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Episode: How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng)
Author: Lenny Rachitsky
Duration: 01:40:03
Episode Shownotes
Farhan Thawar is the head of engineering at Shopify, where he oversees more than 1,000 engineers and a platform that powers over 10% of all U.S. e-commerce. Before Shopify, he was VP of engineering at Pivotal Labs and Xtreme Labs, and co-founder of Helpful.com. In our conversation, Farhan shares:• Why
choosing the harder path leads to better outcomes• How to create intensity within your org (without burnout)• Why every company should be embracing pair programming• How he hires without interviewing• How he built the world’s largest internship program• His mission to create a “crafter’s paradise” for engineers• Much more—Brought to you by:• DX—A platform for measuring and improving developer productivity• Persona—A global leader in digital identity verification• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-shopify-builds-a-high-intensity-culture-farhan-thawer—Where to find Farhan Thawar:• X: https://x.com/fnthawar• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fnthawar—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Farhan’s background(05:38) Choosing the hard path(09:37) Getting comfortable with looking dumb(13:20) Lessons from working with visionaries(19:19) Creating intensity in organizations(22:06) The power of pair programming(29:18) Shopify’s culture of intensity(37:18) Meeting Armageddon: revolutionizing company meetings(39:46) Reducing distractions(41:10) Deleting 1M+ lines of code(49:05) Three buckets of building(57:45) Remote work and trust battery(01:00:29) Finding stability in uncomfortable times(01:03:14) Hiring philosophy(01:11:41) Internship programs and co-op systems(01:15:32) Lessons from managing 120 direct reports(01:20:40) Failure corner(01:27:46) Lightning round and closing thoughts—Referenced:• The Steve Jobs quote about connecting dots: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/463176-you-can-t-connect-the-dots-looking-forward-you-can-only• Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/• GitHub: https://github.com/• Farhan’s “questions to ask” framework: https://x.com/fnthawar/status/1514193402828574721• Palantir: https://www.palantir.com/• Joe Liemandt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liemandt• Chamath Palihapitya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamath_Palihapitiya• Xtreme Labs: https://www.xtremelabs.io• Parkinson’s law: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-parkinsons-law-6674423• Pair programming: https://dev.to/documatic/pair-programming-best-practices-and-tools-154j• Cody Fauser on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codyfauser• How Shopify builds product: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-shopify-builds-product• Chaos Monkey: We look at Shopify’s new ‘culture of focus’: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/shopify-chaos-monkey-meetings-culture-deann-evans• Empowering devs with AI: How Shopify made GitHub Copilot core to its culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVKBwcm5dbw&t=2318s• Tobi Lütke of Shopify: Powering a Team with a ‘Trust Battery’: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/business/tobi-lutke-of-shopify-powering-a-team-with-a-trust-battery.html• Brian Chesky’s new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach• Stop Being Deceived by Interviews When You’re Hiring: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/02/07/stop-being-deceived-by-interviews-when-youre-hiring/• Shopify’s made the Life Story a major part of their interview: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294140• Internships at Shopify: https://internships.shopify.com• Nick Adams on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-adams-32b28139• React Native: https://reactnative.dev• Swift: https://www.swift.org• Acquired podcast: The Mark Zuckerberg interview: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-mark-zuckerberg-interview• The Power of Performance Reviews: Use This System to Become a Better Manager: https://review.firstround.com/the-power-of-performance-reviews-use-this-system-to-become-a-better-manager• Airbnb’s Vlad Loktev on embracing chaos, inquiry over advocacy, poking the bear, and “impact, impact, impact” (Partner at Index Ventures, Airbnb GM/VP Product): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/impact-impact-impact-vlad-loktev• The Secret to a Great Planning Process—Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite: https://review.firstround.com/the-secret-to-a-great-planning-process-lessons-from-airbnb-and-eventbrite• How to do great work: https://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html• Challengers on Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Challengers-Luca-Guadagnino/dp/B0CX5MZ9M4• Halt and Catch Fire on Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Halt-Catch-Fire-Season-1/dp/B0CKXZNT96• Meta Ray-Bans: https://www.meta.com/smart-glasses/shop-all• Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/making-meta-andrew-boz-bosworth-cto—Recommended books:• The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds: https://www.amazon.com/Undoing-Project-Friendship-Changed-Minds/dp/0393254593• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World: https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World/dp/0735214484• Manna: Two Visions of Humanity’s Future: https://www.amazon.com/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-ebook/dp/B007HQH67U• Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street: https://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-Street/dp/1504000021—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_00
If you do the hard path and it doesn't work, actually you still kind of 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.
00:00:11 Speaker_00
I go, what are you doing to try to find a job? Are you really learning anything from sending out 10 resumes a day? Why don't you look at the API docs and build something? Even if you don't get a job at Shopify, you've learned something.
00:00:20 Speaker_01
First, I want to talk about another theme, creating intensity in your organization.
00:00:24 Speaker_00
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?
00:00:29 Speaker_01
The more I dig into the Shopify way of working, the more fun stuff I never expected emerges. There's been a drive to delete code and simplify.
00:00:37 Speaker_00
We have a delete code club. We can always almost find a million plus lines of code to delete, which is insane.
00:00:42 Speaker_01
I found this great quote from you. Not everyone can look stupid in public over and over, but I believe it's my superpower.
00:00:48 Speaker_00
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 it's to understand the content.
00:00:59 Speaker_01
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.
00:01:05 Speaker_00
They're mostly different people, but they're similar in one thing is that they have an
00:01:12 Speaker_01
Today, my guest is Firhan Thawer. Firhan is vice president and head of engineering at Shopify.
00:01:18 Speaker_01
Shopify is an incredibly interesting company because they have over 10,000 employees, are fully remote, and even though they were founded almost 20 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.
00:01:40 Speaker_01
A lot of this is thanks to Firhan, 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,
00:01:58 Speaker_01
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.
00:02:08 Speaker_01
He also shares a bunch of great hiring advice and a bunch of hiring stories which are going to blow your mind.
00:02:13 Speaker_01
He also talks about their engineering intern program where they're going to hire over a thousand engineers just for their intern program in 2025.
00:02:20 Speaker_01
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.
00:02:32 Speaker_01
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 Thaur.
00:02:47 Speaker_01
Firhan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. As I was preparing for our conversation, I talked to a bunch of people that you've worked with over the years.
00:02:58 Speaker_01
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?
00:03:11 Speaker_01
Second of all, does it sound good to talk about these three themes in our time together?
00:03:15 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think, I mean, I have ideas on where all three of those things came from. And I think that it is something that if you look back on my career, I've like hit points on each of those things.
00:03:27 Speaker_00
But I don't think at the onset, I knew that that's what I was doing. But it turns out, in retrospect, that's what I ended up doing.
00:03:32 Speaker_01
Perfect. So this is like the Steve Jobs, everything looking backwards, it all connects. Today's episode is brought to you by DX.
00:03:40 Speaker_01
If you're an engineering leader or on a platform team, at some point your CEO will inevitably ask you for productivity metrics.
00:03:47 Speaker_01
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00:03:57 Speaker_01
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00:04:14 Speaker_01
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00:04:29 Speaker_01
This episode is brought to you by Persona, the adaptable identity platform that helps businesses fight fraud, meet compliance requirements, and build trust.
00:04:37 Speaker_01
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00:05:29 Speaker_01
Learn more at withpersona.com slash Lenny. Again, that's withpersona.com slash Lenny. Okay, so let's start by talking about the hard path. Okay.
00:05:42 Speaker_01
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.
00:05:54 Speaker_01
Share this advice, why it's important, where you learned, where you kind of like developed that this is the right approach.
00:05:59 Speaker_00
But the short version is that if you have a choice and you choose the easy thing and it works, great. If you choose the hard thing and it works, great, like you kind of did more work.
00:06:09 Speaker_00
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, or they're not usually around in the easy path.
00:06:21 Speaker_00
And what happens is you've gone through this exercise and now you're like, I've kind of lost, I lost the choice or I was trying to do something, it didn't work out for me.
00:06:29 Speaker_00
But if you do the hard path, and it doesn't work, actually, you still kind of 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.
00:06:40 Speaker_00
And I can give you like a quick example. So I meet lots of like job seekers. And they're like, I go, what are you doing to try to find a job? I'm like, I'm sending out 10 resumes a day. I'm like, okay, that sounds like kind of easy.
00:06:51 Speaker_00
And like, are you really learning anything from sending out 10 resumes a day? Versus I would say to them, hey, you know, all these companies you're interested in, Shopify might be one of them.
00:06:58 Speaker_00
Why don't you look at the API docs and build something, build a Shopify app, build an admin extension, like build something on top of Shopify.
00:07:05 Speaker_00
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 repo now and you can show people.
00:07:13 Speaker_00
You're learning about the product that might translate to a job you might get somewhere else.
00:07:18 Speaker_00
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.
00:07:26 Speaker_00
And the same thing happened to me taking hard courses, I would get worse marks. But I ended up meeting smarter people in those courses, because they were there for the same reason I was because the content was hard.
00:07:36 Speaker_00
So that's something that I've just realized in my life, that if I do the hard thing, and 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.
00:07:47 Speaker_00
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.
00:07:54 Speaker_01
So on that, building on the last point you just made, people could hear this and think, okay, if it's harder, that's going to be the right path. sometimes harder is still like a bad idea.
00:08:05 Speaker_01
Like for example, joining a terrible company that's extremely frustrating to work at, or building, I don't know, a house in a really dumb way, but it's just really hard.
00:08:14 Speaker_01
What else do you find is important to think about when you're thinking it's not just harder, but also X, Y, Z should probably be true.
00:08:19 Speaker_00
Yeah, 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.
00:08:30 Speaker_00
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.
00:08:38 Speaker_00
There was a time when I was doing my MBA in financial engineering, by the way, and I mean, I'm a tech guy, I'm still a tech guy. And all these people were going into, like, finance jobs.
00:08:46 Speaker_00
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 it was the learning journey.
00:08:55 Speaker_00
And so I would say a big part of it for me is, yes, there's the how do you win even if you lose? Because if it goes poorly, you can still come out of it with skills.
