Jean-Michel Lemieux -CTO at Shopify

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Jean-Michel, the CTO at Shopify, and we discuss what it takes to build a product-focused culture, how Shopify is removing the barrier to entrepreneurship, and why building a backpack full of knowledge will give you a competitive edge in problem-solving. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) By the way, I love Shopify because I use you guys for my family's charity. We sell these children's books, and it's just the easiest thing in the world to use.

(Jean Michel at 00:00:45) Awesome. Awesome. How long have you been using Shopify? And do you remember how you picked? Did you try a bunch out, or was it just...

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) I did. I actually did. I had tried a couple, and I think it was just so fast to get started. And I had chosen Shopify before using my family's charity because my background's engineering. I've been writing code for about 17 years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) So, you know, just through the process of doing projects, all your friends are like, "Oh, you write code. Can you do a website for me?" And you just don't want to do it. You're like, "No, I don't do that type of code." But then you eventually find these little products that you push off on people. And so the easiest one ever to use was Shopify. And then I was like, "Alright, if I just tell everyone to go use that, then they don't bother me and they can just figure it out on their own."

(Jean Michel at 00:01:35) Yeah, exactly. We've tried to—I mean, you can tell it's kind of been built by geeks. You know, we've got Liquid and templating, but also we've put a really good veneer on that, which is, you know, I think it just out of the box, it works. And if you want to get into the meat, you can go and do what you want. So we try to strike that balance pretty well because I think I know as a developer, I know developers actually have a huge play in what tools people use out there. You know? Because people ask you, right? They're like, "What do you want to use?" And I think if developers like it—and it's kind of counterintuitive—then I think developers are going to be one of your biggest sales forces in some ways, right, just by the trust factor they have. And then, you know, if developers like it, it means that it's pretty malleable. And then so it's been—yeah, it's cool to hear. Well, thanks for using us. It's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:19) It's a lot like Stripe in the sense that...

(Jean Michel at 00:02:22) When it...

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:22) When it came out, it was just so good. There was no need to find an alternative. It's like even if there was a copycat that was equally as good, once you find the first one that works, you just stop searching. You're like, "This is perfect. It works. Until someone in my network tells me there's another reason I have to switch, I'm just going to stick with this."

(Jean Michel at 00:02:40) Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:41) So I want to know a little bit more about you. How did you get involved with technology? Did you play video games when you were younger? Did you write code?

(Jean Michel at 00:02:50) Yeah. So maybe I took a complete opposite path. So I don't know, do you watch the Grammys this Sunday? The Grammys?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) No, I didn't.

(Jean Michel at 00:02:58) So Billie Eilish kicked ass this year, right? I think she won—I don't know, I actually couldn't stay up the whole thing—but she won everything. But what's really cool about the story is her and her brother basically produced the Grammy-winning album from their bedroom. So there's a YouTube video, and if you go online and watch the video about how they actually created "Bad Guy," you know, sampling from a crosswalk in Sydney, Australia, they've got like Ace's drum machine. So that was me as a teenager. So I had a music setup in my bedroom. I mean, this is a long time ago. This is like late '80s. And I was in a music class. I did art class, and I love creating music. And my parents got me an Atari ST. And I had already been playing music, and I was like, "Holy crap, I can literally create my own songs from my bedroom. This is amazing power." And then I did that through high school. I never programmed actually through high school, so I did a lot of music. And one year, my final year, I actually went to the drama teacher and I said, "I think you don't need a band this year for our school play." You know, literally, like, this is like automation through the—I'm like, "I think you can fire the whole band. I can do the whole thing." And she's like, "What are you talking about?" I said, "I can—we're going to do a Les Mis, Phantom of the Opera, you know, medley, and I'll do all the music. I'll sequence it on my computer. We're going to do it live. So live, I'll basically be replaying what I've sequenced, and I'll do one track live. And I'll do the drums for this one or do a bit of piano, et cetera." And I pulled it off, and I was like, "Man, that was great." And then, you know, last year of high school, I go to the guidance counselor, and I'm like, "I have no idea what I should do in school because I've been painting, doing art, doing a bit of math." And she's like, "There's this new profession called computer science. It'd be perfect. You've been using computers. Why don't you go into that?" So I remember my first class in university, you know, computer science, CS One, whatever, sitting around a bunch of people who've been programming for a while, and I felt pretty much like the odd person out. I never programmed. I hadn't. So I remember sitting beside what I found the nerdiest-looking person in my class, and his name was Pascal Blay, and he taught me everything I know and got me kind of onramped into, I guess, from a user of computers as a creative outlet to building them. So that's how I got into programming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:15) So you played multiple instruments?

(Jean Michel at 00:05:18) Yeah. Sax—at that time, a lot of saxophone and piano.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:23) So alto sax was my first. I did that for like seven years.

(Jean Michel at 00:05:26) Okay. Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:27) Yeah. And then I moved to—did some bass guitar, which I really didn't like. So I moved to acoustic and then electric guitar. And then I wanted—you know, fast forward 10 years—and I want to just improve. And so I was talking to my brother-in-law. He's a music producer. Did a bunch of the boy bands in the '90s and stuff. And, uh, yeah. Yeah. Like, Aaron Carter and... What's car? Aaron?

(Jean Michel at 00:05:50) Rick...

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:51) Hogan. Yeah. Yeah. Like, the song about Shaq or something—he wrote that one. Yeah, he did a bunch of cool stuff, but, um, or he was part of the group for Universal. But, yeah. So learned drums to work on my rhythm and timing. And not actually—learning drums after having experience with all these other instruments, it actually really affects your playing across everything when you learn something completely new like that.

(Jean Michel at 00:06:14) Yeah. I think I mean, it's kind of like software, right? You want to be a full-stack musician. So I actually started with baritone saxophone, which is just keeping the rhythm, right? And, again, just going back to what Billie and her brother did in her bedroom, like, it's all about the rhythm. Right? And that's what—so I got into baritone saxophone and went, you know, went up the stack. Right? Alto, soprano, piano—it's fascinating to see it also. A lot of parallels with programming, honestly. It's insane.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:39) There's a further one. If you don't learn to master one first and you only dip your toe into each of them, then you never become really great.

