Having worked at Shopify, Tobi is 100% a try-hard Elon wannabe. Anil is correct that this is about performing "being a CEO" for the sake of his image among his peers.
My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal hiring process. The "other" category includes examples like "Olympic athlete".
I know some folks who work and have worked at Shopify and their experiences track with this statement.
I was told that within Shopify there's something called a "Tobi Tornado" - basically when Tobi swoops in on a program / feature and demands significant change in short order. Carefully planned initiatives can be blown up and then it's maximum effort expected to turn it around.
What everyone had in common was saying that Tobi is quite a smart person and often not wrong, but he's still human, and so there's simply no way he can make 100% good calls because he can't always have full context.
Fwiw this is exactly what I'd expect a product founder to do. If I wanted to work at a bank I'd go work at a bank. It's so easy for groups to over-cover-their-asses, go for maximum safety everywhere, design-by-committee all the things, etc. I think this is almost unavoidable in a large org. It's the task of a decent product minded founder to add some balance to this.
I've no idea whether Tobi gets it right, just.. this isn't necessarily a bad thing!
I mostly agree that the benefit of a product-focused founder & CEO is the ability to make judgement calls, even corrections, and get things moving faster
However, I think the more work you blow up when you do this, the more it’s reflective of a poor management style; even if it’s the right call under the circumstances, that call should almost certainly have been made earlier.
Of course we don’t live in a perfect world, and if something’s 75% done but really bad, you press the red button and stop it, even if people will be upset.
But if you’re consistently being described as a “tornado”, that says to me you’re not applying your founder judgement early enough in your company’s development process.
Amazon and Ebay operate more like banks. Which is how Shopify carved out their market share. This is a fairly mature market. It's just that the incumbents aren't great because of how slow-moving they are...
There are certainly slow-moving ecommerce platforms that I'm sure would be happy to take your business. Yet Shopify has the best product. Why do you think that is?
Blowing things up like that is mostly for people who want to feel important. It's a bad leadership model and fairly disrespectful to your employees IMO
There's a kind of survivorship bias to people saying "he's very smart". I was in a neglected part of the engineering org far away from his micromanaging. If he had been showing up and complaining about my projects I wouldn't have stayed for years.
I've heard it called "Seagull Management." A manager swoops in unannounced, shits all over and disrupts everything, and then swoops out while the rank and file have to deal with the mess.
Got one of them. I ignore him most of the time. This has generated more ROI than his initiatives would have. Evidenced by the teams who do them generating a loss every fucking time.
His nickname, which he wasn't worked out, is the first half of a sexual lubricant brand because he's such a wanker.
Keep telling yourself that. I'm sure you'll still be thinking that at 80 when you look back at whether or not your life meant anything anyone after you would give a shit about. Money doesn't mean shit when you're old and alone. My family also has "fuck you" money; don't think retiring at 40 overawes me. Beyond a certain point, it doesn't hide being an asshole.
He can be right 100% of the time, this is no way to run a company.
You hire passionate people who pour their soul and overtime into a thing then you parachute in, override half their decisions, micromanage other half, then leave leaving them to live with the mess.
After a few of these stunts, you end up with disillusioned, cynical, burnt out people who just don't care any more, and either quiet quit or leave for greener pastures, or the kind of folks who crack the game and fail upwards while caring nothing about the company and the products.
And as soon as the word spreads out that this is your modus operandi, smart folks who have neen around the block a few times will avoid you like the plague.
It can work if you're willing to churn people (khm Elon), for some definition of "work".
You could be right, but in the hypothetical world where he's 100% right, and the current path the project or feature is taking is heading towards a dead end or is broken in some way. I feel there is a real cost that can be more easily ignored, e.g. working on a dead end or slowly failing thing that isn't set on the right trajectory is ultimately demoralizing and ends up in hindsight having been an opportunity cost and waste of your time vs. working on something else. And conversely if he's right about something like this, there should be positive feedback when it is turned around and starts performing better for the team involved?
Yeah I don't mean to say founders, CEOs, etc, should ignore problems when they see one (let's assume they correctly identify the problem, ie 100% right): quite the opposite!
But there's a (slower, harder?) way to right the ship and make the team better, and (quicker, easier?) way to swoop in like a Marvel Avenger and break everything (and everyone) in the process.
I feel Founder Mode should in theory be the former, but is in fact excuse for many to do the latter (I've no evidence for this, just what it looks like to me).
Ah ok yeah I see where you're coming from there. It's kind of like the question of did Steve Jobs need to be an asshole to be as successful as he was. And it can be tempting to think that they are intrinsically linked, but I also like to believe there is a world where he grew more on the empathy side but was still able to lead Apple perhaps even better.
A CEO/founder can be the most brilliant person in a company, and still not be as well informed about a specific aspect as someone else, simply because they don't have time with their other competing responsibilities.