00:09:03 Speaker_00
But if you actually take the hard path, you'll have these like intense working relationships with smart people that, again, will continue on in your life.
00:09:12 Speaker_00
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.
00:09:19 Speaker_00
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.
00:09:28 Speaker_00
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.
00:09:37 Speaker_01
Speaking of that 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 superpower, too Yeah, and I think I mean it sounds funny.
00:09:51 Speaker_00
But again, I'm the one who's always trying like super dumb things and Sometimes they work and you know, like even like my wife hates that I try these things even at home, right? I'll just like, you know, what's an example like
00:10:04 Speaker_00
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 ruin the clothes. I'm like, okay, but now I know that this mode should not be used.
00:10:12 Speaker_00
But maybe I would have uncovered that there's some super fast quick wash that I can do in 20 minutes that now saves us, you know, 40 minutes of watch time every single time we use the washing machine.
00:10:22 Speaker_00
So there's things like that, but I will ruin lots of clothes trying to do that. But same at work. We'll try things and sometimes it can lead to disaster, hopefully not.
00:10:31 Speaker_00
But you can imagine people trying to like, oh, let me try this new configuration of GCP and maybe we'll get some benefit, but maybe we'll take Shopify down. We don't want to do that. So you want to have some sort of guardrails.
00:10:44 Speaker_00
But there is something around trying dumb things and saying dumb things. Half the time, by the way, when I say something dumb, people go, I had the same question. I think they just were scared to say it.
00:10:55 Speaker_01
So for folks that may want to, because I feel like this skill is so hard, but so important, being okay with failing, being okay with looking dumb.
00:11:02 Speaker_01
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?
00:11:09 Speaker_01
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.
00:11:16 Speaker_00
I don't know. I mean, I kind of grew up working retail. And like people come into the store, and then they would say, hey, like, and you're on working on commission. And they're not always buying stuff. And if they don't buy, you don't make any money.
00:11:28 Speaker_00
And so maybe just the fact of like going up and forcing myself to talk to people and then, you know, trying to get them and maybe you spend an hour with a client and then they don't buy anything.
00:11:36 Speaker_00
But you're getting that reaction of a bunch of negatives. And all you have to do is say, okay, and just go to the next customer. You can't really dwell on it and be like, oh my god, my whole day is ruined.
00:11:47 Speaker_00
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 it was a way to kind of build up some confidence. And people say this like telemarketing, or you know, like,
00:11:58 Speaker_00
There's a bunch of things you can do to get a lot of rejection. Cold calling is another one. And that can lead you to actually building up resistance. I don't know if I'm genetically better at it or not.
00:12:07 Speaker_00
I just think that I literally don't care if I look dumb. I've always said the dumb thing. I'm not doing things on purpose to get nos, which, by the way, is part of some sales training, which is like, go and get 10 nos. I haven't done that.
00:12:22 Speaker_00
But I have been in many situations with many sharp people, business people, successful people who have said to me, turn around and say, that's the stupidest fucking question I've ever heard. I've definitely had that happen to me.
00:12:33 Speaker_00
And I'm like, all right, let's move on to the next question.
00:12:36 Speaker_01
I love that attitude. And I think that's key to it. It's just like bounce off of it and not be crumble.
00:12:41 Speaker_01
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.
00:12:48 Speaker_00
Oh, yeah, still. Yeah. So how about this that I heard? 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.
00:13:02 Speaker_00
And literally, I got this message back saying, I've already explained this to you three times. 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 understand the content. Right.
00:13:12 Speaker_00
And actually, by the way, I say these were like, I saved them. Like, I literally screenshot it because I'm like, remember this? Like, it doesn't matter. I'm trying to learn.
00:13:20 Speaker_01
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.
00:13:29 Speaker_01
So there's a guy named Joe Limond in your 20s, and Chamath in your 30s, and Toby this decade, maybe yourself next decade if things go well.
00:13:39 Speaker_01
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?
00:13:49 Speaker_00
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 going to work for a different billionaire every decade.
00:13:56 Speaker_00
Like that's not how it works. But they're very, they're similar. They're mostly 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.
00:14:08 Speaker_00
They're very long term thinkers. They're irrational in that they'll look and say, hey, 10, 15, 20, 25 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 1% a week.
00:14:23 Speaker_00
And so the melding of the two, I know where I'm good and I'm good at like kind of pushing the ball forward.
00:14:28 Speaker_00
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, why don't we merge forces? And so that is something that has resonated with me is like, how do I find these irrational,
00:14:41 Speaker_00
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 for me to become unreasonable. And so I have to kind of merge with these people.
00:14:53 Speaker_00
And so that is, again, something that I specifically have sought out. And even when I was starting my own company in 2015, I actually sat down and wrote a list of all the unreasonable people that I knew in Toronto.
00:15:04 Speaker_00
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.
00:15:15 Speaker_01
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 going to try to build it.
00:15:24 Speaker_01
I'm going to find someone to merge with, 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 going to, I need to get good at all these things.
00:15:36 Speaker_01
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 insight is just recognize your strengths and weaknesses and double down on your strengths.
00:15:47 Speaker_00
Yeah, it sounds funny, but like me and you talked about it, that framework I wrote down, which I tweet out, like me writing that down changed how I picked jobs forever, right?
00:15:58 Speaker_00
Because I kind of 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?
00:16:10 Speaker_00
And 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.
00:16:17 Speaker_00
title, company, 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. You're like, oh my God, like this is exciting.
00:16:29 Speaker_00
And if you don't have 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.
00:16:38 Speaker_00
So instead, I look at the framework and go, does this align with my framework, right? Actually to the point of like, I actually sent my framework to a recruiter.
00:16:46 Speaker_00
And I said, hey, this thing, because they kept going back and forth to me, and I go, hey, this doesn't align with my framework.
00:16:52 Speaker_00
So it really saves me time from not being distracted, but it also forced me to think about kind of every year I can reevaluate what I'm doing and look at the framework and say, is this true to my values?
00:17:03 Speaker_00
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've done that before.
00:17:13 Speaker_00
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.
00:17:25 Speaker_00
And so I encourage everyone, anybody looking for a job, I always say, write down a framework, you can use mine as inspiration, right? But figure out what you care about, and make sure that what you're working on lines up with that.
00:17:37 Speaker_01
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 up for sharing?
00:17:48 Speaker_01
Is there something to learn from that?
00:17:50 Speaker_00
Yeah, sure. So this happened when I was at my previous, a few companies ago, we were running a mobile company called Extreme Labs. That was the one that Chamath was the major investor in, and so we worked with them directly.
00:18:01 Speaker_00
And what I realized was that company was amazing. We worked on it for many years. It was a mobile app development company.
00:18:08 Speaker_00
We got to work on mobile apps for the biggest brands in the world, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, the NFL, NBA, Bloomberg, Slack, you name it. We worked on those mobile apps.
00:18:16 Speaker_00
And this is right when the iPhone and Android were really gaining steam in the 2009 to 2013 era. And then we eventually got acquired by Pivotal.
00:18:25 Speaker_00
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.
00:18:35 Speaker_00
to one in which we were really trying to attach consulting to like the product. And I ended up being like a field CTO, which really, you know, was, I mean, it was fun to learn about that world, but it was different than what I was doing.
00:18:48 Speaker_00
And so if I looked across my framework, it kind of was violating all the things that I was trying to, I wasn't working with the smartest people anymore. I was on IC, I wasn't learning as much as I could be learning.
00:18:58 Speaker_00
And I wasn't, 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, you know, not aligned. And then I just told the team, hey, I plan on resigning.
00:19:07 Speaker_00
And that, by the way, led to great other things, because I'm an investor in new companies that have spun out from there. And like, it was a great experience.
00:19:13 Speaker_00
I'm just saying like, it, at the time, lended me to say, hey, you're not actually focused on the right things.
00:19:20 Speaker_01
I want to come back to Extreme Labs. I know there's other stories there that are interesting. But first, I want to talk about another theme of things that people often raised when I asked them about you. And this one is intensity.
00:19:33 Speaker_01
And it's specifically creating intensity in your organization, the value of that, the power of that. I've seen that the way you describe this, and I love, is how do you expend more kilojoules per hour versus spend more hours on work?
00:19:48 Speaker_01
So talk about just why intensity, first of all, is so important to an organization.
00:19:53 Speaker_00
Yeah, so I think 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.
00:20:03 Speaker_00
And if I just expend more calories in that hour, right, like we both are, you know, let's say we both work nine to five. If I can just get more done in the nine to five, the time has elapsed the same for us, but I just got more done.
00:20:19 Speaker_00
And that allows me, of course, to be like, hey, I'm going to take my kid to soccer and do other stuff.
00:20:22 Speaker_00
We can still do the same things out of work, but during work, I just want to try to get as much done as possible during the time versus expanding the time.
00:20:30 Speaker_00
And I can give you an example, right, I used to work at a company where, you know, it was like, I worked 12 hours a day, but I was playing foosball in the middle of the day. And then we'd go for a coffee break. And like, you kind of do these things.
00:20:40 Speaker_00
And of course, the time expanded to 12 hours, versus, you know, 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.
00:20:52 Speaker_00
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.
00:21:03 Speaker_00
And it's so tiring that usually when people switch on to pair programming, they sleep like, you know, 10-12 hours a night the first few nights because it's so intense, you're working so hard. But for me,
00:21:14 Speaker_00
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.
00:21:22 Speaker_00
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.
00:21:31 Speaker_00
I think there's another unintuitive fact is that people who are really good can actually output high quality collateral quickly.
00:21:42 Speaker_00
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.
00:21:51 Speaker_00
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?
00:22:00 Speaker_00
Like Parkinson's law at scale, instead of, you know, if I give you an hour to do something, a good, a really good person can get a high quality output in one hour.
00:22:07 Speaker_01
I want to talk about how you create an org that operates this way. But specifically, you just mentioned pair programming, and that's one of your favorite tools. Talk about why this is so powerful, when you recommend it.
00:22:20 Speaker_01
I think as an outside observer, it's like two engineers on the same code. Why wouldn't we do things half as fast? Talk about just why you're a big fan of pair programming specifically.
