Tobi Lutke  🌳 🌲 🛒 🕹Ovjeren akaunt

When I hire someone at Shopify we can make the assumption that we work together for a decade. There are a lot of things that changes. And most of Shopify's advantage comes from there. For example:

The value equation changes entirely. In some places average tenure is only 18 months. Yes, you might want to work everyone 80 hours to make that work. On-boarding is expensive so you skip it. You need value day 1. The relationship is exploitative.

We don't need that. We can hire on future potential and help people get there quickly. Junior employees are put together with seasoned vets and sometimes coaches to help them get there. We are all on the same side of the table and want the same.

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.