to say yes to a thing you actually say no to every other thing you could have done with this period of time [Music] how do you bleed through such a period of volatility uh I mean it was uh um and I've had did a very good job of it but like I certainly did it uh like as
they suddenly had to deal with volatility that's true um um I think shop shopifiers have captured their imagination uh like of everyone um in this massive swing towards Digital Services and [Music] um uh Market Vito cost Shopify to be extremely uh exposed and like just uh
you know on everyone's mind and then and then uh the pullback was equally drastic which wasn't a fascinating experience internally right like there's lots of discussions you get always everyone's getting messages from their parents about like hey what's going on I mean I
I I've never thought that um companies uh and and their stock have that much to do with each other but like it's it's uh it's it's it's related but not uh like like no one in a company works on the stock um if things are going well I think if
people start working on stock things are actually like that should be a sign when things are going pretty poorly in the company um and so um it's been you know it's been a challenging time to for for leadership because you you have never knew what
kind of puzzle box plaid of would drop onto your desk in the morning and um um I think though the the perfects are very important during that time but the things that are important during all times which is the most important thing is to keep most of one thing the most important thing
and uh the most important thing in our case is like make a product that's really appreciate about entrepreneurs and can deal with not just for current but also the next problem sets of problems be adjusted quickly we've shipped a bunch like a lot of products
that had in the early days of like crops I pick up and so on and then we just uh took it from there how do you do that though like how do you keep the most important thing the most important thing when the world around you is sort of going crazy yeah I I would say like the
um when you dig into it and wants us of what the most important thing is it's it's usually not like you put for current tactic but it's actually the overall uh strategy and the North Star is a sort of thing but you need to protect right like um the end result of like the reason why
company exists is a thing that needs to be protected right and then in our case it's very much like we love entrepreneurship we think entrepreneurship should be simpler but we think entrepreneurship should be simple on internet when it has been in
in in in in in in the past a physical world um and um uh we want to build software to make entrepreneurships just uh easier like at least make it so that the technological side and the internet side and uh obvious all these things are not something you have to worry about we
take care of all of them and you make great products and fighting markets at the um to the degree that we can have we have a voice as well but like basically show up there's something people want and um we will tune whatever began to make you um uh reach your audience
um because if that is your uh uh Northstar just because suddenly there's shadow in place and no one can reach uh stores and these things you know that's an obstacle which no one could see coming um but if you know in which direction you want to go then you just know okay
well clearly we have to get around this obstacle So like um uh as as long as we keep going in the same direction it's all fine right now no one can reach reach out stores so make sure that we have a retail stores uh we get the catalog online and these
website pick up these kind of things so you can run this constant given what's going on right now what's the best thing we can do and you run this over and over and over um like this I actually think even Concepts like road maps and and just generally plants actually overrated
um I think um uh like a the best possible roadmap is have a very clear view of what matters to your Merchant have a super strong model of your own capabilities um as a company and then a run rerun the function of like deciding what is the very best
thing you can work on every moment you have teams ready to pick the next task instead of everyone's doubtedly working off a thing that of course gets interrupted by reality okay um so so this is how you do it now how what how this looks in actual practice
is you go you you look at everything that is being done in your company and you put things into categories helpful not helpful right now um because reality changed and and and and I think we ended up stopping to work on canceling or not getting um uh sixty percent of our things we
were working on uh which I think everyone was ready for because it was very obvious and um first half of 2022 but we are going into very different times right so everyone was looking to see like how can we be most helpful and I think everyone really want it
um to you know all of us made life decisions we were not doctors we were not Frontline workers um uh we were not essential workers but we worked in a technology industry a technology industry was probably amongst the least affected from a productivity perspective
we had home setups and um so you know given us for being able to help be helpful with the primary objective that everyone had um which is health related um we could at least nail it on what we call it uh do and so that's everyone rallied around this and we got church
we've got cracking on that I imagine it pulled you all together too because all of a sudden there's a lot of meaning and urgency to what you're doing I have a cent I mean I wouldn't say it's like I I mean it clarified permission for everyone and and the mission
I know I know some some sometimes sounds everyone talks about the mission and it's almost like one of those things you go like well what's your mission statement and whatnot but it matters it's like it's it's it's it's a reason like for I mean some
companies might have mission statements that are kind of dissonant with what they actually want and that's unfortunate um but like uh I think that's rare and found in that companies they Vape it tends to be coming from a particular observation or a particular
the reason why they needed to exist and um in in some cases that is a limited goal at some point you might accomplish this goal um and then you're looking for something else I I imagine in our case I don't think being threatened by this but this
this is super forever Mission an infinite game if you're okay if you want and um so it it's really clarifying for us now gave us very difficult times for like I mean like man so many people will hold up on in tiny little apartments and then step outside for a year or more
um there's a lot of mental health issues you know like it's he was previous everyone wanted to they had so much energy to want to do something people were like upset with what they were seeing in so many different ways not just covert but also like you know other
conversations like there's a lot of racial unrest for very good reasons and I think there was a lot of energy that couldn't be converted into productive means um uh during this time which made things challenging as well and it's it it was it wasn't a fascinating time it was a
challenging time I think it was a clarifying time I think a lot of companies we connected really with why they are there for and uh what they like how they think about their own principles how they think about organizing or thinking about talking how
they think about contributing not just as a company but also as a community and uh um we had to go through this all in a hurry and uh all at the same time and Leadership for this was Turkey yes are there different roles that you see for Founders and CEOs I have a good word for
non-founder-led companies I sort of used to refer to benefit the fashion image companies but super implications like that the founder-led companies are mature usually imagine which is actually not true um so so I'm sort of lacking a great um uh moniker for for non-founder-led
companies um but but if you've looked for both these types they are very different internally completely like like let's let's keep going with the tone professionally managed companies are often are like the mental picture comes to my mind it's like a river stone
right something that's like really smooth around all the edges it's like um there's like it's a very similar uh skill level on everything but usually they're like if they have significant competencies they're often about just operational excellence and uh you're
very very quantifiable things um everything that can be measured they tend to be very good at um the core competency of C or leadership team is stakeholder management because there's a lot of which is like I I say with great respect because it's a very very hard thing to do it's
it's extraordinarily hard to align the interests of uh you know very very different groups um and bring them all to the same side of the table you have share order Community sometimes Society sometimes um you're definitely your local economies your employees your
