How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/1accff4304418ed3

If you do the hard path and it doesn't work.
Actually, you still kinda win because you've now done something hard, you've probably worked with smart people, you've learned something along the way that is like valuable. I meet lots of job seekers.
I go, what are you doing to try to find a job? Are you really learning anything from sending out ten resumes a day? Why don't you look at the API box and build something. Even if you don't get a job at Shopify, you've learned something. First I wanna talk about another theme, creating intensity in your organization. Everyone says, Oh yeah, like work hard and like
Do more hours when you're young, whatever. I'm like, what if you just did more per minute? The more I dig into the Shopify way working, the more fun stuff I never expected emerges. There's been a drive to delete code and simplify. We have a delete code club. We can always almost find a million plus lines of code to delete, which is insane. I found this great quote from you. Not everyone can look stupid in public over and over, but
But I believe it's my superpower. I have been in many situations with many sharp people who have said to me, That's the stupidest question I've ever heard. My goal there is not to annoy the person, but is to understand the content. I was looking at your LinkedIn and your career history, and I noticed that you worked for
A different billionaire every decade of your life? They're mostly different people. But they're similar in one thing is that they haven't

Today my guest is Furhan Tower. Furhan is vice president and head of engineering at Shopify.
Shopify is an incredibly interesting company because they have over 10,000 employees.
Are fully remote.
And even though they were founded almost twenty years ago.
They continue to operate with urgency, velocity, and a very first principles ways of thinking.
Which translates into them seeing record usage.
Blowing away their earnings calls just recently.
and building a beloved product.
A lot of this is thanks to Furhan.
Who, in our conversation, shares very specifically what he's done to maintain intensity and urgency within the engineering team.
Including their meeting cadences.
the counterintuitive power of pair programming
How they run meetings, how they cancel meetings constantly.
And so much more. He also shares his experience with indexing towards choosing the harder option when you have multiple options to choose from and why that ends up making your life easier.
He also shares a bunch of great hiring advice and a bunch of hiring stories which are gonna blow your mind. He also talks about their engineering intern program, where they're gonna hire over a thousand engineers just for their intern program in twenty twenty five.
I've had a lot of people on this podcast from Shopify.
But that is for a very good reason.
Because this company and its leaders have a lot to teach us about how to run an incredible business and build an incredible product.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously.
With that I bring you Furhan Thour.

Furhan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Thanks me.
As I was preparing for our conversation, I talked to a bunch of people that you've worked with over the years.
And there's basically three themes that kept coming up over and over and over.
One is hiring.
Two is creating intensity in your organization.
And three is choosing the hard path.
First of all, does that resonate? Second of all
Does it sound good to talk about these three themes in our time together?
Yeah, I think I mean.
All I have ideas on all w where all three of those things came from.
Um, and I I think that it is
Uh something that
If you look back on my career, I've like hit
Points on each of those things.
I knew that that's what I was doing, but it turns out in retrospect that's what I ended up doing.
Perfect. So this is like the Steve Jobs, everything looking backwards, it all connects. Yes.
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Okay, so let's start by talking about the hard path.
Okay.
Advice that I've heard you share with people often
Is
When they're trying to decide amongst a bunch of options is to choose the harder path
Because that
makes life easier down the road.
Share this advice, why it's so important, where you learn where you kind of like develop that this is the right approach.
But the short version is that
If you have a choice and you choose the easy thing.
And it and it works.
Great.

If you choose the hard thing and it works, great. Like you kinda did more work.
But if it doesn't work and you chose the easy thing.
You've actually not learned anything because you kind of chose the like you haven't done a lot of work. You haven't probably worked with the smartest people because they don't usually are they're not usually around in the easy path.

You've gone through this exercise and now you're like I I've kind of lost. I lost the choice and or I I I
I was trying to do something I didn't have it didn't work out for me.
But if you do the hard path and it doesn't work.
Actually you still kinda win because you've now done something hard, you've probably worked with smart people, you've learned something along the way that is like valuable. And I can give you like a quick example. So
I mean lots of like job seekers.
And they're like
I go, what are you doing to try to find a job? I'm like, uh I'm sending out ten resumes a day.
I'm like, okay.
That sounds like kinda easy and like are you really learning anything from sending out ten resumes a day? Versus
I would say them, hey
You know all these companies you're interested in, Shopify might be one of them. Why don't you look at the API docs and build something? Build a Shopify app.
Build an ad admin extension. Like build something on top of Shopify.
Even if you don't get a job at Shopify, right, which is maybe your goal.
You've learned something. You've built something. You have things in your GitHub uh repo now and you can show people. You're learning about the product that might translate to a job you might get.
Somewhere else.
But so I think that even though it's harder, right, of course you can't every day
build an app on a different platform. Maybe you can, once a day.
You will learn something in the hard path. And the same thing happened to me taking hard courses. I would get
Worst marks.
But I ended up meeting smarter people in those courses'cause they were there for the same reason I was, because the content was hard.
So that that's something that I've got to do.
I've I've just realized in my life that if I do the hard thing
And I I I just naturally tend towards doing that. Like I ended up doing
I went to Waterloo and I did a minor in electrical engineering on top of computer science, and when I did my MBA, I did a minor in financial engineering.
Because the smarter people were in that path.
And they're still my friends today.
So on that building on the last plane just made.
People could hear this and think, Okay, if it's harder, that's gonna be the right path.
Sometimes harder is
still like a bad idea. Like for example, joining a terrible company that's extremely frustrating to work at.
Or um
building a I don't know, a house in a really dumb way, but it's just really hard.
What else do you find is important to think about when you're thinking it's not just harder, but also XYZ should probably be true.
Yeah, one one real one is of course the people, because I find that my path has always focused on
Trying to pick the best learning journey.
Like where can I learn the most?
And for me, everyone's different. Like some people might learn better from like books or the domain they're in, but for me, I learn a lot from people.
And so I try to put myself in those harder rooms.
on purpose. There was a time when I was doing my MBA in financial engineering, by the way, and I I mean I was I'm a tech guy and still a tech guy.
And all these people were going into like finance jobs.
There was a point where somebody said to me, Why are you in this class? Because they knew that
I was doing it for fun.
Right. And so it was because I w it was the learning journey. And so I would say a big part of it for me is
Yes, there is the how do you win even if you lose, because if it goes poorly, you can still come out of it with skills.
But if you actually
Take the hard path. You'll have these like
Intense
um working relationships with smart people that again will
continue on in your life.
And that also just forces you to be in this constant state of uncomfort.
by going into these rooms and saying, I don't know anything
And it's harder. And I agree with you, you don't want to do dumb things like oh let's just do this thing in a dumb way. That's not what I mean. I mean
Let's do the let's let's try to do the hard thing that we can learn at learn from. And by the way, it happens to be on the path.
It's just as a
is a it might take more manual work.
Or it might not be the way most people do it.
But we think we can learn more from that path.
Speaking of that, uh I found this great quote from you.
Not everyone can look stupid in public over and over.
But I believe it's my superpower.
And I try to make it my whole team's superpower too.
Yeah.
And I th I mean it's it sounds funny, but
Again, I'm the one who's always trying like super dumb things.
And
Um sometimes they work.
And uh, you know, like even like my wife hates that I try these things even at home, right? I'll just like
You know, uh what's an example? Like you know, maybe like a new new washing machine and I might try some weird mode with some clothes, and I'm like, Oh, you you ruin the clothes I'm like, Okay, but now I know that this mode should not be used, but maybe I would have uncovered that there's some
super fast quick wash that I can do in twenty minutes that now saves us
You know, forty minutes of wash time every single time we use the washing machine. So there's things like that, but I will
ruin lots of clothes trying to do that.
Um but same at work.
We'll try things and sometimes
Um it can lead to disaster, hopefully not. But
You can imagine th people trying to like, Oh let me
Try this new configuration of uh G C P and like maybe we'll get some uh benefit. But
Maybe we'll take down.
Like we don't we don't wanna do that. So you wanna ha you wanna have some sort of guardrails.
But there is something around trying dumb things and saying dumb things.
Right? Half the time, by the way, when I say something dumb, people go, I have the same question.
I think they just were scared to say it.
So for folks that may wanna'cause I feel like the skill is so hard, but so important, being okay with failing, being okay with looking dumb.
Is there something you
Help people.
You tell people to help them build this, other than just like I'm genetically good at this stuff.
Like what helped you become comfortable with being wrong and failing?
Before you were like a big shot exec where it's like, Oh, he's fine, he knows what he's doing. I don't know. I I mean I kinda grew up uh working retail.
And like people come into the store and then they would say, Hey like they didn't and you're on working on commission?
And they're not always buying stuff. And if they don't buy it, you don't make any money. And so maybe just the the fact of like going up and
forcing myself to talk to people and then
You know, trying to get them to s and maybe you spend an hour with a client and then they don't buy anything.
But you're getting that like that reaction.
of like uh a bunch of negatives.
And all you have to do is say
Okay, and just go to the next custom. Like you can't really dwell on it and be like, Oh my god, like
um this is gonna like my whole day is ruined, but instead you have to learn from that and say, Okay, let me try this, let me try that.
And it's not easy.
But uh it was a way to kinda build up some some confidence. And people say this like telemarketing.
Or you know, like
There's a bunch of things you can do to get a lot of rejection.
Um cold calling is another one.
And that's that can uh lead you to actually
building up resistance. I don't know if I'm genetically better at it or not. I just
Think that
I literally don't care if I look dumb. Like I've always
Said like the dumb thing.
I'm not doing things on purpose to get nose.
Which by the way is part of like some sales training, which is like go and get ten nose and you know, like like that's but I don't I haven't done that.
But
I have been in many situations
With many sharp people, business people, successful people, who have said to me, like turn around and said
That's the stupidest fucking question I've ever heard.
I've definitely had that happen to me and I'm like
All right.
Let's move on to the next question.
I love that attitude and I think that's key to it. It's just like balance off of it and not
Be crumble.
And I think it's empowering for folks to hear from someone like you that has done so well.
That people tell you that is the dumbest question I've ever heard of. Oh yeah, still.
Still. Yeah, that so how about this that I heard
Uh, that's the dumbest fucking question. And then recently I heard I've already explained this to you.
Three times.
Like
Because I kept asking and I didn't I didn't understand.
And literally I got this message back saying I've already explained this to you three. I'm like, Okay, like I still don't get it.
So like
My goal there is
Not to annoy the person.
But it's to understanding the content.
Right. And actually by the way, I say these were like messages. I save them.
Like I literally c screenshot it because I'm like, Rem remember this? Like
It doesn't matter, I'm trying to learn.
One more question along these lines. I was looking at your LinkedIn and your career history.
And I noticed that you worked for a different billionaire every decade of your life.
So there's a guy named Joe Limond in your twenties, then Chamoth in your thirties.
And Toby
This decade, maybe yourself next decade if things go well.
Other than what you've shared, or maybe it is what you've shared, is there a thread across these three folks?
that have been really successful that you've learned from that maybe is consistent across them all, or even just like specific to each one.
It's interesting because I didn't yeah, again, this is like looking back, you're like, Wait a sec, I didn't plan it this way. Like there's no way you could plan it, right? I'm gonna work for a different billionaire every decade. Like that that's not how it works.
But
They're very s they're similar. They're mostly diff different people.
But they're similar in one thing is that they have an irrational view of what the world should look like over the next decade or so. They're very long-term thinkers. They're irrational in that.
They'll look and say, Hey
Ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five years.
This is what the world's gonna look like.
And I'm not good at seeing that vision, but I'm good at trying to move towards that vision one percent a week.