So the allure of parachuting in and fixing a problem also comes with understanding the limitations that your brief on the situation was by summarized Powerpoint.
Which is one thing that's been said about old Microsoft era Gates -- he simply worked that much harder and faster to be able to do it effectively.
I fell for this fallacy during the early days of the Tesla Skeptics wave. I thought no way this nonsense management style will keep them going once the competitors catch up. OEMs know how to make good reliable cars. Tesla is a shitshow.
Turns out the incumbents repeated many of the EV specific mistakes Tesla did early on, and Tesla continued to innovate in what they thought matters (electric powertrain, software, infrastructure etc.)
Even today if you watch some of Tesla's old battery day presentations, I am amazed at the level of care they put into their operations. The systems integration goes down to even the little things: https://youtu.be/Hl1zEzVUV7w?t=3761
People really see this with how far ahead SpaceX and Starlink are.
How does Musk keep getting the top people from the best schools to want to come to his companies when it is well known that prior groups get ground down to nothing and then tossed aside?
I tried to figure this out by confronting Starlink employees directly at DEFCON conference a few years back.
Essentially they are so driven they just want to work with A players. They dont tolerate B players or they will leave. Musk is sometimes wrong to the detriment of the team but sometimes he is really right and he pushes the team to perform their best and to think outside the box(or first principles as he would say).
Not good enough until I get to fire tens of thousands, turn their life upside down and gaslight them on their way out. And I am sad because these laid off people can
't even praise my genius while cleaning out their desk. So I am just leaving.
> I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not.
> For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.
Obviously, as I'm replying to someone with first-hand Shopify experience, which I don't have, take all this as you wish. I only know the Twitter Tobi. (and I think his "AI first" memo is ridiculous, to the point that I struggle to imagine that the same person wrote this twitter thread)
2019 public-facing Tobi is probably the least insane version. He has gotten worse and more egocentric (and more explicitly right-wing) since then.
Early (pre IPO) Shopify had a pretty toxic internal culture with a lot of drinking and sexual harassment. I was lucky to be there around the post-IPO, pre-pandemic era when there was a bit of structure and the techbros were getting reigned in a bit. Once the pandemic hit I think he just lost his mind.
Because so many of them are spoiled brats that can't deal with even the thought of putting others before themselves? Just guessing. Effective Altruism is a hell of a drug.
Not from my point of view: Last year I paid for a product from a shop that was using Shopify, you would think that given that this was a one time transaction, once the payment has been processed they wouldn't keep storing your PII forever but guess what? A couple of months ago I was going to buy a product from a totally unrelated shop also using Shopify and as soon as I typed my email address they sent me an OTP to my phone to autocomplete all my personal details. So paying for a product equals to creating an account with Shopify.
This is incredibly shady and I wonder if it's even legal here in Europe.
You may have thought you were saving your details with that shop (or not realised at all of course) but yes this is a recentish feature I think, at least I haven't noticed it for long, branded 'Shop pay' iirc.
As for legality in the EU/UK, it's just like everything else, on some level they technically asked for consent and you gave it, but yes, dark patterns abound.
Right, but the enforcement on this stuff is terrible, you probably also started receiving mailing list spam that you didn't knowingly opt in to, and nothing's going to change or come of it even if you do report it to the ICO.
I think it's shady to use cross-shop information unless the customer explicitly opts into it.
But shopify isn't just a payment processing service. It's a full blown ecommerce suite. Do you think there's an online store out there that gets rid of all PII once an order is paid for, or even after its fulfilled?
We've had people try to return/replace things (or even credit card disputes) years after they bought it. How exactly would that work if we got rid of all information about their order shortly after they made it?
Shopify store owner here. Credit to them, they make deleting customer data trivial. One obvious button.
This is interesting though: is that data deleted everywhere? It makes no sense just to delete from ‘my store’. But I can delete any customer data at any time.
Perhaps this is a nice example of complexity. From the outside it’s easy for us to why don’t they just…, but as soon as you scratch the surface…
> My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal hiring process.
Hah! Now you have my curiosity. What do they replace the normal hiring process with? A game of LoL?
Some weak evidence of why "exceptional abilities" is not a bad idea, even if gimmiky, is that performance "at the extreme" is highly correlated. So that the people who tend, eg., to be concert pianists, tend also to be very accomplished artists, and the like.
So if you're hitting (a verifiable) top 0-0.5% in some field, there's a reasonable bias towards assuming a high general competence.
I did once hit 0.5 percentile in a multinational PHP exam in my teenage years however I did have a second window open with an interpreter running for the most fringe questions. -- who knows what that means.
Yes! Well specifically someone who is a concert pianist and then who also set out to be a software developer. The ability to get very good at a difficult thing is highly correlated to being able to get very good at another really difficult thing.