00:22:30 Speaker_00
It is the most underutilized management tool in engineering, bar none. It is just not used as much as it could be. So pair programming, for those who don't know, it's two people on one computer, right?
00:22:41 Speaker_00
So two keyboards, two mice, two monitors, but one computer. They work together. And if it's remote, you can use a tool like Tuple, which we use, and you can just remotely be on one computer. And you're totally right.
00:22:51 Speaker_00
The famous tweet about 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 write even less than that. Because it's not about lines of code, right?
00:23:04 Speaker_00
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?
00:23:15 Speaker_00
How do we think through the problem and build the right solution for the problem at hand? You know, Toby famously built a lot of Shopify pair programming.
00:23:24 Speaker_00
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.
00:23:31 Speaker_00
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.
00:23:38 Speaker_00
And then what their 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.
00:23:50 Speaker_00
And so they delete all the code, kept the tests and then wrote it again.
00:23:53 Speaker_00
And sometimes it'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.
00:24:06 Speaker_00
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.
00:24:17 Speaker_00
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.
00:24:27 Speaker_00
But the reason is, is that code lives a long time, code is a liability. the like the right solution, the usually shorter lines, more elegant solution tends to appear after you've done a bunch of pathfinding.
00:24:41 Speaker_00
And the only way to do that pathfinding is kind of start, and then delete, and then start and be like, Oh, no, no, I know, delete. And it's super hard to delete, by the way, because, you know, we're humans, and we have this sunk cost fallacy.
00:24:53 Speaker_00
So it's hard to delete. But if you can do that, you will actually land upon a much, much better solution.
00:24:58 Speaker_00
And of course, pair programming has high, high rates of learning because you're just sitting beside, not only whether it's tuple or directly, you learn keystrokes and you learn how somebody thinks about a problem, you go back and forth on the talking.
00:25:12 Speaker_00
And yes, you will write probably less code, but you will move faster along the path of delivering value for your customers than you would if you did it on your own.
00:25:20 Speaker_00
And there's all these studies that show happiness is higher, knowledge transfer is higher, less silos, intensity is higher, all the things, and at a price of like, you know, 20% or something of like what you would normally do.
00:25:33 Speaker_00
The analogy I have is the underhanded free throw in basketball. Right? Statistically known to sink more baskets, but looks dumb and nobody does it.
00:25:43 Speaker_00
Literally, Shaquille O'Neal, I'm not that big a basketball fan, but I read this about Shaquille O'Neal, who was a Hall of Famer, and they said, why don't you throw underhand? Because he was notoriously bad at free throws. And he goes, it looks dumb.
00:25:53 Speaker_00
Even though he's paid millions of dollars a year to do this thing, it looks dumb, doesn't want to do it.
00:25:58 Speaker_01
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 going to do that.
00:26:05 Speaker_00
I'm never going to do it because it looks dumb. And by the way, go back to the beginning of the interview. I don't care what looks dumb or looking stupid. We're going to do this. And so actually I ran the biggest pair programming shop in the world.
00:26:15 Speaker_01
So on that note, so what percentage of Shopify do this? Is this how you all operate?
00:26:21 Speaker_00
Yeah, so Shopify, I mentioned that Toby and Cody did this at the beginning of Shopify. And the cool thing about pair programming is, and in my old world at Xtreme Labs, is that we knew exactly what to build.
00:26:31 Speaker_00
Because 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.
00:26:42 Speaker_00
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 40 hours a week.
00:26:54 Speaker_00
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.
00:27:04 Speaker_00
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 field, be like, hey, we're going to go down this path. Oh, now I know exactly.
00:27:15 Speaker_00
And sometimes, by the way, 18 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.
00:27:27 Speaker_00
And so you don't want to be pair programming for 18 months. You want to be like wayfinding and pathfinding and then go, I see the matrix. Let me just delete everything and now build it. Because the learning is what you're going for.
00:27:37 Speaker_00
We have all the learning. Now let's write the code.
00:27:39 Speaker_01
Got it. So it's basically when the code is really, you're pretty sure this is correct and it's really important segments of the code base pair program.
00:27:49 Speaker_00
Yeah. And then also we do a lot of pairing during like an incident or a way to like figure out together, work with somebody and say, Hey, I'm not really sure.
00:27:56 Speaker_00
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.
00:28:01 Speaker_01
I can't help but ask, AI, how does that impact this way of working?
00:28:06 Speaker_00
So AI is super interesting. What's happening right now with an AI copilot, like GitHub Copilot, 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.
00:28:19 Speaker_00
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.
00:28:28 Speaker_00
And they're talking and then it's building us. 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.
00:28:37 Speaker_00
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,
00:28:47 Speaker_00
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.
00:28:53 Speaker_00
But I love today's world of AI copilots 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 pull forward.
00:29:06 Speaker_00
And so all of those things are like a win for engineering and a win for everybody who wants to build any sort of software.
00:29:14 Speaker_01
That makes a lot of sense. Basically, everyone's going to be a pair programmer.
00:29:17 Speaker_00
Yes, exactly.
00:29:18 Speaker_01
In the future. OK, I want to come back to what else you have done at Shopify to create intensity.
00:29:24 Speaker_01
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.
00:29:34 Speaker_00
Yeah. So we have a few things that we have going for us, right?
00:29:36 Speaker_00
So one, we have this tool called GSD, which stands for get shit done, which you probably heard from maybe talking to other Shopify folk, which is this notion of like weekly updates to the whole company on what's happening.
00:29:47 Speaker_00
Again, Parkinson's law at scale. If you ask people every week, they want to show progress every single week. So that's one way I talked about pair programming as well.
00:29:55 Speaker_00
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.
00:30:06 Speaker_00
So teams have this notion of like every six weeks, actually coming together and walking through the roadmap, the resourcing and what they're working on with their immediate leadership, but then also with Toby.
00:30:18 Speaker_00
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 on, you know, a bunch of us will be in the office together.
00:30:28 Speaker_00
And we're going to go through every project in the company. And we're going to talk about the project, the resourcing, how it's going, and we're going to make changes.
00:30:36 Speaker_00
And again, that creates intensity, because you want to show what has been done, what have you learned since the last six week review.
00:30:43 Speaker_00
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, you know, let's say a team is a dozen engineers, you can do a lot.
00:30:55 Speaker_00
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.
00:31:04 Speaker_00
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 six weeks, we're like, here's the trajectory, right?
00:31:12 Speaker_00
Like, I actually, I want to get that Elon shirt made, like, what have you done this week? Because Parkinson's law is real. It sounds funny, but like, you know, I keep bringing this up, but whatever time you allot to something will be the time it takes.
00:31:25 Speaker_00
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. And it's probably like six months in most companies.
00:31:37 Speaker_00
Shopify, this is like a week or two. You sit down, you're like, Hey, this is kind of the bones of it. Let's bring some more people and think, but then, you know, it's going to start like leaking. So we just like launch it. Right.
00:31:46 Speaker_00
And we do the same thing with lots of things. We just try to move more quickly and get out of the chain. We don't do change management. We kind of just like land it and then go, hey, everyone, it's kind of like a volatile company.
00:31:55 Speaker_00
This is what's happening. But this is how we get things done quickly and then move on with our lives.
00:32:00 Speaker_01
Wow, there's so much there. I've been through the six month reorgs and I'm trying to, like, I think that context you just shared of we're at a volatile company. We're changing things.
00:32:11 Speaker_01
It's not going to be smooth, but here's, we think this is for the best. It's just the culture of Shopify. It sounds like we want to keep moving fast.
00:32:20 Speaker_01
We know this isn't going to be the smoothest thing, but we just know this better to make the change at this point versus wait.
00:32:25 Speaker_00
It's how Toby increased the resiliency in the company. He would walk around in the old days when we had a data center, just unplug machines.
00:32:31 Speaker_01
Or the chaos monkey.
00:32:33 Speaker_00
Yeah, chaos monkey, right. But that actually works because it just says, hey, by the way, shit's going to break. And so let's be resilient to that. It's the same thing here. Hey, by the way, someone's going to move your cheese. It's fine.
00:32:44 Speaker_00
We are here to create more entrepreneurs in the world. We're not here to have a six month change management roadmap. And that will just actually hurt the speed at which we can deliver value to merchants.
00:32:52 Speaker_01
So kind of on those, 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?
00:32:59 Speaker_00
Each project. So each project can get, like it has an update. It might have a video of here's the experience. It'll have a bunch, obviously a bunch of writing on like what's changed since last time.
00:33:09 Speaker_00
We have a process called OK1 and OK2, which is like OK1 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 I'm not aligned, and they can make changes.
00:33:21 Speaker_00
And then when it goes to okay, too, it's typically a VP level of the area, who's now looking to say, okay, what you're working on actually aligns with the overall architecture.
00:33:28 Speaker_00
But by the way, have you looked at this context, maybe you haven't seen this, this is happening, or the industry, and you're trying to align at that level.
00:33:35 Speaker_00
And then again, like I mentioned, every six weeks, we go through with Toby, and like, he's an intense guy himself. And so the A lot of it is like, hey, why is this taking so long? Are we overthinking it?
00:33:46 Speaker_00
Are we not trying to move forward on this thing because we're blocked on something? Is there some piece of infra? Actually, I'll give you a good example.
00:33:54 Speaker_00
In one of the reviews from last time, there was 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 LLMs today have a very small output context window.
00:34:08 Speaker_00
But in the review, I actually met, we have a shared Slack channel with all the LLM folks, right? I messaged in the OpenAI channel, I messaged in the Gemini channel, whatever.
00:34:18 Speaker_00
And within an hour, we had increased the output context on a bunch of major models, and we were able to kind of move forward through the thing just because I asked. And so that's an example.
00:34:30 Speaker_00
It didn't take another six week review, but it increased the intensity because the team was like, oh, we were blocked because we thought we had to now chunk up this data and do this thing because we had smaller output context.
00:34:38 Speaker_00
And we thought we could do a big input context, but we'd have to do this caching. It was like this whole thing. And I'm like, well, did we just ask them?