And so the melding of the two I know where I'm good and I'm I'm good at like kind of pushing the ball forward.
And if they're good at the long term vision
we can both align to say, like, you're good at this thing, I'm good at this thing, how do we why don't we merge forces?
And so that
is something that has uh resonated with me. It's like how do I find these irrational
Like
you know, all progress depends on the unreasonable man, right? Like how do I pair with these people because I'm altogether too reasonable?
And there's no way to for me to become unreasonable.
And so I have to kind of merge with these people.
And so that is again something that
I specifically have sought out.
And even um
When I was starting my own company in twenty fifteen, I actually sat down and wrote a list of all the unreasonable people that I knew in Toronto.
And I went down the list and met every single one of these entrepreneurs to figure out
Are we API compatible?
And could I work with them? And I ended up
Picking one of them and starting a company.
That is an amazing story.
So first of all, I just love this insight that
Being aware of I am not
This is not a superpower of mine.
And I'm not gonna try to build it. I'm gonna find someone to merge with and connect your APIs together and be the person that builds it, not the person that envisions what to build.
I think that's awesome because a lot of people I'm gonna I need to get good at all these things. I need to become the best at vision.
And strategy and execution and collaboration and all these things and
So I think alone this isn't really interesting instead is just recognize your strengths and weaknesses and double down on your strengths.
Yeah, it sounds funny, but like
Me and you you c you talked about it that that framework I wrote down, which I tweet out, like
Me writing that down changed
How I
Picked jobs forever.
Right? Because I kinda had this
Lull after my first job.
In between, where I was trying to figure out why nothing felt as exciting as my first job.
And it turns out
that it took me to sit down and be like, what do I actually care about? And you get people can get confused. I get confused all the time, by the way, by
Things that are not on my framework. So for example, a good one.
Title.
Company.
Um money.
All these things can confuse you because you could have somebody say
A recruiter messages you and says, Hey, by the way, here's a new job and here's the compensation. Like, Oh my God, like this is exciting.
And if you don't have
And a written down
framework of the things you actually care about.
It's very hard to be distracted.
Right? So very hard not to be distracted, you get distracted by that. So instead
I look at the framework and go, does this
uh align with my framework.
Right. Actually to the point of like I actually sent my framework to a recruiter.
one time and I said, Hey, this thing'cause they kept going back and forth to me and I go, Hey, this doesn't align with my framework.
Right?
So it really
um saves me time from not being distracted, but it also forced me to think about
kinda every year I can reevaluate what I'm doing and look at the framework and say, d is this true to my values? Now
My wife will say this that I'm like a robot.
When I realize that my framework is being violated.
I will resign.
Like instantly.
And I d and I've done that before.
So
without even having another job or anything. I just go like oh my framework is being validated and then resign.
So there's this thing where
I just I know what I enjoy working on and that framework helps me find it. And so I encourage everyone, anybody looking for a job, I always say
Write down a framework. You can use mine as inspiration.
Right. Um but
Figure out what you care about.
And uh make sure that what you're working on lines up with that.
And this framework is the
Questions to ask about where to go work. That's your framework. Okay, cool. We'll link to that so folks can check it out.
The example of you resigning when it didn't meet your framework, is that a story you're for sharing? Is there is there something to learn from that? Yeah, sure. So I mean like so this happened when I was at uh my previous uh a few companies ago, we were running a mobile company called Extreme Labs. That was the one that Shamath was uh the major investor in. And so we worked with them directly.
And
What I realized was and so we've we got a with the company was amazing. We worked on it for many years. It was a mobile app development company. We got to work on mobile apps for like the biggest brands in the world, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, the NFL, NBA, Bloomberg, Slack.
Like you name it, we worked on those mobile apps and this is right when the iPhone and Android were really
Gain steam and
like oh nine to twenty thirteen era.
And then we eventually got acquired by Pivotal.
And over time my role at Pivotal, Pivotal and Pivotal Labs
Changed from
Hey, I was running the biggest office in the world, I was running the biggest pair programming office. I'm a big fan of pair programming.
Two one in which
We were really trying to attach consulting to like the product.
And I ended up being like a field CTO.
Um which really, you know
was I I mean it was fun to learn about that world, but it was different than what I was doing.
And so if I looked across my framework, it kind of was violating all the things that I was trying to work. I wasn't working with
Smartest people anymore, I was on I C
I wasn't learning as much as I could be learning.
And I was so I wasn't on this and I wasn't having a lot of impact. I was like, Oh, wait a sec, this is completely um
uh, you know, not aligned. And then I just
Told the team, Hey I plan on resigning and
And uh that by the way, led to great other things because I'm in
investor in new companies that have spun out from there and like it was a great experience. I'm just saying like it
At the time
landed me to um say hey you're not
You're not actually focused on the right things.
I wanna come back to Extreme Labs. There I know there's other stories there that are interesting.
But first I want to talk about another theme.
a c of things that people often kind uh raised when asked about you and
Uh this one is intensity.
And it's specifically creating intensity in your organization. And the value of that, the power of that.
I've seen that y the way you describe this and I love is
How do you expend more kilojoules per hour?
versus
Spend more hours on work.
So talk about just why intensity, first of all, is so important for to an organization.
Yeah. So I think there's a the there's a few things. One
I have this fundamental belief that like one hour is one hour. Like it's the same hour, right? If you spend an hour, I spend an hour, it's the same time that goes by.
And if I just expend
More calories in that hour.
Right? Like we both are you know, let's say we both nuc work nine to five.
If I can just get more done in the nine to five.
We have both ex the time has elapsed the same for us.
But I just got more done.
And that allows me, of course, then to be like, Hey, I'm gonna take my kid to soccer and do other stuff like
We can still do the same things out of work, but during work, I just wanna try to get as much done as possible during the time.
Versus
Expanding the time.
And I can give you an example, right? I I used to work at a company where
You know, it was like I work twelve hours a day, but I'm playing foosball in the middle of the day, and then we'd go for a coffee break, and like you kinda do these things.
And of course the time expanded to twelve hours.
Versus
You know, um, trying to compress into that eight hour day and pair programming is a great example because so it's such an intense activity.
Two people on one machine.
You can get so much done.
When two people are working together, not being distracted by the internet and distractions.
And just focus on
writing like the solution to the problem at hand.
And it's so tiring that usually when people switch on to pair programming
Um they sleep like
you know, ten, twelve hours a night, the first few nights because
It's so intense, you're working so hard.
But
For me
That
intensity actually leads to like extraordinary outcomes.
Even if you don't have to put in more hours.
Like I think most people I you probably hear this all the time. Everyone says
Oh yeah, like work hard and like do more hours when you're young, whatever. I'm like
What if you just did more per minute?
Right? Like
Quickly
Get through things. I think there's another unintuitive fact is that
People who are really good.
Can
Actually
output.
high quality collateral.
Quickly.
So like
Take a person who is good.
And extremely good.
The extremely good person can actually get a lot of output in a short amount of time, and the person who's good might take longer. Like I think there's a
There's a time variance there that people don't think about. So you can kind of like
not drop the quality too much, but get the time down by like
Two X? Three X?
Right, like Parkinson's law at scale.
Instead of you know, if I give you an hour to do something
A good per a really good person can get a high quality output in one hour.
I wanna talk about how you create an org that operates this way.
But specifically you just mentioned pair programming, and I know that's one of your
Favorite uh tools. Talk about
why this is so powerful when he recommended
I think as an outside observer, it's like two engineers on the same code. Why wouldn't why wouldn't we do things half as half as fast?
Talk about just why you're a big fan of pair programming specifically.
It is the most underutilized management tool in engineering.
Bar none. Like it is just not used as much as it could be.
So
Pair programming, you know, for those who don't know, it's two people on one computer, right? So
Two keyboards, two mice, two monitors, but one computer. They work together. And if it's remote, they use it. You can use a tool like Tupal, like which we use.
And you can just remotely be on one computer.
And you're totally right. The the famous tweet about uh pair programming is
Wait a sec, we have two engineers on one computer. Won't they write half as much code?
And the answer is, Oh no no, they're right even less than that.
Because because it's not about lines of code, right? The throughput limiter is not hands on keyboard. It's not like we're both sitting there
And the limiter is like us trying to get through the key, like the keystrokes onto the screen.
The limiter is
Where is the good, elegant solution?
How do we think through the problem and build the right solution for the problem at hand?
Um
You know, Toby
famously built a lot of Shopify pair programming.
And what he would do.
Is he would actually set a timer.
And him and his the CTO, Cody, would pair program for one hour.
And if they did not finish the problem in one hour, they would delete all the code.
And they would keep the tests.
And they would start over.
And then the what they're thinking was
If we were not able to articulate
and write the code for this feature in one hour, we must be on the wrong design.
We must be building the wrong thing.
And so they delete all the code, kept the tests.
And then wrote it again. And sometimes they'd be over by one minute.
And he would still delete the code.
And start over because his thinking was
The right elegant solution.
should be able to be written in one hour.
And so
Pair programming, I mean, that's an extreme version of it, but even at like Pivotal Labs, if your pair was sick that day and you wrote a bunch of code,
The strong version is like your pair would come in the next day, delete
all the code that you wrote and then you'd write it again the next day.
And again, like
What better
time to rewrite code than like right after you've written it because you now know the problem domain. And it's by the way, it sounds like a waste of time, right? Like it sounds like I'm just deleting code, but
The reason is that
Code lives a long time, code is a liability.
And
the like the right solution, the sh usually shorter lines, more elegant solution, tends to appear after you've done a bunch of pathfinding.
And
The only way to do that pathfinding is kind of
Start.
And then delete.
And then start and be like, Oh no, now I know.
Delete and it's super hard to delete, by the way.
Because
You know, we're humans and we have this some cost fallacy, so it's hard to delete.
But if you can do that.
you will actually land upon like a much, much better solution. Of course
Pair programming has
High, high rates of learning.
Because you're just like sitting beside like not only
you know, whether it's tuple or remote like where directly you're you're learning keystrokes and you learn how somebody thinks about a problem, you
Go back and forth on the talking.
And yes, you will write like probably less code.
But you will move faster along the path of like delivering value for your customers.
Then you would
Um if you did it on your own. And then there's all these studies that show
Happiness is higher, knowledge transfer is higher, less silos.
Intensity's higher.
All the things.
And at a price of like, you know.
twenty percent or something of like what you would normally do. The analogy I have is um
The underhanded free throw and basketball.
Right.
Sink more baskets.
um but looks dumb and nobody does it. Like literally Shaquille O'Neill, I'm not that big a basketball fan, but I read this about Shaquille O'Neal, who's a Hall of Famer, and uh they said
Why don't you throw underhand?'Cause like he was notoriously bad at free throws and he goes, It looks dumb.
Even though he's paid millions of dollars a year to do this thing.
It looks dumb.
Doesn't want to do it.
I remember those Shaquille O'Neal years when he was
Hit a special free throw coach and I remember them talking about this and he's like No, I'm never gonna do that. I'm never gonna do it, because it looks dumb. And by the way, go back to the beginning of the p of the interview.
I don't care what looks dumb or looking stupid.
We're gonna do this. And so actually I ran the biggest pair programming shop in the world.
So on that note, so h what percentage of Shopify like Shopify do this? Is this how you all operate? Yeah, so Shopify I mentioned that Toby and Cody did this at the beginning of Shopify.
And the cool thing about uh pair programming is and in my old world at Extreme Labs is that we knew exactly what to build.
'Cause we were building like mobile apps that were almost like contract manufacturing like
We have an iOS version. Can we build an Android version? So we kind of
quickly were able to say
Here's the spec.
