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r/WhiteHouseBets

You people want a Gamestonk take, well okay then you’re going to get a Gamestonk take. Unless you’ve been completely living under a rock up until today (Thursday the 28th, as I’m writing this), a bunch of Redditors on Wallstreetbets have created a commotion in the stock market by pumping shares of Gamespot, AMC, Nokia, and a few other “Memestocks” towards the moon, nuking a hedge fund (and possibly the Mets?), attracting a lot of attention along the way. You can catch up on what happened a few days ago here,… Read more r/WhiteHouseBets →

The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class

I’m happy to finally share a thesis I’ve been chewing on for a little while. I call it The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class, which states: The higher you ascend the ladder of the Educated Gentry class, the more you become Michael Scott. We should start with one background assumption, which is I’m going to assume you’ve watched The Office (The American version) or at least have a passing knowledge of the main characters. If not, then this idea will probably not land as hard, but I hope you read… Read more The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class →

Why the Canadian Tech Scene Doesn’t Work

Toronto is not the next great startup scene. Neither is Waterloo, or Vancouver, or anywhere in Canada.  I’m sorry that I have to write this. I really am. I want it to work. But the growing chorus of aspirational claims that “Toronto’s tech ecosystem is growing faster than anywhere else in North America” or “The Toronto-Waterloo corridor is ‘the nice person’s Silicon Valley’” honestly do not portray an accurate picture of what we’ve built here.  To be clear: I am not saying there are no individual success stories of Canadian startups, or that there are… Read more Why the Canadian Tech Scene Doesn’t Work →

Fixing Audit Won’t Fix Fraud: An Interview with Kris Bennatti of Bedrock AI

This week I have a really interesting interview to share. I talked with Kris Bennatti, the founder & CEO of Bedrock AI, about one of my all-time favourite topics: fraud.  Kris is a data scientist by trade, and started her career in external audit as a CPA at KPMG. She’s now the founder of Bedrock AI, and leads a team of researchers who use unstructured data to understand and predict corporate malfeasance, fraud, and other bad things. She spends a lot of her time thinking about fraud, earnings manipulation, and… Read more Fixing Audit Won’t Fix Fraud: An Interview with Kris Bennatti of Bedrock AI →

BFCM

It’s Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend, the biggest days of the year for Shopify. Inside our HQ, it’s just called “BFCM”, and it’s a very big deal. In our… Read more BFCM →

Election Day 2020: René Girard, Part 2

A couple years ago when I started this newsletter, the inaugural post was an introduction to René Girard. I’ve been meaning to rewrite it for quite some time. Today – Election Day, 2020 – seemed like a pretty good time to do that.  In my opinion, Girard’s worldview on mimetic desire, differentiation, and scapegoating is still the best way to understand Trump and the MAGA movement. So I went back and substantially rewrote the original Girard essay. I think this one’s a lot tighter and better, and clarifies some of… Read more Election Day 2020: René Girard, Part 2 →

Six Lessons from Six Months at Shopify

I’m now six months into Shopify. So far it’s going basically on schedule: as I was told, “Your first couple months you’re going to have zero idea what’s going on. Then around month three you’ll come up for air and think, ok, I got this; and then you’ll try to start doing stuff. Then you’ll really struggle, because you won’t be in that happy new float-around-and-learn-people’s-names mode, you’ll be in oh-shit-can-I-really-do-this mode. It’s actually a little scary. But then around month five or six, you start to actually figure some things out… Read more Six Lessons from Six Months at Shopify →