00:34:44 Speaker_00
If we get bigger, and then they were like, oh, we don't have this is undocumented, but like, we'll just enable it right now for Shopify. And so that kind of created the intensity of the team be like, oh, we can now quickly get unblocked.
00:34:53 Speaker_00
So that's the kind of example of just like, moving quick and trying to like, just ask 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.
00:35:02 Speaker_01
That's a great example.
00:35:04 Speaker_01
And as you're describing the ways that you create intensity and velocity within Shopify, it's interesting that 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?
00:35:17 Speaker_01
There's all this like, less meetings. And I know you guys famously cancel all your meetings and that's a whole thing we can talk about. But it's interesting that more check-ins and regular check-ins allow you to move faster.
00:35:30 Speaker_01
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 continue to refine. These are actually the most important.
00:35:38 Speaker_00
I mean, it's a combination of like trust but verify, right? Because don't forget, the goal of the check-in is not for you to be like, haha, I caught you not doing your work like that.
00:35:46 Speaker_00
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?
00:35:54 Speaker_00
It wasn't to try to catch Parag 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?
00:36:06 Speaker_00
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 I can then look at the answer and say, Oh, so now are we going to try like, have you thought of this? Have you tried?
00:36:16 Speaker_00
It's a way to pair on the problem. So It's not like, you know, we talk, we have this word, like, everybody talks about micromanagement as a word, and like, we don't actually think it's a dirty word at Shopify.
00:36:26 Speaker_00
But the reason we don't think it's a dirty word is 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?
00:36:33 Speaker_00
And if I work on this problem with you, I kind of got to see where you are pretty often, and then give you advice, or you're going to share context with me, because I don't, I'm not in the work every day.
00:36:42 Speaker_00
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.
00:36:48 Speaker_00
It's 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 on ones with me.
00:36:58 Speaker_00
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, he goes, oh, you misunderstand why you're here. I'm we're here to work on problems together.
00:37:08 Speaker_00
And I was like, oh, 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.
00:37:17 Speaker_01
I love that. Okay. One thing you mentioned is meeting thing for people that don't know what you all did with meetings. I think it might be worth just sharing that briefly because it's awesome and something a lot of companies can learn from.
00:37:28 Speaker_00
Yeah, sure. Actually, the funny story about the meeting Armageddon is that 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.
00:37:39 Speaker_00
Because I was like, hey, have you seen, I think it was Dropbox. Have you seen what Dropbox is doing and meeting Armageddon? And so he was like, this is super interesting. This is years before I started.
00:37:47 Speaker_00
So I think it's funny that it ended up being a real thing. But here's what we do. Once a year at a random time, we will delete all recurring meetings
00:37:57 Speaker_00
that have more than two people, so not one-on-ones, and are internal people only, so not interviews or external partner meetings. And then we have a two-week moratorium where you're not allowed to add a reoccurring meeting.
00:38:08 Speaker_00
You can add a regular meeting, but not a reoccurring meeting. And the idea is that there's a lot of inertia behind a recurring meeting.
00:38:15 Speaker_00
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 kind of just do a meeting reset.
00:38:24 Speaker_00
And I think 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.
00:38:31 Speaker_00
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. The other thing is it frees up so much crafter time, right?
00:38:41 Speaker_00
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.
00:38:53 Speaker_00
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.
00:39:02 Speaker_00
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.
00:39:12 Speaker_00
So we're at something like three hours of meetings per week for an individual contributor at Shopify, which is phenomenal. Three hours a week is amazing. I think managers is not that bad.
00:39:21 Speaker_00
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.
00:39:29 Speaker_01
And how many hours was it before meeting, get in and work?
00:39:33 Speaker_00
Yeah, you're asking me a good question. I have to go look and see, but it came down by something like 50 or 60%. Like it was like something like five or six hours for individual contributors and came down to three.
00:39:42 Speaker_00
And then the managers, I think it was like 10 and came down to six, something like that. Like, but it was a huge difference. And the only two things were like I mentioned, where like one was the meeting, get in the other one was like this.
00:39:51 Speaker_00
And I can talk about this. This is like a,
00:39:53 Speaker_01
Yes, let's talk about this.
00:39:54 Speaker_00
Yeah, so I mean, I love Slack. It's like the IM tool, everybody uses it, but it can for sure cause distraction. And so what we did was we moved all announcement information.
00:40:03 Speaker_00
So like anytime you're sending a status update or large group announcement, we moved all of that to like face meta workplace, like Facebook for work basically, which is now being deprecated.
00:40:13 Speaker_00
So we'll have to figure that out, but it just moved all this stuff to like a ML feed that you can kind of consume differently than you would Slack, because Slack is like a messaging unit.
00:40:23 Speaker_00
You see an alert and all this stuff versus workplaces like, oh, I want to go and consume content from the company and get updates and share updates. And so that reduced a lot of distraction as well.
00:40:34 Speaker_00
And so I'd love to figure out what the next tool for us is, but it's probably something more like a river of information that I can dip my toe into versus like IM and chat everywhere.
00:40:44 Speaker_01
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.
00:40:50 Speaker_00
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.
00:41:00 Speaker_00
And so we wanted to move that somewhere else.
00:41:02 Speaker_01
I feel like the more I dig into the Shopify way of working, the more fun stuff I never expected emerges. I'm curious what else is going to emerge.
00:41:11 Speaker_01
So we've been talking about ways that you all 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?
00:41:20 Speaker_01
What else have you found helps create more kilojoules per hour?
00:41:24 Speaker_00
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.
00:41:31 Speaker_00
So like pair programming is the number one. I will say the weekly cadence helps a lot, right, which you mentioned, which again, which is part of GSD, which is sharing the updates and then the six week reviews, that does a lot.
00:41:41 Speaker_00
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 system that can allow us to be like, hey, wait a sec, there's too many things going on of this type
00:41:53 Speaker_00
We probably have to sit back and reset and figure out what's going on. So one thing that happened, for example, was we, we started seeing that it was taking a lot of time to develop in our admin, like engineers at Shopify developing in the admin.
00:42:04 Speaker_00
So we called it like what's called like a code yellow, which is before code red, but code yellow is this idea of like, Hey, we're going to call a code yellow on the admin.
00:42:11 Speaker_00
We want to make sure that the developer experience inside Shopify is really good. It should be easy to start up the repo. It should be easy to make changes. It should be easy to see the changes.
00:42:21 Speaker_00
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.
00:42:32 Speaker_00
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 you actually give an example of one of these.
00:42:42 Speaker_00
So we in 2020, 2021, the heyday of like pandemic. Obviously, there was a crypto summer again, and crypto is going nuts.
00:42:51 Speaker_00
And we were sitting back and saying, wow, a lot of our merchants are now asking for NFT gating, remember NFT 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 but only if you have the token.
00:43:04 Speaker_00
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 buyers to have to have the NFT to have this great experience. And we're like, we agree.
00:43:13 Speaker_00
You want to be able to do, we want you to be able to do whatever you want. And so we want to build this for you too. And same with Toby. He's like, you guys are thinking about it wrong. Because he goes, how long would it take to build NFT gating?
00:43:23 Speaker_00
I'm like, I don't know, two, three weeks. He goes, now how long would it take to build like a platform layer, which exposes APIs so anyone could build NFT gating in one hour? I'm like, I don't know, like two, three months. He goes, do that.
00:43:36 Speaker_00
He goes, because you don't know what they're going to build on top of the platform. NFC 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.
00:43:47 Speaker_00
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?
00:44:00 Speaker_00
So like, he does this thing to us all the time where he goes, 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.
00:44:08 Speaker_00
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 write code against an API that doesn't exist.
00:44:19 Speaker_00
Because 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 and the server. And then he'll go, this is correct, the correct client code. Now let me go implement the server code.
00:44:31 Speaker_00
And this notion of building things as infrastructure, that sounds slower today because it's going to take two, three months instead of two, three weeks. But after that, the things that people built on top, right, were so easy to build.
00:44:43 Speaker_00
There were so many more scenarios that were emerged. It's just a different way of thinking about software. And it really, again, allows, it's intensity in a different way.
00:44:52 Speaker_00
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 quicker way.
00:45:03 Speaker_00
And of course, you know, who knows what can flourish from there.
00:45:06 Speaker_01
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 point solution for someone.
00:45:16 Speaker_01
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 a lot of this is very useful, especially for platform businesses.
00:45:29 Speaker_00
No, exactly. And actually, you're making me think of a stat. So last year, I tweeted out, you know, maybe a tangent, but I tweeted out that GitHub Copilot has written over 1 million lines of code for Shopify.
00:45:41 Speaker_00
And people are like, oh my God, and it got like picked up and everyone's talking about it. And I go, I don't know why everybody's getting so crazy, because what I want to see is GitHub Copilot deleting 1 million lines of code.
00:45:50 Speaker_00
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 deleted millions of lines of code this year.
00:45:59 Speaker_00
Because we're trying to focus on, again, the sunk cost and rebuilding things elegantly or you don't need this anymore and rebuilding. And I even tweeted out, I think someone said, oh, Shopify is in the top 10 Ruby codebases in the world.
00:46:10 Speaker_00
And I said, I never want to see us on this list again. It's not like we shouldn't be gunning for number one and we should be gunning for number 100. We want to be not on this list. Someone else can take the crown.
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00:47:14 Speaker_01
Wait, talk about more about this. So there's been a drive to delete code and simplify. What's kind of that? What's what's behind that? What's going on there?
00:47:21 Speaker_00
Yeah, so there's a few things, right? One is
00:47:24 Speaker_00
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 a complicated set of tools we give to merchants, but the more you can simplify, the much easier everything becomes.
00:47:36 Speaker_00
Resiliency, performance, reliability, maintainability, all the ilities become much, 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.
00:47:49 Speaker_00
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 more easily.
00:48:00 Speaker_00
And now everything else becomes like easy to build on top of. And so we routinely, we have like 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.
00:48:13 Speaker_00
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 it's good or bad. We can always almost find a million plus lines of code to delete, which is insane.
00:48:25 Speaker_00
But at the same time, I applaud the teams for going after like the cruft in the code base and everything gets easier, right? Code loads faster, it's easier to understand.