(Jean Michel at 00:06:50) Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:51) Because I see a lot of the students coming out. I did some mentoring for a couple years on CodeMentor, and...

(Jean Michel at 00:06:58) I would talk to...

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:59) These students coming out of these coding academies, and they're like, "Yeah, we did one project for three weeks in this framework or this language, then we did something for two weeks," and they come out and they have no depth of understanding of how one single system works. And I was like, "Just go dive into Ruby for three years." Or, you know, like, just go dive into something deeply so that then you can build those analogies and those parallels further out.

(Jean Michel at 00:07:26) Yeah. Exactly. I mean, we talk often about each one of those experiences, right? Whether it be different instruments or different parts of the technology stack. It's like, it's all this knowledge you put into your knowledge backpack. And when problems start coming at you, you just have more tools, right? We're just literally little problem solvers. And I think Einstein had this big quote, which is like, how did he solve problems? And that's what I think that's kind of what he talked about. He's like, you just end up reading, reading, understanding, and nothing like—you don't actually solve anything until something shows up, and you can actually pull all these tools out of your backpack. And you're like, "Oh, I think I've seen this." And then once you start seeing the same ones returning, that's when you start actually getting some skill. You're like, "Oh, I've seen that pattern before. I know, you know, I know how to change keys when it's the right time to do that." Or I, you know, in programming, I know how the OS works versus just what client programming is. I can pull those things together and... yeah? It takes some time. It takes some time and a lot of practice. But anyway, long story. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:25) No. I love it. One day, I was sitting down and I was like, you know, I've been staring at these pixels on the screen for 15-plus years, and I keep hearing this thing. You know, I'm a kind of geek. I listen to some Neil deGrasse Tyson-type stuff. And I keep hearing, like, energy isn't created or destroyed, but then at the same time, we have power generation plants that create the power. And I'm like, that created this conflict in my brain. So I started doing research to figure out like how do the electrons actually emit from the pixel? Like how does it come from the power station all the way out through your computer? And so I went on this tangent for six months learning all the different steps and how transistors and everything works and how electricity flows, and it's just brilliant.

(Jean Michel at 00:09:11) Oh, it's insane. Yes. Exactly. And I think if anything, a lot of people probably think we figured everything out as humans, right, technology-wise. We figured everything out, right? We can make electrons move. We're all over the place. But I think what I worry about a lot in how we can actually make the planet a better place in the future is people realizing, actually, what we have right now is version one of everything, right? Technology-wise, must be, you know, computing, energy production, et cetera. And then, but we need people to take what we have today apart so we can see what's actually possible, right? We see, "Oh my God, that looks like that was so archaic now that we understand physics a bit more, material sciences, et cetera." So, yeah, I think that infinite curiosity is super, super useful. I did not go into that rat hole. I've been going into more software rat holes these days. But how commerce works, but, yeah, it's best.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:00) Well, what are you learning over there?

(Jean Michel at 00:10:03) What am I learning? Uh, fascinating. Good question. One that's pretty interesting is image quality. And you're like, "Whoa. What does image quality have to do with Shopify or commerce?" But we're realizing that in a fashion industry, when you're buying online, we see returns are a big deal. And this, you know, makes the newspaper, right, about whether it'd be the impact on the planet or just a logistical overhead—18 to 20% of apparel is returned. And then as a geek, I'm like, "Well, why is that?" Like, cool. Like, is that a wrong size? Is it they click the wrong button? Like, what is it? And if you start digging into what actually causes a lot of returns, one is sizing, right? It's like, "Oh, you said it was a medium, but your medium's not the same as my medium." Like, what—medium's almost too coarse-grade of a measurement, right? If you like, especially when people get used to knowing how things feel, but the other one is color. Like that—like, what kind of blue was that? Like, that—oh, that's not the same blue that I thought it was going to be. So those two things are really interesting. I'm like, so how do we solve both colors and sizing? So sizing, obviously, you know, looking at trying to get actual personal measurements and coming around with, like, what kind of personal measurements can you bring around? Like, you've got your credit card in your wallet, but you also need your sizing. And the second part is really looking at JPEG specifications on color ranges and color hues. So a lot of our images are compressed, and we're—I have someone on my team looking at literally, like, what kind of fidelity are we losing in the compression, and how does that impact, you know, screen resolution, screen quality, and basic color mismatches between what people are expecting as well. So, um, there's a new JPEG spec that's been worked on. I figure, I think, JPEG 2000. So we're kind of looking at being really hit—involved in that and some of the actual screen manufacturing as well to make sure we can have a really good representation of what something actually looks like. So I think that's going to complement—you know, we've got a lot of 3D modeling going on, so it gives you, you know, gives you some volumetric. You can get the size. You can put it in your living room. But that's going to be—color and sizing, I think, are going to be some big ways that we can kind of use technology to hopefully get that 18 to 20% down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:13) No. I agree because I was watching, I think, like, Brain Games. I don't watch a lot of TV, but when I do, it's usually science or something I feel like is educational. And they were showing how your brain perceives colors and shadows. And...

(Jean Michel at 00:12:29) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:29) It's heavily influenced by the colors around it. And so you've got those plays too. When you started talking colors, I was instantly thinking like, "Oh man, the colors on your site around the product are going to influence how you do the product." And I thought about my wife, and she has these—like, a timer that at different times in the day, the phone tints, you know, for the evening. And I was like, "Oh, so her whole screen is tinted a different color." And so you've got all of these things. And then sizing, like, I like these Lucky Jeans. You got—you have Lucky up there?

(Jean Michel at 00:13:03) No. No. I'm a Paige fan, but yeah. Oh, I...

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:05) I haven't heard of this. Let me write this down. Paige, P-A-G-E?

(Jean Michel at 00:13:09) P-A-I-G-E, I believe. They're kind of like these faux stretchy jeans. I like to wear jeans. I'm like, "Okay, I need colored jeans now that are as comfy."