customers of course um and um the board of directors and and and and taking everyone for Journey is is is is is a tricky thing to do the way you do this in a professionally run company is by planning right like you because click bad companies
I promise that people tend to not like to work for or companies that sort of were like a shadow of their former itself how does this happen but she what happens is uh revision to the meal right like it's it's uh the tragedy of a comments uh is
is is the active ingredient entropy you can call it like all these things describe the same thing they all affect companies um um we're a department or the tech company reverts to the sort of middle of a bell curve ambient industry competency um uh for everything it does
um that's like really bad because ambient industry or like Orthodox quality is just quite low um uh on it just it just is um and so um what you're trying to do is like literally everything a company does is try to beat provision to earning reverse to remain and um
uh you you your options there are like usually like you have a strategy uh that's that's the plan the plan by the people have a stupid stakeholder management who have will bring all the stakeholders on site impure the plan with a ton of legitimacy and when the legitimacy that the plan
has ends up being the thing that beats or vegetarian because um you can now go around saying hey you team you are implemented you have engineering team you implementing the things on the plan uh you uux you're gonna build the user interface for this sales events what's
gonna happen when and when we have Rich competency and how to explain the product and so um this is this is a mechanism now all this to say I found that a company doesn't need this right because there's another thing of legitimacy which is the founder
and I'm not saying this is a person it's actually the fact that the founder is in the coffee is a fate um I think legitimacy is one of the most underappreciated uh resources that exists I think I think that that only really good piece of writing I've I've
found and you probably might have 10 others is is italics uh with metallic Road a essay on the topic of legitimacy more like investment blockchain world but like it's I think it brings true across and um so where does this come from um in every company there's a sort of
phonic story like like everyone sort of gets this clear sense that hey the reason why we have this job the reason why we're on this Mission the reason why we're doing this thing is because at some point someone took the first step right like they wrote the first letter
of quote that story is imbued in the companies in onboarding it's like it's it's even if even if no one would actively talk about is something people eventually like encounter what happens when a story is told is that there is some scent like a little
bit of legitimacy almost deposited into a bank account that's like you can almost think about it as social credit of some of some kind um this this happens in our companies but if the founders are still there they can still draw on as a count of legitimacy
and so my role I see um very often is that um I have the like pretty humbling uh ability to like like use the resources deposited into this uh backup card of legitimacy in the company you make changes and because I can speak for the entire story of a place yeah now
if I would leave Shopify this bank account would only increase but no one could draw on it and therefore it can't be an active ingredient in a company okay what does office mean well the best thing Founders can do with subtraction this is surprising but like it's it's
the the the reason like it's much much much easier to add things um than it is to uh to to to to remove things um adding things is a lot more expensive than removing things actually um uh however it requires some measure of bravery and and and
um uh well risk taking anyway um saying yes to a thing is actually like if you say no to a thing you say no to one thing if you say yes to a thing you actually say no to every other thing you could have done the first period of time and so as people are adding things
um the the set of things that can be done it becomes smaller and smaller smaller and a set of things that has to be maintained gets larger and larger and larger and come you end up with more and more people actually working on just maintaining of uh the the status quo or
maintaining code bases and so on um it's a bit of subtraction coming it very often some things build like every every individual Edition was a very good idea but where it builds to is actually a like sediment layers of something that actually doesn't make
sense and that you have to walk away from like sometimes you're building for really really good reasons a product that actually will not make a difference for the company or when um reality changes you actually have like like I just said earlier I had to subtract 60
of everything like an entire indeed 15 was working on which um the reason why I could do this is because I could draw on the legitimacy of like hey I I have seen every single version of his company I've I've seen recessions I have seen downtrends I've seen chaotic times and
I've seen corn times I know what to do and um so why this might affect you negatively because like something your day-to-day job is changing the thing you want to be working on you want to be prouder because it's going to help with um the what the look of his mission in a
better way and um that is a form of subtraction and then there's many many others that uh like that that we could go into so I actually very rarely like the very very very best non-founder um CEOs can subtract it does happen Nadella that has done it with at Microsoft in a
phenomenal way like potentially better than many founder CEOs can um but it's about probably 10 times harder to do um or 100 times harder and um uh so so that's almost a service um I rendered like for for the business so so in in a in a way where you have
Riverstone on one side you really have sort of a sort of volcanic ash kind of spiky object thing um of a rock on the other side like they like some have very very strong aptitudes spiky object sometimes surprising weaknesses it's it's not a
well-rounded thing in Rand but it's usually perfectly appropriate in terms of well an ideal case it's appropriate in its aptitudes for the um a particular set of problems that the company a company serves and I think this is why they end up feeling so different internally
you mentioned risk taking I'm wondering how you think about restating in sort of a professionally managed just to use those terms versus like a Founder LED company yeah I mean uh um but there's exactly one thing that doesn't take risk which is do the same thing I want to ask those
the number one thing that is very very hard to teach actually a way how to convince people of um but I'm pretty sure it's true is that um I just don't see value in doing the same thing as everyone I suppose I just I don't I don't I don't know if who
grows up to say I'm gonna join in this like I'm gonna become I'm gonna go into finance and then although it's not the best example I'm going to go into let's let ux let's go go to design uh ux and then I'm gonna do work that corresponds to sort of but generally everyone else launches
around me right like I I see what you might want to because it gives you more common ground with your peers in other places it gives you um it's easier to appreciate sort of making a slightly different version of something else but someone does because
when you if you encounter was people who were behind that you can now have conversation about the sort of slight changes you made but I I think that's just but if everyone does this that makes this planet simply spin too slowly I I I
think um sometimes there's significant wisdom encoded in what everyone's doing in most cases go all in on it but in many cases just use like put everything you've ever learned together to make something that just as good as possible Right like because otherwise I think
you're holding yourself back and I think the company needs to do risk this for people now it's not no one's intuition every single time you do anything that is different from best practices like we have so many euphemisms for just basically doing undifferentiated work
um it's a strong statement I'm making here but but best practices actually just simply means don't take risk and do with what everyone else is saying you should be doing um best practices are not that black good there should be best no their average risk adjustments yeah
exactly it's just average and um I don't think I have no time for average I I I don't think our is that good uh around plaid off I think we can do much better on everything there's no chance that in 100 years people are looking back and saying wow back then we just
nailed everything like it's just listen it's not gonna like they barely need anything like I mean you look up like three years and be like wow you just kind of I had no idea how to do all these things right I guess so um you know like all video contracts and software was