00:48:34 Speaker_00
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, 25% of all code is now written by AI. I'm like, where's the delete? Where is the 25% of all code is deleted by AI? Right?
00:48:48 Speaker_00
Like this is where we have to start thinking about it because the right code is never the voluminous like lines of code metric. It's always something else. It's always like elegance. And that's where we have to think about.
00:48:58 Speaker_00
So it is something that we, as part of us being long-term infrastructure thinking, we really do care about that.
00:49:06 Speaker_01
I love this in part because 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.
00:49:15 Speaker_01
I used to be an engineer actually, but both my engineering brain and my PM brain, I love the idea of killing stuff that's useless, fixing, making code cleaner and better. more durable.
00:49:26 Speaker_01
In reality, very hard for companies to prioritize this kind of thing. Is there anything you found that helps you do that?
00:49:32 Speaker_01
You mentioned hack days and weeks or 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 want to do this more, any advice?
00:49:41 Speaker_00
Yeah, so we actually think about when we're building something, we think of it in 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.
00:49:51 Speaker_00
You're 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.
00:50:01 Speaker_00
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,
00:50:10 Speaker_00
in one hour, 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.
00:50:20 Speaker_00
But now I have to go and build the infra. You're now slotting yourself into infraland, which is like, that could take longer.
00:50:26 Speaker_00
But you're now enabling it for a bunch of use cases you don't have to think about at once, because you may have people using your API in a different way. So I think you kind of have to slot yourself. Now, how do people get into this mode?
00:50:36 Speaker_00
It is super, super hard. And I would say, like Toby is a secret sauce here, because he pushes us to think about things as infra almost all the time.
00:50:44 Speaker_00
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, he goes, you know what I'm gonna say, right?
00:50:51 Speaker_00
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 he actually maybe I'll tell you a little anecdote. He has a story where he says,
00:51:03 Speaker_00
There are unlimited amount of wrong options for any problem. There's probably 10,000 right options, but everybody stops at the first right one.
00:51:12 Speaker_00
Instead, what you should be spending all your time on, because the options that don't work, you're not gonna spend time on.
00:51:17 Speaker_00
But you have to figure out which of the 10,000 options is the right one, and spend time in that, what are all these right options? Don't just stop at the first one.
00:51:24 Speaker_00
And so when I come to and say A or B, I'm picking two of the 10,000, and he's like, that's not what I, go back and generate more options, because those are not the optimal ones. So he is quite, you know, the philosopher on these things.
00:51:35 Speaker_00
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.
00:51:43 Speaker_00
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?
00:51:49 Speaker_00
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.
00:52:02 Speaker_00
Don't just build the feature, go make the feature easy to build.
00:52:06 Speaker_01
I feel like there's just more and more good stuff. What else is there that might be helpful to folks? While you're thinking about it, and interesting, I was reading your tweet where you shared a lot of this advice.
00:52:17 Speaker_01
And 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 or Slack while you're working because you're there being watched.
00:52:28 Speaker_01
And I could see why that is more productive just innately.
00:52:31 Speaker_00
Oh, no, for sure. People, again, like underhanded free throws, not only looks dumb, it feels dumb.
00:52:37 Speaker_00
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, like, a machine.
00:52:45 Speaker_00
Do you ever read The Undoing Project, which is about Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman, the famous philosopher?
00:52:54 Speaker_01
Yes, by Michael Lewis, I think.
00:52:56 Speaker_00
Behavioral economics, Michael Lewis, exactly. And he said, the famous line was, alone we're okay, but together we're a genius. Right? Like that's a pair programmer. That's like two people. You're like, ah, we're, we're okay.
00:53:09 Speaker_00
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 that thinking.
00:53:20 Speaker_00
So I would say another thing that helps us create intensity is demo culture. So as part of the GSD updates, we, we, we encourage people to share like high fidelity updates, which is not just imagery, but actually a demo.
00:53:33 Speaker_00
One of the things that can go wrong if it's just their 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.
00:53:41 Speaker_00
We have this tool called Spin, which is like an internal development environment, like a cloud dev environment where you can say, hey, click here to try this on Spin. And then you can try it and you can see how it works.
00:53:52 Speaker_00
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 because you're like, I'm going to try it. And you're not waiting till the end, especially with a beta flag.
00:54:03 Speaker_00
You're like, hey, it's in my store. I just realized that I went in and now this page takes like 20 seconds to load. Is that what you expect? You're like, oh, we didn't find this use case. You're going to learn that much more quickly.
00:54:12 Speaker_00
And that creates, again, intensity on the fidelity of the feedback you're getting. Famously, some of our PM team will create a friction log.
00:54:19 Speaker_00
They'll be like, I am walking, they'll just create a screen share, create a video and go, I'm walking through, I turn on the beta flag, I'm walking through this experience, here's my feedback on the experience.
00:54:28 Speaker_00
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.
00:54:39 Speaker_00
And so you're not debating about status reports, you're kind of debating about the experience.
00:54:46 Speaker_01
So I'm trying to think like a broadly, all the things you've shared, kind of how they fit together that allow you to move this fast.
00:54:53 Speaker_01
And I just looked up a few stats to 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.
00:55:03 Speaker_01
So you guys are about like 11,000 employees, something like that, according to the Googles. And you're hitting not necessarily all-time highs on market cap because COVID gave you guys a big boost for a while, but you're kind of like,
00:55:15 Speaker_01
coming back to this insane valuation that you all had during COVID. So it's essentially all time highs at a 10,000 plus person company, moving really fast, shipping constantly, people love the product.
00:55:30 Speaker_01
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.
00:55:42 Speaker_00
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.
00:55:47 Speaker_00
So you get both the crafters who are working on this stuff and the leaders who may have broader context working together to kind of unblock.
00:55:57 Speaker_01
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's a lot of power in strategic meetings and check-ins.
00:56:07 Speaker_01
Another kind of bucket is just like the engineering environment, engineers working with engineers, pair programming. Things like that. There's a tool you mentioned for pair programming, Tuple, I think.
00:56:16 Speaker_00
Tuple, yeah. I mean, it's funny because we use it exclusively, but we actually have this line internally. We call it like, Shopify should be a crafter's paradise.
00:56:26 Speaker_00
It should be the place where crafters come to practice their craft and get better at their craft.
00:56:31 Speaker_00
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 places where you'd want those people to actually have a great experience.
00:56:41 Speaker_00
We want them to come to Shopify because we believe this is the best place for that.
00:56:45 Speaker_01
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 workspace, workplace shift from Slack helps.
00:56:58 Speaker_01
I think you're also very firm on their working hours. You basically don't let No, okay.
00:57:04 Speaker_00
No, no. I mean, yeah, not not. I mean, we're not super firm on working hours from that perspective. But I mean, we do have, like, we have a lot of people on East Coast time zones, a lot of stuff happens then. But we do have people all over the world.
00:57:13 Speaker_00
But I did mention, we do have like the check ins on 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.
00:57:23 Speaker_00
And 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 on block 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.
00:57:34 Speaker_00
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 to be like, let's go, let's do this this time.
00:57:44 Speaker_01
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. Why do you guys decide to do that? What have you seen as a big benefit of that?
00:57:54 Speaker_00
Yeah, so we have this remote, so I like to call it like 90% remote or 95% remote because we have these intentional IRL experiences.
00:58:03 Speaker_00
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.
00:58:14 Speaker_00
And we, you know, it's a coming 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.
00:58:25 Speaker_00
which is, hey, you wanna work on a problem, you need to prototype, you need to hack, people can just 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.
00:58:38 Speaker_00
And so a combination of those two things mean like throughout the year, you can recharge, that we have the trust battery notion, which is like, how much trust can you have between people and it can deplete over time if we're remote.
00:58:50 Speaker_00
So, and then we have offices which are like come in if you want. 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.
00:59:01 Speaker_00
Today I work from home, 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 90 plus percent remote.
00:59:09 Speaker_00
But I would say the main reason is we want to hire the best people in the world. And those people can be anywhere. just happens to be that they're not all of them are near an office.
00:59:20 Speaker_00
And so, but again, with the burst thing, like, here's a good example for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I encouraged all of engineering leadership to come to Toronto, we're all going to be in the office, like, you know, watching the graphs.
00:59:29 Speaker_00
And then, you know, for hack days, 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.
00:59:39 Speaker_00
And so it's kind of a little bit of a combo. I wouldn't call it hybrid, though, because like, you don't really have, like, every Friday, you come in or don't come in, it's more like coming if you want.
00:59:48 Speaker_01
There's so many things to talk about. This trust battery metaphor, by the way, is awesome. I've learned to use it also.
00:59:53 Speaker_01
And again, it's just basically everyone, your trust with someone is like, think of it as a battery that can deplete and grow, and you should try to charge it up when you can, and then use that charge over time.
01:00:06 Speaker_00
And it can be strategic, by the way. I've seen people use it as like, I'm pretty sure Toby says he starts everyone at 50% and then he gets to know you.
01:00:12 Speaker_00
And then I've seen people use it as the opposite saying, hey, look, this team is hard charging, I'm going to start you at 100. Assume that you already have high trust, do the things.
01:00:19 Speaker_00
And only if you are doing things that are off, 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.
01:00:30 Speaker_01
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.
01:00:41 Speaker_01
I know you have some pretty unique perspectives on how to hire people that are awesome, but also hire them quickly.
01:00:46 Speaker_01
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?
01:00:53 Speaker_00
I think the personality of the leadership team is quite intense. We have a lot of founders on the exec team, which are impatient, intense people by design. But even some of the non-founders are just accomplished people.
01:01:09 Speaker_00
We all have this attitude of impatience. And so maybe that's I don't even know if that's like a learned skill you can learn or if it just comes like, you know, it comes along with your personality, like genetics.
01:01:21 Speaker_00
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,
01:01:32 Speaker_00
this thing you're doing, 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 vibes, keep the energy high. So a lot of high energy, intense people.
01:01:44 Speaker_01
It reminds me, while I was at Airbnb, it felt like no matter how well things are going, it always felt like, Brian especially, is just pedal to the metal. No matter how well things are going, there's always, it's not going well enough.