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:18) Right? And so yeah. Yeah. We have a brand Lucky, but I'll go to the store and I'll—there'll be—I'll get the exact same size, buy two of the copies, and they don't fit the same, right? Because they're just—there's differences. And so you have that. So you have all of these things, but I love the fact that you guys are, like, alright, what can we do? Because you're also—you're not the retailer. You're the tools for the retailer. Right?

(Jean-Michel at 00:13:44) Exactly. We're the platform, so people expect us to maybe do some of the heavy lifting technology-wise so they don't have to. Right? I think you're talking about the book charity that you guys run. You don't have to worry about that.

(Jean-Michel at 00:13:56) So it is cool. Honestly, I think I underestimated the cool tech geek stuff in commerce that I get to work on here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:04) So I saw you over at Atlassian, and we were just editing one of their episodes. They have a CTO and a CIO. We had both of them on to get different perspectives. But their culture there is amazing. Do you have fantastic culture at Shopify?

(Jean-Michel at 00:14:20) Yeah. I mean, I was pretty lucky. I landed at Atlassian in 2010, I think. Mike and Scott, who were the founders, I literally cold-emailed them one night and said, "I think we should work together," and got to be part of—if you say culturally, what does that mean in the first place? I think Atlassian and Shopify have a lot in common.

(Jean-Michel at 00:14:42) First is founders that are kind of pot-committed. This is their dream job. They built a company around something they love doing, and they've got really, really good long-term thinking. And I think when you're building a technology product company, that's so important. Right? It means we can make short-term and long-term bets, and I loved that environment at Atlassian.

(Jean-Michel at 00:14:56) Second thing is very product-focused. We're here to bring a product to market, and we really love doing that. And the third thing is just empowering employees. Just treating people as adults, being open with people, assuming that good ideas are going to come from everywhere. So I think if anything, Shopify and Atlassian probably are carbon copies of kind of that mentality with Toby here. Again, his life's job, this is the only thing, and I think that permeates in a lot of stuff that we're doing. And also, we're—what's kind of cool is two companies that did not grow up in San Francisco.

(Jean-Michel at 00:15:37) So we've got—I've got this habit of finding misfits. So Atlassian, craziest thing. I literally picked my family up and moved to Australia to build a tech company the furthest away you can possibly do. But it's kind of like in the environment. When creatures and organisms have a lot of friction, you have to evolve in a certain way. It causes some different evolution, and Atlassian had to evolve in a certain way, which is—at the time, we had to sell our software online with no salespeople, which meant that it had to be super approachable. We spent a lot of time on getting up and started, self-serve, and that was really, really useful at that time. And Shopify up here in Canada, we've had some of the same pressures. Right? We had to just evolve in a different way.

(Jean-Michel at 00:16:21) We had to hire people that didn't have as much experience. We couldn't just poach people from Google or Amazon. So we bet a lot on people growing really quickly, and I think we developed a lot of our internal coaching programs, the way we hire to be very different than what the Valley was. So it's been fun to be in two companies that have been a bit the opposite of the bandwagon establishing in San Francisco or in the Valley.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:46) You mentioned product. I have this on my desk here. I've been reading this lately. Product Mindset.

(Jean-Michel at 00:16:52) Product Mindset. Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:54) Cool. If you haven't read this one—

(Jean-Michel at 00:16:55) I've not read that one. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:57) Yeah. So people recommend books to me all the time. I'm like, okay. And then I found out that we're going to have David and Jessica on the show. And so I said, all right, well, I'll read the Cliff Notes and interview them. I did, and they were really smart. So afterwards, I was like, all right, I need to go actually read the book.

(Jean-Michel at 00:17:17) Oh, shit. Okay. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:18) Yeah. Of course. Yeah. You read the summary. If I read every book—yeah. So I then read it and I was like, oh, this is good because it's got some basics in there, but then some of the way that they describe it, it—you know, I read some books and I'm like, okay, okay, okay, check, check, check. I know this. I've been doing product a long time. And then some people just come around and they say it just differently, and they have new perspective and it kind of gets you excited again, and this book did that for me. So I bought 10 copies.

(Jean-Michel at 00:17:47) Awesome. I'm going to buy it. I've not read it. What was the biggest takeaway for you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) Well, they had some good stories, but I really liked how they focus on making each individual product—well, so it's a mindset of product. So when I say that, everybody instantly loads their definition of product. So they'll look at within a company, if you have—I'll use Stripe because I was in their platform a lot. You notice that first they were just credit card processing, but then they started to break out and had all these—Radar and all these other products. Well, they look at each individual product, and they do financials on it, and they have success for it. And the idea is that the product should be self-sustaining in its own cost, and come up with some sort of value on how you have success with that. And that the cost—it's like a business. Right? You need the—I'm not articulate today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:42) But you need more income than expense. And they model that for the product. And then they have some perspective too about communicating with stakeholders, and it was just a fresh take on it, and I liked it a lot.

(Jean-Michel at 00:18:54) It's interesting. Yeah. I think it's funny that the word "product" is kind of a new-world word. Right? I've been in the industry for almost 25 years, and when I started, there was no product managers. There's no UX. There's no designers. You just had a team, and you built something, and you shipped it. And I think I've been shaped a lot by having to have a lot of roles. You just go back to where we started about music. Right? You have to be the product manager.

(Jean-Michel at 00:19:29) And one of the jobs that I got thrown into being a product manager is—I was part of the founding team that built the Eclipse platform. And that was done out of Ottawa here, and we're building out basically a universal IDE platform. And we're like, hey, how's anyone going to know about this? You know, the first part of product is literally, how do you get people to know about it? How do you build a good community? How do you do onboarding? So as a kind of product owner without the title "product," just as a developer having to create all those other things that actually make up a product—whether it be a business plan, how are we going to fund this, how do we build a community, what's the docs going to be, what's the onboarding?

(Jean-Michel at 00:19:43) How do we get feedback? Having to do that from day one, I think, is a really good empathy that it's just like, you can build it, but there's a lot more involved in creating a great product. And if anything, I always try and—I love people to have different jobs to almost have these different mindsets and understand where it is. I feel like product people also are really good at selling the value of something.

