Speaker unverified: prediction

Transcript context

…edge and I can now look at, okay, who else gets there fast and those are my future leaders. That's a very implicit test. Oh that's interesting. You're testing some adaptability or something like that. Yeah. The biggest difference between people inside of any company or just in general in industry is some people fall in love with solutions. Some people fall in love with problems. And I just fundamentally a person who appreciates the people who fall in love with problems, it's very hard to distinguish during fairly stable times, right? It's very hard to know who is who because well if you don't change anything they look exactly the same. I like inducing change in general to assess this out. How do you induce change? That sounds euphemistic. I don't know. Just literally like that— do stuff. I think reorgs are a standard way. All reorgs work because reorging is valuable. It doesn't matter what your organization structure is afterwards. Well I mean it does, but there's some benefits to any organization structure. But it shakes things out of the stasis— Well, and the advantages of any organization structure accrue immediately. They have disadvantages that only appear over time. So if you change a lot, you do multiple things, you are also, I think heightening your misalignment with the people you don't want in your company is an enormously important thing. So if you— Back to Brian Armstrong. Yeah, exactly. So if you reorg a lot, you end up the people that select out who don't like that. Which is probably the position to take, even if a company thrives under a lot of change and is exposing itself to a lot of change, then it's important that you're clear about that. I think you try to make your company as different from every other company as possible, which is actually I think the opposite of what most companies most CEOs optimize for. And probably most professional management. Right. I think a lot of people want to make their company as similar as possible to all other companies, but to me that's a lack of diversity, right? There should be diversity in companies, because there is diversity in people and people need to fit/find a product. In what ways is Shopify most different from other companies? I mean this sort of internal tool culture is an example of this. It's quite clearly R&D run in a way that quite a few companies are, but they don't acknowledge. We actually say it and celebrate it, and say we actually are of the opinion at this point that everyone should be able to code at least since vibe coding is around. This is clearly this has gone from a have to spend all of your teenage years in a dark room cultivating a rare skill to spending a couple of weekends with YouTube. Let's go. This is not a problem anymore. Speaking of teenage years, I'm always very interested in the on-ramp to entrepreneurship and the on-ramps to programming. And I'm curious, some people decry that programming has gotten harder to on-ramp into where the first stuff I built was like, janky PHP webpages. But obviously PHP is actually very nice. You're just writing code directly in the webpage and you refresh and that's the execution environment. re the first stuff I built was like, janky PHP webpages. But obviously PHP is actually very nice. You're just writing code directly in the webpage and you refresh and that's the execution environment. Yes, totally. Okay to tell my wonderful board member, David Heinemeier Hansson, the high watermark of the world of programming, at least web programming, was clearly when the FTP to PHP file went up and it was instantaneously deployed. How long does it take code to deploy these days? This is all choices now, right? I mean we've made some choices which are worth making. Maybe we'll do it again, but there was an immediacy and a visceralness to programming and that clearly has been lost. It's not most computer science degrees. And this is also how we eliminated things like aesthetics and beauty and stuff. From our codebases or from talking about it, they are beautiful codebases, beautiful code. It's this code that tells a story and clearly communicates what it's there for to everyone who reads it. Ideally, its an artwork of sorts. And so yes, I think we have progressed. I think we have also advanced, but I think we don't have a clear vision to drive simplicity and I think I personally really deeply appreciate and have always prioritized hiring electrical engineers into programming worlds. Just because they just have a better idea for the costs of inefficiency, waste really. You put too many chips on a thing, it's too expensive to manufacture, you will just never sell it. It's not a good product where the zero marginal cost of copying software just means all sins are forgiven. You really have to fit the whole system in your head as an electrical engineer. That's right. So anyway, I think we are immature. We don't know what great is. We leave a lot of this up to people and therefore the outcomes are so different depending on who's on the project. I mean again, we are all getting more conscientious about it and I think we are in a counter swing to the sort of horrors of architecture astronauts that have caused a lot of damage to our industry over the last, especially in the 2010s. So we are getting in a better spot. And then I don't know what AI it was, but the interesting thing is, I don't even think it's going to end up mattering because AI is going to solve all technical depth. So it's like maybe— better spot. And then I don't know what AI it was, but the interesting thing is, I don't even think it's going to end up mattering because AI is going to solve all technical depth. So it's like maybe— To the same question about on-ramps to entrepreneurship. As a kid you were selling things to your classmates. What I observe is a lot of entrepreneurs have the same origin stories, where they were entrepreneurial early, either something like that where they had some business in school. A super common one is Patrick, I did web development and when you're a kid getting paid thousands of euros to build a website, it is like infinite money. I didn't know such large amounts of money existed and obviously to a small business they're like, “Wow, I'm totally taking advantage of this kid for a mere few thousand euros.” And then another common one seems to be drop shipping arbitrage, this whole thing of buying on Ali Express and selling on eBay or something like that. But you maybe have a window into this with Shopify or something. Do you have a sense of what the right, like if a 13, 14-year-old is listening to this and interested in making money, what are the areas where you think are good to pursue today? Yeah, I think t these are the important thing. The mechanisms change and entrepreneurship clubs are really using Shopify a lot and I love that. And this is one of those areas I would love to go much deeper on just because it would be so fun to really, really build directly for them. The super important thing is just go through life understanding that everything around you is built. One of my favorite tweets of all time, probably actually maybe a higher watermark on X on this topic A museum of passion projects. That's right. And I love that because if you can teach that to students, it's worth more than most of the entire curriculums of subjects. And so I think the commonality behind entrepreneurs is that very early in life, somehow something happened that told them that the world is dynamic and it changes. Some of us. I had the enormous advantage of living exactly at the time when we went with computers to no computers in homes. I had one early and lots of my neighbors. So I had the counterfactual there of and being just absolutely fascinated with them. And then networks came in my teens and internet, so I had a front row seat to the world around me in a small sleepy town in Germany was irreconcilable with what was becoming possible. It was so clear that so much would change. And so I think that dissuades me of sleepwalking through the world. It just made me like this. Okay, that's fun. I am sitting on a piece of information that everyone around me doesn't believe yet, but it's clearly true and I'm going to bet on it. I'm going to take reps looking at things around me and figuring out how it could be done better. And that process is I think the most valuable process to cultivate as a young adult or teenager. So the meta process is more important than the actual domain you choose.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.