Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng)
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- If you do the hard path and it doesn't work, actually you still kind of win because you've now done something hard, you've probably worked with smart people, you've learned something along the way that is like valuable. I meet lots of job seekers. I go, what are you doing to try to find a job? Are you really learning anything from sending out 10 resumes a day? Why don't you look at the API docs and build something? Even if you don't get a job at Shopify, you've learned something. - First I want to talk about another theme, creating intensity in your organization. - Everyone says, oh yeah, like work hard and like do more hours when you're young, whatever. I'm like, what if you just did more per minute? - The more I dig into the Shopify way working, the more fun stuff I never expected emerges. There's been a drive to delete code and simplify. - We have a delete code club. We can always almost find a million plus lines of code to delete, which is insane. - I found this great quote from you. Not everyone can look stupid in public over and over, but I believe it's my superpower. - I have been in many situations with many sharp people who have said to me, that's the stupidest fucking question I've ever heard. My goal there is not to annoy the person, but is to understand the content. - I was looking at your LinkedIn in your career history, and I noticed that you worked for a different billionaire every decade of your life. - They're mostly different people, but they're similar in one thing is that they haven't. (upbeat music) - Today my guest is Furhan Thauer. Furhan is vice president and head of engineering at Shopify. Shopify is an incredibly interesting company because they have over 10,000 employees are fully remote. And even though they were founded almost 20 years ago, they continue to operate with urgency, velocity, and a very first principles ways of thinking, which translates into them seeing record usage, blowing away their earnings calls just recently, and building a beloved product. A lot of this is thanks to Furhan, who in our conversation shares very specifically
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