Ian Crosby
@ianwcrosby
Followers
2,157
Following
69
Media
37
Statuses
1,169
Let’s build great things and win. Head of Accounting Products @mercury . Fmr CEO and Co-founder of and . Ex-Shopify.
Vancouver, Canada 🇨🇦
Joined August 2011
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
BAMBAM
• 277293 Tweets
#ไฟไหม้รถบัส
• 194248 Tweets
#BLEACH
• 184033 Tweets
PlayStation
• 156654 Tweets
GLORIOUS REBECCA IN PFW25
• 123276 Tweets
Happy New Month
• 87997 Tweets
JO1 WHERE DO WE GO
• 74696 Tweets
#LINEマンガガチャ
• 55728 Tweets
JENNIE FOR CHANEL
• 45049 Tweets
सोनम वांगचुक
• 42815 Tweets
Independence Day
• 41001 Tweets
コーヒーの日
• 27327 Tweets
都民の日
• 20661 Tweets
KerjaJOKOWI PRABOWOlanjutkan
• 18875 Tweets
YukBARENG MajukanBANGSA
• 18121 Tweets
世界4位
• 15542 Tweets
Anua
• 14339 Tweets
夕刊フジ
• 12296 Tweets
対象作品
• 11851 Tweets
PSN障害
• 10938 Tweets
#花より男子
• 10077 Tweets
@whileonefork
I’m an EWOK type, I don’t get along with ATST but I love JEDI. Anyone who laughs at this tweet is a NERD.
1
1
271
I'm excited to share that I've joined
@Shopify
to lead Product for Balance!
I'm looking forward to making Balance not just a massively successful product, but a very special one in the lives of our merchants.
We're hiring UX/Product/Eng - DM me!
20
9
270
Today I'm excited to announce that Teal has been acquired by
@mercury
! We're very excited to make banking and accounting seamless for accountants and entrepreneurs.
20
8
175
Two huge announcements
@Bench
!
1. Today, Bench re-launches as an all-in-one financial platform with banking, bookkeeping, taxes, and advice, all designed to work together beautifully.
2. Bench has raised a $60M Series C from Contour, Altos, iNovia, BMO T&I, Sage, and Shopify.
19
13
161
I’m a
@LambdaSchool
contrarian.
I think it’s going to be way bigger than even you
@Austen
realize right now. It is so rare in life to be able to make a real difference in one person’s quality of life.
@LambdaSchool
is mass producing changed lives.
This tweet is on track:
People are going to wake up one morning in about 10 years and realize
@AustenAllred
and
@LambdaSchool
have solved education, eradicated student debt, reversed growing inequality, and ultimately saved liberal democracy.
1
7
72
4
9
110
People are going to wake up one morning in about 10 years and realize
@AustenAllred
and
@LambdaSchool
have solved education, eradicated student debt, reversed growing inequality, and ultimately saved liberal democracy.
1
7
72
Manager's guide to success:
1. Hire smart people.
2. Give them the right tools.
3. Get out of the way.
3
36
55
It's been an incredible year working again with my close friend
@adamjsaint
to launch our 2nd startup, Teal. Today we're announcing our $8M seed round led by Katie Reiner at
@torch
, with participation from General Advance,
@BasisSet
and Dash Fund.
With a first set of incredible
9
3
46
Good management is brilliant people looking at high quality data and having honest conversations. Bad management is ethically flexible people manipulating arbitrary data to push an agenda. If you find the former, join the team and hang on tight. They are rare and powerful.
1
26
43
@Samirkaji
I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. I ignore scripted behaviours and look only for whether they will (1) care about the mission, (2) do a good job and (3) be great to work with. Teammates don’t send me thank you emails after meetings so candidates don’t need to either!
1
0
34
When I was in business school, Porter's 5 Forces was held up as the epitome of business strategy. A decade into my career, it's painful obvious that's wrong. The real 5 forces are:
1. Culture.
2. Culture.
3. Culture.
4. Culture, and
5. Luck.
3
4
30
I thought my daughter was playing games on the iPad this morning, but it turned out she was checking her P&L.
0
4
22
4
4
23
My business goals have been so chickenshit.
My new customer survey question is going to be “Have we made a profound difference in your quality of life?”