terrible and look at this uh no one had a home home setup home desk um and uh you know so on and so on um so everything depends on Innovation The Innovation depends on a very basic thing which is like to be Innovative you have to do things that are different
and if you do something different you can either over perform or underperform status quo and RBS now sometimes you get one sometimes you hit the other but like again if you can subtract you can remove afterwards so things were underperformed and give
another a go at it and if you do that effectively over and over then you are a competitors out competing what other people are doing so is that the role of the company then to provide safety uh for that failure internally where I I think so and I think it's it's
I don't think anyone's craft a code on how to do this um I I think like I mean school conspires to tell people here's how to solve problems ideally don't review it and you probably don't have to learn anything new after this and just like a joke right like I mean I I don't
know how do you steal the inverse arguments but this is definitely what schools say and then you are uh like you you were through your beginning of your career yourself put the lie to be statements and and you look around you and people some people will have
vastly different career it comes um because they are just like walking away from they they're using Orthodoxy as a major input um they'll learn everything they can out of it we use it as a starting point where we're not hamstrung by it um they they will do things that could
be described as risky but like I I have to say um this is very very hard to again uh get people to believe but it's actually risky to not take uh if I try higher but like I a lot more people have it's not risky in the moment though right to to follow best practices it's only risky as
you fast forward time yeah and I mean we should acknowledge why if you make like if you do what everyone else does you are like say like well that's what industry does um if you make an edit to it you are you will have a responsibility go to bed for
for that change um at least that's it it from if you risk avoidant this is something you don't you you don't want no if of course if it works it's great at Shopify it's very clear like it's very important that we explain to people like like it's not failure it's not like it's
it's a successful discovery of something that didn't work if if you underperform it's it's we know actually more data and we um um uh they'll try again it's uh people actually a performance mashed out euphemism um to um if I don't take risks
um so it's it's actually for your career a job fair is actually more risky too um not aim high and I think that environment um and with psychological safety to take this risk is very hard to produce and I I imagine there's going to be like 20 years from now but it's going to be
fantastic books on how to create these environments I think that there might be a few um but it's a very hard thing to maintain in my experience two rabbit holes here one being uh typically what seems to happen in this case is risk can be taken outside of
companies not inside so you you leave your job you have an idea you can't do it internally or you fear doing it internally or you don't perceive enough upside to doing it internally and only downside you go start a company uh that that is the risk in the the profile
company succeeds gets acquired how do you think about innovating internally at Shopify versus acquiring to bring that in yeah I mean a sort of an ergonomic for a lot of companies investor in the end state is to become companies that maintain what they've got
um and and then acquire all Innovation I I think that's a I mean I would not be proud of oh yeah like overseeing a company like this I I I I if if Shopify would turn under my watch into that I think someone else could do my job better um I uh like I think companies are like
it's Innovation is a Lifeline I think you want to innovate everywhere and I think every group in a company should be able to go to a conference and talk about how we are doing like how our group is better than sort of a general implementation of this
discipline or idea um and by us doing things differently and how you're thinking about this first principle thinking applied to uh any area can can yield huge upside and um I mean ideally that I think the best uh like like a way I would like that to see
this is actually that for our own purposes to build the best company that supports it being extremely Innovative for entrepreneurs in the retail space um we are innovating across all the disciplines across like we've recently done a completely new comp system in in
in in in in HR which is not usually a area that sees total Innovation um but we we did it's been very very successful internally um um and um generating a lot of interest externally as well and and it's it's this is just Shopify applied to a place it usually just simply
doesn't see a lot of innovation and therefore it's notable that we we want to have the same thing everywhere the best then ex entrepreneurship is like actually get this be Innovative inside of Shopify which has for balance sheet to support this kind of thing
um you know failure is just not that fatal upside is massive because anything can be brought like to tune to Market there quickly um and and then you know if there is like if Shopify with its focus on entrepreneurs says well we this idea there's more value in this if
it's brought to another segment or maybe like this com system might be prioritizable well but that's not our main thing like we are perfectly happy to hear this to others and maybe um people go and prioritize it and then make this a sellable product for other
companies which would like to get take a take part in some of these Innovations so take backs actually I think that's probably a better way for entrepreneurship in in the face we're going in I think it's important like the sort of stories around entrepreneurships
are very much come from the same period of time where there was like a unique um saturation of like incumbent incompetent uh in incompetence however as it's too strong about I think it's like incumbent it's just it you know what it's a fairly new idea but you have to innovate at the
pace and talk right right like it's actually it fits into the times because we end times where everything changes so quickly all the time and therefore so much more compared every time new infrastructure comes online every time uh you know I don't know like
Transformer models are like like just like we figured out how to get an unreasonable value out of machine learning now um like it's it's the perfect sort of midpoint between the the academic ideas and the vocational like just just to get it done but no
um that's a huge huge space for Innovation and now it's time for for companies to apply this to their own problems and potentially for new companies to be formed around this it's amazing that it exists it's a it's a great example which I'm giving um these examples are not coming along
at the pace anymore as the early 2000s right like um or you know a lot of a multi-billion dollar companies um uh in in Technologies uh like come from is it a three four five year period of startup creation right which was this extreme Goldilocks zone of um
uh everything was changing the mobile SAS internet uh Broadband um member Broadband folder um all of these things happen at the same time and and it it was just like easier it's pretty like this so I think it's so see you could take um like I did massive risk career risk
to just go all in on an idea because the batting average of just having a good idea given all the technological changes if you just pick up natively um they're building an internet native in my case software as a service e-commerce system rather than
software that could sort of Supply online stores um then that was just like so categorically different from what everyone else was going for but there was just a clear obvious business opportunity in there that wasn't like it's not a craziest idea right like it's like
but it was enough I think but if it's more difficult and subtle now so if you can basically what I'm saying is I think a great entrepreneurship is actually about extracting amazing innovative ideas out of now much much more Innovative larger companies and
existed previously um and bringing them to other fields and I think that's a good form factor for entrepreneurship coming back to the revision to the mean one of the other ways so best practices is a way to sort of start the path towards revision to the
mean another way would be bureaucracy how do you fight against that your 8 000 employees now how do you fight against that's good to know actually um it's um wealth I mean yeah like I mean subtraction helps a lot you know sometimes again works here happens because