(Jean-Michel at 00:20:21) You know, as engineers, we're like, "Hey, it works." You know? Think about you go through your entire computer science degree, and you're like, "Man, I made it past the tests." You know? I took an image file, got imported, and I analyzed it. I did image recognition properly. I did bounding objects algorithm. It's fucking awesome. I'm like, "Cool. But why does anyone care?" You know? So I think, what am I going to use it for? And I spent a lot of time on coaching on getting engineers to understand the value of what they're doing. And value is, why does it matter?

(Jean-Michel at 00:20:52) So for example, at Shopify, we're doing a lot of performance work. And we're like, "Hey, we made rendering of Liquid on the server three times faster." I'm like, "Cool. Why does it—what's the client-side impact going to be? What do merchants know?" We've got to uncover that. And for me, that's a big part of the product mindset because product means value. You're literally delivering value to someone. And at some point, I think we have to talk in that language.

(Jean-Michel at 00:21:18) Here's—you know, in the case of products: by the way, your online store now is going to be two times faster rendering on client side because of this change. And by the way, the internet baseline is two and a half seconds, and you're at one. And I'm like, "Well, we don't have a product manager to talk like that." I'm like, "No. This is just human speak." Just like you build something, it's valuable, and you ship it. And I think—I mean, Elon in some way has a great way of doing it. Right? The quintessential engineer and has a great way of talking about the value of what he's doing, whether it be being a multi-planetary species.

(Jean-Michel at 00:21:50) Why is that—why is it valuable to do this? Right? Or why is it valuable to build funky, cool cars? It's because of a very, very simple message. And I think if anything, for engineers, I think people that have a product mindset of explaining value is extremely important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:09) They have a lot of that in the book too. Connecting the value—yeah. Connecting the value of what you're working on back to the product.

(Jean-Michel at 00:22:17) I just winged it there. So okay. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:19) Dude, first of all, that was mic-drop good advice. I love that. And you can even take it a step further too because you communicated the speed against the baseline, but then you could just go pull some study on page load speed against sales close percentages, and now you've actually made them more money by that Liquid template rendering update.

(Jean-Michel at 00:22:41) Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:42) We just made you—that's the headline. We just made you guys more money.

(Jean-Michel at 00:22:44) We just made you more money. Exactly. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:46) We're on that. We're on that.

(Jean-Michel at 00:22:47) You just made your money. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:49) You're welcome.

(Jean-Michel at 00:22:49) Thank you. Mic dropped. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:52) Oh, man. Okay. So what is your—when you guys go up against competitors, we were talking earlier about, like, why did I choose Shopify versus—let's just pretend there's no other solution. But what are your key differentiators? What do you say makes you stand out against others?

(Jean-Michel at 00:23:11) So I think the first thing is we kind of have a lead in this market, and we actually spend a lot more time trying to imagine what's the green path for entrepreneurship around the world, and we try to remove all the barriers. Right? So going to the bank—I really don't have to go to the bank and deal with all that bullshit. Right? Getting a website set up, getting a payments provider. So we actually spend way more time almost exploring the space of commerce and spending time with merchants, running our own businesses, and smashing down every barrier we saw.

(Jean-Michel at 00:23:29) We announced a couple months ago our Shopify Fulfillment Network, which is our logistical back end and warehouses, and that was kind of not looking at competition. We kind of didn't want to work on this. It's pretty involved to get into warehousing, but then our merchants were like, "Hey. By the way, once we start getting more than 10 orders a day, I spend my time negotiating with third-party logistics providers, trying to figure out how many I need, finding packaging. You know, there's some big guys out there. We just—we don't want to give our stuff to them. Can you just make this problem go away for us? Because entrepreneurs want to spend their time—I want to be spending my time in marketing or spend my time in product development."

(Jean-Michel at 00:24:18) And we're like, "Okay. Okay. Let's go figure this out. Let's bring technology to the warehouses." So that's where our mindset is as opposed to looking at what other people are doing. We have a million merchants now just literally telling us what things piss them off about running a business, and our job is to take that away. So that is literally the focus of what we do. Now what are we really good at? I mean, I think scale has been a big one. When you start a business, you don't want to have to change.

(Jean-Michel at 00:24:43) You're like, "Hey, if you're onto something, you end up at Shark Tank." You don't want to have to replatform, and we've got the world's biggest, I'd say, DTC brands on us. So Fortune magazine had, I think, Kanye and Kylie as examples of businesses that have grown to the fastest zero to $1 billion retail businesses on the planet, and they were built on Shopify with—and I don't know if I can say the size of their teams, but they're small teams. You know? Kylie and Kanye's teams are not—they don't have a 100-person team. And I think what they do do is they've got Shopify who've helped them do that. So whether it be sneaker bots, sneaker selling, fashion, et cetera, we've had the scale. So I think that gives some comfort to people that they can scale with us, and we're going to be there.

(Jean-Michel at 00:25:27) We've had some sales—you know, we have a lot of celebrities who've been on us, and it doesn't go perfectly on day one because we're trying to push the boundary all the time, but we welcome as many people we can. So I think that's number one. Number two is we're really flexible. You know, you've seen it with our online store editor, with our APIs. We realized that we tried to solve the 80% case of what merchants and entrepreneurs need, but realized that commerce is different depending on what you're selling, how are you selling it, what kind of brand do you want.

(Jean-Michel at 00:25:59) So that flexibility also comes with—we try and make sure that entrepreneurship is still a human experiential part. So that's why you don't see Shopify. You shop online and basically—I think the stats are pretty much every American is going to have shopped on a Shopify store in a month, and no one knows about it. So that's a really important thing that we're here to make your brand look great. And that's our entire purpose is to make it so that you can figure out what kind of business you run and run it your way and have the experience you want.

(Jean-Michel at 00:26:31) And I think that's—and you can have the relationship with your customers, which I think is really, really important. On the technology side as well, I think you'll see that we just innovate really quickly. You know? We've got, again, built-in AR, VR functionality of our online stores coming now. You know, doing the warehouse work—we ship really quickly. So I think there's a long-term bet on us that we're just keeping at this for a long term with—and bring as much technology as we can to it. So I think, anyway, I can go on forever, but I think that's some of the things I hear repeated to me a lot. And people trust us. They're kind of like—they trust us. You know? We're kind of a shoot-from-the-hip company where we don't bullshit and we ship first and talk later.