Go quick.
Shopify is such a different company, right? We are a pathfinding company. We are trying to find
the right thing to build.
And so
Pair programming may or may not make sense all the time, like pivotal and extreme, we were doing forty hours a week.
Shopify is much more of like a
four to eight hour a week pair programming culture where
You're gathering together on a problem and saying, Hey, let's pair for half a day or let's pair every Wednesday
And we use that tool.
in our arsenal to move quickly down a path.
But a lot of other time is spent
Pathfinding and trying to figure out what to build.
And trying to convince people to be like, Hey, we're gonna go down this path. Oh, now I know exactly. And sometimes, by the way.
Eighteen months later.
We've now figured out
All the things
And we should
That's the time we should delete everything and start over?
And
That's something that we will do at that point. And so you don't want to be pair programming for eighteen months. You want to be like wayfinding and pass finding and then go,
I see the matrix.
Let me just lead everything and now build it.
'Cause the learning is what you're going for. We have all the learning. Now let's write the code.
Got it. So it's basically when the code is really
You're
Pretty sure this is
uh correct and it's really important uh segments of the code base.
Care program.
Yeah, and then also we do a lot of um pairing during like an incident or a way to like
figure out together, work with somebody and say, Hey, I'm not really sure and let's let's jump on a call together or jump on a tuple and like go down the path and say, Let's figure out together what's going on.
I can't help but ask uh
AI, how does that impact
This way of working.
So
Yeah, super interesting.
What's happening right now with an AI co pilot, like GitHub co pilot, is
It is your pair programmer.
So you now can feel like you're pairing actually without another human. You can pair with the AI.
And so what's happening too is that you're seeing people use like
Like whisper like they're talking to Cursor.
And they're talking through Whisper to say, okay, let's build a new React component that does this. And they're talking, and then it's building goes, Oh no, that's not what I meant. I meant doing this. So you can actually not even have to type.
Just using voice
Go back and forth with your pair programmer. I would say
That's amazing. I would still contend
take that experience and add two humans together. So you've got like an AI co pilot.
and humans because what's happening is generating code and the two humans can look and say
Oh, I know what it's trying to do and
either delete the code because you have inspiration and write it yourself, or just take the suggestion and move it forward. But
I love today's world of AI co pilots because you're now
You never have to code alone on your own.
Right? You never have to code alone. You can try a different language now.
Because the API and the syntax is much easier to
To pull forward and so
All of those things are um are are like a win for for engineering and a win for everybody who wants to build
Any sort of software.
That makes a lot of sense. Basically everyone's gonna be a pair programmer. Yes, exactly. In the future.
Okay, I wanna come back to what else you have done at Shopify
to create intensity. And I think again, it's important to highlight the intensity is meant to how do we
Get more done in the time we have and then go home.
Not just work all day, every day weekends kind of intensity.
Yeah. So we have a few things that we have going for us, right? So one, we have this tool called GSD, which stands for Get Shit Done, which you probably heard from maybe talking to other Saba folk.
Which is this notion of like weekly updates to the whole company on what's happening.
Again, Parkinson's Law at scale.
If you ask people every week, they wanna show progress every single week. So that's one way I talked about pair programming as well.
The other thing we do as a company is
We used to have like
twice a year was our cadence. We like like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or
Like we had like an event in the summer.
And now we do six week reviews.
So teams have this notion of like every six weeks
Actually coming together and walking through the roadmap, the resources and what they're working on.
With
Their immediate leadership?
But then also with Toby.
And so what's cool about that, and by the way, it's a huge time investment.
Right, we all get into a room, it's happening tomorrow.
So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we're going uh all you know, all a bunch of us will be in the office together and we're gonna go through every
project in the company.
And we're gonna talk about the project, the resourcing, how it's going, and we're gonna make changes.
Again that
creates intensity because you want to show
What has been done, what have you learned since the last take sweep review?
And we find six weeks is a very good cadence because
It's short enough.
That you can remember the context.
And it's long enough. Six weeks is long enough, especially if you have
Let's say a team is a dozen engineers.
You can do a lot.
And not only that, you can do a lot in a day.
But this is like kind of like a check in point. And what I've noticed too with intensity is
Let's say we get a review.
And there's some feedback we get in that review. We don't wait till the next six week review, right? Like the next day
We are building things, we are iterating, we are tagging people, and then by the next week speaks, like here's here's the trajectory.
Like I actually

Elon shirt made, like what have you done this week? Because
Parkinson's Law is real. It sounds funny, but like we I you know I keep bringing this up, but
Whatever time you allot to something will be the time it takes.
Right. So if you're doing something
Monumental?
Like
I don't know, you're doing like a reorg or something, right? You can do it the slow way.
Let's like sit down and plan and roll it out over and it's probably like six months in most companies.
Shopify this is like a week or two.
You sit down, you're like, Hey, this is kinda the bones of it. Let's bring some more people and thing. Then you know it's gonna start like leaking, so we just like launch it.
Right? And
We do the same thing with lots of uh things at the shop. We just try to move more quickly and get out of the
Change we don't do change management.
We kinda just like land it.
And then go, Hey everyone, it's kind of like a volatile company. This is what's happening, but this is how how we get things done quickly, and then move on with our lives.
Wow, there's so much there.
Uh I've been through the through those six month reorgs and
Uh, I'm a trainer.
Like I think that context you just shared of
We're at a volatile company, uh
We're changing things. It's not gonna be smooth, but here's we think this is the for the best.
Uh it's just the culture of Shopify it sounds like we want to keep moving fast.
We know this isn't gonna be the smoothest thing, but we just know this better to make the change.
At this point versus weight. It's how Toby increased the resiliency in the company. He would walk around in the old days when we had a data center and just unplug machines.
Yeah, chaos monkey.
Yeah, Chaos Monkey, right. And then but but that but that actually works because it just says, Hey, by the way
Shit's gonna break.
And so let's be resilient to that. And so same thing here. Hey, by the way, if someone's gonna move your cheese.
It's fine.
We are here to create more entrepreneurs in the world. We are not here to have a six month change management
Road map.
And that will just actually hurt.
The speed at which we can deliver value to merchants.
So kind of on those on the th all the things you shared. So there's weekly updates. So the weekly updates are each person shares what they're working on for the week. Is that the idea? Each project.
Project.
Each project can get like it has an update, it can have a video of a of here's the experience. It it'll have a bunch, obviously a bunch of writing on like what's changed since last time.
We have a process called OK one and OK two, which is like
Okay, one is typically at the director level where they're like
Okay, this is like I'm aligned with the direction that this is going at or
A nod aligned and they can make changes.
Then when it goes to OK two, it's typically the VP level of the area.
Who's now looking to say, Okay
what you're working on actually aligns with the overall architecture, but by the way
Have you looked at he at this context, maybe you haven't seen this, this is happening or in the industry.
So you're trying to align at that level.
And then again, like I mentioned, every six weeks we go through with Toby and like
He's an intense guy himself.
And so
a lot of it is like, Hey, why is this taking so long? Are we th overthinking it?
Are we not trying to move forward?
Um on this thing because we're blocked on something.
Is there some piece of infra?
Actually, I'll give you a good example.

There was a an interesting AI problem we were trying to solve with LLMs.
That required us to have a very large
Output context window.
And
Most of the LMs today have a very small output context window.
But in the review
Right. I actually met we have shared Slack channels with all the LLM folks, right? I messaged in the OpenAI channel, I messaged in the Gemini channel, whatever.
And within an hour I had I had we had increased the output context on like a m a bunch of major models.
And we were able to kind of move forward through the thing.
Just because like I asked.
And so that's an exact like it didn't it didn't take another six week review, but it increased the intensity'cause the team is like, Oh
We were blocked because we thought we had to now chunk up this data and do this thing because we had m smaller output context and we thought we could
do a big input context, but like we'd have to do this caching and it's like this whole thing and I'm like, Well did we just ask them?
If we get big and then they were like, Oh, we don't have this undocumented, but like
We'll just enable it right now for Shopify.
And so
That kind of created the intensity for the team to be like, Oh, we can now
quickly get unblocked. So that's a kind of example of just like
Moving quick and trying to like just
Ask a again, ask a dumb question. I'm like, This is probably not possible, but and then they came back and said Oh yeah, we can do that.
That's a great example.
And
As you're describing the ways that you create intensity and
velocity within Shopify
It's interesting that what like what you're listing is a bunch of like meetings and check-ins, which to most people would feel like
Why do we need so many there's all this like less meetings, and I know you guys famously cancel all your meetings and
Uh that's a whole thing we can talk about. Yeah.
But it's interesting that
More check ins and regular check ins allow you to move faster.
Imagine it's partly because it just makes sure you're not working on things that are unnecessary and dumb and not going to be used. And it's just continuing to refine. These are actually the most important.
I mean it's a combination of like trust but verify.
Right,'cause don't forget
The goal of the check-in is not for you to be like, ha ha, I caught you not doing your work. Like that it's not like the Dilbert boss, like, hey, did you do your thing, right?
It is
Like even when I look at the Elon text, which is like, Hey, what did you get done this week?
It wasn't to try to catch
Parog in a you didn't do anything or you did a bunch of useless stuff. It was
Hopefully to pair on the problem.
Right? Meaning like
When I asked somebody, hey, like did you, you know, did we move forward on this LLM project because we now have this larger context window? And then they came back and said,
Oh, here's what we learned.
It's so then that I can then
Look at the answer and say
Oh, so now are we gonna try like have you thought of this? Have you tried like it's a way to pair on the problem.
So
It's
It's not like um
You know, we we talk we we have this word like everybody talks about micromanagement as a word, and like we don't actually think it's a dirty word to shopify, but the reason
We don't think it's a dirty word, it's because it's not just again, Dilbert Boss saying where did you do the thing? It's like
Hey, can I work on this problem with you?
And if I work on this problem with you, I kinda gotta see where you are pretty often.
And then give you advice or you're gonna share context with me,'cause I don't
I'm not in the work every day.
To then come back and say
Oh.
Based on what I know and what you know, can we move this in this direction?
Maybe that's better for merchants. It's like it's really like, I don't want to overuse the pairing paradigm, but it is really much like can I pair with you? And I learned this actually very early.
In my shopify tenure because
Toby would have these one animal with me and I'd be like, Toby, you don't have to waste your time, man. Like you hired me, I got this. I'm like where he goes
Oh, you misunderstand.
While you're here.
I'm we're here to work on problems together.
And I was like, Oh, like I didn't even think I didn't I thought he hired me to take problems away.
He hired me to work on problems with me.
Like that's completely different than what I thought.
I love that.
Okay, one thing you mentioned is meeting thing. For fe people that don't know what you all did with meetings, I think it might be worth just sharing that br briefly because it's awesome and something a lot of companies can learn from.
Yeah, sure. Actually the funny story about the meeting Armageddon
is that um I was messaging Toby prior to me starting at Shopify about meeting Armageddon.
And so I actually think I had a little hand in him like doing this before I got to Shopify'cause I was like, hey, have you seen I think it was Dropbox.
Have you seen what Dropbox is doing and meeting again?
And uh
And so he was like, This is super interesting. This is years before I started. So
I think it's funny that it ended up being a real thing, but h here's what we do.
Once a year at a random time.
We will delete.
All recurring meetings.
That
have more than two people, so not one on ones.
And our internal people only.
So not interviews or external partner meetings.
And then we have a two week moratorium.
where you are not allowed to add a recurring meeting. You can add a regular meeting, but not a reoccurring meeting.
