Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify's COO Killed 12,000 Meetings

Kaz Nejatian is the Chief Operating Officer of Shopify. In January 2023, he wrote the internal memo that delivered ~12,000 calendar event cancellations to Shopify employees and gave the corporate world a three-word case for what was wrong with modern meeting culture: "Meetings are a bug."

Tobi Lütke gave the philosophical framing. Nejatian ran the operation and wrote the line that stuck.

Here is the memo, what it actually did, and what it teaches anyone who cannot delete 12,000 meetings unilaterally.

The Quote

From the internal Shopify memo, dated January 2023, shared publicly by Shopify with UNLEASH:

"No one joined Shopify to sit in meetings. Not one person has ever thought, 'you know what will make a big impact on entrepreneurship? Day after day of back to back meetings.' People join Shopify to build. To make cool shit. To see the thing they had their hands on get released so they can say, 'whoa, I made that.' Meetings are a bug along that journey."

Nejatian followed up on X/Twitter the same day:

"Meetings are a bug. To start 2023, we're cancelling all Shopify meetings with more than two people. Let's give people back their maker time."

WorkLife News preserved the tweet and the subsequent reporting.

What Nejatian Actually Did

The Shopify purge was an engineering operation, not a policy memo.

• A script ran over the holiday weekend that deleted every recurring calendar event with three or more attendees.
• ~12,000 events disappeared.
• A bot was deployed to enforce the new rules going forward, auto-pinging meeting organizers who violated the policy.
• Slack replaced email for internal messaging; large group chats were restricted to announcements.
• A two-week cooling-off period prevented anyone from immediately recreating cancelled meetings.

Nejatian's own framing of why Shopify did it this way, from the memo (also via UNLEASH):

"Uninterrupted time is the most precious resource of a craftsperson, and we are giving our people a 'no judgment zone' to subtract, reject meetings, and focus on what is most valuable."

The framing matters: "no judgment zone." Shopify did not just delete meetings. It explicitly signaled that declining future meetings was acceptable.

The Three Lines in the Memo That Carry the Argument

The Nejatian memo has the strongest density of quotable lines of any internal communication on meetings in the modern era. Three of them carry the argument.

"No one joined Shopify to sit in meetings."

This is the diagnostic. The memo opens with what the company is actually for. The opposite of meetings, in Nejatian's framing, is making things. The argument is not that meetings are bad in the abstract. It is that meetings displace the work people came to the company to do.

"Meetings are a bug along that journey."

This is the slogan. Bug is software vocabulary, deliberate at a software company. Bugs are not features. Bugs do not get optimized; they get fixed. Bugs are not a process to be improved; they are a thing to be removed.

Calling meetings a bug is the most aggressive linguistic framing any executive has used. Most CEOs talk about "right-sizing" meetings or "making them more effective." Nejatian declared them broken.

"Uninterrupted time is the most precious resource of a craftsperson."

This is the principle. The asset being protected is not "focus time" in the productivity-app sense. It is the cognitive uninterruption that allows complex work to happen. Once you frame it as a resource, the meeting load becomes the thief.

The Math of the Purge

Per Shopify-shared research published by WorkLife News:

• 76,500 hours of recurring meeting time freed.
• 33% reduction in meeting time per employee in the first two months versus the same period in 2022.
• 25% projected increase in completed projects (Shopify-internal figure).

The freed hours are the headline number. 76,500 hours across ~11,600 employees is roughly 6.6 hours per employee per quarter — almost a full working day every three months that previously went to recurring meetings of 3+ attendees.

Why This Is Different From "We Should Have Fewer Meetings"

Every executive at every company says some version of "we should have fewer meetings." Nejatian's intervention was different in four specific ways.

1. Action preceded policy

The deletes happened first. The policy was written to defend the deletes, not to gradually phase them out. Most organizations get stuck at the policy step and never reach the delete step.