(Jean-Michel at 00:27:21) I think people appreciate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:24) When you were talking about the team size of the celebrities, I just imagined, like, Kim Kardashian's, like, whole family is the one operating the store.

(Jean-Michel at 00:27:35) That's pretty much it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:36) Yeah. I like there's action visual.

(Jean-Michel at 00:27:38) Yeah. If you want to see a fun video, there's a YouTube video of Jeffree Star's sale pre-Christmas. We worked with his team pretty closely. It didn't go super well, but we learned a lot, and now it's very smooth. So anyway, we do a bit of reality TV show where I had to have one of our DevOps or infrastructure engineers on the phone with Jeffrey's team.

(Jean-Michel at 00:28:02) But anyway, all is well. But, again, we react really quickly and we love following these, you know, some people see those entrepreneurs as celebrities, and, yeah, it's easy for them. But, honestly, the amount of work they put into their products, into branding it, getting it out there is just, it's really fun to see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) Now you mentioned a couple times, like, internal coaching programs, coaching. Like, how do you approach that?

(Jean-Michel at 00:28:27) I think the first thing is because we were outside of the Valley, we had to hire for potential more than experience. So what happens when you hire for potential more than experience is you've got to accelerate that potential kind of actually realizing itself. And what we've noticed is a lot of that potential is locked in self-confidence and a lot of the human things. Right? Like, people have the skill, but we're not taught in school how to be humans. Right? We're taught to solve problems, but a lot of those end up being whether it be teamwork or imposter syndrome or communication gap. You know? Like, the human language is extremely hard to understand. Right?

(Jean-Michel at 00:29:07) People have a lot of subtlety. So the coaching problem is how do we pull potential out of people quicker? Because we need that as a company. And we know that how people show up in their roles and their lives is probably going to play the biggest impact. So we've really doubled down on coaching as being a kind of an important human tool to pull that out quicker.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:28) No, you make a good point too. Like, school, they teach you work in an isolated fashion. Like, you're not allowed to share. You're not allowed to help each other with the test. And that is the exact, like, opposite of what the skills you need in real life is.

(Jean-Michel at 00:29:42) Life's about cheating, isn't it? Isn't life about cheating? It's serious. It's like, you come up with the best solutions by cheating, which is, like, what else is happening out there? Who's doing what? Let's talk to a bunch of other people who are half done their work. And it's like this big, I don't know if you like, there's a Mexican food called mole, which is like this, it's basically like this almost a sauce that you never finish it. You just, it's almost like a starter, like a yeast starter. You just keep building it and building it. That's kind of like how innovation is.

(Jean-Michel at 00:30:10) It's like this thing that's never done that you just, your job's not to finish and get an A. Your job's to just add more ingredients to it as you go and it gets better and better over time. So, I mean, I actually have an onboarding talk to a lot of students here, and I just go, rule number one, learn how to cheat. Like, that is going to be your best tool. And part of cheating is actually showing your homework way ahead of time. Right? Like, showing your dirty, messy draft is probably the most important thing to do, but, like, we almost have to, like, beat that. Like, I hate the word "beat," but you literally have to, like, be really, like, tell people straight up. Like, you've got to unlearn your twenty-three years of schooling because, as you said, the exact opposite is how the schooling system is built. And I think people get recognition. They want to get an A-plus, and they want to get it at the end. And that's not how you build a team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:01) Yeah. You're right. You're in my head, I'm thinking about school, which I did poorly in school. But the kids that would do their work, they would go—

(Jean-Michel at 00:31:10) You're just being modest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:13) I wish. My brother's a doctor and my sister's a physics teacher, and I was always the odd one out. But so they would, you would take your project and you would go off and hide and make it absolutely perfect. And then you would go show it at some deadline to the individual, and you would get rated on if you were good or if you were bad. And then you would never see that project again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:36) And, yeah, like, the way you work now, at least when I coach my people, like, my next generation of leaders, what I notice is inevitably when they first join the team, they want to go off and, like, "Oh, I'm going to go work on this for a while." And I'm like, not like our team is a small team. You know, we're a product team. Like, you know, you go work a day or two to accomplish the bare minimum version of what that business requirement is, and then you come back and we look at it and discuss it and move on. And that works for our level of team right now. But I found that the more momentum we can build, right, the less of the "go hiding and making it perfect" and the more of the "let's constantly check in and iterate as a group," now we're all a part of the process, and then we get these new ideas and everything can sort of move forward in this momentum pattern. And that, and then people love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:26) Like once people start working like this, like, "Oh, we just absolutely—"

(Jean-Michel at 00:32:29) Love it. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:29) Because, like, they get these immediate gratification, like, forty-eight-hour feedback loops, and it just builds the project. Everyone gets pumped.

(Jean-Michel at 00:32:38) And I think one of the things that I realized is, you know, as you said, we have all this language: exams, tests, A-plus from schools. Like, what language do we use now? Like, what's the language of cheating? And one of the things we came up with was being really open about, "Hey, we're having a chat right now. I'm at 30%." Right? "I'm at, this is a 30% chat, a 0% chat, a 60% chat, or it's a 90% chat." And that percentage is, like, how far am I into this problem space? So at a 30% chat, it opens you up going, "Hey, we're in brainstorming mode. Let's figure out directionality here. Let's add more options to the table." And a 90% chat, I'm going to nitpick every pixel on the screen or every line of code. And it just lets you have the right chat at the right time.

(Jean-Michel at 00:33:28) And we found that language to be really useful just as a starter, right, to chat. Because we found a lot of people's, I guess, feelings got hurt when they're in the, they're like, "Well, I thought I want to be open, but you're, like, you're slamming me about pixels. I'm not ready for pixels." Or, "Hey, I think I'm done, and you didn't give me any harsh feedback." So it's like having that almost a barometer of, like, how in progress is the problem, and let's have that kind of discussion has been, like, super useful as a, I guess, a language of having these early chats more often.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:00) That is ridiculously brilliant. How did you guys come up with that?