01:01:58 Speaker_01
How do we go faster? How do we do more?
01:01:59 Speaker_00
Well, I'll actually go farther.
01:02:01 Speaker_00
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?
01:02:13 Speaker_00
Are you really taking the risks you need to be taking? So I think you kind of have to over rotate a bit and have a there should be a few things on fire at all times. Not because
01:02:21 Speaker_00
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, because all these things that should create this thing of like, it might work.
01:02:35 Speaker_00
And so you want to have a little bit of chaos at the edge.
01:02:40 Speaker_01
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, your business is unlikely to become incredibly successful.
01:02:53 Speaker_01
And that is even more stressful and painful.
01:02:55 Speaker_00
Correct. Yeah, it's like the opposite, right?
01:02:57 Speaker_00
It's like this idea of like, people feel like the comfort gives you like stability, and really the uncomfort gives you stability, because now you're constantly learning, and that makes you more robust against things that could come across.
01:03:11 Speaker_01
Choosing the harder path, some 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.
01:03:23 Speaker_01
You kind of like to prefer not to interview and do something instead. Talk about that.
01:03:28 Speaker_00
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.
01:03:37 Speaker_00
Everyone at the company knows this, where somebody interviewed well, wasn't as good at the job, or the opposite, didn't interview well, and then came in and was phenomenal.
01:03:45 Speaker_00
One example I have from my startup, right before 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.
01:03:58 Speaker_00
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.
01:04:08 Speaker_00
And person A, we let go within a few weeks because like not a fit for our culture.
01:04:12 Speaker_00
And person B is still, 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?
01:04:24 Speaker_00
But it was just so cute. And we gave them both a shot. 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. It was all pair programming at my startup. And so they pair program.
01:04:37 Speaker_00
And actually, as an aside, you know I really believe in pair programming when I made people work in pair programming with my own money. Like I, I paid people to have, I paid for two people to be on one computer.
01:04:49 Speaker_01
So that's why you don't have the code.
01:04:51 Speaker_00
Yeah, exactly. Right. Less than half the code.
01:04:52 Speaker_00
But anyway, so pairing and they, um, and it was pretty clear after just 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 going to work out in person B was.
01:05:05 Speaker_00
So what I really like to do is use this race car analogy. If I told you, hey, I want to go hire the best race car driver, there's not really that many questions you could ask them except for put them in the car.
01:05:16 Speaker_00
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 30, 60, 90 days to make sure that the thing that they are bringing actually lines up with what we need at Shopify.
01:05:31 Speaker_00
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?
01:05:38 Speaker_00
Like we mentioned like the chaotic environment and fast-moving environment Shopify is. That's not for everyone, but that's okay, right? We're not looking for, right? We've talked about that.
01:05:46 Speaker_00
We want to be as, you know, the best 10,000 person company in the world. We're not looking for like millions of people. We just need the best 10,000.
01:05:53 Speaker_00
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.
01:06:02 Speaker_00
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 at Shopify for four months.
01:06:15 Speaker_00
We get to see what it's like for them to be at Shopify for four months. And that can turn into 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.
01:06:27 Speaker_00
I think I've heard a company where like, oh, we have an intern process. And then afterwards, we interview them for full time.
01:06:32 Speaker_00
I'm like, what are you going to learn from like, let's say even eight hours of interviews that you're not going to have learned from four months of real work experience?
01:06:39 Speaker_00
Like, and so there's just things like that you just got to look at the work product. And so I'm a big fan of like job trials.
01:06:44 Speaker_00
And in my previous companies, I almost like you mentioned, I almost didn't interview anybody, I almost just said come in and work.
01:06:50 Speaker_00
And it allowed us, we had a much higher like, in the first 90 days, like 20% attrition before 90 days, because it just didn't work out. But those after 90 days, we had less than 1% attrition, because they knew exactly what they're getting into.
01:07:02 Speaker_00
And we knew exactly how they were going to fit.
01:07:04 Speaker_01
So in terms of the hiring process, you're still at Shopify, you're interviewing people, they're doing technical evaluations, things like that. But it sounds like there's a very strong setting of expectations.
01:07:15 Speaker_01
We will hire you, but we'll actually clarify if this is a good fit in the first 30, 60, 90 days. And we're gonna do like, 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?
01:07:27 Speaker_00
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.
01:07:33 Speaker_00
Because by doing that, we can likely assess the skills that you have in your interview closer to what's happening in the job, right? So that's one.
01:07:41 Speaker_00
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 going to be, like, does it show that you are a curious person with range?
01:07:57 Speaker_00
Because if it does, that's likely more of someone who's going to be a fit. Like, I mean, I had this famous line from somebody who said, you know what I don't like about resumes? I'm like, what?
01:08:04 Speaker_00
They go, it tells you what you did, but it doesn't tell you why you did those things. And it's such an interesting insight, right? Your resume should be a why. Why did you go from this company to this? That's the interesting part.
01:08:17 Speaker_00
Not that you are a PM at Microsoft and a PM at Stripe. It's like, why did you switch from Microsoft to Stripe? There's something interesting there. So the life story is trying to pull that out. It's like, why did you make these decisions?
01:08:28 Speaker_00
What did you do in your past that was interesting? Are you curious? I read this great book, Range, by David Epstein. That book was maybe one of the hardest books for me to read in my life because every page I was like, I don't believe it.
01:08:42 Speaker_00
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.
01:08:51 Speaker_00
And funny for me, because like, I ended up redesigning the compensation system to 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.
01:09:01 Speaker_00
So, but I think that that's what we're trying to tease. And then yes, in that first period, we actually have a survey that goes over Slack that says, Hey, how happy are you with the person that you hired?
01:09:13 Speaker_00
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?
01:09:22 Speaker_00
But then also, together with the person, figure out, hey, 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.
01:09:35 Speaker_00
Could be at Shopify, could be in the same role, could be in a different role, could be at a different company. But that's like a good thing for everybody.
01:09:41 Speaker_01
And then do you actually do work trials with new engineering hires or is it like something you aspire to do?
01:09:46 Speaker_00
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?
01:09:52 Speaker_00
So like 2025, 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.
01:10:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, so just to double click on that. So you're hiring a thousand interns over the course of the year. That's a lot. And the idea there is these folks are actually useful, building useful things.
01:10:15 Speaker_01
And it's an interview process for... Yeah, I mean, I think it's two things.
01:10:18 Speaker_00
One is, is some people look at an internship program as like community service, like, let's give back to the community, let's hire early talent. And I'm like, hold on a sec.
01:10:27 Speaker_00
Are you telling me I could hire 1000 people over the year, and they will come to work with an LLM and a brain because they're growing up in the age of AI.
01:10:35 Speaker_00
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.
01:10:46 Speaker_00
They'll be useful to us. We'll teach them some stuff as well.
01:10:50 Speaker_00
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 positive, or they might stay at Shopify and be useful over a longer period.
01:11:01 Speaker_00
Like, it 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 1001 interns to beat you guys. And I'm like, great.
01:11:12 Speaker_00
Like if we can just from that one tweet, if I can get like the early talent ecosystem restarted here after, you know, a really tough last few years and layoffs.
01:11:22 Speaker_00
It's great for everybody because now they're realizing that they also realize that these people are super valuable and they bring together a completely different set of skills. And by the way, here's a secret.
01:11:31 Speaker_00
In pair programming, interns will always be more intense than the full-time. And so that also helps the flywheel of intensity go.
01:11:39 Speaker_01
Go for it. It all just keeps coming back. Did the internship program emerge out of this co-op system that Canadian schools have? I know Waterloo has a big co-op program.
01:11:48 Speaker_00
Yeah, I went to Waterloo. And so yeah, hint hint. So I went to Waterloo. And I did my I did co-op and I did intern programs there. It was amazing.
01:11:58 Speaker_00
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, 24 months. And you end up walking.
01:12:08 Speaker_00
I mean, I think one of the big parts of it is just interview skills. Because I interviewed for 10 plus jobs every four months. And I did that six times.
01:12:16 Speaker_00
And so you come out having done lots, 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.
01:12:25 Speaker_00
And what I felt like we needed to do was, again, restart this notion of early talent in the ecosystem. There's, I would say, one or two big differences with our intern program. One is we're making them come in three days a week. versus full remote.
01:12:40 Speaker_00
And the reason for that is, and we're doing it just in three offices right now, Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa.
01:12:45 Speaker_00
And the reason for that is because we want them to have a cohort because early talent is different than you and I who've been in the industry.
01:12:52 Speaker_00
We worked in office, we worked out of office, we're more comfortable with navigating like partnership discussions and like talking to people in different companies. But these people have not, they maybe have never worked anywhere.
01:13:02 Speaker_00
And so to not have the IRL component would do them a disservice. And so we specifically made it in those ports. And the people are traveling, by the way, like they're like moving to Montreal to do the internship. It's great.
01:13:13 Speaker_00
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.
01:13:20 Speaker_00
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.
01:13:26 Speaker_00
And of course, nothing like typing someone on the shoulder and be like, have you seen this error before? And so it's easier in an early talent situation.
01:13:32 Speaker_00
And then, of course, over time, if they become full time, they can still come to the office, right? Come if you want, but they can also go full remote.
01:13:39 Speaker_01
That is amazing. For folks that don't know anything about these co-op programs, briefly, it's just basically while you're in school, before you've graduated during the summer, you go work at a company. Or during the year, okay.
01:13:49 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's during the year. So what happens at Waterloo is, what I did was I did eight months of school at the beginning, so two terms. My first co-op term was summer.
01:13:56 Speaker_00
But then it was work, work, school, work, school, alternating for the whole rest of my time at Waterloo.
01:14:01 Speaker_01
It's like semesters alternating.
01:14:03 Speaker_00
Exactly. So every four months I did either a school term or a work term. So I was doing work in January sometimes and September sometimes.
01:14:09 Speaker_00
And it was super good because again, it also allowed me to be super intense at school for four months and then go to a super intense work experience for four months.
01:14:16 Speaker_00
But yeah, it's a model that like, I mean, I go to, I was just at Waterloo this week doing a talk. So I just like, I love that symbiotic relationship between Waterloo and employers. And by the way, not just Waterloo, right?