The idea is that
There's a lot of um
inertia behind a recurring meeting. It just always is there and you know it's coming up. And like it's hard to delete because you're like
Oh yeah, we talk about this thing every week.
And so what we do is we kinda just do a meeting reset.
And uh I I think yeah, it's just called Chaos Monkey and
Some you know, the admins go in and just delete everything.
Now what's cool about it is
It forces you to rethink, do we need a recurring meeting, or do we just need one meeting, or do we need a different cadence? That's one thing.

Frees up so much crafter time.
Right. Like one of the stats I track across engineering.
Is
How many hours are individual contributors in meetings per week?
And we noticed
That after we did we did two things, by the way, and this is I have a spicy second one for this, but the first one was we deleted meetings.
And the second thing we did was
We moved a lot of our Slack into workplace.
Facebook workplace.
Which I'll talk about.
Those are the only two things we did.
And we saw a huge
decrease in the amount of time crafters were in meetings.
And then we saw all kinds of other productivity enhancements because they were able to have that flow time and work on things. So we're at something like three hours of meetings per week for an individual contributor at Sho Fi, which is
Phenomenal.
Three hours a week is amazing. I think managers is not that bad. I think it's
I think I tweeted this. I think it's six or seven hours per week.
That's not bad at all.
In order to get aligned and then
All the rest of the time is work time.
And how many how many hours was it before a meeting get in and
And we're going to be able to do it.
fifty or sixty percent. Like it was like something like five or six hours for individual contributors and came down to three.
And then the managers, I think it was like ten and came down to six, something like that. Like
But it was a huge difference. And the only two things were like I mentioned were like one was
the meeting get in, the other one was like
This and I can talk about this. This is like a Yes, let's talk about this. Yeah. So I mean
I love Slack. It's like the I am tool. Everybody uses it.
But it can for sure cause distraction.
And so what we did was we moved all announcement.
information. So like any time you're setting a status update
Or large group announcement.
We moved all of that to like Facebook meta workplace, like Facebook for work, basically.
Um which is now being deprecated, so we'll have to figure that out. But
It just moved all the stuff to like a ML feed that you can kind of consume
Differently.
Than you would slack'cause slack is like
I'm messaging you and you see an alert and all that stuff.
versus uh workplaces like
Oh, I wanna go and consume content from the company and get updates and share updates.
Um, and so that reduced a lot of distraction as well.
And so I'd love to
you know, figure out what the next tool for us is. But it is it's probably something more like
uh like a river of information that I can dip my toe into versus like I am in chat.
Um everywhere.
That is super interesting. So it's specifically things that are just updates where you don't need a discussion. You almost want to discourage discussion. Yeah. I mean it has the commenting.
But it's not the same as like
Uh, you know, it's not it's not the same tool like Slack. By the way, Slack is amazing. We use it.
It's just that for this thing
It wasn't working for us, and so we wanted to move that somewhere else.
Feel like the more I
dig into the Shopify way working, the more fun stuff I never expected emerges.
I'm curious what else is gonna emerge.
So we've been talking about ways that y'all
Uh and you specifically have created intensity, especially in the engineering org.
And then you've also shared just broadly Shopify.
What else is on that list? What else have you found helps?
create more kilojoules per hour.
Yeah. So I think again, I think there's nothing I would say again, start from the beginning, there's nothing more than pair programming because literally you can't do anything else but be on your computer. So like pair programming is the number one.
Um I will say the weekly cadence helps a lot.
Right, which you mentioned, which again was just part of GSD, which is sharing the updates and then the six week reviews. That that does a lot.
On the other side we also have a lot of metrics and alerts.
That help us see when potentially things might be happening in the in the system.
That can allow us to be like, Hey, wait a second.
There's too many things going on.
Um of this type.
We probably have to sit back and reset.
And figure out what's going on. So one thing that happened, for example, was
We s we started seeing that it was taking a lot of time to develop in our admin, like engineers at Shopify developing in the admin.
So we call the like what's called like a code yellow.
Which is before code red.
But Code Yellow is this idea of like
Hey, we're gonna call it Code Yellow on the Admin.
We wanna make sure that
The developer experience inside Shopify is really good.
It should
Um, you know, it should be easy to create to start up the repo, it should be easy to make changes, it should be easy to see the changes.
And so those are the kinds of things that again we can create intensity because this code yellow
allows the champion
To tap anyone on the shoulder and say
Stop what you're doing and come help this thing.
Which is an infrastructure layer thing.
And by building out this infrastructure
It allows you to go fast.
It takes longer to build the infrastructure.
But it makes you go fast forever afterwards, right? Actually I'll give actually give an example of one of these.
We
In twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, the heyday of like pandemic.
Obviously there was a crypto summer again and crypto is going nuts.
And we were sitting back and saying, Wow.
A lot of our merchants are now asking for NFT gating, remember N F T gating, which is like
If you have the token
You can now go into the storefront and see my products, you can see my prices, and you can check out it, but only if you have the token.
And
We were getting a lot of demand from merchants to be like, We want to do this, we want to sell an NFT, and we want our our buyers to have to have the NFT to have this great experience. And we're like,
We agree.
You wanna be able to do we want you to be able to do whatever you want.
And uh so we want to build this for you too.
And
Same with Toby, he's like
You guys are thinking about it wrong.
'Cause he goes, How long would it take to build N F T gating? I'm like, I don't know, two, three weeks.
He goes.
Now how long would it take to build
Like a a platform layer which exposes APIs so anyone can build NFT gating in one hour.
I'm like
I don't know, like two, three months he goes, Do that.
He goes'cause you don't know.
what they are going to build on top of the platform.
NFT gating is one thing, one use case.
But if you spend the time to build out the infrastructure layer, he calls it putting gas in the tank. If you put the gas in the tank
People could drive on that gas for a long time going forward.
And so
He goes, I always want you to think about and he had the key part was
What can you build so anyone could build this in one hour?
Right. So like he does this

Oh, this should only be.
He'll say it and people get the wrong thing. He'll say
Oh, you could write this in a day.
And what he means is
What has to be true so that you could write this in a day? What infrastructure do you need?
And he actually develops this way. He will always like
He will write code against an API that doesn't exist.
'Cause he's like, You know what should exist here? This API.
He'll write the code, he'll go back and forth and refine the client on the server.
And then he'll go, This is correct.
Correct client code.
Now let me go implement.
The server code.
And like this is notion of like building things as infrastructure.
That sounds slower today because it's gonna take
It's two three months instead of two three weeks.
But after that.
The things that people built on top, right, were so easy to build.
There were so many more scenarios that were emerge.
It's just a different way of thinking about software.
And
Um
It really again allows
It's intensity in a different way. It's intensity around building this infrastructure layer, which we want to build quickly, but
Takes two or three months.
In this case.
But then can get
Everyone building on top of our infra.
In a much, much m quicker way. And of course
You know, who knows what can flourish from there.
It's interesting and it makes sense that so much of the way you all think is about
Building the best possible platform.
versus the necessarily best possible like point solution for someone.
And it also explains why you spend so much time in crafting really great code and pair programming, because again, it's a platform for other people to build stuff on.
So I think it'll a lot of this is
very useful, especially for platform businesses.
No, exactly. And actually you're making me think of a of a of a stat. So
Last year
I tweeted out
Uh
you know, maybe a tangent, but I tweeted out that GitHub Copilot has written over one million lines of code for Shopify.
And people are like, Oh my God And it got like picked up and everyone was talking about it. And I go, I don't know why is everybody getting so crazy because
What I wanna see is GitHub Copilot deleting
One million lines of code.
Like that's when you know
We're actually at this point where this is close to an engineer, right? And so
We famously have
Um
deleted millions of lines of code this year because we try to focus on
the again, the sunk cost and like rebuilding things elegantly or you don't need this anymore in rebuilding.
And I even tweeted out I think
Someone said Oh Shopify
uh is in the top ten Ruby code bases in the world. And I said I never want to see on this on this list again.
Like it's not it's not like we shouldn't be gunning for number one and we should be gunning for number one hundred.
Right? Like we want to be not on this list.
Right? Someone else can take the crown.
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Wait, talk about more about this. So there's been a drive to delete code and simplify what's kinda that
What's what's behind that? What's going on there?
Yeah, so there's a few things, right? One is
The more
context you can fit in your head around a code base and you can never really fit all of Shopify in your head because it's
big complicated complicated set of tools we give to merchants. But
The more you can simplify
the much easier everything becomes resiliency, performance, reliability, maintainability, all the illities
become much, much more much easier.
When the code base is simple.
Now
All you need really is like the mandate, right? Of like
Oh well let's look at this code and
If I could start this today, would I really build this thing, or do I now have enough domain expertise to say
Oh no, this is the right solution. So can I delete
Start over.
And build this.
Uh more easily.
And now everything else becomes uh like easy to build on top of.
And so we routinely
We have like a I have a delete code club.
We have hack days, which happens two or three times a year, where there's always one team.
that is focused on deleting code. They even have like a manual. Here's how to find things to delete.
And it's amazing. We almost always delete. I don't know if this is good or bad. We can always almost find million a million plus lines of code to delete. Um, which is insane.
But
At the same time
I applaud the teams for going after like the cruft and the code base, and everything gets easier, right? Code less loads faster, it's easier to understand.
This is why when I look at GitHub stats
You shouldn't really look at
You know, I think Google put out and said, Oh, twenty five percent of all code is now written by AI
Where's the delete?
Where is the twenty five percent of all code is deleted by AI?
Right. Like this is where we have to start thinking about it because
The right code is never the volume
like lines of code metric. It's always something else. It's always like elegance.
And that's where we have to think about. So it is something that we um
As part of us being long term infrastructure thinking.
Um, we really do care about that.
I love this in part but'cause it connects to the topic we're talking about, which is speed, velocity, intensity.
Smaller code base, cleaner, better code base allows you to move faster.
I used to be an engineer actually, but both my engineering brain and my PM brain, like I love the idea of
We're you know.
Killing.
Stuff that's useless, fixing making code cleaner and better and
more durable, uh in reality, very hard for companies to prioritize this kind of thing.
Is there anything you found that helps you do that? You mentioned hack.
hack days and weeks are one part of that.
probably helps that Toby's an engineer and he understands the value of this kind of stuff. But I guess for folks that wanted
Do this more any advice.
Yeah, so we I mean we actually think about when we're building something, we think of it in uh one of three buckets. We're like, are you building an experiment, a feature, or infrastructure?
And once you bucket things, you can say, Oh, it's an experiment like cool.
This is not infra. This is like we're trying something to learn.
And it might turn, by the way, that might turn into an experiment or infra, but it starts off as an experiment.
Now if you're building a feature
A feature is basically you're taking advantage of an existing piece of infra, right? So token getting is the example I gave.
If you could now build that
In one hour.
You you would probably say, Oh, we have the right infra below it.
But if you did what Toby does, which is he's like, here's the infra I wish existed, here's the feature, the feature might be quick to build.
But now I have to go and build the infra. You're now m slotting yourself into infraland, which is like that could take longer.
But you're now enabling it for a bunch of use cases. You you you don't have to think about it at once'cause you may have
people using your API in a different way. So
I think you kinda have to slot yourself.
Now how do people get into this mode?
It is super, super hard.
And I would say
Like Toby is a secret sauce here because he p he pushes us to think about things as infra almost all the time. I mean, one of the things that annoys me the most probably is that
I'll always come to him and say, Hey, we can do A or B and he looks he looks at me and he goes,
You know what I'm gonna say, right? I'm like
You're gonna say
Go back and generate more options.
Because he doesn't like those.
I don't like A or B.
Come back when you have something else.