people put sediment layers of peroxis on top of each other like uh I have found people don't actually describe things that work really well as bureaucracy I think bureaucracy um and process are almost terms that are exclusive to things that did not work
um so if top people talk about some area having a lot of bureaucracy it's actually usually an area that if you apply some first principle thinking you might actually find a way of um just streamlining this enormously right it's not all bad you know like if
this is it is fundamentally extremely hard to build things in groups of people right like there's very few very very important things that can be done by individuals anymore on online you just we've almost mined the entire value space like like oh basically all the minerals that were
like like on the surface have been mined out right like so like minerals of value by the way um the um valuable minerals are now fairly deep underground for that if you need organized groups of people to build the infrastructure the supporting a tissue
the safety like this you you you have to like optimization you have to build uh high-tech Minds uh mining operations now um so to speak and um that requires coordination that requires incentive systems that requires operation that requires culture that requires like
every trick in a book to to to say hey um we are going to do things that can only be done in in in in in teams very often there is conflict between um different like dissonant infinite games right like it's like the infinite Shopify is causing this like sort of
like like getting towards the horizon behind which there's a lot of value for entrepreneurship entrepreneurs that's a journey shopifiers are um what you need to do is get as many groups and as many things like like parts of the company to all be in
alignment with this overall um overarching goal it's very easy for a group to to end up like before like a decent and on goal and um I think what you um but this sometimes encounter is um lack of larger like I don't know I don't know if it's a good example I I remember
when I started to look into it like how to do a charity work right like um you know that's something I I want to do I I'm very interested in sort of comprehensive like how can I affect like for every means of energy I have time money or other resources how can I be as
beneficial to all the communities around me as as I can and so I'm like the first thing you realize when you talk to people is like you have to make a choice between individual level and Society level impact right like and um um individual level is like you can do
something for a person and that's deeply gratifying because it's very sort of immediate and and frankly it's deeply popular with people it's very easy to point at like almost all of us are hero stories around uh charity uh of individual level
but like the data like if if anything it actually causes problems because you usually when you create dependence on charity for things such as actually the opposite of I think the goals you are having so so you end up having to look a lot at a society level things like
what's for Upstream problems for um the thing that you're trying to try to solve anyway companies are just the same you you have this with the society level at the individual level experience um and um company design only allows you to uh really um try to uh
you know get to the large outcomes of a company get get to the alignment and and try to avoid bad individual level experiences to the degree to the best degree possible ideally to run like like just like uptime on servers you want to get to a 99.99 SLA on people having good
one-on-ones of their marriage I didn't really gets that would be great um but of course there's going to be bad ones like like people will have you know maybe the same person that usually has good one at once at some point has just a disastrous one
and um one of the problems is like in terms of criticism you know like a lot of people then describe um all of a company through their lens of their one individually bad experience that actually was an exceptional case and so on and so if you you know you end up like with a story
um becoming and and description of an exception which was actually rather expected although unfortunate anyway with all that being said um but obviously is very very real and absolutely soul-crushing horrible and mind-numbing if it happens uh like I last like I I I'd be
um if I I do not want to build a company that causes people to have to go to Cafe experience however there are instances where what people describe as proxy is actually um good checks and balances which are like a way you are trying to solve a problem
you you see a hole in a wall and what you would try to do is paper over it which might make perfect sense in the in in the sort of local context that you have but actually if you the next person with a larger perspective says actually we we use driver patches um because that
doesn't cause problems of rodents and um the person like if they talk to the next person they say you know what that wall that this hole is actually bad for it shouldn't be there let's actually get rid of entire walk and but you know I saw an even more perspective might say
you know be actually going to remodel this entire floor in this prophetical office where I'm just sort of spinning up for the purposes of this conversation uh the entire floor is being redesigned so that world doesn't matter it's like that hole is going to be
no one has to fix this right now and this is unnecessary work and the next person might actually say hey you're going digital by Design if you don't even have offices anymore and um so so what the the culture you need is that ideas and action and proposals
come from absolutely everywhere ideas must be only present but um decisions on the video strategy should be like coming from the place of right perspective which sometimes is for people that walk across the front line and sometimes actually the other people
will have a really intuitive understanding of a long-term goals of a business and so that's you know when when when things get marked up there and not explained right I have found that is people who reach forward biography in these cases but I don't think that is biography I don't
know if this is a useful conversation but like maybe um I'm not a democracy apologist I I I I do I I I'm I'm if you ask anyone at Shopify they will be able to cite many many instances of me uh using my legitimacy to subtract but obviously in
every instance um I I can however it's not all over bad I guess I like the visual of sort of sediment layers and how it builds up over time and you end up with this outcome that nobody intended but you fast forward time and nobody would have chosen this but it
happens and it happens so incrementally that nobody notices that's it I think that's a road to all evil and and businesses like very very smart people in groups sometimes to um extremely entertainingly dumb things like it's like every individual killed it along the way
um however the result is something that absolutely no one can steal men about required to be done this way and um if you don't have a some kind of system of removing those things and and and and like I mean she was by the way very good this is why one of the books I
give to my Executives is like is Parkinson's law which is a wonderful 80 page read on like how silly companies end up being you know like in in very often so so being able to make fun of these kind of things and then just like hey let's replace it with something better so it's
a good way of doing it how is your thinking on compensation changed a lot I I think our compensation is um I mean I'm very much in this because I've got on on this quite a lot um it can last a little while and I actually don't know if it's a super interesting
topic it's just sort of like a problem we had um I mean actually not one this is like the other thing a lot of solutions that are multivariant based they sort of like five like five things I mean I'm usually a believer that like if there's smoke somewhere there's probably a fire but
like it's often like one of those small smothering fires that's been going on for like 2 000 years in the root system and no like it's it's like like these things exist right like they're um in in real life as well therefore the existing companies um
I I think the way technology industry ended up doing computation is one of those many many many sediment layers of I think individually good decisions which amount to a place that's just strange for something as important as compensation I think we should not
press into Service reflexively Such highly financialized derivative the instruments of enormous complexity and influge variants of outcome without there being an agreement with between both sides of uh but that's something that they want now a lot of stock
options and others use these things are exist because it's a tax optimization system very often it's not actually true anymore in many places like in in either Canada has a different tax system never had really uh stock options in most places actually bears in some
