Archie Abrams: preference

Transcript context

…Is there an example that comes to mind where you did that where something short-term looked like, "We should definitely do this," but we're thinking thinking 100 years out so we're going to approach it this way? It's kind of very much just imbued in the culture. Almost everything kind of feels that way. And I'll give, practically speaking, every six weeks all the R&D group leads we get together and we sit with Tobi and each other and review every single project across the company. Every six weeks, every single R&D pull up the dashboard, and look at it. And in that conversation, so much of the conversation is about both the technical how. How are we building this in a way that allows for Shopify to have optionality in the technical decisions that we are making? And I think for Tobi, one of the things I've learned and so is that how, the technical architecture determines strategy in a technology company even more than the what and who we're building for. If you build the right technical how and set yourself up to have a platform that can be adaptable, flexible, that is incredibly valuable over the long term. It means we will sometimes take longer to ship a feature. It means we'll not chase certain deals or what have you, but we're going to kind of make that investment. And it comes through in all of our reviews and just how we got to do our work together. Wow, that is really unique. I've not heard of that where how... Usually it's the opposite. Let's not worry about how we're going to build this thing. It's why are we building this thing and then when are we building it? And not just the architecture is the most important thing.…

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