Right, he has a he actually and maybe I'll tell you a little anecdote. He has a story where he says
There are unlimited amount of wrong options for any problem.
There's probably ten thousand right options, but everybody stops at the first right one.
Instead what you should be spending all your time on because the the options that don't work, you don't you're not gonna spend time on.
But you have to figure out which of the ten thousand options is the right one.
And spend time in that
What are the all these right options? Don't just stop at the first one.
And so when I come to and say A or B, I'm picking two of the ten thousand.
And like he's like, That's not what I go back and generate more options because those are not the optimal ones. So
He he is like quite
you know, the philosopher on these things and it does really change the way the company works.
Because
He'll push you on these things. And then we we over time learn
To spot the same patterns and I learned to push my team on infra and deleting code and making things simple. Because by the way,
Who doesn't want to get free stuff, right? Like
Free performance.
Free, easy to navigate code base.
Free maintainability, free resiliency, because now we went and did the hard work of deleting.
It is hard.
But that goes back to
The beginning, right? Like choose the hard thing.
Don't just build the feature, go make the feature easy to build.
I feel like there's just more and more good stuff. What else? What else is there?
That might be helpful to folks. Uh while you're thinking about it, uh and interesting, I was reading your
Tweet where you shared a lot of this advice.
And I
You mentioned this briefly, but I think it's important with pair programming, one of the benefits is there's no
Multitasking.
You're not like
Checking Twitter, Slack while you're working,'cause you're there watching being watched.
And I could see why that is more productive, just innately.
Oh no, for sure. People and P again.
Like uh underhanded free throws. Not only looks dumb, it feels dumb.
People don't like they feel like they're wasting time sitting beside somebody and being like, Well, I could be on my computer doing this thing. Like
But
Together they are building a like a machine.
Right? Like
Do you ever read um
The undoing project?
Which is about Amos Versky and uh Danny Conneman.
The famous, you know, philosopher uh Michael, I think.
Michael Lewis, exactly.
And he said, um
The famous line was uh
To uh you know, alone we're okay, but together we're a genius.
Right? Like that's a peer programmer.
That's like two people. You're like oh we're o we're okay, but like together we're a genius.
And that's exactly what pair programming is. And hopefully
Me plus like an LLM is a genius.
Right, as well, but that's like the that's the genesis of that of of that thinking. So I would say another thing that helps us uh create intensity is demo culture.
So as part of the G S D updates
We h we we encourage people to share like high fidelity updates, which is not just imagery, but actually a demo.
One of the things that
can go wrong if it just are screenshots is you don't really get the full experience. Like you can't tell how slow things are or whatever, but with a demo, so
You can put a link, we have this tool called spin.
Which is like an internal
uh development environment.
Like a cloud dev environment where you could say, Hey click here to try this on spin.
And then you can try it.
And you can see how it works. Or you can turn or they say turn on a beta flag in your own store.
And then try it.
And so this short circuits a lot of misunderstandings'cause you're like
I'm gonna try it.
And you're not waiting till the end.
Especially with a beta flag, you're like, Hey, it's in my store. I just realized that I went in and now the that this page takes like twenty seconds to load. Is that
What you expect. You're like, Oh, we didn't find this use case.
Like you're gonna learn that much more quickly.
And that creates again intensity on the fidelity of the feedback you're getting because
You know, famously some of our PM team will create a friction log.
They'll be like I am walking, they'll just trade a s a screen share.
Create a video and go, I'm walking through, I turn on the beta flag.
walking through this experience, here's my feedback on the experience.
And
you're getting this high fidelity throughput coming back to you that you're like, Okay
Let's fix these things for next week's iteration and then share another
Beta flag.
And say, Okay, try it now.
Try it now.
Try it now. And so you're not um
Debating about status reports?
You're kinda debating about the experience.
So I'm trying to think like a broadly
All the things you've shared, kinda how they fit together.
that allow you to move this fast. And I I just looked up a few stats.
to g give people a sense of just the size of the company today and
how successful it has been as we as they hear the stuff we're talking about. So you guys are about like eleven thousand employees.
Something like that, according to the Google's
And you're hitting
Not necessarily all time highs on market cap'cause Covid gave you guys a big boost for a while.
But you're kind of like
Coming back to
This insane.
Valuation.
They all had during Covet. So it's
Essentially all time highs.
at a ten thousand plus person company.
Moving really fast, shipping constantly.
People love the product.
And it feels like one key of what you're describing is essentially this operating rhythm that creates
These check-ins that keep people moving and focused on the right sorts of tools and getting them quick feedback if they're moving in the wrong direction.
And having the leaders pair with those people on those problems, not just checking in, but actually pairing with them on the problems that they're facing. So you get
Both.
Like
The peep the crafters who are working on the stuff.
And the leaders who it may have broader context
working together to kind of unblock.
And it's so interesting that it's like again, people are often like, We don't need meetings, get rid of all the meetings. Like you guys do that.
But also just there is a lot of power in strategic
Meetings and check ins.
Another kind of bucket is just like the engineering environment, engineers working with engineers, pair programming.
Um
Things like that. There's a tool you mentioned for pair programming. Tupul, I think. Tupul, yeah. I mean it's funny because like we use it exclusively, but
Um, we actually have this no we have this line internally. We call it like Shopify should be a crafter's paradise.
It should be the place where crafters come to practice their craft and get better at their craft.
obviously like resonates from a lot of the engineering crafters, but it's not only engineering, it's UX and PM and like
ML, like all the pla all the places where you'd you'd want those people to actually have a great experience.
We want them to come to Shopify because we believe this is the best place for that.
I love it.
There's also I just wrote a note down of just how you set up your teams for success. Oh, just avoid distractions. So I think the pair programming helps, the work space, workplace shift from Slack helps.
Uh I think you're also like very firm on t on like their working hours. You like

No. Okay. No, not really. I mean yeah, not not s I mean, we're not super firm on working hours from that perspective, but I mean we do have
Like we we have a lot of people in East Coast time zones, a lot of stuff happens then, but we do have people all over the world. But I did mention we do have like the the check ins and the six week reviews on the Cadence. So that six week cycle.
does give you a little bit of the like what did you get done and are you blocked?
Mentality.
And um
You can expect like a couple being coming in a couple of times and being like, Hey, we didn't get a lot done being unblocked for you to change your
your approach to go, okay, I don't want to go to another review where we didn't get a lot done. So what am I doing this time?
to make sure we unlock a lot of progress and
that check in can give you that ammo.
Be like.
Let's go let's do this this time.
And you're also remote first as a company, which I think is especially cool now. A lot of companies are going back to not remote. You guys are staying remote.
What do you why do you guys decide to do that? What's what have you seen as a big benefit of that?
Yeah. So we have this uh
Remote. So I like to call it like ninety percent remote or ninety five percent remote because we have these intentionals intentional IRL experiences.
So every summer we just started last year. Like sorry, this year.
We're doing this thing called Shopify Summit where we bring the whole company together.
Get together and we like
It's a combination of talks plus hack days and we you know, it's a
come together experience like food and like parties and like you know bands and like
It's a super fun way to kind of
re energize and rebuild your trust battery over time.
And then we have this thing called bursts.
Which is
Hey, you wanna work on a problem, you wanna uh you need to prototype, you need to hack.
People can just s say, hey, I'm starting a burst, we're gonna have five people, we're all gonna go to Ottawa or Toronto or Montreal or somewhere else.
And we're gonna talk about this problem and get together.
And so a combination of those two things mean like throughout the year you can recharge
We have the trust battery notion, which is like
How much
uh you know, how much trust can you have uh between people and it can deplete over time if you're remote.
So
And then we have offices which are like come in if you want.
Right, like I mentioned, I come in like once a week and now Toby moved to Toronto, so now I'm in like three days a week. But it's like
If you want to come in, you can, you don't have to.
Right, today I work from home.
Um, but tomorrow I'm going in. And that allows you again to have those random interactions.
and allow you to feel like yeah, we're like ninety plus percent remote, but um
The I would say the main reason is
We want to hire the best people in the world.
And those people can be anywhere.
And um
Just happens to be that they're not all of them are near in office. And so, but again, with the bursting, like here's a good example. For Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I encouraged all of engineering engineering leadership to come to Toronto. We're all gonna be in the office, like, you know, watching the graphs.
And then um
You know, for hack days, I tr I try to get people to go to the ports, right, which we have
You know, four of them Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and New York.
Which again are coming if you want.
But then get that IRL.
And so it's kind of a little bit of a combo. I wouldn't call it hybrid though,'cause like you don't really have
Like every Friday you come in or don't come in, it's more like come in if you want.
There's so many things to talk about.
Uh, this trust battery metaphor, by the way, is awesome. I've learned to use it also in
Again, it's just basically
Everyone you trust with someone is like think of it as a battery that can deplete and grow and
You should try to
Yeah.
charge it up as when you can and then use that charge over time.
And it can be strategic, by the way. I've seen people use it
As uh like I'm pretty suby says he starts everyone at fifty percent and then he gets to know you.
And then I've seen people use it as the opposite, saying, Hey, look, this team is hard charging. I'm gonna start you at a hundred. Assume that you already
Have high trust do the things.
And only if you
are doing things that are off uh off alignment, does your trust battery deplete? So I've seen people use it the terminology in it as a shortcut way.
to figure out how to work with somebody.
I love just how first principles you all are and there are so many things are so unique.
to how you operate and clearly it's working.
And so I feel like we just keep going on and on.
I want to talk about hiring. I know you have some
pretty unique perspectives on how to hire people that are awesome, but also hire them quickly.
But before we get there, is there anything else that you think might be really valuable to share?
in terms of intensity, velocity, moving fast.
I think the personality of the leadership team is quite intense.
Um
We have a lot of like
We have a lot of founders.
On the exact team.
Which are impatient.
Intense people by design.
But even some of the non founders
are just accomplished people
who um tend to be pretty like they have we all have this attitude of impatience.
And so maybe that's I don't even know if that's a like a learned skill you can learn, or if it just comes like you know, c it comes along with your personality, like genetics.
But
We typically even at the leadership team, for example, we try to do like
My here's my weekly thread of all the things that are going on so that we can not only share
But also show progress on things and then someone can jump in and say, Oh
this thing you're doing that ha it relates to my thing that I'm doing over here.
But it creates this notion of like there's a lot going on all the time.
And we wanna keep the
Keep the vibes, keep the energy high.
So, a lot high energy intense people.
It reminds me while I was at Airbnb it felt like
No matter how well things are going, it always felt like the foun Brian especially is just
Pedal to the metal. No matter how well things are going, there's always that's not going well enough.
How do we go faster? How do we do more?
Well I'm saying I'll actually go further.
I think if you don't have like
Two or three big projects that are on fire.
You're probably not pushing hard enough because you're not really trying things that are outside of your like
If everything's going well, are you really trying are you really taking the risks you need to be taking?
So I think you kinda have to over rotate a bit and have a there should be a few things on fire at all times. Not because
It like you should create that.
But it should just happen because you're stretching into new things that potentially or you're going faster than you should have, or there's a new leader you've
Counted on
early like all these things that should create this thing of like it it might work.
And so um you wanna have a little bit of chaos at the edge.
I I love that.
And it may sound stressful and why would I want that? Why would I want to work
With chaos and fires everywhere, but in reality
If you don't, you're
business is unlikely to become incredibly successful.
And that is even more stressful and painful.
Correct.
Yeah, it's like the opposite, right? It's like this idea of like
People feel like the comfort
Gives you like stability.
And really the um comfort gives you stability.
Because now you're a con you're in a con you're constantly learning and that makes you more robust against things that could come across.
