💪🏽 Nice words from @sama and @patrickc on our push for AI reflexivity🙏🏽 x.com/tobi/status/1909251946…

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

Design at Shopify is having a moment. A big moment! Incredible talent, and even stronger output. So we gave it a home: Shopify.design Come explore

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

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. 👇

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

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.

Always listen and learn from @tobi whenever you get a chance. One of the most independent thinkers out there.

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.

🚀 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. 👇

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

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. molly.studio

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?

Welcome @MSchwaibold @jaytel and team to Shopify 🚀

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

Come join one of the best teams ever built in Silicon Valley: fal.ai/careers When we started @fal 4 years ago, never in my wildest dreams I thought we would get this far. But with the right team, you can achieve anything. It is a privilege to wake up every day and work with the smartest, kindest and the most driven people that make up this company. It is a privilege to witness the bleeding edge of technology and enable our users build brand new applications never seen before. We have had incredible conviction in the future of Generative Media from the first day we experienced AI models that can create. And today we are 40 people and growing building towards this future. We are excited to double down on all parts of our business to serve our users and push the space forward!

Today, we're thrilled to announce our $125M Series C funding round at a $1.5B valuation, led by Meritech Capital, marking our third successful raise in just 12 months! fal’s Generative Media Cloud now powers tens of thousands of applications, supporting over two million developers and more than 300 enterprise customers. From initial prototypes to fully scaled production, we've become the essential infrastructure enabling some of the most innovative and creative work in the industry. Over the past year alone, we've experienced extraordinary growth—averaging 40% month-over-month, consistently exceeding our own ambitious projections. Each month, hundreds of thousands of new developers and thousands of fresh applications join our platform, unlocking entirely new use cases previously thought impossible. With this latest round of funding, we're significantly scaling our engineering, support, sales, and marketing teams to keep pace with the accelerating demand and enthusiasm from our community. Our vision has always been clear: build a generative media platform that effortlessly creates dynamic, real-time content across video, audio, image, and 3D. Thanks to our incredible team, dedicated partners, and visionary customers, that's precisely what fal delivers today—empowering creativity at unprecedented scale.

wow!! 👀 📈