Speaker unverified: prediction

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…measure what you can measure thematically. So that's not the entire space of how to make better companies. There's a huge amount of things that are unquantifiable— taste, quality is hard to quantify. Well not only that, because those are the obvious examples of unquantifiables, but the big one is… I'm curious, there's team at Shopify that's doing a great job of their product and there's a team that's lost and has kind of a wooly direction and actually their dev tools suck and so it's very hard for them to make forward progress and they're thrashing with lots of “keep the lights on” work. Just how do you distinguish between the team that's struggling and the team that's executing really well? Yeah, I mean this is why my answer is…here's what I've found works: have rituals by which we talk at the latest every eight weeks, and so let the teams talk about the progress against the goal. We have an internal system called GSD— getting shit done. It's for the central register clearinghouse, it's our wiki, it's our feeds and stuff like this. But it also has every project in it. And so it's built around teams updating everyone else registering, “Here's something we learned.” And so that was step number one. Let's get the actual state of a business into a legible internal system, by which you can reason about it. Where is every project, what are the deadlines, what has changed? And so this is what these reviews are about. his is what we have on the screen—they get a little tldraw that we can drag images and mockups and everything into, but that's their area. But all the metrics and all the things are on the screen right in front of everyone and we can talk about that and how many people are on a team and this kind of stuff. And giving everyone an opportunity to just talk to me, even if it's only quickly, is incredibly valuable. Is it like people want to get into running? The couch to 5K program starts with:get off the couch, go walk down the block, go walk down two blocks and things like that. It turns out that from an organizational point of view, having a centralized source where you track all the projects and you list out your goals and you post updates…that sounds too simple to work in the same way that getting off the couch is too simple as a step to running a marathon. But it turns out both are true. I think honestly it's not a complex idea and it's extremely valuable for 15 other reasons, other than it powering these reviews. But yeah, it's not terribly complex and it works. No, we took inspiration from GSD—your system—as we built out ours similarly. Having a centralized internal source of truth for projects that are going on is surprisingly helpful and it feels like it shouldn't be. But it is. from GSD—your system—as we built out ours similarly. Having a centralized internal source of truth for projects that are going on is surprisingly helpful and it feels like it shouldn't be. But it is. Yeah, it's funny because… so again, it's an internal system. Shopify has a culture of building internal software. I mean I tend to point out Shopify itself started out as internal software to power my snowboard store, so it'd be funny to not do this. And so I think fundamentally companies are all pretty bad. All the companies of today are pretty bad compared to the companies we will have in the future. And I don't know how I would possibly run Shopify without having GSD and I think there's going to be some productization of GSD that'll be available to everyone that's probably going to be renamed 15 times or whatever— become a category of software that's going to exist. And then everyone's going to be wondering how the hell did we build software before we had it? And I try to have Shopify live in that particular state a little bit earlier. Has your proclivity for developing internal software ever led in just a really hilariously overbuilding internal software direction? Oh yeah, absolutely. All the time. What's the most ridiculous internally developed piece of software? You have static sort of internal GeoCities. It's static site hosting, which is, it's the most incredible… Yeah, it's like a nineties web of all pros and cons. Well, what I think is interesting is you think it's important to build your own HR software and you would recommend people at least think seriously about that. Maybe you can share the worldview there. I’m not sure I exactly recommend it, but we have ideas about how to do HR, in terms of compensation and so on, that they're just different from what's normally implemented. This is most true in project management software, like again GSD. If you use software by others, you have to buy into their vision. Some vendors tell you the software can do absolutely everything and that should be— Softwares have a worldview. So you're adopting Workday's worldview when it comes to your HR, which may or may not be what you want to do. That’s right. And I think that's important to realize and it's important to use to your advantage. And I think this is why it's really, really important to buy software. The people who buy the software are the people who should use the software in the end because they have a better view of what needs to be had. So in our case in HR, we had some things that were not doable with Workday and other systems and so we did it ourselves. I mean, this led to a journey that might have gone a little bit too far on, “How should this be done?” This is one of our areas where probably Shopify is the weirdest bit of software ever made, but like, it’s working for us. urney that might have gone a little bit too far on, “How should this be done?” This is one of our areas where probably Shopify is the weirdest bit of software ever made, but like, it’s working for us. So the internal systems you use will subtly affect the decisions that you make. Everyone's probably been in meetings where it's like, “Oh well we can't do that because the system doesn't support it.” And so again, do you want to have a Workday designed compensation system? Probably not. You wouldn't frame it that way. Which is why again, it's important that people think about what is the vision they want and does this offer support. I’m trying to make… true true. There were the kits in the LAN parties of the '90s that set up the internet sharing for everyone when that was still difficult. I'm a tool maker, infrastructure thinker in my entire life and I deeply believe in environments that cause people to accomplish bigger and better things than what they even imagined they could have done. Marshall McLuhansays first we make the tools and then they shape us, or something along those lines. I have a terrible memory for exact quotes, but the sentiment is right and so I think this is powerful and it's something I want to channel at every level. Again, I want the people who have a utilitarian problem of, “Hey, I need an online store” to accidentally catch Shopify because this is the go-to software. Having opinionated software that you use to tweak the environment. What I tend to visualize, it's like what are the things if you're sitting with a friend over drinks in an Irish pub… I’m with you so far. And the question is like, “Hey, you've done an online store, you've done an e-commerce business, you've done a retail business for Shopify, would you do this again?” The answer to the question is hopefully “hell yes.” And then there comes a list of things that we would like to do. Amongst bosses, it just makes it easy. It allows me to build the business not feeling like I have—when you try to paint a painting and you have mittens on—this sort of, there's perfect vision in your mind but you can't get it out because the tools… We've all used software like that. Exactly. So another thing is that it keeps me cutting edge. We are going through an enormous platform shift. Shopify predates smartphones like a software, so we have seen multiple platform shifts and usually what happens when you study any kind of industry upheaval or recession or anything, it's hardest on the small businesses, but really big businesses get bailed out anyway. And everyone in between has usually the line of credits or whatever capital to make it through. You're talking about an economic recession. Economic recession. So, something happens in the world, small businesses are the ones who are wiped out. The failure rates during recessions is enormous, and that's a huge drag on economies because 60 to 80% of all people will work for small businesses.…

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