instances now coming which is sort of interesting I think Germany is creating some tax favorability for stock options um and um so so like the world is very different um I think these things should be available but not prescribed and so I mean we switched to a very simple system where
everyone gets a number this is what you make every year and um so everyone agrees but like the ground truth is of compensation and then you can say we want this in cash do you want visit stop options um uh and there's going to be other things like uh so like we will
hopefully get to a place where you can use uh like like we have currently I think two or three sliders but you can uh choose how you want your conversation and then like they're hopefully will be 10 or so to get as we build more capacity for
different options like a charity Market would be great um maybe even a charity bucket for individual level action and Society level action would be like maybe make that decision at this level um would be it would be wonderful um and uh so so so we now have a system
that we control that they can say like Hey we're making our conversation system an implementation of our belief in what's actually the fairest best and most flexible and and treat people like adults so they can make choices and then if you want stock you just simply get
those um and if if if a stopped market value or Shopify is a very low at this point um you get more shares and it's very high um you get fewer shares but presumably once you got previously have appreciate value they have left before you kind of ahead in both ways
and um the moment of Joy like I mean this sort of gets into the weeds of of previous compensation models like the thing that really I think is it's the weirdest thing about the previous systems is you make these like big grants four or three years um at some point there's a grant date
all these grants are created every single time before this this Grand moment like you actually have to look at the stock and because I'm like man like the individual outcomes of the people forgetting this next set of Grants is so different based on what's
Happening that week because again it's like this has nothing to do with company right like like Shopify is real Market values going up I think fairly rapidly but all my amazing things for your building that's what I'm working on um Shopify is the stock price is like
this crazy function over time based on again sentiment market value so tying everyone's lifetime earnings really put like to this other thing just like why are they swinging compared to the thing that we are working on feels like just such a pattern violation I think it's just like
a steel man wipers stealing me argument but it should affect what uh uh uh you in a like a Shopify employee uh makes us lifetime earnings whether or not Russia invaded the Ukraine the week before for Grant or not right like it's like that seems like if
someone wants to steal and then this but like let's do it over beers in a bar and I'm like oh yes because that would be fascinating conversation but I don't think it's that it's a silly thing to have to even discuss like I feel like the answer should be no and therefore
you should Design Systems with that it's not that big of a factor what do you think businesses can learn from programming I think all of business has to be rederived from programming principles I I had this intuition I think we even had
this situation on previous episodes like we talked about this wherever I tried it it worked better and all other approaches and um I I think people need to understand it why is this like because it sounds random I mean I know like they especially do in the
technology industry we are sort of used to um putting technology on on treating it with deference like if if you go into like an open gas or like in into Finance um the engineering and technology is almost like a cost center it would be about as random to them to say hey we
have to derive all of business from engineering principles as it would be to come to a technology industry and saying hey you have to derive all your HR System from server culture right it's like it's a total random idea here's my um uh ethereum we can talk about
examples I I think um we ended up in a quite path dependent but very unideal treatment of what technology is and what uh and how people think of Technology and I actually I I think it's causal from the way campuses of universities are organized in the 50s and like big
statement Turing came up with a turing machine and and you know reading executions from tape and writing back to it to it and fundament formalized um uh the architecture that we are using um this sort of created this sort of conceptual
can be an explosion around this time it took like for this to the 60s for having like a reasonable implementations of of these things of course we have some examples before but um where did everyone put them if you actually I I'm I'm well through the books that Chronicle the
history even though it was our obscure books that are un like more people have to read um it's always a basement of some building click work a rental off campus across the street from the MIT or Harvard or something like this where they put people um because it didn't fit into anything
right like it's like um what is this thing it's like it has a lot to do with language really like because I mean what's great about language language is a concept of taking um a very complex Concepts abstracting them behind you votes um you know like
it's it's the concept of abstraction which is a like what is it mathematics well mathematics is like it's it's called as probability it's it's like it's called a sort of um it's theoretical cohesion a very equivalency sign is like those two sides
are exactly the same thing not just reasonably similar um it's it's it's it acts on a very limited syntax like a very few uh like it's it's it's sort of a language but it's actually it doesn't have a concept of abstraction it's like everything is just these formulas picture and um
um so you end up with this new word of a turing machine which is actually the midpoint between human language and Mathematics it has none of the theoretical path of mathematics it's all only the Practical things um there is no such thing as a pie that
is an infinite number that you can't compare to the end of a universe there is a very practical uh like you can make a function called pi and this function you have to make a decision for how much compute you need to invest into it at some point you should stop because
otherwise you end up an end with endless loop so therefore like what computation actually is is a practical part of mathematics and the um much more uh definable parts of linguistics um basically what wittenstein was trying to do and with Ricardo's exactly 100 years ago
um um I think wittenstein was actually probably the first hacker um and um and so so you have a completely new field what do we do we put it like we call it what computer science engineer like engineering we're still not sure what to call of it and but it's it's it's it's
much larger it's it's actually like I I think we've taken a significant chunk out of all the fields and figured hey there's actually a unification out of it and all the Practical people for the next 50 years gravitated towards the whatever Department was called uh uh uh
computer science if you were because that's where and and leaving behind overviews this is why we end up like the philosophy group was only doing reader physics and um physics basically only does like uh String Theory I like I like it's also I
think the topics had a lot going on in Academia are basically the disciplined versions of a nerd snipe right where the things which are like yes let's discuss them but like it's not clear that it will have to be of practical value I'm being somewhat critical of these groups here um because
frankly I am I I think we are just not thinking about all the stuff right okay or with all this being said what help reduces leave us um I I think what this field is probably is is some kind of Applied computational philosophy this is the correct way of
thinking about it it's like if I'm a little bit like economic Game Theory and economics ended up being likes of an extraction from people playing poker you you like like absolutely you you found like a practice in theory was applied and then
a lot of ideas from get free were sort of informed to this um computers like isn't computer science is not it's a bad term because it's actually all applied um and therefore um it's the most applied field of systems design it's a more supplied field of architecture it's the most
applied field of control theory it's the most applied field of almost all these things and it's it's sort of a it's a practical almost vocational side of Academia like extracting all the good bits and so um but to be left it like we would kind of left to the Nerds and said hey for
most in Industries your cost center you just sort of enable the things that other of us do and the Revenge of the nodes is actually that we now build all these companies which have gone out performing everyone else and and and and frankly everyone has to kind of
