EP 203 - How Shopify Scaled Product Teams from 20 to 250+ | Brandon Chu

LLMs are going to be 90% better than you at everything except one thing. The only way to differentiate yourself from AI is that you have to become a crazy niche specialist in something, and that one thing becomes your job. Brandon, I had a different relationship with him. He was my manager, and then he invested

in our startup. He was part of Shopify's early days. Just to show you how fast Shopify was growing — when the team started, it was about 20 people. In 18 months, they were 250 people. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or Toby — because they're obsessed with the product, they become the CEO. It's much easier to learn the

CEO skills than the product skills. It's not a universal rule, but at least in Shopify's case, Toby is the product. He's a dictator when it comes to product, and that's 80% of its success. What are the things that this time you're doing differently, knowing that you joined Shopify and now you're creating your own company? The bar for software is as low as it

could ever be. Things that used to take literally 5 years, you can now build in one week. [music] So what changes then? If there's going to be a million times more software out there, not everyone in the world is going to value software the same way anymore. [music] What you build needs to be really, really good. They

invested in us, and then they actually sent a bunch of their marketing team to Iran to help us with Facebook ads. At the time, they didn't know that Facebook and Google and everything else were blocked. So we had to create a lot of local ways to actually market our product. Facebook is probably, in the history of business,