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Rousseau Kazi
Product at Shopify
Rousseau Kazi is a product leader who recently joined Shopify in a Product role.1 He was previously the CEO and co-founder of Threads, a workplace collaboration platform that was acquired by Shopify in June 2024.34
Some key points about Rousseau Kazi:
- He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.1
- He attended the University of California, Berkeley for his education.1
- As CEO of Threads, he led the company from its founding in 2019 until its acquisition by Shopify.5
- When announcing the Threads acquisition, Kazi expressed that there were "a million feelings and thoughts from this journey" of building the company.3
At Shopify, Kazi's role is described as "Working on special projects with some of my favorite people".2 This suggests he may be involved in innovative or strategic initiatives within the company following the Threads acquisition.
Kazi appears to be well-connected in the tech industry, with over 500 connections on LinkedIn.1 His move to Shopify, along with the Threads team, is part of what some have described as Shopify's "acqui-hiring" strategy to bring in talented founders and teams from within their app ecosystem.2
Highlights
Been playing with this for the past 30mins. Genuinely impressed with how good this works.
Congrats @Suhail and team. Can't wait to use this for a bunch of explorations.
Big news! Today we are announcing that @Shopify is acquiring the Threads team.
There are a million feelings and thoughts from this journey, but nothing more than gratitude to all of our users and customers for building with us, my colleagues (both current and former) for making all of this possible, our investors, especially @mvernal, @eladgil, @avichal, and @jess for their unwavering support and guidance, and all of our friends and family who put up with the late nights, canceled plans, and the general roller coaster that is startup life.
To our customers and users who have been asking, here’s how we got here:
The past several months have been some of the most interesting and intense of my life. It all started with the rise of Instagram Threads, which presented us with the opportunity to sell our domains.
Around the same time, a handful of companies approached us, wondering if we would be open to an acquisition. When this happened in the past, we would politely decline. However, this time, things were different. We weren't that excited about the time it would take to invest in a rebrand, and with mind-warping technological advances now being a commodity, we were excited about joining a place where we could tinker at scale.
Each company we chatted with was incredible. However, what ultimately led us to choose Shopify over others was their culture; two distinct things in particular:
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Craft-obsessed. Their obsession with not just building the right thing, but also building it the right way is inspiring. Sacrifice shows priority, and hearing stories about some of the hard decisions they made to ensure that what they ship is robust, scalable, and trustworthy, even at the cost of short-term metric gains, really proved that their obsession with craft was much more than a feel-good slogan. Their discussions and decisions have me truly believing they're going to be around for 100 years.
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For entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. Just about every product and engineering leader I met was an ex-founder who grinded for years to turn nothing into something. They all still had that air of resilience, obsession with the details at every part of the stack, and a compelling vision of the future for whatever they were working on. Threads leadership is also made up of ex-founders, so the entrepreneurial focus at Shopify made it clear that it would be the best environment for us to grow and thrive.
Very excited for this next chapter with the team and grateful for all of the support we’ve received over the years from those who believed in us.
As always, thanks for (th) reading.