(Jean-Michel at 00:34:04) I have no idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:05) It just kind of happened.

(Jean-Michel at 00:34:07) I heard it from someone somewhere. Someone, I think a mentor told me about that somewhere, and I just, I ripped it. I ripped it off. I cheated. I cheated. I still have to cheat someone's and I've, I forgot where it came from, but it's, yeah, it's been super useful here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:21) Yes. Because, like, the questions we were asking is, you know, how do we make it easier, faster? And it's almost like, you know, you come up with good ideas. It's like, some things sound so good. You're like, "Can we do that? Like, that sounds so good. Are we allowed to do that?" It's like, "Yeah, man. That's what we're here to bring value quick and help progress the world." I love that 30, 60, 90%, and I think it, my brain's going crazy right now, so I—

(Jean-Michel at 00:34:46) It's simple. I mean, super simple. Yeah, there's a book there. We should write a book on this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) There's a—

(Jean-Michel at 00:34:52) There's a book. There we go. That's the title.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:55) There is a book.

(Jean-Michel at 00:34:57) But it's even more interesting because, like, socially, like, I want to show up as a CTO to a lot of 30% chats. Like, nineties are, like, too late. And then when I show up, I get a lot of, like, people are nervous. They're like, "Well, what are you doing? I'm not done." And I'm like, "No, but this is where we have to talk." Like, we're brainstorming, and do we understand the problem? Do we know, are we going to go east or west in this problem? Like, why? Like, what's the weather? Like, we have to understand the scope, the terrain, the, like, look at all the maps. Like, that's the super interesting part of problem solving. But I see a hesitation with, again, "Why is the CTO showing up at three? They should show up at the end." Like, that's not how a collaborative, innovative company works. So, anyway, I'm not there yet, but I find the 30%, honestly, is probably one of the most important kind of chats to have in technology and just in general problem solving.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:54) At what, like, we were having this conversation the other day. We were talking about connecting the value to the customer, and then you go through the project and you start at 30%. The value is usually pretty there at 30%. But then as you move towards the end, like, there is a time and place in which the customer value sometimes gets lost. And we were talking about that the other day. Like, at what point you have this customer value and then you turn it into specs and you start executing on the specs. Like, where is the exact moment in time that you disconnect from the customer value? And there's a certain part in the project and it was just an interesting question. Because, yes, if you create specs completely based on the customer value, it's baked in. But, like, at what point do you stop thinking about the customer in the conversation? And then just have awareness of that.

(Jean-Michel at 00:36:45) One tip I give teams, again, just going back to the days when I had no product manager on my team was, I had to record screencasts and do demos. So I'm always like, "What's the demo? You've got three minutes on stage at some random conference. What demo are you going to give?" Seriously, I'm like, "What are you going to show?" And people are going to pay you money for that thing, or they're going to walk out, and you have three minutes. And I ask teams that a lot because I just want to focus. Like, "What's the value you're trying to ship?" And I love demos too, and I always have teams start from the beginning, start from scratch, and show, you know, show how easy, like, how does this fit? Right? Like, show the context as a good forcing function for value. But the other thing too is, like, you know, for building things higher. Right? Like, you take some wrong turns sometimes. But at the beginning of a product, project, or product, I think having a bit of a green path, which is knowing, "Okay, if we build this one thing to enable this," and then, like, "I can see how that's going to be leveraged. And I can see, I can see a couple of years of work in this area." Right? So if you take, you know, like, take Shopify as an example. Right? Online store. Right? Like, building an online store is, like, we start with, like, "Okay, we need templating. We need configuration. We need settings. We need, how do we, do we see a path?" We need simplicity in setting up. And I think having teams spend a bit of time upfront on what that green path is, then when you, you know, if you feel like you're, like, "Oh, what's the value again?" You kind of anchor on, remember what journey we're on, like, what really matters. And I think a lot of teams don't take the time to have a bit of a green path to go, "Okay, I'm not just doing one project. I'm really on this mission for a little while," and it can be a really good way to get back. Like, as you're in the details of making it work or you're on this detour of finessing or polishing the spot, you can really just go back to your green path going, like, "What does this, why does this matter again?" as a really good anchor. So those two tips. Demo, two-three-minute demo and get everyone on the team to be able to do it, and then have a bit of a green path, which is beyond this project we're working on. Like, "Why does it matter?" And then that's a really good anchor to come back to again and help decide, right, if you're on the right track or not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:02) I love it. That's, like, super great advice. And then it made me think too. I got asked a couple days ago—sometimes, you know, how things just come in clusters—I got asked, like, randomly, like, a number of times from different people, "How do I, you know, know that I'm ready to be a CTO?" Like, "I might be a director of engineering, and I think that there's an opportunity, and I might be able to move up, whether in my company or to another company." And then so I had those in my mind coming into this call, and then I saw that, you know, you made the transition from, you know, I think it was VP at Atlassian and then to CTO. And I try to tell people I get hung up on titles. Well, I'll let you answer this. But, like, what was, like, internally, how did you know you were ready to make a transition, like, for more?

(Jean-Michel at 00:39:53) Man, okay. This is a super interesting topic. So I feel like I've had the same job for twenty-five years. Like, I'm just going to put that, like, I literally had the same job. I've, you know, building software with teams on interesting problems. That's literally all. And I think at some point, people gave me permission to have a bit of responsibility on the people we work with, the culture, and the technology. And I think your entire job in tech is how do you mix those three things together really well and get better at each one, right? Get better at working with people, get better in understanding problems, and get better at building things and using technology leverage. And I think what's, I guess, maybe giving me the privilege and, you know, to be the CTO of Shopify is, like, that's all I think about. I don't think about the title. Like, I just like doing that over and over and over again, and I love it that there's an infinite number of problems. And I think the people I've seen who either get stuck in a role or don't advance, I think they're waiting for some big change. Or, like, "When I'm a CTO, then I can do this other thing," or "I can," but it's all the same job. Right? Like, we're just, so I think falling in love with that being your profession and that being something you do is going to bring you to amazing places. I'd say, you know, in my career, I've had, you know, ebbs and flows of different things that you specialize in. You know? I took almost a year off to write a book at some point, so that was really, really interesting just to figure out how to write and explain things. You know, super geeky technical on platform work in Eclipse. You know?

