Farhan Thawar: recommendation

Transcript context

…Makes sense. Okay, final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. We have this recurring segments that I call Fail Corner where generally people come on these podcasts, they share all their successes. Here's all the things that I've done, right. Here's all the big wins. And everyone feels like, oh man, I wish I was always successful people. When in reality, everyone that comes on has failed many times. Is there a story of a failure in your career that you could share that helps people see that even folks like you fail, and maybe what you learned from that experience? I have a few. I'll say one thing by the way, because I think I read this in Tim Ferriss's book or in the podcast where he said, create a failure resume and write everything down. And I would not recommend doing this because I did this and I got super... I'm like a high energy happy guy. I wrote down, I have a note on my phone called Failure Resume, and I wrote down all the times I failed and it is depressing. So I would not encourage people to do that, but I'm happy to tell you about a few instances. So well, one is actually I've been laid off twice and people would not expect like, oh, I'm doing this thing and I've been laid off twice. And I think in both times it was the right thing, it was the right thing for the company, the right thing for me. And I kind of used that experience as a way to reevaluate and eventually came out 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, we were rebuilding our point of sale system, which now does billions of dollars of GMB. But back then we were like, well, let's rebuild it with a new UX and a new technology platform. And it was my first week and I'm the mobile guy, coming from Extreme Labs. They're like, should we build this in React Native, or should we build this natively on the mobile platforms? And so I went through this evaluation, spent a lot of time, blah, blah, blah, and I came back with a hedged solution, which is kind of dumb. I said, let's do iOS and Swift and let's do Android in React Native. 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, 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. And we then spent 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. 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. It was a clear winner. By then, we had also launched a 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. It's in market, but we're going to have to rewrite. We're going to have to rebase back onto this iOS version. And I think I burned 18 months of time with a hundred engineers, literally from the decision I made in the first week of joining Shopify, and Toby, when I went to Toby and I told him, I go, hey man, I think I made this mistake and we have to do this and it's going to cost us a hundred engineers, another six, whatever. f joining Shopify, and Toby, when I went to Toby and I told him, I go, hey man, I think I made this mistake and we have to do this and it's going to cost us a hundred engineers, another six, whatever. And he looked at me and he goes, you should tell everyone this story. That's all he said. Not like, hey, bad, good. He goes, did you learn something? 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, 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, 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, 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. And so what I should have done, and by the way, even now thinking back it would be super hard to do, first week at Shopify, right, is take a risk on a platform that we have not launched in production app on, but he was correct in that we should have, because we would've saved ourselves so much more time. So yeah, total failure, 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. But I literally burned I think 18 months of time for a hundred engineers as my first decision in the company.…

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