it's misunderstood by everyone who's read it, and as a result of it, we have a crap ton of bad software that should not be in production, in the hands of people. And this is just a really good way to churn everyone off from these products. Look, people don't want to be tested upon, and this culture we've developed of ship things that you're not proud of that you know are bad just to, like, get some people to react to it, it's just really bad.
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