Tobi's Shopify Memo
The hottest topic in most of my founder and VC group chats yesterday was a leaked Shopify memo by CEO Tobi Lütke which he ended up releasing on his own:
Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify.
In the memo, he outlined 6 expectations for all employees going forward at Spotify.
Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It's a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don't think it's feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you're not climbing, you're sliding.
AI must be part of your GSD Prototype phase. The prototype phase of any GSD project should be dominated by AI exploration. Prototypes are meant for learning and creating information. AI dramatically accelerates this process. You can learn to produce something that other team mates can look at, use, and reason about in a fraction of the time it used to take.
We will add AI usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire. Learning to use AI well is an unobvious skill. My sense is that a lot of people give up after writing a prompt and not getting the ideal thing back immediately. Learning to prompt and load context is important, and getting peers to provide feedback on how this is going will be valuable.
Learning is self directed, but share what you learned. You have access to as much of the cutting edge AI tools as possible. There is chat.shopify.io, which we had for years now. Developers have proxy, Copilot, Cursor, Claude code, all pre-tooled and ready to go. We’ll learn and adapt together as a team. We’ll be sharing Ws (and Ls!) with each other as we experiment with new AI capabilities, and we’ll dedicate time to AI integration in our monthly business reviews and product development cycles. Slack and Vault have lots of places where people share prompts that they developed, like #revenue-ai-use-cases and #ai-centaurs.
Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI. What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.
Everyone means everyone. This applies to all of us—including me and the executive team.
Every year or so, a CEO publishes a manifesto that significantly reshapes tech company cultures across the industry.
Recent examples include Brian Armstrong’s influential 2020 article"Coinbase is a mission-focused company” and Mark Zuckerberg’s “Year of Efficiency”.
Tobi is a trendsetter among CEOs across the industry, and yesterday's memo will shape how founders approach using more AI and hiring less people in 2025, especially with the recent downturn in the financial markets.
That’s likely great news for founders building AI tools aimed at developers, PMs, designers, and marketers—increased AI adoption should benefit their products (though, on the flipside, they might end up selling to fewer seats).
We've observed a notable "pull forward" effect in revenue for AI applications industry-wide, with companies hitting remarkable ARR milestones faster—and with smaller teams—than ever before.
Some people are calling it “vibe revenue” which is meant to say that companies and employees are experimenting with many AI products right now and subscribing to many similar products at the same time.
We recently illustrated this phenomenon in a slide for a Chapter One deck, and notably, many of these ARR numbers have grown since we created it a few weeks ago.
Some memos become cultural moments for our industry, giving CEOs the "green light" to reimagine their own orgs.
Tobi’s memo feels like one of those moments.