No Priors Ep. 49 | With Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates

(music plays) Hi, listeners, and welcome to another episode of No Priors. Today, we're joined by Glen Coates, the VP of product at Shopify, where he leads the core developer platform, including all of their AI products that we'll get into today. Before he was a leader at Shopify, Glen was the founder of Handshake, a B2B e-commerce platform that was acquired by Shopify in 2019. We're excited to talk about how AI is changing e-commerce and entrepreneurship as well as innovation at scale and leading at Shopify. Welcome, Glen.

Thanks for having me.

So, lots of fun stuff today. Let's definitely cover your personal story quickly since you're also a former founder, one of several at Shopify now. Can you give us some of your background?

I- I was a comp sci grad. I spent the early part of my career in video games, and then I had a weird left step in my career where I moved to San Diego in 2008 to run the US operations of an eco-friendly shopping bag company. You know, like, you take your own bags to the store, that whole thing. Anyway, this company did a whole bunch of wholesale. They sold a lot of bags through stores, and through that I ended up, um, getting to the idea for Handshake. And Handshake was a- initially a very, like, sales rep-focused B2B e-commerce product, but then became both for sales reps and for customers to buy online. So Handshake eventually became basically a B2B-only version of Shopify, like a wholesale-only version of Shopify. So it's not hard to join the dots from there to after, you know, building Handshake for better part of nine years here in New York, the opportunity came up to, uh, join forces with Shopify, and then I've been at Shopify for almost fi- it'll be five years in May. I started out very much focused on- on B2B and wholesale, which was obviously the point of the acquisition. I spent about a year doing that. I then moved on to focus... uh, I- I ran a- a code red on checkout in 2020, which was the first year of the pandemic, and then since the end of that, um, I've been leading the kind of core product group at Shopify, which is- um, you could think of it as all of the built-ins of Shopify, the online store, the checkout, the back office, the developer platform, the app store, um, uh, and yeah, that's- that's what I do at Shopify.

Lots of- lots of good stuff. What's a code red look like?

A code red is when Toby sends an email to the entire company saying, "This thing is the number one priority," and he means it. (laughs) From an actual operational perspective, what that really means is if the team that's working on this code red asks you to help, please drop what you're doing and help. This is the number one priority. So that's how they work, but usually a code red is a symptom of some other much more systemic problem that's gotten you to that point. At least in my case, checkout code red in 2020 was, "Hey, the checkout is failing in, I don't know, three, four, five different ways, and the checkout is a pretty important part of Shopify obviously, so let's go fix that." So we, me and, you know, somewhere between, I think at- at its peak it was probably 200, 300 people working on various parts of the problem. So we all, like, scrambled for a year and, like, did what it took to, um, fix those issues, but then at the end of that year, Toby took a step back and said, "Okay, well, why did that happen? Like how did we get to the point where those problems even happened in the first place?" And then that led to some of the reorganization of the company around less... like there used to be 12 to 15 of these kind of fairly small fractured business units, and now there is actually only like three or four which is actually truer to what the product is, but of course each of those units is bigger than the ones that were before, so it actually requires you to lead in a slightly different way o- once you start grouping that many- much of the product and the people together.