understand but that isn't because we can technical skills but actually because we and I'm including myself here in sort of this engineering discipline by uh uh being very loose with it because I clearly don't have an engineering degree um about we spent our formative
years designing systems that are have to be resilient to like weird non-deterministic like the kinds of things that are even that you can't even really put into a market formula right like the hacket loss and like um and you know our word actually is one
of Chaos in which we are trying to pretend that it isn't and then we have to put abstract systems almost in the heritage of linguistics um this is an e-commerce system like like that word has right now at Shopify alone like three
and a half thousand four thousand people in in r d working on like every single day and has had so um if it's slightly fewer for for years and years and years um 18 years of my life invested into it and so um that is um there's a lot behind this okay all this why is this
um applies to business business is unbelievably complicated um business is a um your your departments are trying to um use um sort of old old way of world Imports to try to make the most of it in most places like where all the Imports are um uh processes um bureaucracy
um and story The V7 means by which uh click and all of those leading to a culture you know like that's your your um compensation team for instance had those mechanisms are by which they ventral process to look up okay there's a new job a new sub spline what's a cost
center what's the comparables what is the Radford or compensia data say is a comparable what's up percentile here's the salary let's use this as an import well this is data processing right like and and we should you know engineering discipline has a lot to say about how to
build very resilient systems that can roam across a lot more than just a few inputs like this and actually Implement um like a function that spits out the right results based on way more important members and but a function is auditable and can run every
moment and if you are thinking about making change to your business like what would look like when a certain uh discipline or jar falls into a different part of the Department of a company well now it's I made all of this executable I now go and um just edit one file and then it rebuilds
a model of a business I think and then if you like it in a engineering that's sort of engineering thinking company the bat becomes the new desired model and the goal of uh the um HR discipline is actually not to make all these arbitrary decisions but
actually to look at what is the model of a company what is the actual state of a company whatever moves that gets the actual State as close to the model as possible we have a biggest discrepancies a company like that is it retains its ability to evolve with a changing
landscape because it's extremely hard to change bureaucracy extremely hard to change advocacy for stories in real business um it's extremely hard to figure out obviously like little arbitrary exceptions that have been created and and um can still move fast okay but also
um just leads to much more fear and observable outcomes you can you can use all the systems building advantages of like unit tests of linters of like like where are things weird um data processing observability uh you know dashboarding um and so so these These are the
Ambitions I think amongst the sort of most technical run engineering companies and and it it allows you to think about what we have done but it gives you a new tool because at the end of the day I think what terrain like invented um is a uh his EP um
um is not as separate as people make it out to be if you look at the cells that make all life this is kind of what DNA is like it's a it's it's a read head and the right and the right head and it like it creates more DNA it creates more cells it can it's it's like
it's it's the comparison is on it's not equal design in terms of mathematics but like by analogy yeah like I I think it's a lot more fundamental than what you've had credit for I think 120 years from now when we talk about human history um like these books felt like hacker by
Stephen Levy and a dream machine and um look code by pets old and you know office kind of these books are actually um going to be referenced books that that show the actual Mainline history of our species right and and currently we like it's sort of like relegated like the
newspapers talk about I mean current affairs which we showed like they are also important but it feels like we are living on this in in this weird word but actually has not integrated its own Mainline history track uh into the public Consciousness
and I think this is why the world is so weird to so many people why is like why are things the way they are well because we have a model in our minds a little bit propagate a model through uh I had no school media books um that's deeply rooted in the physical in which
which is easier for us to reason about to be fair but it's not it it's it's it's an it's an extraordinarily lossy model um uh uh if if you actually hold it up to what is happening in the world like anyway it's it's this is a topic I could talk on for hours I I I deeply
um uh I never know if it's an interesting topic um because like I have no answers I I just um I I'm trying to like I I think uh I I think it's worth uh uh like I think what's I mean what's the trdr the trdr here is um just like poker taught economics a lot
because it was applied Game Theory and people play many many hands in an evening and therefore develop a more intuitive understanding of uh a a part that's important to to economics uh and the best parts of mathematics um I think engineering involves applied systems
design um it has a discipline of systems design and Venice just vastly like we are talking about slightly ahead we're talking about 100 years ahead um in in to everything else it is not a contest when when you when you hold it up to uh sort of Industry Orthodox
thinking on on these things if that Orthodox thinking is purely informed by a sort of a pre like if a book is basically from from the 80s it will have interesting things to say because the sort of how to implement things with humans it's going to be one
more better developed and potentially how to craft story and and process um but it was a fairly minor support roles now to to site I think what makes it interesting is the fact that there's no answer right if there was an answer or a definitive answer be a little bit less interesting
yeah I wouldn't do this I'm only interested in you yeah I'm I'm I mean I'm honest I'm no I'm interested in my deal and I'm actually uninterested in fields where the ideal is figured out yeah because there's like I have nothing to contribute there like I um
I like I sort of I I love and understand technology I love and understand like design and and ux um why because I really really care about people like it's it's I know it's a weird thing to say but like I am um I have sort of built my life around
um giving people superpowers due to technology right like this is what I love delivering so these are the three pieces technology is for enablement people are the point of it all um and people are awesome and people are creative and people need to be augmented with technology and
I think that's our application of us technology the technology industry to cause this to happen instead of replacing our people and um what we should replace is toil and drudgery yes and right like this is like we those other things we replace sometimes there's jobs because
we are mean or because we didn't know better or we couldn't do better better only toil drudgery let's replace all these jobs everyone locked into these jobs it's a creative person and contributes significantly more if enabled with proper tools
and so of course ux is in the very middle it's like ux makes all the world of technology and everything we have accomplished there available and approachable by everyone it's a it's a fundamental equivalent as a and and and so um I this is like I think I um and
and I have a concrete set of problems that I need to solve around um organizing tens of thousands of people in like to do um uh but a highly Innovative company with tens of thousand people I think um um this might be surprising to people I don't think that has been attempted many
times before I I don't think people like you know there are companies who can describe as being highly Innovative but are hundreds of thousands of people because I think you're gonna always get sort of a residue of uh Innovation out of it and if you have a lot of people
that ends up being you know uh still significant in terms of innovation uh per the BET comes of course there are phenomenal companies that have succeeded this but I'm I think it's not unique but it's probably single maybe low double digits
of copies have ever attempted it most companies are just trying to be like a bit like find their product Market called competency and then play a defensive game around this which is a very very different thing uh to do um everyone payslip service to