Choosing the harder paths, I might say.
Okay. Let's talk about hiring. You have some really interesting takes on
hiring. One that I've heard about is that you
You kind of don't like the interview process. You kind of like to prefer not to interview and do something instead.
Talk that.
Yeah, so throughout my career what I've noticed is that
And I'm sure everybody this is a dirty little secret, right? Interviews are not a good predictor of performance. We know this, we know this from studies, we know this, everyone at their company knows this, where like somebody interviewed well.
wasn't as good of a job or the opposite.
Didn't interview well and then came in and was phenomenal.
One example I have from my lap for my startup.
Wh right before you know we came to Shopify was
I hired two people for machine learning.
One was like a PhD.
Taught at the university, was like, oh my God, no brainer was also recommended by an employee. We're like, oh my God, this person's gonna be great.
The other person was like a dude I met at the coffee shop who had never had a software job, but was like just so interested
In machine learning.
And um
Person A we let go within a few weeks'cause like not a fit for a culture.
And person B is still when
Was at our startup and is still at Shopify today, and is a phenomenal machine learning engineer who literally at our Christmas party was like, You know, this is my first software job, right? We're like, How?
But was just so cute, like
And we gave them both a shot. Like the key was
I didn't use the resume in either way to
Bias.
We brought them both in.
We said here's the environment. We had it was all peer programming at Mic Startup.
And so they pair program.
And uh you know I've seen
An aside.
You know I care I I I really believe in peer programming when
I made with my I made people work in peer programming with my own money.
Like I I paid people to have I paid for two people to be on one computer. So that's why you know.
Yeah, exactly, right, less than half the code. Anyway, so
Pairing
And they um
And it was pretty clear after just a you know, a few weeks. I'd say let's let's say up to three months is like the amount of time I give people. Um
that person A wasn't gonna work out and person B was.
So
What I really like to do is use
This like race car analogy, if I told you, hey, I wanna go hire the best race car driver
There's not really that many questions you could ask them except for like put them in the car.
And so the same thing happens with us is that
Of course we have to do interviews.
But we do really spend time in the thirty, sixty, ninety days to make sure that
That
Thing that they br are bringing.
actually lines up with what we need at Shopify.
And
You should also be transparent with people because if it's not a fit, it's actually good for them and you to figure that out as quickly as possible because they could be amazing somewhere else, right? Like
We mentioned like the chaotic environment and fast moving environment shop players. That's not for everyone.
But that's okay.
Right. We're not looking for right, we've talked about that we wanna be as, you know
The best ten thousand person company in the world.
We're not looking for like millions of people. We just need the best ten thousand. And so if it's not a fit, like
It's in your interest and our interest to figure that out quickly so that you can go somewhere where you will be amazing. And for us to have the people who will be amazing at Shopify.
And so
Job trials.
I'm a huge fan of
Which leads me to like intern programs. What a great interview process, because you now have real work product from
Somebody for four months.
They get to see what it's like to be a chop five for four months.
We get to see what it's like.
For them to be at Shopify for four months.
And that can turn into um
A full time gig.
And that's a great interview process because you literally know exactly you don't have to
I'll give you a funny example. I think I've heard a company where like, Oh, we have an intern process
And then afterwards we interview them for full time. I'm like
What are you gonna learn from like
Let's say even eight hours of interviews that you're not gonna have learned from four months of real work experience.
Like
And so
There's just things like that. You just gotta look at the work product. And so I'm a big fan of like job trials. And in my previous companies,
I almost like you mentioned, I almost didn't interview anybody. I almost just said, Come in and work.
And
It allowed us we had a much higher like
in the first ninety days, like twenty percent attrition before ninety days because it just didn't work out.
But those after ninety days, we had less than one percent attrition.
Because you they knew exactly what they were getting into and we knew exactly how they were gonna fit.
So in terms of the hiring process.
You're still at job fight, you're interviewing people, they're do technical evaluations, things like that.
But it sounds like there's a very strong
Setting of expectations.
We will hire you, but
Well actually
clarify if this is a good fit in the first thirty, sixty, ninety days and we're gonna do like actual we may let you go, and there's a good chance we may let you go. Is that just the way you set things up? Yeah, I mean I think the way to think about it is more like
We want to make the interview process as close to the real job as possible.
Because by doing that
We can um likely assess the skills that you have in your interview closer to what's happening in the job, right? So that's one.
Two
We have this interview
Step called the life story.
Where we try to figure out
If
All the are all the experiences you've had up until now.
actually gonna be um like it does it show that you are curious a curious person with range?
Because if it does
That's likely more of someone who's gonna be a fit. Like I mean I I had this famous line from somebody who said
You know what I don't like about resumes? I'm like what? They go, It tells you what you did
But it doesn't tell you why you did those things.
It's such an interesting insight, right? Like
Like your resume should be a Y.
Like why did you go from this company to this? Like that's the interesting part. Not that you are a PM at Microsoft and then a PM at Stripe.
It's like why did you switch from Stripe to m like Microsoft to Stripe? Like what there's something interesting there. So
The life story's trying to pull that out.
It's like why did you make the decisions?
What did you do in your past that was like interesting?
Are you curious? Like
Do you have like I always fought I I read this great book, uh Range by David Epstein.
I that book was maybe one of the hardest books for me to read in my life because I every page I was like
I don't believe it. I kept thinking I was a specialist. I kept turning the page going, I don't like this data that keeps showing that generalists are better. And then by the end, I realized that I'm a generalist.
It just was like it took me so long to realize and
Funny for me because like
I ended up redesigning the compensation system for JavaFi, even though I'm an engineer. So
I still thought of myself as an engineer.
through and through even though
I work on recruiting and HR and all these other things. So
But I think that
That's what we're trying to tease and then yes.
In that
First
uh period. We actually have a survey that goes over Slack that says hey
How happy are you with the person that you hired?
And that should in conversation with the person, you should give them the feedback to figure out, hey, are there things you need to adjust to kind of better fit in and
Make sure the expectations are set up.
But then also together with the person figure out hey
If you're not if you're not feeling this
Let's find you either a different role in the company or somewhere else because
We want
the people here to have high impact, but that person should have high impact somewhere.
Could be at Shopify, could be in the same role, could be in a different role.
Could be at a different company.
That's like a good thing for everybody.
And then do you actually do work trials with new engineering hires, or is it like
Something you aspire to do. Yeah, I would love to do it's hard to do with the volume of resumes we get, but we do do it at scale with the internship program.
Right. So like twenty twenty five.
We're gonna hire a thousand interns.
And like
That is gonna give me a thousand job trials.
to pick like the top, you know, X percent of those to come to Shopify full time.
Yeah, so just to double click on that. So you're hiring a thousand interns over the course of the year. Uh that's a lot.
And the idea there is these folks are actually useful building useful things.
And it's an interview process for you. Yeah, I mean I think it's two things. One is
is some people look at an internship program as like community service, like let's give back to the community and let's hire early talent. And I'm like,
Hold on a second.
Are you telling me I could hire uh a thousand people over the year?
And they will come to work with an L M and a brain, because they are growing up in the age of AI.
They will be useful to us because they come from a different generation and they have like in our case in commerce, they have a different experience about shopping and AI and bots and chat and voice and
Like all these things.
They'll be useful to us.
We'll teach them some stuff as well.
And then together we can decide if they you know, they might end up going somewhere else, in which case we have the Shopify imprint on them going to whatever other company, which is
I think a pl a positive.
Or they might stay at Shopify and be useful over a longer period. Like seems like like win win win.
The other thing that was cool is after I did that tweet
A bunch of other CTOs messaged me and said
Hey.
We're gonna hire a thousand one interns to beat you guys and I'm like
Great.
Like if we can
Just from that one tweet, if I can get like the early talent ecosystem restarted here after
Noah.
a really tough uh s last few years and layoffs.
Huh it's great for everybody because now
They're realizing that
They also realize that these these people are super valuable.
They bring together a completely different set of skills. And by the way.
Here's the secret, in pair programming.
Interns will always be more intense than the full time.
And so um that also helps the flywheel of intensity go.
How wonderful. It all just keeps coming back.
Yeah.
Did the internship program emerge out of this co op system that
Canadian schools have. I know Waterloo's has a big co op program.
Yeah, I went to Waterloo. And so yeah, it hint hint. So I went to Waterloo. Um
I and I did my I did co-op and I did intern programs there. I went it was amazing. Uh what a great experience because what ends up happening is you leave Waterloo with your degree.
But also with two years of experience because I did six
Four month work terms, twenty four months.
And you end up walking I mean, I think one of the big parts of it is just interview skills.
'cause I interviewed for ten plus jobs every
Uh every four months.
And I did that six times and so
You come out having done lots of you have a lot of interview experience, but you also have work experience.
And so
Just taking that to the next level, Shopify has always had interns.
And
What I felt like we needed to do was again
We start this notion.
of uh of early talent in the ecosystem.
There's one I would say one or two big differences with our intern program. One is
Um we're making them come in three days a week.
Versus full remote?
And the reason for that is
Or and we're doing it just in three offices right now, Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa.
And the reason for that is because
We want them to have a cohort'cause early talent is different than
You know, you and I who've been in the industry
We worked in office, we worked out of office, we're more comfortable with navigating like partnership discussions and like talking to people in in in different companies. But these people have not. They maybe have never worked anywhere.
And so to not have the IRL component.
Would do them a disservice.
And so
We specifically made it in those ports and then people are traveling, by the way. Like they're like moving to Montreal to do the internship. It's great.
And then
If you're a mentor or manager for one of the interns,
You have to at least see them like IRL once a month.
So we're kind of making these experiences and of course they'll have a cohort.
Of dozens of people that will be with them along the way.
And so we think that'll just make their experience better. And of course
Nothing like tapping someone on the shoulder, be like, Have you seen this error before? And so
It's easier in an early town situation. And of course
Over time if they become full time, they can still come to the office, right? Come if you want. But um they can also go full remote.
That is amazing.
For folks that don't know anything about these core programs
Briefly it's just basically wh while you're in school before you've graduated during the summer, you go work at a company or during the year. Okay. Yeah, it's during the year. So what happens in Waterloo is
What what I did was I did eight months of school at the beginning, so two terms. My first co op term was summer, but then it was
Work.
S work school, work, school alternating for the whole rest of my time at Waterloo. Is
Exactly. So every four months I did either a school term or a work time. So I was doing work in January sometimes and September sometimes.
And
It was super good because again, it also allowed me to be super intense at school for four months and then go to super intense work experience for four months.
But
Yeah, it's a model.
That like I I mean I go to I was just at Waterloo this week doing a talk.
So I just like I love that
That symbiotic the relationship between Waterloo and uh
And the them and employers and by the way, not just Waterloo, right? Lots of schools do a summer program, U of T and others, lots of schools in the States.
Fun fact, so total tangent. Uh I had a startup called Local Mine started it uh in Montreal, of all places. I'm not Canadian, but
Moved there for various reasons. It was awesome.
And our first hire was actually uh from the co op program.
I don't know if it was Waterloo, his name's Nick Adams.
And he applied just he saw our job posting, I think, and
And we're like, what is a co op?
And he came to work and then he went back to school and then we hired him.
And then he ended up at Airbnb when we got a car.
See, there you go. And see so for us actually what my first when I did my startup helpful
We hired uh I had I had one one or two engineers.
And then I actually um
literally just um hired four interns.
Because you you hire them in February for May.
And I because I was doing paraprogramm, I had to make sure I had four full times by then. So I hired the interns in anticipation of having
the f the full times. And I literally had I think it was I was off by one week.