2. The default was inverted

Before the purge, the default was "this meeting exists; you must justify cancelling it." After the purge, the default was "this meeting does not exist; you must justify creating it." Defaults are the most powerful policy mechanism.

3. Enforcement was technical, not social

A bot enforced the new rules. The policy did not require humans to politely decline meetings; the system pushed back automatically. Removing the social cost of enforcement is what made it sustainable.

4. The COO took the heat

Nejatian, not Lütke, was the visible face of the policy. The COO position is unusual for the public face of a calendar policy. The signal: this is an operational decision about how the company runs, not a founder's philosophy.

The Limits of the Approach

The Shopify purge worked because Shopify had three things most companies do not.

• A CEO and COO aligned on the action. Lütke and Nejatian were both fully behind it. Most companies have one without the other.
• A culture that absorbed software-vocabulary leadership. "Meetings are a bug" lands at Shopify because the audience is engineers. It would land differently at a sales-led company.
• A 100% remote workforce. Shopify had already eliminated "office centricity" in 2021. The purge was step two of a longer remote-first arc. Companies with hybrid or in-office defaults face additional cultural resistance.

If you have all three, run the Shopify playbook. If not, the individual-level alternative is calendar camouflage.

What This Means for Lunch Specifically

Notably absent from the Nejatian memo: any specific protection of the lunch hour.

The purge eliminated recurring meetings of 3+ attendees. It did not block 1:1s, ad-hoc syncs, or "quick check-ins" — which is exactly the category of meeting most likely to land on someone's lunch hour. Shopify's policy makes recurring lunch-hour standups impossible. It does not stop a one-off 12:30 PM 1:1 booked yesterday.

That is the gap CovertLunch fills, and it is the gap that exists even at the company that ran the most aggressive meeting purge of the modern era. Calendar camouflage works at the individual level when organizational policy has limits.

What Anyone Can Take From This

Three lessons that translate beyond Shopify.

1. The honest label loses

"Lunch" gets booked over. "Vendor Sync" does not. The label is the signal, not the time. Shopify's purge fixed the structural problem; calendar camouflage fixes the labeling problem.

2. Defaults beat policies

Recurring meetings keep happening because the default is "yes, by inertia." Flip the default on your own calendar: lunch is blocked unless you actively unblock it for a specific external commitment.

3. Subtract before you optimize

Most calendar-management advice is about optimization: shorter meetings, better agendas, async-by-default. Shopify's intervention is about subtraction first. Optimize the meetings that survive. Delete the rest.

Related Reading

• Tobi Lütke: Subtraction Is the Best Founder Skill — the CEO who authorized the purge
• Meetings Are a Bug: What Shopify, Microsoft, and Wall Street Admit — synthesis
• Meeting Overload Solutions — playbook for executives without Nejatian's authority
• No Meeting Days — the practice Shopify formalized

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Shopify actually delete 12,000 meetings?

Yes. The figure was reported by Fortune (which gave a slightly lower number of 10,000), WorkLife News (which gave 12,000 as the Shopify-internal estimate), and the LA Times. Director of EMEA partnerships Deann Evans confirmed the figure on the record.

How did employees react?

Per WorkLife News reporting, the first two weeks were "intense and uncomfortable." Many employees adapted within a month. Several executives, including Evans, did not restart cancelled meetings.

Is "meetings are a bug" Nejatian's original line?

The phrasing appears in the January 2023 Shopify memo authored by Nejatian and shared with UNLEASH. The "bug" framing is consistent with software vocabulary and is widely attributed to him. Lütke uses the related but different framing of "subtraction."

Could a non-tech company do this?

Probably not at the same scale or speed. Shopify's culture, remote-first model, and engineering-vocabulary leadership style created unusual conditions. The principle (default to no, subtract recurring meetings) translates; the specific mechanism may not.

What about the meetings that survived?

Per WorkLife News, the surviving meetings were predominantly external customer calls, 1:1s, and a small number of essential cross-functional syncs. Internal status meetings were the largest category eliminated.