Molson Hart

If we can help a young engineer or designer to get 10 years of career advancement in a single wall clock year, then we do it. If the student is ready, the teachers will appear. We get to share in that additional skill for the rest of that decade.

Besides hiring (and sometimes sadly firing), It's my believe that companies can only become better by the individuals in the company getting better. The skill of the company is the sum of the individuals skills and context. "Company" is purely a collective term.

Context is the most important. The type of projects that high context teams can do are vastly different from low context teams. That's where all the innovation comes from. And that's also why some areas mostly produce fairly shallow apps now.

None of that is even about product, or market fit, or timing. Its all about people. Treating everyone with dignity and not falling into the fallacies and trappings of some orthodoxy. Don't do things the way people with agenda tell you to. Do what makes sense.

Shopify build a profitable lifestyle company before it took investment. I think that was a key ingredient of our success. I learned from @dhh that VC by default is not a good strategy.

But I also think that you have to always re-validate your decisions. Not taking VC for 6 years eventually got invalidated for Shopify because it got clear that it *was* a venture. After that we took VC and that was the right thing in our case.

We took VC investment in 2010 but we didn't change the company. We got better in many respects but changed no opinion on how to work together, hire, or form teams.

Because those were our own bets based on what kind of company we, the founders, wanted to work for. @danielweinand always said: lets not build a company that we wouldn't want to work for in 10 years time. Future regret minimization is a powerful force for good judgement.