Shopify, SPACs and Status: My Interview with Jim O'Shaughnessy (Part One)

So, to me, the big potential of Twitter is that it becomes a truly decentralized and yet connected intellectual marketplace where you can find and vet the very, very best minds in the world.

Twitter is like the free tier of the world's great thinking. It's where the best thinking takes place.

The best analysis, the best work, the most thoughtful commentary and understanding and deep dives are free. This is an abundance problem, not a scarcity problem. This is a problem of curation and opinion and understanding how to navigate this deluge of people saying what's on their mind. It becomes very reputation-based, first of all. And Twitter i... See more

The open community of the internet is somewhere where you can find other people who are interested in those same things as you and who want to learn about those same things as you in a way that was not really possible before, without there being a substantial amount of transaction costs involved.

Tobi likes to say that “the web is great, but it has two critical design flaws.” The first design flaw was that payments weren't built in, even though they almost were. And that helped Amazon grow and win this whole slice of commerce. And the second flaw was that identity was not baked into the web. It was left up to websites to decide how they man... See more

And then eBay started pitting sellers against each other, as you're trying to please buyers more. And as they went down this path of optimizing for getting rid of friction, they killed what made the place so uniquely magical. And eBay's still around, obviously, but it is not on the pulse of commerce like it used to be. So that was a model of sellin... See more

Shopify's goal is really to bring back a part of the world of commerce that I call “high trust commerce”. It's commerce where you have this ecosystem of buyers and merchants who are all deeply committed to the art of commerce. We're committed to this idea that maybe shopping isn't supposed to be this completely frictionless experience.