(Jean-Michel at 00:41:33) At Atlassian, I did a lot of team building. I had to hire 500 engineers. I had to think about onboarding. I had to think about a lot of that. And coming to Shopify, I've actually been able to go almost back into technology in some ways, like a bit of the T in CTO.

(Jean-Michel at 00:41:46) I've had the luxury of hiring some really strong engineering leaders here and have been able to dip back into technology. But I think, again, that ebb and flow between them has just been around solving problems. So I think at some point too, you do have to realize from a leadership perspective that understanding humans is a really good asset. You know, you don't do much alone anymore.

(Jean-Michel at 00:42:08) So I think I actually had to almost go back to school on humans, right? Probably having kids and teenagers, getting married, being married for 20 years, being in a couple, building companies—you learn a lot just as personal growth. And I think bringing that into how you communicate, the relationships you have, stakeholder management, which is literally just people have to know about stuff. Right? Fill them in. People have biases. Make sure you address that. Practicing that over and over again, I think is why people kind of tap me on the shoulder and don't mind kind of hanging out with me doing these kind of gigs.

(Jean-Michel at 00:42:44) No, it's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:45) It's definitely a skill, and it definitely has to be something that you work on because I realized quickly, like, I would sit there for over a decade and just tell the computer what to do constantly.

(Jean-Michel at 00:42:58) And then—

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:58) I go interact with my wife. It's just different communication styles, right? And then now I have—and then I wrote my first book, and that was a massive experience to understand how many times you have to write something or how to communicate it effectively and sustainably.

(Jean-Michel at 00:43:20) Well, the first draft of my book got ripped apart. I remember it like it was yesterday. The reviewer we had, I think his name was Tim Sid—"Jean-Michel, you wrote this book for you. Shame on you. It's like shame on you. You just went—" and it was a friend of mine. "You wrote this book for someone exactly like you. You don't write a book for you. Who are you writing this for?" And talk about product mindset. I was like, "Holy crap, you're entirely right."

(Jean-Michel at 00:43:43) Right? We had the most advanced chapters, the super geeky things, way up front. It was all this stuff because I'd been working in this area for so long. It was all the stuff that I wanted to learn, but I didn't bring anyone along in the journey. And I remember he said, "You guys have to go back to the drawing board and just remember, who's your customer? Who's going to read this book and write it for them?"

(Jean-Michel at 00:44:09) And that was so humbling. But it's real, right? That's exactly—we get hung up in what we like, what we want, how we think. And a lot of, I think, building software and products is kind of coming out of yourself and having a lot of perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:26) Yeah. Communication, just learning how to write, learning how to talk—those are just skills that are just massively life changing, just incredibly valuable. Now you said you had some kids. How old are they?

(Jean-Michel at 00:44:39) They're—how old are they now? 16 and 18.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:42) Oh, wow. I've got 2.5 and 10.

(Jean-Michel at 00:44:47) Oh, wow. Okay. There you go. You're at the 30%. I'm at the 90%.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:51) I know. I'll tell you what, though. You're right, though. At that 30%, ages two to four is when they're most impressionable. It's when core characteristics get locked in, so it's good to have those 30% conversations.

(Jean-Michel at 00:45:07) Yeah. No. But it's funny. I, you know, talk about pairing—I'm a big pair programming fan. I actually made a mistake where, you know, as your kids get older, you think that they're becoming more independent. But actually, humans are sponges forever. And I realized I wasn't actually pairing with my kids enough on homework. Because you're like, "Hey, they're teenagers. They don't want to—they want to just do their own thing." But I try to integrate, like, how can we work on problems with teenagers? Because one is I forget some of the stuff, and I always like to see how my kids walk through problems. So I had to kind of relearn a bit of pairing at home, which was—we did a bit of a kitchen. "Okay, let's come to the kitchen and chat about how things are going." And it's something we lost at home and I think is super valid.

(Jean-Michel at 00:45:49) And I think companies lose that as well, right? Of just—I think pairing as a tool to understand how people think is really important. And, you know, going back, I think some of the tools we've had in our trade of pull requests and issue tracking and, you know, I spent a lot of time in Bugzilla way back when. I'd come in on Monday morning. I'd spend the whole day responding to all the influx of bugs coming in. And I realized that when you're solving problems, a lot of engineering debates and arguments would all happen in Bugzilla, GitHub, and pull requests. But I'm like, but that's not where the software design happens. You're literally seeing—there's so much you don't understand about where—when was the first line of code that was written for this? Where did they start? And could you have influenced that earlier than when it was done or when there was a pull request, and everyone's so attached to their problem?

(Jean-Michel at 00:46:39) So I think I'm a huge fan of hitting these problems earlier, and I've made the missteps at home where I see my kids and they just show me at the end. I've been trying to infiltrate myself at the beginning a bit more, which is, again, let's get into that 30%. And it's a big pet peeve at work as well when I see big technical discussions flare up. And I'm like, "Do you guys ever—did anyone go to the whiteboard together a bit earlier? Or did you write a readme to explain a bit about what your direction is and get some feedback?"

(Jean-Michel at 00:47:09) So, and again, another thing that I think is easy to forget, but pairing—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:15) Yeah. I like the day one, like at Amazon. I've got a couple of friends that work over there.

(Jean-Michel at 00:47:21) Yeah. They have to write—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:22) They have to write the press release, which is similar to the demo.

(Jean-Michel at 00:47:24) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:25) They're so good. By the way, if you ever run a meeting and do the multi-page report before discussing a really tough topic, that is by far one of the most beautiful ways to conduct a hard topic meeting. So useful because everyone reads this narrative, and they have the whole thing in their head and all the details, and then you can have an informed discussion about it. It's hard to do. You don't do it for small things, but it's really useful with larger things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:59) Uh, now, I know you had mentioned the kids. Did either of them end up in technology, any of them interning at Shopify?