01:14:27 Speaker_00
Lots of schools do a summer program, U of T and others, lots of schools in the States.
01:14:32 Speaker_01
Fun fact, so total tangent, I had a startup called LocalMind, started in Montreal, of all places. I'm not Canadian, but moved there for various reasons. It was awesome. And our first hire was actually from the co-op program.
01:14:45 Speaker_01
I don't know if it was Waterloo, his name is Nick Adams, and he applied, just he saw our job posting, I think, and we were like, what is a co-op? And he came to work and then he went back to school and then we hired him.
01:14:56 Speaker_01
And then he ended up at Airbnb when we got acquired.
01:14:58 Speaker_00
See, there you go. And so for us, actually, when I did my startup, Helpful, I had one or two engineers. And then I actually literally just hired four interns, because you hire them in February for May.
01:15:15 Speaker_00
And because I was doing pair programming, I had to make sure I had four full times by then. So I hired the interns in anticipation of having the
01:15:21 Speaker_00
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 want to talk about just one other topic real quick and then we'll wrap this up and it's around extreme labs.
01:15:38 Speaker_01
Okay, and 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.
01:15:49 Speaker_01
One fact I heard while you were there is you had a hundred reports, direct reports that reported to you. 120 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.
01:16:05 Speaker_00
Yeah, so what ended up happening there was we started off small, right? It was 10 people when I got to Xtreme Labs. I wasn't the founder, but I was very early on. And I just had everyone report to me.
01:16:15 Speaker_00
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 did, there's managers are useful.
01:16:27 Speaker_00
But I was trying to figure out, could I solve the problems that they needed their manager for in other ways? So for example, what should I be working on?
01:16:34 Speaker_00
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. I tried to figure out ways to not have managers be the answers to those questions.
01:16:47 Speaker_00
I'm like, there should be another answer. And so pair programming really helps you get unblocked quickly, because you have another person that you can bounce technical ideas off of, having a product backlog can tell you what to work on.
01:16:57 Speaker_00
We had demos every week, demos internally, and we had demos with the clients every week, because we were contract manufacturing for mobile. That gave them feedback on whether they were going in the right direction.
01:17:07 Speaker_00
We had set working hours, which made things super intense in the office. This is, again, 2009 to 2013. So all these things didn't really need a manager. And what I realized was the unblocking thing needed a manager. I'm blocked on this.
01:17:19 Speaker_00
Well, I said, OK, if I had all these directors, I did two things famously. One, I had a lot of direct reports. And two, I did not do any scheduled one-on-ones.
01:17:27 Speaker_00
Because you can't have 120 direct reports and do scheduled one-on-ones, because you're never doing anything but one-on-ones. So I said, I'm going to be around a lot, because I don't have a lot of one-on-ones. So we can do unscheduled one-on-ones.
01:17:37 Speaker_00
And what that means is, if you are blocked, actually, there's a famous picture. I had this weird 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.
01:17:49 Speaker_00
And people, if they were blocked, they could just come up to me.
01:17:52 Speaker_00
Actually, one cool thing about pair programming IRL is you can kind of 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.
01:18:00 Speaker_00
If one person is laying back, you're like, it's not working. So you could just walk up to them and be like, what's happening? But they would come and ask me questions, and I could unblock them. Like, hey, we're blocked on this. We don't have this API.
01:18:10 Speaker_00
We need money for this machine, like whatever. And so the unscheduled one-on-ones ended up being a real clarifying thing for me, because I did scheduled one-on-ones my whole career.
01:18:19 Speaker_00
And I realized after leaving Microsoft for three years, I'm like, were all those one-on-ones useful? Once a week for three years, 150 one-on-ones. So the unscheduled ones were, though.
01:18:28 Speaker_00
I was like, when I knocked on my manager's door and said, I have this problem, those were important. So that's what I created at Xtreme. And the 120 Direct, it just grew over time. I just didn't think I needed managers.
01:18:38 Speaker_00
I was like, let me unblock these people in another way. And we came up with other things to systems to unblock them that didn't require a manager. I just also had a good memory. I knew exactly everyone's skills and compensation.
01:18:50 Speaker_00
I knew all that off the top of my head. So that helps. The other thing, the thing that broke was actually, this is Chamath. He came in and became our biggest investors.
01:19:00 Speaker_00
And 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 explain to him why it would work.
01:19:07 Speaker_00
He just said to me, I'm not going to debate with you whether this works or not, but will it work at 400 people? And I said, probably not. He said, okay, so let's change it. And so like, we did then ended up putting a little bit more of a structure.
01:19:20 Speaker_00
But I went to, I made a few people directors, and I and I forced them to have 40 direct reports each, like I said, we're just gonna make it still pretty flat.
01:19:29 Speaker_00
And then that did end up working because it still allowed them to use the system to unblock people versus having to do a one-on-one every week or having to talk about things that potentially a system could unblock.
01:19:42 Speaker_00
And so I tried to figure out ways to systematize things.
01:19:45 Speaker_01
I love it. Just another example of doing things differently, not necessarily just here's how it's done and I'm going to do it that way and experimenting with it, even if you knew, like, OK, maybe long term this isn't the way it's going to operate.
01:19:55 Speaker_01
I imagine at Shopify, you don't have 120 reports.
01:19:58 Speaker_00
No, we have the F14 or something, right? We do have these guardrails where I think we say, hey, in engineering, you should have between eight and 20. There are definitely people who have more and people who have less.
01:20:10 Speaker_00
But we do try to keep things as flat as possible because we do believe that it doesn't make sense to have three people reporting to somebody and then they only have three people. You just make a very deep hierarchy. We actually do see, by the way,
01:20:23 Speaker_00
The farther you are from Toby, we can see things in the survey results. The alignment gets out of whack. And so you do actually see that you want to be closer. You want to have a flatter org in general.
01:20:35 Speaker_00
And that can be achieved by just having more direct reports per level.
01:20:39 Speaker_01
Makes sense. OK, 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.
01:20:53 Speaker_01
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.
01:21:03 Speaker_01
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 learned from that experience?
01:21:10 Speaker_00
I have a few. I'll say one thing, by the way, because I think I read, I think I read this in Tim Ferriss's book or on the podcast where he said, create a failure resume and like write everything down.
01:21:18 Speaker_00
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.
01:21:28 Speaker_00
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.
01:21:39 Speaker_00
And like, I've been laid off twice. And, you know, I think in both times, it was the right thing, like it was the right thing for the company, the right thing for me.
01:21:45 Speaker_00
And I kind of use that experience as like 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 2019,
01:21:59 Speaker_00
We were rebuilding our point of sale system, which 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.
01:22:07 Speaker_00
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 natively on mobile platforms?
01:22:17 Speaker_00
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 kind of dumb. I said, let's do iOS and Swift, and let's do Android and React Native.
01:22:30 Speaker_00
And the reason I said that was I said, I want to learn about React Native, and I think Android's the harder platform, so let's build that in React Native.
01:22:35 Speaker_00
But iOS on Swift, because that guarantees us a product in market, and we didn't have any React Native apps in market at the time. A year later, We launched the iOS version and it was a huge success.
01:22:50 Speaker_00
And 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.
01:22:58 Speaker_00
Like we were 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.
01:23:07 Speaker_00
And by then we had also 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 huge mistake. We just spent a year building this thing.
01:23:17 Speaker_00
It's in market, but we're going to have to rewrite. We're going to have to rebase back onto this iOS version. I think I burned 18 months of time for like 100 engineers, like literally from the decision I made in the first week of joining Shopify.
01:23:30 Speaker_00
And 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 going to cost us like 100 engineers, another six, whatever. And he looked at me and he goes, you should tell everyone this story.
01:23:42 Speaker_00
That's all he said. Not like, hey, bad, good, like he goes, did you learn something? Like 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.
01:23:53 Speaker_00
But he goes, 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 always come down harshly on people who do not take risks.
01:24:05 Speaker_00
And you did not take a risk in this case. But if you take a risk and it doesn't work out, you'll never get in trouble because you took the risk and it was the right risk to take. But he goes, but you didn't take the risk.
01:24:15 Speaker_00
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 buy, right?
01:24:21 Speaker_00
Is like, take a risk on a platform that we have not launched an 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.
01:24:34 Speaker_00
Sorry, the product is super successful now, and we're all on React Native, and even the shop green app is on React Native. Everything's React Native, and we're core contributors. It's all good.
01:24:42 Speaker_00
But I literally burned, I think, 18 months of time for 100 engineers as my first decision in the company.
01:24:48 Speaker_01
This might 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, okay, that felt like a really good decision to me, and it's interesting.
01:24:58 Speaker_00
It sounds like it, right? But it wouldn't have been his.
01:25:01 Speaker_01
But it's like, obviously, you don't want to 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?
01:25:12 Speaker_01
Because, you know, in hindsight, of course, we should have done this. But looking back, what do you think you should have done other than we should have done the risky path?
01:25:19 Speaker_00
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.
01:25:29 Speaker_00
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, we became release captains for React Native. Like, I knew that I was going to do all the things.
01:25:40 Speaker_00
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 hedged incorrectly, because I knew I was going to do all these things.
01:25:49 Speaker_00
And I should have looked at my own thought process and say, if I do all the things, can I fail?
01:25:55 Speaker_00
And I didn't take that into account because again, I did like five or six, like I literally, I put 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 we were doing all the things.
01:26:05 Speaker_00
We became core contributors in 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.
01:26:18 Speaker_00
And I didn't have the confidence 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.
01:26:31 Speaker_00
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.
01:26:37 Speaker_01
Okay, that makes a lot more sense. It's so funny that Facebook had a similar mistake early on in their career.
01:26:44 Speaker_00
In Gamer 5.
01:26:44 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly. I know.
01:26:46 Speaker_01
I don't know if you were at Zuck's interview at the Chase Center that the Acquired podcast did, and he talked about this, where their market cap dropped 80%, they were about to go public, they went to this app, no one thought they could do mobile ads, and he's like, that set us back a year and a half, but he's like, but based on all the pain he's gone through since then, he's like, that was not too bad.