So one intern had no pair for a week, but then after that in May
I had four full times, four interns, and then they paired the whole time.
What a journey.
Okay, I wanna talk about just one other topic real quick and then we'll wrap this up.
And it's around extreme labs. Okay.
So there's a bunch of stuff here. It feels like it's just like this.
Tech Mafia of Canada that a lot of incredible people emerged out of, and there's a whole bunch of stuff we can talk about.
One fact I heard while you were there is you had a
Hundred reports, direct reports.
Yeah that I reported to you.
A hundred and twenty.
Hundred and twenty direct reports feels like a complete nightmare to me.
Tell me why you decided to do that, if you'd recommend that for other people.
Yeah, so what ended up happening there was
Uh we started off small, right? It was ten people when I got to Extreme Labs. I wasn't the founder, but I was very early on. And
Um, I just have one report to me.
And then as we grew
I just kept having those people report to me and I was trying to figure out
Like, you know, we talked about like crafters and crafters paradise, this idea of like
People don't really like they they their managers are useful.
But I was trying to figure out could I solve the problems that they were they needed their manager for in other ways. So for example.
What should I be working on?
I was like, Okay, well we have product backlogs.
Or
I'm blocked on something. Or
I need feedback on the product I'm building.
Or I'm stuck on this technical problem. Like I tried to figure out ways to like
not have managers be the answers to those questions. I'm like there should be another answer.
And so
Pair programming really helps you get unblocked quickly because you're
You have another person that you can bounce technical ideas off of.
having a product backlog can tell you what to work on. We had demos every week.
Demos internally.
And we had demos with the clients every week because we were, you know, contract manufacturing for mobile.
That gave them feedback on whether they were going in the right direction.
Right.
We had set working hours, which made things like super intense in the office. This is again like two thousand nine to twenty twenty thirteen.
So all these things didn't really need a manager.
And what I realized was what the unblocking thing needed a manager. I'm blocked on this.
Well I said okay
If
I did have all these directs. I did two things famously. One, I had a lot of direct reports, and two, I did not do any scheduled one on ones.
Because you can't have a hundred and twenty direct reports on two schedule one on ones because you're never
Doing anything but one at once.
So I said
I'm gonna be around a lot because I don't have a lot of one on ones.
So we can do unscheduled one on once. And what that means is
If you are blocked.
Actually, there's a famous picture where I'm I had this weird like cube desk where it was like a circle almost in the middle of the whole floor of engineers.
And I was always there because I wasn't in a lot of meetings.
And people could if they were blocked, they could just come up to me.
Right. The cool actually one cool thing about pair programming IRL is you can kinda look across.
And just see if it's working or not, because if two people are intensely on the computer
You know it's working if one person's laying back or like
You're like, it's not working.
So you could just walk up to them and be like, what's happening? Um
But they would um
They would come and ask me questions and I could unlock them, like, Hey, we're blocked on this, we don't have this API, we need money for this machine, like whatever.
And so
The unscheduled one on ones ended up being like a real um clarity clarifying thing for me,'cause I did
scheduled one on ones my whole career and I realized after leaving like Microsoft for three years, I'm like, where are all those one on ones useful?
Right, once a week for three years, right? Hundred fifty one on ones.
So the unscheduled ones were though. I was like when I knocked on my manager's door and said, I have this problem.
Those were important.
So
That's why I created it Extreme.
And the hundred and twenty direct just it just grew over time. I just didn't think I needed managers. I was like, let me unblocks these people in another way.
And we came up with other things to
To
Systems.
to unblock them that didn't require a manager. And I just also had a good memory. I knew exactly everyone's skills and
Compensation and you all that off the top of my head.
Um so that helps.

Actually, this is Chamath he came in and uh
became our biggest investors and he's he's obviously a smart guy.
But he said the right thing, which is not
This can never work because then I would go into defense mode and t explain to him why it would work.
He just said to me
I'm not gonna debate with you whether this works or not.
But will it work at four hundred people?
And I said
Probably not, he said, Okay, so let's change it. And so like
We did then end up putting a little bit more of a structure.
But I went to um
I made a few people directors and I and I forced them to have forty direct reports each. Like I said, we're just gonna make it
Still pretty flat.
And then that did end up working, um, because it it still allowed them to be use the system to unblock people versus like
Having to do a one on one every week.
Or having to
Um
you know, talk about things that potentially a system could unblock. And so I tried to figure out ways to to systematize things.
I love is just another example of doing things differently, not necessarily just
Here's how it's done and I'm gonna do it that way and experimenting with it, even if you knew like, okay, maybe long term this isn't the way it's gonna operate.
Imagine at Shopify you're not you don't have one hundred twenty reports.
No, I have like we have the F fourteen or something.
Right. Like we do
We do have like these guardrails where I think we say, Hey, like in engineering, you should have between eight and like twenty. There are definitely people who have more and people who have less.
But we do try to keep things as flat as possible.
Because we do believe that
Like it doesn't make sense to have like three people reporting to and then to somebody and then they only have three people
So like it does it it's you just make a very deep hierarchy. We actually do see, by the way.
The farther you are from Toby, the like the we can see things in like the survey results, like the the alignment gets out of whack.
And so you do actually see that you want to be closer.
You wanna have a flatter org.
In general.
And that can be achieved by just having um more direct reports per level.
Make sense.
Okay.
Final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round, we have this recurring segment that I call Fail Corner.
Where
Generally
People come on these podcasts, they share all their successes. Here's all the things that I've done right, here's all the big wins, and everyone feels like, Oh man.
I wish I was always successful like these people. When in reality
Everyone that comes on has failed many times.
Is there a story of a failure in your career that you could share that helps people see that even folks like you fail and maybe what you learn from that experience?
I have a few. I'll say one thing, by the way, because I think I read I think I read this in Tim Ferris' book or on the podcast where he said, Create a failure resume and like write everything down.
And I would not recommend doing this because I did this and I got super I'm like a high energy happy guy.
I wrote down like I have a I have a note on my phone called Failure Resume and wrote down all the times I failed.
And it is depressing. So I would not encourage people to do that, but I'm happy to tell you about a few a few instances. So
Well, one is actually I've been laid off twice.
And people would not expect like oh like you know I'm doing this thing and like
I've been laid off twice.
And uh, you know, I think in both times
It was the right thing, like it it was the right thing for the company, the right thing for me, and I kind of
use that experience as like a a way to reevaluate and eventually came up with my framework of how I want to spend time. But
That's maybe a different story. I'll tell you about one at Shopify.
The first
Week that I started
Uh twenty nineteen.
We were ch we were rebuilding our point of sale system.
which you know now does like billions of dollars of GMB, but back then we were like, let's rebuild it with a new UX and a new technology platform.
And it was my first week and I'm the mobile guy coming from Extreme Labs.
They're like, should we build this in React Native?
Or should we build this uh you know natively on uh mobile platforms?
And
So I went through this evaluation, spent a lot of time, blah blah blah.
And I came back with
A hedged
Solution.
Which is kinda dumb. I said, let's do IOS and Swift.
And let's do Android and React Native.
And the reason I said that was I said I wanna learn about React Native and I think Android's the harder platform, so let's build that in React Native.
But IOS
on Swift because that guarantees us
uh a a product in market and we didn't have any React native apps in uh in market at the time.
A year later.
We we launched the iOS version.
And uh it was a huge success.
And uh we then spent like another six months building the React Native version for Android and everything else.
And we realized pretty quickly that React Native was the platform for the future.
Like we're like, Oh my God, this will allow us to have one platform, you could run it on
the web as well, and we could use the React engineers from the web to work on it. Like it was like a clear winner.
And
And by then we had also lost the shop launched the shop app, which is React Native, and so we learned a lot about this.
And I went back and I said, Hey everybody, I made a total I made a huge mistake.
We just spent a year building this thing, it's in market, but we're gonna have to rewrite we're gonna have to rebase
Back onto this iOS version.
I think I burned
Eighteen months of time for like a hundred engineers?
Like literally from the decision I made in the first week of joining Shopify.
And
Toby, when I went to Toby and I told him, I go, Hey man, I think I made this mistake and we have to do this and it's gonna cost us like you know a hundred engineers, another six, whatever, but and he looked at me and he goes,
You should tell everyone the story.
That's all he said.
Not like
Hey, bad, good, like he goes, Did you learn something? Like it was it was like a
It was an epiphany for me, but he was like, This is a learning org.
And I totally failed and I told everyone I failed and my mistake and everything else because just tell everyone.
Because
He goes, Do you know what mistake you made?
And first I was like, I don't think I like what mistake he's like
You didn't take
He goes, I will
I will always come down harshly on people who do not take risks.
And you did not take a risk in this case.
But if you make a r if you take a risk and you and it doesn't work out.
You'll never get in trouble'cause you took the risk and it was the right risk to take.
Because but you didn't take the risk.
And so what I should have done, and by the way, even now thinking back, it would be super hard to do first week of job, right? Is like
Take a risk on a platform that we have not launched a
in production app on
But he was correct in that we should have.
Because we would have saved ourselves so much more time.
And so yeah, total failure.
Um sorry, the product is like super successful now and like we're all on React Native and even the
Shop Green app is on React Native everything's React Native and we're like core contributors, like it's all good.
But I literally burned, I think, eighteen months of time for a hundred engineers.
as my first decision in the company.
This may be the best example of failure coordinator we've had yet.
This is a great example. Both of them actually are
Although I'm wondering, like, okay, that felt like a really good decision to me.
And it's it sounds like it, right?
But it wouldn't have been his.
But it's like obviously you don't wanna just take risks. There's like a limit of like a risk, but like, you know, informed.
I guess is there anything you missed there that would told you this was the right path?'Cause you know, in hindsight, of course we should have done this, but I
Looking back, what do you think you should have done other than we should have done the risky path?
Yeah, I mean one thing about my career as well is I don't really do anything halfway.
And when I started looking into React Native, it was never just that I'm like, Oh, let me look at the docs and like read and like build a thing.
It's like I flew to Meta and met with the native the React team.
I became a core contributor. I ran the React Native working group.
Like I like we became release captains for React Dave. Like I I was do I knew that I was gonna do all the things.
So I'm like
And of course in React Native you can also drop down to native and do things there that are not possible. So like
I think I
I hedged incorrectly'cause I I knew I was gonna do all these things and I should have looked at my own
Process if I do all the things
Can I fail?
Mm.
And I didn't take that into account because again, I did like five or six, like I literally I put all everyone together, I was running the group, I was like release captain, like I would hang out with like the React team and meta, like I would be doing all the things. We became core contributors at React Native.
before we became core contributors in React because of all the things I was doing. And so
I think just like knowing
That I was gonna go all out.
I should have said, You know what, this is not gonna fail.
And I didn't I didn't
I have the confidence in in in that
Path.
So I hedged.
Right, hedging is the worst.
And I remember the CTO at the time said
I'm wondering if I should force you to go React Native. Like he literally said that.
And I said I will do
If you say that, I will do it. But that would have been his decision and so he didn't do it. He didn't tell me to do it.
Okay, that makes a lot more sense.
It's so funny that uh Facebook had a similar uh mistake early on in their career.
Yeah, exactly. And uh
I don't know if you were at the Zuck's interview at the Chase Center that the Acquired Podcast did and he talked about this.
Where like their market cap dropped eighty percent, they were about to go public, they went to this app, no one knew
Thought they could do mobile ads.
And he's like
That's that's back a year and a half, but he's like
But like
Based on all the pain he's gone through.
Back like since then, he's like, That was not too bad.
Yeah, it's true.