Then I’m going to build like hell until my team has gotten “yes” from a million people.
#GoBig
1
2
22
In absence of good data, most people will create strongly held beliefs based on unrepresentative anecdotes and wishful thinking.
3
8
16
Spent some time working with
@adamjsaint
today on a new startup.
I forgot how great it was to work with highly competent friends. Such a joy.
4
0
19
It’s pretty clear at this point that has hit on something big.
If you want to join a team of competent people focussed on winning, we’re hiring our first PM role:
4
3
17
Justin Trudeau thinks he can allocate capital better than entrepreneurs.
3
0
17
We’re hiring over 200 people. But before people join
@Bench
, I wanted to share an unvarnished view of what it's really like. It's hard and messy. But incredibly worthwhile.
Thank you
@DailyHiveVan
and
@darcynews
for the honest story.
0
1
16
When I was growing up, my family constantly warned me that starting a business was “risky.”
“Look at your great uncle, he lost his shirt in business. Far better to study a profession.”
Why do we reflexively feel that sending an invoice is riskier than $100k in student debt?
2
2
16
2006: Yahoo offers $1B to buy Facebook.
2016: Facebook offers $1B to buy Yahoo.
0
7
16
Big day at
@Bench
today, we just released a massive expansion to our service: Pulse.
From today, all Bench customers now have a real-time view of cash in and cash out, across all their cards and institutions.
0
2
15
Hey
#Vancouver
@bench
is growing and we’re hiring 100+ people by Christmas. Everything from engineering to account support, entry-level to senior. Come look at what we’ve got!
0
4
14
Welcome cards for me to sign for our new March customers. The tiny monthly stack has grown!
0
0
14
Signatures are an anachronistic, insecure way to “verify“ identity in 2020.
Moving to e-signatures feels like “well we have no idea why we’re doing this but let’s at least do it online.”
3
1
14
Thanks
@hainsworthtv
for having me on the show today! We're excited to solve bookkeeping for Canadian small businesses!
@bench
@BNN
0
3
14
My latest article via
@VancityBuzz
#VanTech
. Our governments need to stop playing tech dress-up and start graduating more software engineers.
4
5
14
We just lowered our lowest price from $115/mo to $95/mo. Medium-term plan is to price in the $40-60/mo range and pack the entry package with even more service and value. Goal is to be *ridiculously* valuable to entrepreneurs.
1
2
13
My favourite moments as an entrepreneur: people falling in love with
@Bench
and deciding they need to tell the world about it. Thanks for the shout out
@TMFproject
!!
1
0
12
Here's what people don't understand about vertical saas.
Shopify, Toast, Service Titan - they are each just getting started.
And there are still so, so many untouched verticals. We need 100x more Shopify's.
99.99% of vertical saas market cap is yet to be created.
2
1
10
I used to have to go skydiving to have the experience of plummeting to Earth.
Now I just need to hold bitcoin.
1
0
12
"It has saved me, it has saved my business and my sanity, and heaven forbid, my marriage" -
@fbombchic
and
@KevinPricePOB
, I'm so humbled that
@Bench
could have this effect on your life and I wish you the best with your business!
0
1
11
Fintechs like
@Bench
@Square
and
@Plaid
are standing by to help quickly and at massive scale.
@stevenmnuchin1
@USTreasury
you don't need to rely on intransigent banks. We are ready to help *today*.
@zachperret
@jack
2
1
11
VC: have you considered increasing customer retention by removing the “cancel” button and instead making people call into an obscure support line and torturing them for an hour?
Me: 🤦🏼♂️
2
2
11
Love
@Calendly
but would be 10x better if it went from: “Here’s some of Sarah’s open time slots, now open your own GCal in another window and reconcile some times that work for you both”
To: “Login with your GCal and we’ll only propose times that work based on both calendars”
4
0
9
Good morning to all the builders out there. This is your year to shine!
2
1
10
@bryan_johnson
You want to align us with ourselves, so we can understand how to align with AI.
Did I get it?
1
0
10
The tech conventional wisdom is to figure out how to charge your customers more. It’s what I hear every time I walk out of a VC meeting. But I want to figure out how to charge customers *less* and *give* them more.
