Thanks @harleyf - we made it - Oct launch and >1M orders by early Dec. Shopify x WOB: 7M SKUs 5M daily reprice events 4 currencies 3 languages 2 international warehouses 1 platform Biggest BFCM, ever. Biggest Christmas trading, ever. 2025 will be WILD.

I love all my ecomm friends on all sorts of different tech stacks…but I’ll say it again: Get on Shopify or get left behind. The gap widens weekly.

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it. But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet. Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years. And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor. You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

The sheer scale of a trillion dollars can be hard to comprehend. Let me put it in perspective. You would be able to buy 42 miles of high speed rail in California with that much money.

I’m thrilled to be joining @Bodenclothing as Director of Product & Portfolio. Why Boden? They’re a British heritage brand I’ve grown up with, and there’s definitely something special about joining a business that’s loved by three generations of your own family. Boden is also at a really exciting moment: back to profitability, live on a fresh @Shopify platform, approaching £400M in revenue with a fast-growing US business, the first US store has opened in Atlanta and another shortly in Nashville. I’ll be leading product, portfolio, UX and AI, and I’m super excited to spend time getting to know our customers, our team and the tech stack! More soon.

Who can intro me 😂

By the time our leadership team got around to a serious conversation about AI strategy, the staff of World of Books had been running one for the better part of a year. Here's the story of AI implementation at an enterprise Shopify merchant: x.com/DavidMagee/status/2059…

Finishing up at World of Books today after nearly 5 years - very grateful to have been part of the journey, and leaving a business that's far bigger and even better than it was in 2021. An amazing company with a great mission and incredible team - too many people to thank, but a massive shoutout to a bunch of people that pushed and challenged me along the way! We bought businesses, launched new products, channels, propositions and built an amazing team. More on what's next soon. Staying in the @Shopify ecosystem 💚

I think Hormozi is largely a grifter, but I agree here. More transparancy, shorter control intervals - this is how we've fixed teams in the past. Either they improved or we found out who we needed to replace.

We've done a lot of work on this at World of Books - a Shopify merchant going all in on AI, agentic harnesses and the 'dark factory' idea - sharing our learnings for other merchants here: x.com/DavidMagee/status/2054…