01:27:07 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's true. Actually, maybe what people don't know is I was at Facebook. 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 crashing.
01:27:25 Speaker_00
And we had obviously direct access to people at Apple, but we shipped a new app on Monday and it crashed. Not just us, but us, Facebook together. And so I remember that whole HTML5 fiasco from the inside.
01:27:36 Speaker_01
I thought you would say you also told Facebook to decide on an HTML5 app to set them back a year.
01:27:41 Speaker_00
I did not. We just happened to be there when they were doing it.
01:27:45 Speaker_01
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?
01:27:55 Speaker_01
Either touch on something you've mentioned, a last piece of nugget of wisdom, or we just go straight to the round.
01:28:01 Speaker_00
Yeah. I mean, I'll say something maybe embarrassing for you. I've been using your performance management framework from your first round review article, not knowing, by the way, that it was you.
01:28:13 Speaker_00
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.
01:28:24 Speaker_00
There's a Google link in there to a Google Doc link with 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.
01:28:35 Speaker_00
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 go through it. But I was like, how can I generate some of this with an LLM?
01:28:47 Speaker_00
And so I wanted to send her the original article. So I went back to the first round review, found the article and said, Oh my God, it's Lenny, like the same guy.
01:28:54 Speaker_00
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.
01:29:05 Speaker_00
I've had multiple people in a review process tell me that that When I deliver the feedback in, of course, the format, they would say, wow, I've been in this for a long time. This is the best performance review I've ever had.
01:29:17 Speaker_00
And it's because the framework pulls out good information. So congrats to you.
01:29:21 Speaker_00
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.
01:29:29 Speaker_01
Well, how about that? I love that. I will also give credit to a former guest on this podcast, Vlad Loktev, who was my manager at Airbnb, and that's where I was inspired to write about that framework.
01:29:41 Speaker_01
So it trickles down to him, and I don't know where he learned this. He probably invented it. So credit to Vlad also for that.
01:29:49 Speaker_01
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.
01:29:56 Speaker_01
And that's one that I've slowly discovered many, many companies use, and they don't know where it came from. They just call it, oh, we have this W framework. Someone flip it and call it the M framework.
01:30:05 Speaker_01
But that's another one that has trickled into the ether of tech companies, which is awesome. Amazing. With that, Farhan, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I'm ready. Let's do this.
01:30:19 Speaker_01
What are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people?
01:30:23 Speaker_00
There's one, so Toby has an annoyingly long set of books that he recommends, and they're all, like, not all, they're usually good, depends, because we're not totally in sync on fiction, for example.
01:30:33 Speaker_00
But he recommended one to me that I think everyone should read right now called Manna, M-A-N-N-A, from Marshall Brain. It is a book about, It's a book about AI.
01:30:44 Speaker_00
And I think the most interesting thing about it, though, is about a future in which the AI tells the humans what to do.
01:30:53 Speaker_00
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.
01:31:02 Speaker_00
So I would recommend reading that book. It's not long. That's fun.
01:31:04 Speaker_00
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, I think it's Bill Gates, what his famous book of all time is, it's this book.
01:31:15 Speaker_00
And the cool thing about the book is that it is not easy to digest for anyone with focus problems. Like, you know, Paul Graham wrote the post, How to Do Great Work, and it's super long.
01:31:28 Speaker_00
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 12 chapters, 12 stories, no breaks in between.
01:31:39 Speaker_00
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 depths of each problem, you will just learn something just like that post by Paul Graham.
01:31:51 Speaker_00
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?
01:31:57 Speaker_00
And not in a pejorative way, like in a, if you can get to the end, like you will extract the alpha from this post if you can read it all. So I love, so those are, Mana is like the opposite. It's very, very easy and easy read.
01:32:11 Speaker_01
I'm excited to read these. Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?
01:32:17 Speaker_00
A recent one was Challengers, the tennis movie with Zendaya. I just randomly I was at home and I put it on. And the cool thing about it was more the cinematography and music.
01:32:28 Speaker_00
They had this weird style, art house style, where they would be talking and music would get like super loud. Like it was very strange, but a very, very good movie. And then you say you said movies and
01:32:39 Speaker_01
Or TV show, anything like that.
01:32:42 Speaker_00
Yeah, one of my all-time favorites is probably Halt and Catch Fire. I don't know if you've watched that.
01:32:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, that early tech. Early tech.
01:32:49 Speaker_00
Yeah, and I think there was an Andreessen podcast where he said this is the closest thing to what a real startup looks like. So Halt and Catch Fire is an all-time recommend. Everybody has to watch it.
01:32:59 Speaker_01
Do you have a favorite product that you recently discovered that you really love?
01:33:03 Speaker_00
I don't know if I want to be in the zeitgeist right now, but the Meta Ray Bans are amazing.
01:33:08 Speaker_00
And the biggest thing about the Red Array bands was just that, I think 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.
01:33:15 Speaker_00
And I was like, oh, I can swap two devices for one device. Cause I always have sunglasses and AirPods because, you know, I'll go for a walk or listen to a podcast. And now I can just have one device.
01:33:25 Speaker_00
And this happened to me, I was at a, you know, in the summer I was at a pool party and someone called me and I just took it for my sunglasses and people were confused. It's like where I was taking this call from. But, um,
01:33:34 Speaker_00
They are the right amount of tech, like they're 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.
01:33:42 Speaker_00
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.
01:33:52 Speaker_00
And they, I got to get this amazing set of video that I would never have gotten. So I really like the Metaray Vans.
01:33:58 Speaker_01
We had Boz on the podcast who leads a lot of that work, and he's got 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. I tweeted it. Two more questions.
01:34:10 Speaker_01
Do you have a favorite life motto that you find useful in work or in life?
01:34:15 Speaker_00
Okay, I do. And it's on a lot of my profile bios. And it is, everything you know is wrong.
01:34:25 Speaker_00
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 my motto. And the reason for that is, it's this notion of
01:34:36 Speaker_00
If all the knowledge you knew was incorrect, could you, from first principles, build up like a view of the world?
01:34:42 Speaker_00
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, even though you say this is correct, that this is going to work, right?
01:34:58 Speaker_00
Actually, one example, my wife hates this, is I have a Tesla. And I routinely will switch gears without fully stopping the car, which you cannot do in a regular car. But like, I'll be in drive and I'll slow down to drive back up into my driveway.
01:35:12 Speaker_00
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 because you're going too fast. But like, and she hates it.
01:35:21 Speaker_00
But I'm like, I'm always trying weird things. And so that's why I say everything you know is wrong. Like, who knows what's possible? Just try different things.
01:35:29 Speaker_01
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 an electric car, there's no gear you're breaking, it's just software.
01:35:39 Speaker_00
Exactly.
01:35:41 Speaker_01
This quote reminds me of that you shared of everything you know is wrong. The founders of Airbnb always talked about just this point that everything around you was designed by somebody.
01:35:50 Speaker_01
Another human, they're not necessarily that much smarter or insightful. It doesn't mean what they did was correct. Somebody else points out better potentially.
01:35:57 Speaker_00
I think Steve Jobs had a similar thing. Like, hey, you can design anything. Everything's designed by people. I love that one too.
01:36:04 Speaker_01
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. Is that real? Okay, tell that story.
01:36:17 Speaker_00
Yeah, so again, this is 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 out, I'm always scanning.
01:36:27 Speaker_00
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.
01:36:35 Speaker_00
But 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.
01:36:43 Speaker_00
She was smiling her face, taking everyone's order, making sure that there was a thing happening in the kitchen. She was kind of doing a phenomenal job of organizing the entire crazy busy restaurant.
01:36:54 Speaker_00
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 just a waitress. And I said, well, would you like to, this is at Xtreme Labs.
01:37:02 Speaker_00
I said, would you like to work at Xtreme Labs? She's like, what's that? So I explained it to her and I got her contact info. She came into the office, and she first started off as our receptionist.
01:37:10 Speaker_00
So she moved from the retail world into the office world. And then I 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.
01:37:20 Speaker_00
And over time, we actually hired many more people from the restaurant that were really, really good at their job. And what was amazing was, one, she was organized, but not e-organized. I had to teach her Google Docs and G Suite and everything else.
01:37:32 Speaker_00
But she was super smart, but just never had the opportunity. The coolest thing about this is that she ended up taking over one of the HR functions for us.
01:37:41 Speaker_00
And she had a college degree and because of the work she'd done with us, she was able to parlay that into finishing her, like doing one more year and getting a university degree.
01:37:51 Speaker_00
And now she's a director of HR at a company, which is amazing from like, she went from that environment to this environment.
01:37:57 Speaker_00
And a lot of her people she pulled, the smart and 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 do they do that?
01:38:10 Speaker_00
How can I work with them? And this is one example of pulling somebody out of that environment. And I do have lots of other ones where I overhear someone, and they're a designer or an engineer, and I try to hire them into my company as well.
01:38:22 Speaker_01
Wow. That is such a good story. I love that maybe restaurants are the new feeder system for tech companies to not think about that.
01:38:31 Speaker_00
Yeah. I mean, everyone's smart at something, right? So I was trying to figure out, if she was really good at this thing, could she be good at something else?
01:38:36 Speaker_01
Amazing. I feel like there's so many stories, more stories to tell, but we're going to wrap it up and let you go. Farhan, two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, learn more, maybe apply to work at Shopify?
01:38:47 Speaker_01
And how can listeners be useful to you?
01:38:49 Speaker_00
Sure. So Twitter is probably the place I try to hang out the most, x at fnthower, and maybe I'll put that in the show notes. And then listeners for me, I mean, I love to be challenged.
01:39:02 Speaker_00
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.
01:39:09 Speaker_00
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.
01:39:20 Speaker_00
You should try this. Or that doesn't make any sense. I would love to learn more. So that's what I'm looking for.
01:39:24 Speaker_01
All right, well, leave a comment in YouTube or on the Substack post with what Ferhan got wrong. Amazing. Amazing. Ferhan, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening.
01:39:39 Speaker_01
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01:39:52 Speaker_01
You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at LenniesPodcast.com. See you in the next episode.