Case in point I have a friend who is a top 32 magic player in NA. She recently, not even a year ago recently, made it her goal to become a chess grandmaster and she's already 2000 ELO. You could argue that maybe some skills transfer but it's pretty shaky reasoning.
Exactly. Olympic athletes in one sport have a much higher chance of being an Olympian in another. It’s not that they inherently “sporty” that makes the difference but they’re willing to put in the 100s of hours of training and get up at 5am regularly. You could say it’s discipline that would make them a good SWE?
I expect a concert pianist who's applying for a software developer position to be worthy of an initial consideration.
I know a software developer who could well be a concert pianist, for example. Ie., that pool of people who overlap, in that overlap, are probably extraordinarily talented.
We once interviewed a former national [racket sport] champion from [country] for a React/JS SWE role. Our in-house [racket sport] expert, who happens to be the best player among us, was sure they’d ace the coding exercise. The next day, when we asked for his verdict, he gave us a few words: “He sucks. He got absolutely nowhere.”
Lesson learned: extreme talent in one domain not always a predictor of aptitude in another.
It's a good filter for drive/ambition, not immediate talent.
The best grad/intern I have supervised had the least domain knowledge starting out, but was an olympic finalist level swimmer. They were easily the most competent by the end of the graduate rotation.
Unfortunately, they were also annoyingly perky first thing in the morning as they had already been awake and training since 4am.
Every group has these people. Whether it's churchgoers, world leaders, tech CEOs, high schoolers, beer league softball, or even chimpanzees. Social bullshitters who do most things for the image among a small group of peers. It's a good skill to recognize this kind of pattern and how so many kinds of patterns are the same things repeating themselves in a different environment.
They've been slathered with money, PR and attention for years before even making a single penny in profit. At some point that creates a sense of cognitive dissonance that's hard to shake.
I remember one town hall where he was asked "If you had to start over again, what sort of company would you start?" and his answer was "I wouldn't, all the good ideas are already taken."
There's a difference between having the humility to admit that you might not be able to hit another home run, and between claiming that "all the good ideas are taken." At best, the latter is an admission of a lack of a desire to even try anymore, at worst it shows a stunning lack of curiosity and creativity.
To assert that "all the good ideas are taken" is ridiculous on its face. How can anyone possibly know that? How can anyone even know that the number of possible good ideas is finite?
It's a thing that has been said by various people throughout history and it has always been a ludicrous assertion before. Why does he think it's different now?
If what he meant was "I'm out of good ideas", that's different, of course.
Dunno, Shopify is the second largest Canadian corporation, in a country ruled by a bunch of monopolies enforced by the government. Only RBC, a 161 year old bank, is worth more.
The skip the line concept sounds interesting. I'm interviewing and some companies telling me they schedule an interview in 2 weeks feels like a light rejection / recognition that the skill has abundant offer.
It reminds me of the time I wanted to go out with a girl and she scheduled a date with me in 2 weeks, not a good outlook. I was happy to have a date so I just counted the days. When this happened with another girl I was less invested in, I told her to forget it, and she literally removed the guy she was seeing that week to go out with me.
I think that when the queue is too long, the solution is to cut the line or find another one (or participate in a meat market as a commodity amongst 100 for a low probablity of advancing for a low salary)
on the topic of hiring - the “life story” interview left a particularly bad taste in my mouth.
I didn’t click with the recruiter because she kept hounding me about why I didn’t finish college. Felt totally put on the spot in the most discouraging way, the whole thing seemed like a formal way to discriminate against those that don’t fit their in-group.
It does say Top 100, and implies competitive gaming.
You made it sounds stupid. But being Top 100 in something with a huge global competitive base is not of useless or easy.
If you are offered a kid who spends 16 hrs per day competing and studying to be the best at something, and they can channel that energy at your company (with probably a shitty salary) wouldn't you take it?
Well having a fast reaction time is directly correlated with your IQ, and so you could make the argument that to be good (like professionally good) at video games means you're exceptionally intelligent. I certainly wouldn't list it in the list as you've described though.
Yeah, the first (and most famous) studies were done by Ian Deary in the 80's and 90's, where he would have subjects perform simple tasks (such as checking how quickly you can cover a light with your finger), and he found a correlation with reaction time, which grew stronger as the task became more complex. There are more recent, higher quality studies, but Deary did a lot of the early work and is who I'm most familiar with since his work was mentioned in the bell curve. Should be enough info for you to google it
The bell curve is not debunked, it basically follows the NYLS, which is a multi decade, highly respected study. The book is one of the most respected surveys of the field.
There are people who claim the whole field of intelligence research is “debunked”, but we give them the same level of respect as people who claim the moon landing has been “debunked”.
My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal hiring process. The "other" category includes examples like "Olympic athlete".