Innovation but Innovation costs you a lot Innovation is a if you want this every single like solving any single problem in the company is 10x as hard as it is if you don't um and um uh I I so so I don't think about any people have sign upsets kind of a headache um but I I think it's
intoxicating one of the things that you sort of said was unleashing people with technology which is it's fascinating to me because small differences in skill technology can amplify or leverage that ability to massively different results
you and I have the same iPhone we have the same Technologies available to us but you can do a lot more with that than I could well I'm not sure about that but like um I I yeah like I mean again the tools we use is a multiplier not an added not not something with ads like uh
um I think until the computer around the most powerful tool in the world but at a probably a slight goal um um It's actually an interesting conversation about the muffin what might have been the most the highest sort of multiplier tour that existed
um before probably sitting on top of hypocrisy frankly oh uh there's probably a times 10 like I I mean I'm sort of making this up right now but like I invocated let's say you would uh go go back to pre-sort of desk calculator times um um you know like the way they had to do
the Manhattan Project was rooms and rooms and rooms of people um a lot of what they did is like at Los Alamos was actually a carbonating uh um a calculus doing the trajectories for artilleries um and uh they had rooms and moves and moves so full of people doing this
manually right and and so um uh all these people but it's like better at mathematics than I will ever be and most of us will ever be and um but we're knocked behind writing tables for every particular artillery every one of them was different so you had to rederive all
the calculus like lookup tables basically for different distances but I think and that's that's that sucks so so now you're living in a world where one of them could probably go on YouTube and learn enough programming in uh maybe a week from scratch because again people must
be always to make how complicated it is to learn programming it's like you fire up Khan Academy you sit down you clear your calendar and by the next weekend you're programming some useful stuff like what like this example and you will write a function that you input
some calibration numbers from artillery that the UK about and the distance and maybe an elevation difference and we'll spit out very quickly um to uh you know exactly by the point it um or you do it with a desk calculator so after that person after you do this
this function this thing is going to always be like correct maybe you need to add someone else wind at some point because you forgot about it but like that's just one optional parameter um you add to the function that function will solve the word field yeah that gets
it done um forever um Vermont productivity added to the world is not the utility value of a fashion it is freeing all the best people at calculus when Flat Earth into new productive work and actually write these functions I I it's it's it's it's
flabbergasting in terms of a planetary productivity number um by the way VIA terrible at carbonating productivity like also this is because this none of what I just said would actually be in productivity numbers that economists use to figure out if productivity is going up so are
we more productive now because based on that we should be massively but it doesn't seem nowhere because um um but I I'm curious why it doesn't seem that way um I think it does overall like if you put a movie on from like there's a there's a funny uh list I've seen
recently about like um all the movies you love that could not exist in a world that has cell phones if you're just like die hard yeah um and obviously it's just like it almost you've watched in those days so so like has changed a lot it's just we all we we
are all the frogs sitting in the slowly boiling water with the sentiment yeah but the sentiment is like I mean one of the most important things that I think everyone's overseeing is for uh um I'm great but everything else is effect in fact
um so this is actually like a metric you can do look at per country basically people have to answer question how are you doing and how do you think everyone else is doing around you right and um what do you get back everywhere in the world is like I'm doing great everyone's
anxiety is based on their understanding of everyone else which everyone else literally disagrees with like so we all think everyone has to do bad at everything that's getting worse but it isn't like it it's it the numbers don't bear down there's countries I think
South Korea was like 9010 like 90 people are doing fine and they're only fake like ten percent think anyone else is okay have a so our sentiment is it's a it's an important thing like the sentiment tracks um the actual experience of planet Earth in the same way a comp like
a stock tracks for fair market value of company um it's maybe eventually convergent but sometimes vastly swinging Up and Down based on a driven driven a lot by media right and what you're exposed to and the messages you're getting yeah because I mean why
because media I mean a media has a crutch against technology for frankly understandable reasons like um everyone in media works for an institution that probably was negatively affected by Tech now I think media itself like if you if you trip some out it's actually doing great like podcasts
are doing great like um a builder operated founder operated videos killing it you're found overrated video it it is like it's the Golden Age of media along my normal size I could never I like there's no chance I would like I I I am a clicker delighted customer
for the product of the knowledge project but I don't think I would have been serviced in any other period of time right so um and uh um so so founder Builder operated videos doing amazing um institution Legacy institution operated media some of them are actually
doing great I mean titles some at higher inference break than we ever have it but but like there is a Prestige change to be to these jobs and and so I I understand but people are fundamentally uh it either space are colored and and
pessimistic about the changes that technology technology weird but what is technology technology is progress so so um if you have the people who do like like um on the airwaves uh you know like every person on the planet ends up becoming oh well everyone becomes sort
of average of five people they spend the most time with Fred like that's just sort of a really well documented or oh if it's fundamentally true but it's super useful as if as a as a mental model and I think that uh you know one of those people is a media for most people
and um um so you're adopting a set of beliefs which are I think extremely colored um and in this particular case I think somewhat unfortunate because you just recast the applied field of human progress as something that is causing detrimental outcomes um which you know
again in the individual case can happen but clearly on society level isn't um and and so um we lost our ability to to to to be optimistic enough future and love progress and and I think that's I mean I think that's extraordinarily unfortunate and this is like somewhere in the top
five things that we really odd to edit um and because people actually think they are doing okay like no not so perfect everything like you know like everyone has problems um it would be great to get rid of all those two but like overall things are going in a
really really neat Direction uh um and um you know like books like Enlightenment now and so on like everyone Chronicles hey what was the past like well well overwhelm you with evidence for how good we have it well if you can go back in time you definitely
choose today like I I have incredible um I don't know both the year Envy the it yeah like it's just like I I you know I was born in 1980 um prayer probably one of the best sort of like um it's it's one of the better times to be born like we saw like perfectly so we
did into physical like like a little bit of a hand over and digital nativeness and all these kind of things but man like wow is that got to be diminished compared to what our children will see you hit on something interesting there which is the search for
um accuracy over utility so a lot of people dismiss ideas because they're not 100 accurate even though they're useful how do you think about that oh man like I mean this is like a reoccurring topic that you I think teach extremely well like what concept of like all models I
use uh are wrong but some are useful like yeah I just like it's it's a right way to think like I think this is another one of those things that you learn um um in engineering adjacency like electrical engineer it has this video well done um
um the scientists don't uh sadly um uh but but Computer Engineering is like you're carving a system that works out of before you got now that's good engineering but like actually if you expose yourself to this this is actually good thinking but again you have to