Um
Uh, we I was at Facebook.
the like we were uh Extreme Labs worked on the Facebook app and we worked on that app.
I was in the office when we submitted the IOS app.
every single day that week because it kept getting rejected kept it kept crashing.
And we had obviously direct access to people at Apple, but like it would we ship a new app on Monday and it crashed, ship an app on not just us, but us Facebook together. It was just
And so I remember that whole HTML5 fiasco from the inside.
I thought you would say you also d told Facebook to decide on the HTML five hours to set them back a year. I did not. We just happened to be
We happen to be there when it was when when they were doing it. Yeah. That's so funny.
Amazing. Thank you for sharing that.
Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you think
would be valuable to leave listeners with.
May either touch on something you mentioned, a last piece of negative wisdom, or or we just go straight to the round. Yeah. I mean I'll say something maybe embarrassing for you.
I've been I've been hu I've been using uh your performance management framework.
From uh from your first round review article
Not knowing by the way that it was you. Like I actually found it
Like you being like the famous Lenny podcaster.
But the old days maybe the Lenny the PM?
And I remember reading this a long time ago.
And just copying there's a Google link in there to a a Google Doc link with a f with a like a a template for a performance review framework.
that I've been using for years. Literally every review I've done at Shopify uses that framework.
And I was writing
A post to my admin about
How we can use LLMs.
To
make it easier for me to write these reviews, even though obviously you have to read it all and and go through it, but I was like, how can I generate some of this with an LM?
And so I wanted her to send her the original article.
So I'm back to the first round review, found the article and said, Oh my God, it's Lenny.
Like the same guy.
So I will say
One thing that's interesting about that framework is
I've used it now for you know, like I said, six years here.
is that and I don't think it's me, I think it's actually the framework pulls out good information.
I've had multiple people in a review process tell me that that
When I deliver the feedback.
In the of course the format.
They would they would say, Wow, I've been in this year a long time. This is the best performance review I've ever had.
And it's because the framework pulls out good information. So congrats to you. But I think it was funny that
Randomly I was coming on this podcast and I just wrote that article to my
that doc to my admin like two, three weeks ago, and realized it's the same person.
Well, how about that?
I love that. Uh I will also give credit to s uh former guest on this podcast, uh Vlad Loktev, who was my manager at Airbnb, and that's where I
was inspired to write about that framework.
So it trickles down to him. And I don't know where he
He probably invented it.
Uh so credit to Vlad also for that. Another fun fact along these lines, I have another first round repost about the W framework, which is a framework for planning.
I do annual planning.
And that's one that I've
slowly discover many, many companies use and they don't know where it came from. They just call it, Oh, we have this W framework.
Someone flipped it and called the M framework.
But that's another one that has trickled into the ether of tech companies, which is awesome. Amazing.
With that
Forhan, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
I'm ready.
Let's do this.
What are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people?
There's one uh so Toby has an annoyingly long set of books to that he recommends and they're all like not all. They're usually good. Depends,'cause we're not in totally in sync on fiction, for example. But
He recommended one to me that I think everyone should read right now called Mana.
M A N N A.
From Marshall Brain.
It is a book about
It's a book about AI.
And I think the most interesting thing b about it though is about
A future in which the AI tell the emplo the humans what to do?
So it's this idea of like imagine in the future you came into work and the AI would tell you what emails to pay attention to or what dashboard to look at because something weird is going on.
It takes that to an interesting level, so I would recommend reading that book. It's not long.
That's fun. I think another book that I recommend to people
And it's kind of a weird one to recommend, but it's Business Adventures from John Brooks, like the famous if you ask a
I think it's Bill Gates what his famous book of all time is.
It's this book.
And the cool thing about the book is that
It is not easy to digest.
For
Anyone with focus
Problems like you know, um
Paul Graham wrote the post How to Do Great Work and it's super long.
The best part about that post is that you have to be able to read the whole thing.
And so the same thing with business adventures. I think each chapter is it's twelve chapters, twelve stories.
No breaks in between, it's just each one is super long.
But it just goes into a problem at such depth.
That if you can maintain your focus to get through the
The depths of each problem.
You will just learn something, just like that post by Paul Graham, like
I loved that it was so long because I sent it to people and I said
The test here is can you read it?
Can you just get to the end. And um
Not enough.
pejorative way. Like in a if you can get to the end, like you will extract the
the alpha from this post if you can read it all.
So I love I so those are yeah, mana is like the opposite.
very very easy and and uh easy read.
I'm excited to read these.
Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?
I read a recent one was uh Challengers.
The tennis movie?
with Zendai. I I just randomly I was at home and I put it on.
And the cool thing about it was more the cinematography and music.
They have this weird
uh style, arthouse style, where they would uh be talking and music would get like super loud. Like it was very strange.
But a very, very good movie.
And then you saw you said movies and
Or TV show, or TV show.
Yeah, one of my all time favorites is probably Halt and Catch Fire.
If you've watched that. Yeah, but early tech.
Yeah, and like if you I think there was an Andreessen podcast where he said this is the closest thing to what a real
Startup looks like.
So Halting Cash Fire is like an all time like recommend. Like everybody has to watch it.
Your favorite product that you recently discovered that you really love?
I don't know if I want to be like
in the in the zeitgeist right now but like the meta ray bands are amazing.
And the biggest thing about the Red Array bands was just that I think I I never got into it and I saw people around me wearing it, but I only got into it when somebody said I'd never take my AirPods with me anymore. And I was like, Oh
I can swap
Two devices for one device,'cause I always have sunglasses and uh and AirPods because you know, I'll go for a walk or listen to a podcast.
And now I can just have one device.
And this happened to me I was at a
you know, in the summer I was at a pool party and someone called me
I just took it from my sunglasses and people were confused. It's like where I was taking this call from. But
Um
They are the right amount of tech, like they're in unintrusive, you can't tell, they don't look like any tech. And then I also I was playing soccer with my kids. I have three kids.
I just turned the video on.
And I was the goalie and they were taking shots and I was watching them. They had no idea.
That I was just recording and it was such a cool moment because I was in
Playing soccer with them. I wasn't with my phone.
And they I got to get this amazing set of video uh that I would never would have gotten.
So I really like the meta events.
We had Boz on the podcast who leads a lot of that work and uh
Uh, he's got a lot a lot to teach us. And I put on Ray Bans while we were doing the interview just for fun. You could see my setup.
Okay, did it.
Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find useful in work or in life?
Okay, I do.
And it's on like a lot of my profile um like bios.
And it is uh
Everything you know is wrong.
And the reason I like that one and people always like, What would you put on a billboard? Or like and people always come back to me and say that's like they know that as as my motto.
And the reason for that is
It's this notion of
If all the knowledge you knew was incorrect.
Could you from first principles build up
Like a view of the world.
And that's kind of how I like to think of things is that
Anything could be incorrect.
Even things that you think are correct, which is why again back to the I like to experiment, I like to look stupid, because I'm always trying shit because I'm like
I don't know if it's a little bit more.
Even though you say this is correct.
that this is gonna work, right? Actually one example my wife hates this
Is I have a Tesla.
And I routinely
We'll switch gears.
Uh without fully stopping the car?
Which you cannot do in a in a regular car, but like I'll be in drive and then I'll slow down to drive back up into my driveway, and while it's moving, I switch it into reverse. And like
You never would know that that's possible except for trying and sometimes it goes beep beep beep'cause you're going too fast.
But like
And she hates it.
But I'm like I'm always trying weird things and um so that's why I say everything you know is wrong. Like who knows what's possible.
Just try different things.
I do the same thing with my Tesla. I used to do it with a non electric car and my wife was always like don't do that, screwing it up. Yes, exactly. I love that on the an electric car. There's no gear you're breaking, it's just software. Exactly.
Uh it all this quote you reminds me of that you shared of Everything You Knows Wrong. It the founders of Airbnb always talked about just this point that everything around you was designed by somebody.
Another human.
They're not necessarily that much smarter or insightful. It doesn't mean what they did was correct.
Somebody else finds some better potentially. I think I think Steve Jobs had a similar thing. Like, hey, you can design anything, like everyone everything's designed by people. I love that one too. Yeah.
Final question.
So you told me the story of this PhD you hired versus just a guy you met in college.
Sorry, in a coffee shop.
I read another similar story where you hired a waitress.
Yes. Is that real? Okay. Tell that story.
Yeah, so
Again, this is some another
There's a long list of reasons my wife is annoyed with me, but this is another one of them where
Whenever we are whenever we are out.
I'm always scanning.
And I'm always scanning people and like, you know, one like
Do I know anybody around whatever I like to scan for people and have a good memory for faces. But
Um, in this case we were at a restaurant and I saw a waitress doing a very, very good job, like an extremely like
She was
running between different tables, she was smiling her face, taking everyone's order, like, you know, um, making sure that like there was a thing happening in the kitchen. She was kinda like doing a phenomenal job of organizing the entire crazy busy restaurant.
And so when talking to her, I said
What do you do outside of this because you look like you're super She's like, What do you mean I'm I'm just a waitress? And I said, Well, you would you like to
Like we're this is Extreme Labs. I said, Would you like to, you know, work at Extreme Labs? Like, what's that? So I explained it to her and I got her her contact info.
She came into the office and she first started off as our receptionist, so
She moved from like, you know, the retail world into the office world.
And then I um brought her on as my admin and she became one of my recruiters.
And I taught her how to recruit and talk to people and she came in with me to info sessions.
And over time
We actually hired
many more people from the restaurant that were really, really good at their job.
What was amazing was
One
She was organized, but not e organized. Like she had to teach her Google Docs and G Suite and everything else, but she was super smart.
I just never had the opportunity.
The coolest thing about this is that
She ended up being um
She ended up taking over the H one of the H R functions for us.
And
She had a
A college degree.
And because of the work she had done with us, she was able to parlay that into finishing her un you like doing one more year and getting a university degree.
And now she's a director of HR.
at a company which is amaz like is amazing from like
She went from that environment to this environment and a lot of her
People she pulled.
The smart
uh and you know intense people she pulled from that environment also ended up on these amazing career paths. And so I just like if I see someone doing a good job, I'm like,
What like what do they do?
Now how can I work with them?
And uh this is a one example of like pulling somebody out of that environment. I and I do have lots of other ones where like I overhear someone and they're a designer or an engineer and
I try to
Try to hire them in into my company as well.
Wow.
That is such a good story. Uh I love that uh maybe this like restaurants are the new feeder.
Yeah.
For tech companies to not think about that.
Yeah, I mean everyone's smart at something, right? So I was trying to figure out
She was really good at this thing, could she be so good at something else?
Amazing. Feel like there's so many stories, more stories to tell, but
We're gonna wrap it up and let you go.
Forhan, two final questions. Where can folks find in line if they want to reach out, learn more, maybe apply to work at Shopify? And how can listeners be useful to you?
Sure. So
Um, Twitter's probably the place I try to hang out the most, X.
Um at F N Thur, and maybe I'll put that in the show notes.
And then um
Listeners for me, yeah. I mean like I'd love to be challenged. I'm sure that there are people who are like they heard something that I said and they're like
Oh, that's like super dumb. We do this instead. Or here's research that says that that won't work. I would love to hear more about these because I'm just, again, on a learning journey and if I did something stupid.
Very likely.
I would like to learn a better way to do things. So I would love for people to like comment and say
Hey, this is dumb, you should try this, or if that doesn't make any sense.
I would love to learn more. So that's what I'm looking for.
All right. Well leave a comment in YouTube or on the Substack post with what ye what Furhan got wrong.
Amazing.
Amazing. Uh, Ron, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me.
Everyone.
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