2
0
10
The more I lead, the more I learn that leadership isn’t what I thought it was.
1
0
10
Are you giving your friends and family the best side of you? Or the bookkeeping side of you?
We launched our latest creative campaign today here at
@Bench
! Thanks to everyone in the marketing team at Bench who helped bring this one to life!
#smallbusiness
1
3
9
Staying at a hotel in SF, which has just informed me that the bill for my stay will be $NaN dollars, including $syntax error in taxes.
Turns out there still a ton of opportunity in software.
3
0
9
Bad Product Management -> "What can we add?"
Good Product Management -> "What can we simplify?"
0
2
9
Today (and every day, really) I recognize all the intelligent women in my life and at Bench. Thank you ♀️
0
0
9
Come check out the new Bench here:
More coverage:
0
0
9
Be polite. It costs you nothing, and people will appreciate it.
1
1
9
Standing desks are so last year. I just bought a standing bed because sleeping is the new smoking.
0
0
9
Every time I read about kids taken from their parents at the Mexican border, I imagine my own kids being taken from me, put in a facility, terrified and helpless. How can we as human beings allow this to happen on our watch?
1
0
9
1) Most mature F500 companies are social status games that are only loosely mapped to markets.
These companies persist only because of moats that keep challengers at bay. But the moat in retail banking has just been crossed, and banks are in for a shock. 🧵
2
0
9
Business isn’t risky.
Personal debt is risky.
Whether it’s to finance education, personal consumption, or starting a business. Find ways to avoid personal debt and you will avoid so much anxiety and misery.
There are a million ways to start in business without debt.
3
0
9
@Austen
3 systems for quality at scale:
(1) objective measures of quality at a unit level for (a) customer (b) team member (c) a unit of work.
(2) a training program that doesn’t let new employees serve customers until they demonstrate hitting quality measures in (1)
1
0
9
Now that I’m back into the product world, I’m looking forward to my assigned reading from
@adamjsaint
0
0
6
Password requirements:
2005: Must contain 8+ characters
2010: Must contain an upper and lowercase letter
2015: Must contain a symbol
2020: Must contain an emoji
2025: Must contain a limerick
2030: Must contain a stargate rune
2035: Maybe the problem isn't password complexity
1
0
7
It’s surprising to me that most companies still rely on debunked traditions in hiring / promoting / performance managing employees rather than focussing on being thoughtful and effective. Are we building for the future or the past?
The best companies go their own way.
0
1
8
Hire for ability. Not experience, education, or credentials. Those are bad proxies.
2
5
8
Asking "What is more important to making decisions: data or intuition?" is like asking "What is more important to walking: your left or your right leg?"
You are only as strong as your weakest muscle.
0
3
8
100,000 generations of our families were lucky to live to 30. They spent their lives trying to not to starve.
We tap a magic screen and food happens.
What's possible for humanity now, even during our short lifetimes, is beyond imagining.
Go imagine something and build it! Go!
0
0
8
Great products aren't built by 10x engineers, they're built by 10x teams.
1
3
7
In 2018, if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, it's probably BitDuck, the world's most revolutionary distributed Mallard-based block chain enabled platform for global impact.
0
1
8
Crypto will never go mainstream so long as regular people continue having their holdings exploded by fraud.
Rampant fraud will continue until there is strong and consistent regulation.
The entire point of crypto is to avoid government regulation.
Therefore..
1
0
8
2020 update:
Step 2) You are now a bank*
*powered by
@stripe
Startup Playbook:
Step 1) Whatever you were doing before
Step 2) You are now a bank
3
26
250
1
0
8
It’s amazing what a team can accomplish when it has clear, simple, unambiguous goals. It’s amazing how little they can get done when they don’t. This is another difference between good/bad management.
0
1
8
Engineering quality is not measured in ideological purity. It's measured in maintenance time.
0
3
6
Honoured to be one of
#CAN40under40
! Congrats to my fellow
@Top40_40
honourees
@harleyf
,
@mkatchen
,
@matthswitzer
0
0
7
Don't bother reducing the number of people that dislike your product. Just stoke the fervour of the people that love it.
1
4
7
There's a special circle of hell reserved for people that design customer service for phone companies.
