7 Comments

Tom -- I love that you brought up Tesla's potential licensing of FSD and how it relates to opening the charging network. I think you're right that it represents a new strategy now that things are more competitive. That being said, I don't think they're fully giving up on making cars (or necessarily heading to a 90-10 revenue split), given that they are closer on the Cybertruck and planning to re-introduce the Roadster...

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Peleton, Wahoo, also saw the same with their indoor bikes. Quite different business models - Peleton bikes are loss leaders for the subscription while Wahoo is at the expensive end of a more open ecosystem (zwift, their own platforms etc). It’s a difficult play, you need capacity to meet a peak but then really can’t keep it going once the curve drops back to where it should have been

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How do you think the Shopify meeting calculator impacts trust within the organization. Is there an annual meeting budget? How do you determine if the risk of not meeting is greater than the cost of the meeting?

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Re: impacting trust, I can see it either way, but I'll argue that it strengthens trust. If only the most important/critical meetings get booked, then everyone fully engages in those meetings, avoiding distractions and multi-tasking that result from being back-to-back all day. Similarly, if we invite smaller groups of attendees, everyone has a chance to play a more active role. Does that resonate? Curious what yall think

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Actually I think trust is more complex than that. I’m interested in what happens when a meeting is booked and accepted but then deemed a waste of time. Is there a penalty? Is it a coaching opportunity? What happens the next time that same staff member tried to book the same people?

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Hmm yeah I hear you. From the Shopify standpoint, their C-suite interviews on this point seem to say it's more about making meeting-scheduling more intentional, rather than needing to assign a specific meeting budget, issue penalties, etc.

From my standpoint, anything more formal than that feels like unnecessary friction, giving managers and teams another job responsibility that distracts from the real work to be done. In the case of a "waste of time" meeting, I would say make it a coaching opportunity, and leave it there...

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I’m all for questioning defaults and reducing meetings and making the ones that remain more intentional. We have to consider how all of this feels and how decisions are made. I haven’t seen a lot of clarity around this from Shopify. Maybe it’s too early yet. It is an experiment but these are the things I find fascinating.

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