20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2024
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kaz Nejatian is Shopify’s VP of Product & Chief Operating Officer. Before Shopify, Kaz founded Kash, a payment technology company which was acquired in 2017 by one of the largest fintech companies in the U.S. Kaz then served as Product Lead for Payments and Billing at Facebook, reducing the barriers for businesses in cash-dependent markets to purchase digital ads without a credit card.
In Today's Episode with Kaz Nejatian We Discuss:
1. Learnings From the Greats:
- Mark Zuckerberg: What are Kaz's biggest lessons from working with Zuck? Why does Kaz believe Zuck is massively under-appreciated?
- Keith Rabois: What are Kaz's biggest lessons from working with Keith? How did it change how he operates on a day to day basis?
- Tobi Lütke: What have been Kaz's biggest lessons from working with Tobi? What has he changed most significantly since working with Tobi?
2. Shopify: Why We Build Our Own Tools:
- Why does Kaz believe it is crucial for Shopify to build their own tools?
- When did he doubt this strategy most? What caused him to question it?
- Why does Kaz believe the Stripe
- Shopify partnership is the most important in business?
- What is the role of a PM at Shopify?
- Why do Shopify focus on how not what product is built?
3. Eight Truths The Startup World Gets Wrong:
- Why does Kaz believe "The Lean Startup" has done more damage than any other startup book?
- Why does Kaz believe that 90% of companies do not know what they want when they hire?
- Why does Kaz believe the way that companies pay their staff is totally wrong?
- Why does Kaz believe that most companies pick fights they do not need to pick?
- Why does Kaz believe that for 90% of companies remote work is a terrible idea?
- Why does Kaz believe that everyone in sales and marketing should be able to code?
- Why does Kaz believe that married people with kids are more, not less productive?
- Why does Kaz believe that we totally misunderstand divorce rates?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We say the job at PM at Shopify is to build the right thing the right way at the right time. |
| 0:06.0 | I think the book Lean Startup may have done more damage unintentionally to software than any other book. |
| 0:13.0 | 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. |
| 0:20.0 | I think being remote is an exceptionally |
| 0:21.5 | bad idea for most companies. I encourage almost everyone to not do it. People overestimate the |
| 0:26.9 | importance of what and massively underestimate the importance of how. I'm not saying all PMs need to |
| 0:31.9 | write code, but all PMs need to understand how code is written. That's an incredibly important thing. |
| 0:37.9 | This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and joining me in the hot seat today, we have Kaz Natagian, |
| 0:42.6 | C-O-O and VP of product at Shopify. Now, before Shopify, Kaz founded Cash, a payment technology |
| 0:48.8 | company, which was acquired in 2017 by one of the largest fintech companies in the US. |
| 0:59.0 | Kaz then served as product lead for payments and billing at Facebook, and this is an incredible discussion. You can watch it all on YouTube by searching for 20 VC, that's 2.0 VC. |
| 1:04.0 | But before we dive in, ever wondered what your customers actually do. |
| 1:08.0 | The team over at Thay Do have been living it for decades, and they have recently |
| 1:11.5 | built a product that is frankly enabling the world's biggest businesses to literally know what |
| 1:16.3 | they do. Harnessing Journey Mining with AI, you can turn unstructured data into structured |
| 1:21.3 | customers in minutes, saving weeks of work and months of analysis. They Do Journey Management |
| 1:27.4 | platform is already helping |
| 1:28.8 | over 100 leading businesses, including Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Royal London and Home Depot, to know what |
| 1:35.0 | they do. Don't waste another step. Check out they do.com. But before we continue, let me tell you about |
| 1:41.1 | one schema. One schema is the embeddable CSV importer that will save your team months of development time. |
| 1:48.0 | While building a basic CSV importer may seem simple, |
| 1:51.0 | product teams typically spend over three to six months building and rebuilding their CSV import experiences. |
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