1
0
7
Tesla market cap today: $292B
Market cap of every other car manufacturer put together: $612B
Tesla has grown 8x so far this year. If it grows another 2.1x it will be larger than the entire non-Tesla auto industry. 🤯
3
2
6
Hiring by consensus leads to weak teams.
Before you hire, be up-front about which *one* person makes the choice.
Otherwise, you will get a weak team, and no one will be accountable for fixing it.
0
0
7
I can't really think of any startup problem for which the solution is "go to more conferences."
0
1
7
We're growing
@Shopify
's Acceleration team to work on strategic acquisitions, investments, and more. Come accelerate the future of commerce with
@bram
,
@anna_lambert_
,
@BrandonMChu
, and me. 💸
11
14
244
0
0
7
@Austen
70 years from now: But daaaaaaad, Lucy got her brain pierced when she was *12*, why can’t I??
Ugh, I’m so sick of you and this 3 dimensional reality. I’m the ONLY one of my friends not neurojamming this weekeeeeend 😭
0
0
7
I pitched 100+ investors on Bench before anyone said yes. That's a lot of rejection. But it just takes 1.
0
3
6
Too many CEOs are focussed on pleasing investors rather than building something truly great.
0
1
7
Banking as a Service now allows a neobank to be built in 3-6 months for <$1M. The resulting proliferation of neobanks is starting to eat away at the market share of traditional banks in consumer and SMB. Banking in 10 yrs will look much different than the last 50.
2
0
7
Imagine what we could accomplish if our institutions were optimized for producing greatness. Instead they are optimized for not looking bad.
1
0
7
I'm consistently inspired by
@jamesclift
and the
@Durableteam
team. They're on to something big.
1/ I’m excited to officially launch our open beta for .
Our mission is simple: remove all barriers to entrepreneurship and enable anyone to turn their skills into a profitable business.
We’re also announcing that we’ve raised $6.25m.
19
18
119
0
1
7
@Austen
Hey Austen, we faced this also at Bench. Growth doesn’t cause quality to fall necessarily, that’s just conventional wisdom. Rather, there are systems you need in place to maintain quality at scale, and without them, as you approach scale at ANY speed, quality degrades.
1
0
7
@stevekrouse
I had this thought when I was 23 and here I am still shaving the damn yak 14 years later
2
0
6
Shouting out
@mintlify
as an absolutely incredible platform for hosting API docs. Blown away at how this 9 person team has built the best product in the space in 18 months.
0
0
6
We're hiring!
After a productive first few months in existence and a successful fundraise, the team at is ready to add more back-end developers and dev team lead. Here's a bit more about Teal:
Teal's Culture:
Our mission is to build a profitable
1
1
6
Earlier this year we fixed this and the resumes that were previously rejected had the *same* success rate in interviews. Meanwhile we *doubled* our rate of application-to-interview.
2
0
6
Did you know that the original spelling of "fintechs" is actually "fintex" which was short for "financial total extinction" as a reference to what will happen to traditional retail banks when Stripe Treasury launches in GA?
The more you know. 🤷♂️
0
0
6
Hi
@segment
, let’s have a conversation about how to increase prices on your legacy customers, as the way you are doing it now is not okay.
2
0
6
My close friends know that I'm passionate about dance, and have recently started taking lessons.
Come see me perform live next month! On the graves of crypto prices
0
0
6
@Austen
(3) a clear chain of accountability in which managers are accountable for the quality scores of their teams and have freedom to hire / fire to achieve quality
1
0
6
@parkerconrad
@AriannaSimpson
100% agree. This seems to be a pervasive issue in tech. Big gap between what companies vs. VC's consider "helping." Most CEO's I know accept the "help" to not damage VC egos.
1
1
6
The default culture in HR is to reject resumes for petty reasons just because thats the “right” way to do HR. I guarantee your recruiters are doing this unless you’ve specifically investigated this issue.
2
1
6
A successful Entrepreneur, one time: “Hmmm, it feels like in this one instance I should use a blue crayon.”
One month later:
Investors to every early stage founder: “WE ONLY FUND ENTREPRENEURS WHO USE BLUE CRAYONS”
0
0
6
@sama
Interesting, thanks for sharing! What you most agree with, and what do you most disagree with?
0
0
6