(Jean-Michel at 00:48:08) Not interning. I think one of my kids is staying away from dad's shadow a bit, but I've got one artist and one computer programmer kind of in the family. So—but we'll see where they end up. I hope they do something completely different. My daughter is actually an amazing cook, so I get to benefit from that. It's very tangible. It's really cool.

(Jean-Michel at 00:48:24) But no. We did—I mean, one of the things I got the pleasure of doing at Shopify, which was pretty cool, is as you can tell in our chat, I'm pretty passionate about kids' education, computer science, programming. And one of the things I realized is we would have a lot of interns come to Shopify, and then they go back after four months. And then they go back to school, and school would say, "Go teach something completely unrelated to what they were doing at Shopify." And they'd come to Shopify—we learned so much when you're here. So I was like, "Well, how do we mix universities and companies so we have a lot more hands-on experiential approach?"

(Jean-Michel at 00:49:06) So I partnered with two universities in Canada, and we created a program called Dev Degree. There's a website called devdegree.ca, which is, I think, the world's first full-on work-integrated computer science degree, where instead of doing stints at a company, they literally spend their entire degree here. We get them programming really quickly. We get them working on teams, production software. They end up working on a lot of parts of the stack. And what we've been able to find out with that—and there's a lot of research on how people learn that, like, when you learn by doing and then learn with getting quick feedback loops and actual hands-on learning, you can learn—I think some of the academic research is two times. You can acquire skills like mastery two times quicker. So we have some of our students in our Dev Degree program—after two years are basically programming at the same skill set as someone who graduated and had been here for six months. So just two years full time with all the entourage and the actual real life programming experiences has been amazing. So I think that's—we're graduating our first class this year, which is pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:14) That's exciting. I'm going to send you some stuff on what we're doing with Leaderbits after because I think it might be useful to integrate it, or at least you just need to tell me if it'd be useful because we're always looking to help out, you know, reduce that curve. Because, again, that's at the core of—if we can help make leaders and people better faster, then that just speeds up our processes. And it also makes people's life easier because we've learned these lessons, and it's like enough of us have learned them over and over and over to be able to condense those experiences and help distribute them so people can leverage it to move themselves forward faster. So we're all about it.

(Jean-Michel at 00:50:51) There's—I mean, I think committing to grow people is important. The other thing too is our industry in programming, software development has been pretty crappy at attracting different kinds of people. You know, I think we started this interview going, "Hey, do you get into programming through gaming?" And I'm like, "No." We need more than just gamers. And I think what's been great is we've thrown out the whole "send me your GitHub profile before I hire you." And we're more like, "What do you like? Problem solving? Yes. Cool. Do you like building things that make people amazed? Yes. Cool. You can join us."

(Jean-Michel at 00:51:28) So we use that as a bit of a baseline and then bring people in. And instead of being in school and abstracting and learning about algorithms, if you can apply that in the same week, then we have a lot of people who I think would have opted out of being a software developer, but they can actually viscerally see the impact of the code they're writing on people, on customers. That's kept them in our industry a lot more. So, anyway, I'm a big fan of bridging that gap of understanding what you're building and actually seeing it have an impact as helping our industry as a whole for attracting people who—a lot of people, that's what gets them going. I think we need a lot more of those kinds of people in our industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:09) A hundred percent. I fully agree. And I love what you guys are doing with that. I think it's—I'm going to dig deeper because I just heard about it just now. But alright. So as we start to wrap up here—

(Jean-Michel at 00:52:19) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:20) I know you're a fan of Elon Musk because you mentioned him a little bit. But let's say—do you have any of the Teslas, by the way?

(Jean-Michel at 00:52:27) I did have one. Yeah. I've got one of the original first version of the Model Xs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:31) Alright. So let's say that you've got it in that crazy mode where it's dancing, right? You're in the parking lot.

(Jean-Michel at 00:52:36) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:37) Yeah. You've got it playing the Trans-Siberian Orchestra doing its crazy thing. And out of nowhere, this guy taps you on the shoulder, and it's Elon Musk, right? You're just in the grocery store parking lot. And he's like, "Hey, I want to show you something." And you get into the X and he puts it in Musk mode, something you've never seen before, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:56) He puts his hand on the screen and scans it. You didn't even know it had that ability for biometrics. I know. It's Musk mode, turns on, right? And all of a sudden, the X has turned into a time machine where you get to go back to your past self when you were doing that play for—I think it's Phantom of the Opera. You were doing the music for that play. You get to go back to that person at that point in time and give yourself one piece of advice. What would it be?

(Jean-Michel at 00:53:30) Build stronger relationships quicker, earlier. I think I was—that guy back then was really focused on—I had a bit of myopic view on solving problems. And I think going to the 30% mindset that a lot of people out there are actually going to help me out—I did not tap that energy source. It took me a while to figure out how to tap other people's brains and energy source earlier. So I think that would be the biggest advice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:57) That's so succinct and beautiful. And now Musk is trying to do that actually with his Neuralink API, right?

(Jean-Michel at 00:54:02) That's what he's doing, right? Exactly. If we can have that bandwidth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:06) Yeah.

(Jean-Michel at 00:54:07) I think, yeah, it's—yeah. One of the funniest movies is—is it the Mel Gibson, What Women Want, where all of a sudden he can hear what everyone says and it drives him nuts. And I always tell teams that that's kind of what happens when your product becomes really successful is everyone's going to give you their opinions of what they think. So you have to be aware of what brains you're going to tap into. You still have to—you need some filters once in a while. So, anyway, this was great chatting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:33) Dude, it's fantastic. You know, I do this show, and I love it. But every once in a while, I get someone like you that comes on. It's just like, "Yep. These are the type of conversations." They're the rare ones, but when they happen, I just get renewed energy for doing the show and everything. So thank you so much for being you. Next time I'm around in your area, I'll let you know. Maybe stop by, say hello, get a tour of the office if that's cool.

(Jean-Michel at 00:54:59) Okay. Sounds like a plan. Thanks, man. Talk soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:00) Bye.