Jon Chen

VP Product Acceleration @Shopify. Advisor @Adverbvc. Prev VP Corporate Development & Strategy @Twitter

[Sonith @_sonith]

My conversation with @kayvz, co-founder of Macroscope and Periscope.

We talk about selling for $120M pre-launch to @dickc at Twitter, turning down @elonmusk, getting trolled by Kobe Bryant and much more.

His family immigrated to the Bay Area from Iran and he grew up an aspiring filmmaker. With a push from his mom, however, he toured and eventually got admitted to Stanford.

This led to a series of software startups with his best friends and eventual acquisitions from Blackboard and Twitter. He led product there and eventually (graciously) turned down Elon to co-found Macroscope.

Kayvon is an incredible storyteller, family man, & product mind. And while his accomplishments are many, he's an even better person.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did!

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
1:54 Fleeing the Iranian Revolution to California
4:32 How Gaming Sparked a Career in Tech
8:28 Growing Up With 12 Kids
12:32 Pissing Off an Apple Exec with a Jailbroken iPhone 4:29 From a Cardboard Sign to Winning Emmys
19:20 Building Software While Skipping Class
20:53 Selling $100k Apps to Best Buy & HP
22:32 Getting Acquired Over a Spam Call
27:03 The Importance of Passion
34:21 The Origins of Periscope
39:20 Scott Belsky Invented "Teleportation"
43:20 Six Months of Failed Designs
47:33 Selling to Twitter Before Launching
54:07 Trolled by Kobe Bryant
57:41 Turning Down Elon Musk
01:01:54 Founding Macroscope
01:10:21 His Two Most Consequential Life Decisions

[Carl Rivera @carlrivera]

Design at Shopify is having a moment. A big moment!
Incredible talent, and even stronger output.

So we gave it a home: https://t.co/qkXmfsLHzM

Come explore

[Rousseau Kazi @rousseaukazi]

https://t.co/jJPe6e2i2R

[Jon Chen @jonchen]

@l3amm Congrats Scott!!!

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Congratulations to our merchants on another record breaking Black Friday. LFG

→ Merchants total Black Friday sales were $6.2 billion, up 25% YoY
→ Edge peaked at 489 million requests per minute. App servers handled a peak of 117 million requests per minute, up 40% from last year
→ Shopify’s egress processed 237 billion requests
→ Peak database queries reached over 53 million per second and writes reached over 2 million per second
→ API processed over 31 million requests per minute at peak

[Liquid AI @liquidai]

Today, we’re announcing our partnership with @Shopify to bring Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) to core commerce experiences. Shopify will license LFMs to enhance search and recommendations, improving relevance, conversions, and customer experience at scale.

The first production deployment is a sub‑20ms LFM that enhances search.

Shopify and Liquid have also co-developed a generative recommender model with a novel HSTU architecture. In controlled tests, the model beat the previous stack, leading to higher conversion rates from recommendations. 👇

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Excited to share Jess Hertz is stepping up to be Shopify’s COO. She joined 4 years ago as our GC and has since played the key role in building most of the best systems at Shopify. Congrats Jess

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Shopify merchants will be able to sell directly in ChatGPT.

We’ve been working with @OpenAI for quite some time so people can search and buy products in chat, and it’s something we’ve had a hard time keeping quiet.

Rollout is coming very very soon.

[Kayvon Beykpour @kayvz]

excited to share what I’ve been up to:

today, we’re launching @Macroscope: an AI system that uses your codebase to answer questions about what’s happening and automatically reviews your PRs for bugs. we raised a $30M Series A led by Lightspeed & Thrive Capital, Adverb and GV.

[Harish Abbott @habbott]

🚀 Big news at @tryaugie (Augment) : we’ve raised an $85M Series A, bringing total funding to $110M in just 5 months.

🧚 Why? To supercharge Augie—the most trusted AI teammate for logistics.

📈 Augie is already doubling operator productivity across teams managing $35B+ in freight. Here’s how:

📞 Multi-modal: emails, calls, texts, Slack, Teams, browser tasks, APIs.

🚚 End-to-end ownership: across order-to-cash workflows including approvals, escalations (not just a voice bot or point tool) fully synced with TMS

💡 Smarter every day: builds the most dynamic knowledge base across structured + unstructured data.

Logistics moves trillions every year, powered by relentless operators like Luis at Transportation One. They deserve a teammate who’s got their back. That’s Augie. Watch what Luis has to say!

If you’re an engineer or builder who wants to create AI for the real world—come join us. We’re at Day 0 of transforming a $10T industry. 👇

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Clip from Context (Shopify internal podcast) with @rousseaukazi felt worth sharing. We talked about how the role of PM is evolving in a world of vibes and AI. What is changing, and what isn't

[Marvin Schwaibold @MSchwaibold]

I’m super excited to announce that Molly, the design studio I built with @jaytel , has been acquired by @Shopify to form a new in-house group, Product Design Studio.

We’ll focus on one question: What does the future of commerce look like if we build it from the ground up with AI?

A huge thanks to @tobi, @carlrivera and @katarinabatina for entrusting us with this new role, and to everyone at Shopify who’s already welcomed us.

See you all at work.

https://t.co/yTxmytQ3C4

[Jaytel @Jaytel]

Being quiet about this hasn’t been easy: Molly has been acquired by @shopify.

Before this, Shopify was a client of the studio. We’ve always admired their vision and been bullish about their place in an AI first future. Shopify is the repository for the world’s best products and this, we believe, will prove extremely valuable as commerce moves inside AI interfaces.

The studio model excels in a lot of relationships, but one thing it’s not ideal for: long-term, deep impact across an entire organization. And this is exactly what @carlrivera and @tobi approached us about.

We are joining to form the new in-house Product Design Studio group within the organization to answer one question: What's the future of commerce if we built it from the ground up with AI from the start?

[Jon Chen @jonchen]

Welcome @MSchwaibold @jaytel and team to Shopify 🚀

[Max Brodeur-Urbas @MaxBrodeurUrbas]

As a Canadian, Shopify becoming power users and now investors feels like being able to jam with the band you grew up listening to 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦

Excited to continue helping Shopifolk automate with AI