Hadar's Newsletter #7 - Writing again, and joining Shopify! (06/02/2021)
TL;DR:
It's been a while since I've done this! Here's an update on my life 🙂
This week I joined Shopify's product team to help lead Growth! Couldn't be more excited about this mission, product, and team. Now is the best time join us - you should do it! Fill out this Google Form that'll go straight to me and I'll help you land in the right place.
Been really enjoying angel investing and running my first syndicate deal tomorrow that anyone can invest in! Join my syndicate using this invite link.
Hello! It's been way too long since I've written one of these. I really enjoyed keeping up a habit of writing, mostly for my own learning and clarity as well as to stay in better touch with you all. It's now been over half a year since I've written an update though, so clearly I've fallen out of the habit. Going to pick it back up now and aim for higher frequency / lower fidelity (never more than once a week though, and realistically less frequent than that).
For those who are new to this newsletter, it has two purposes:
I've found this to be a great way to keep in touch with friends I've met at various points throughout my life. I share small updates on what's going on in my life and what I'm thinking about / doing, and friends often reply and this then turns into myriad 1:1 conversations!
Forcing function to develop a better habit of writing down my thoughts on professional things (especially product management, career management, and tech broadly) as well as my intellectual interests (tech policy, philosophy, etc.). Writing about this stuff is how I learn best - structuring my thoughts and getting feedback on my thinking from you all is priceless!
My life
Moving to New York now for about half a year, before moving back to San Francisco more long-term. Let me know if you'll be around!
It's now finally feeling like COVID-19 is in moving into the rear view for those of us privileged enough to be living in mostly-vaccinated communities like San Francisco and New York. I'm looking forward to finally be able to spend time with friends, travel more broadly, and above all else, see live music again!
With that said, I'm really worried about what's going on in other countries like India that haven't had as much success dealing with COVID. It makes me especially sad to hear stories from friends about their families and friends back home struggling with this. :-\
Reflecting on the past year, I'm also weirdly grateful for the opportunities that did come from the pandemic. During this time I was able to:
Focus during my hiatus on a lot of personal goals I had around health, reading/writing, etc.
Spent several months living together with my parents and siblings. Before COVID I would have guessed that all of us being under the same roof for that long of a period of time would never happen again since graduating high school!
Lived in Hawaii for 5 months, which I would have never had the chance to do otherwise. Learned how to surf, enjoyed some beautiful nature, made new friends, and swam in the ocean more times throughout those months than maybe my entire life beforehand.
Lived with my partner's parents in Ohio for a couple months, and in doing that met them for the first time!
Started playing around with health tech products to better understand my sleep and heart/blood health. Been using an Oura for about a year, used Levels Health for about a month, and just got an Apple Watch to test out now too. So far I feel like they add short-term value in helping me understand obvious stuff like that "I should be better about sleeping 8 hours a night" and "I should eat less carbs/sugar," but maybe something more profound will come up after more time.
After not having played video games since late middle school, I picked up Age of Empires II again! Logged around 50 hours already since the start of 2021, especially in multi-player with a good friend, though have dropped off since vaccines. It's been surprisingly helpful for maintaining focus and has made me value strategic thinking more at work. Or maybe I'm just telling myself that. 😅
My career
Biggest personal life update is that this week I made a new career move! I've joined Shopify to help lead their Growth product team. More on that farther below 🙂
I've been angel investing for about a year now and have been really enjoying it! Made just over 30 investments so far and have learned a lot from researching the companies/markets before investing, as well as from the founders I've had the privilege of meeting throughout the process.
For those who are interested in angel investing, I started a syndicate where I'll be sharing access to deals that I'm investing into. My first deal goes live tomorrow morning so I'll share more then! In the meantime, you can use this invite link to join my syndicate on AngelList and as a result have access to deals that I'm able to share.
Joining Shopify
I could not be more excited to join Shopify. In my mind this is the most exciting company in the world to be at right now for reasons spanning macro market direction, product, and team / culture. If the thought of joining us excites you, fill out this Google Form that goes directly to me and I'll help you find the right fit here!
What I'm doing at Shopify
I'm joining as a Product Lead on the Growth team. My role will primarily be to help Merchants get their start on Shopify: understanding all that the platform has to offer them, setting up their store, and getting their first several sales.
The Growth team at Shopify is insanely early. The company and product reach has grown manyfold over the past several years, despite not having as robust of an intentional Growth operation as we could have. We have a long way to go still to build up Growth systems and processes to rival the tech giants. Which to me is the most promising thing I could ever hear! There's only more upside looking forward, tons of low hanging fruit, and opportunities to take big bold bets that propel Shopify leagues from where we are today. I'm excited to help build out the team that will see to this future.
Why I'm joining Shopify
Mission and strategy:
Commerce is one of the most powerful and uniting forces in society, and has been since the early development of human civilization. Even the development of language is believed by some to have been largely motivated by accelerating humans' ability to trade. The internet has accelerated commerce like nothing we've ever seen. Anything that can be done to make it as simple as possible for everyone to participate in commerce, both online and offline, has huge and broadly-spanning benefit to humanity.
Now that we're in the late innings of the era of mobile and cloud computing, much of commerce has been centralized in the hands of a couple aggregators - Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple - in a way that disintermediates and exploits creators, and that also over-commodifies commerce for consumers. Shopify is an antidote to this by enabling creators to develop their own brand and audience and then sell directly to them with minimal capital expenses. And by making shopping fun again for consumers - opting into well-thought-out experiences designed by merchants themselves beats a transactional search on Amazon any day!
Product and impact:
The bold and far-reaching mission of Shopify is working! Just check our (public) growth numbers and you'll see that we're reaching more and more merchants and facilitating more and more transactions over time. And talk to merchants, there are millions of them, and see for yourself how big of an impact Shopify makes in their lives 🙂
Team and culture, from the top all the way to the bottom:
Shopify is one of the most ambitious companies I've come across. We're building a trillion-dollar company that will last hundreds of years, and this is evident every time you hear executives and individual contributors alike talk about Shopify's future.
Everyone I've met at Shopify is incredibly kind and merchant-obsessed. This culture is like nothing I've ever seen before. While other companies I've worked at obsessed over metric optimization and not much else, I can already tell this team cares deeply about affecting change in the human beings our product serves, as well as in supporting one another on the team.
I'm especially excited to be working together again with an old manager and mentor, Archie Abrams. He's an exceptional leader and product thinker who I've already learned a ton from, and as soon as he mentioned to me that he was joining Shopify I knew I had to leave whatever else I was doing and work with him again. I cannot stress enough how important it is in one's career to work closely with people who you trust, who trust you too and will empower you.