think of bets like you have to think and like you have to make choices earlier right like you you have to make a choice when you have like you can't wait for having a hundred percent of uh the inputs because you will never have it sometimes after an
effect you get to go back and give yourself a scorecard for how people did a job did you did you make when you had to have make an important choice how good of a job did you finding all the relevant inputs to collect to make a choice with that's something you can
really sort of review after effect like hey I made this choice this way it was wrong choice um was it the wrong choice for chance in which case you made no mistake um was it a choice for a certain chance that could have been known and wasn't considered that is something you you had
something was it invalidated because you didn't see the bigger picture that's like totally your fault right like on on making Choice as long as the bigger picture would have been available easily like my my test interpreter is always like wherever any 20 minutes I could
have spent to pull this piece of information I didn't consider right into the set of things I uh used as inputs to make the decision if so I wasn't equal to the task of making the choice at the time and I need to um understand this better in the future and approve for
um so accuracy is like accuracy very often is um picking the right result but that's actually independent of making good decisions uh like that's just that's I think resulting is what poker players call this and I think it's not really the right thing to do
let's talk about decision making a little I mean uh we sort of highlight the last two and a half years and all the ups and downs and that how do you keep your cool when everybody around you is sort of losing theirs a lot of people end up getting really invested in their
sort of job title as an identity and um um they think they are valuable because the job is valuable unfortunately so much of a bird is like is is kind of is a second order effect of of self-confidence issues um people seem to have a fairly low opinion
of themselves fundamentally which I I think it's just so sad because I think like we should have a vastly higher like opinion of people's capabilities in in general I have a very very high opinion sadly actually that makes me sometimes disappointed in people
in a funny way it is funny exchange with uh for 12 years I'm recently retired to joined the board he told me like hey Toby one of the biggest differences between you me is like um you have a extremely high opinion in people's ability and therefore you're closely disappointed in people and I
have really low opinion of people therefore I'm just utterly delighted when they do anything useful it's like he's just happy he said he was he was offering this as advice for me to change my mind I I I I think um like I like I think I'm less confused
about people's potential and I think sometimes are that says I in many cases I um see it as one of my major contributions in my career to help people actually reach my potential and and and and have a more clear idea about their capacity uh uh capacity ahead of time one of the
ways harvests low opinion um reflects itself is that people think that how valuable due to um um more legitimate sources of uh um like external accreditentialization well I've watched this boat I mean having um external validation external validation like having a degree is that I'm
valuable because I have this degree um I'm valuable because I am a front-end developer um and most things are fundamentally incorrect I mean maybe in some of these sort of Meandering middling companies that might be true you are valuable because of a brand
we've got you have a value because you make choices you're valuable because as a front-end designer not just that you are actually engineering but you can program but also that you can you you have an aptitude to work on build systems that are like
great and easy and to use for people that are resilient to random people do very random stuff of user interfaces and you build something that will paint now it's your experience it's your skill it's your actual like it's it's your life story rolled up is your is your
intuition is is your ability to make great decisions quickly and um so so often this anxiety that we're talking about popping up the stack to your actual question is that people confuse um their own self-worth and their role in the world and and and and and their
ability to well feed their family frankly with um the continuation of jobs and and the continuation of a role that they have but the question you should have is like how can it be valuable that's Shopify hired you as a person the only reason why we create roads and
Rex is because they are like lures to great people the interview process is not a process of figure can you can you do this role can be kind of slot you into this world it is the jobs will be better for you being here right and so um so people should have us outside anxieties
um uh people should figure out how to be valuable and and and and show great flexibility in this ideally develop range or like you you should make a fundamental choice of of of of of are you are you going all in on specialization I'm for range most people
should opt for range um um Specialists will like everyone who knows that there should be a specialist no space should you know like it's like everyone should be in specialist now they should be like this is this is a very particular set of character traits
um which wants to dedicate itself to a very narrow kind of thing and go unbelievably deep like to a degree that's just absolutely impossible to appreciate for the non-specialists like the depth but but the true depth of true specialist is up is incredible um
what Specialists don't understand is like how how incredibly good journalists can be at at 50 things right like they think like a bit many people figure journalists is sort of like a jack of all tradesmaster of non-legates this is one of the dumbest sentences I've ever
heard that's like not like that's just usually someone who hasn't made a choice and is not good at developing any any kind of like a very fairly rare people um um uh you you like Pareto Principle and no one tells you but first 80 of every field can be done 20 of time so like you
you can you can you end up easily five Fields um for uh in uh to to a degree of eight out of ten um what other specialist is just looking at primary primary topic right so um and frankly this is even incorrect because people know learning the next thing is
significantly faster than learning previous thing because with skilled set of learning is itself a skilled set and it's actually your skill set of how quickly you are learning which determines how long it takes you to pick up any kind of New Field to to a certain
head or 10 out of 10. um okay um anyway how do you get your cooler like no one matters and like humans are awesome and humans are like with like every individual's human has most has more compute than all the computers we've ever built a network together right so
therefore there's a lot of worlds for us to play um and um especially when a million millions of variables change software technology pit bulls right like it's like um right now the way engineering works for a systems work um as great as they aren't as flexible as
they are these days they are still a little bit more you you pour a little bit of cement into your current approach like refactoring and like a technology is tricky so if a word changes it's time for humans to shine and so um we should actually be very self-confident into our
role and then uh again you make decisions I think decision making is misstudied uh adding decision making is uh easiest thing in the world um it is uh blindingly obvious how to make a decision or any decision what isn't is finding the inputs
like what is the context what are all the things that affect the decision developing bad is hard right so um like knowing all things you should look at knowing what to ignore such as what everyone else is doing I mean you might use when everything else is doing is
actually a second order import it's an import like you should look at it make a judgment on like how much value there is and use your judgment on that as a hit put into your decision packing so you're already twice removed and then you build up a picture and then honestly
everyone who looks at the info kind of come to the same I I've actually never really seen this situation where people are truly making different choices like there's always if there are like people on different sides you just have to like okay let's
take it from the top and like talk or click State or the unstated assumptions that are actually inputs into decision making and once was uh flushed out it becomes pretty obvious I find um and then after you make this decision you don't just if it's an important decision like
strategy or something you don't like throw away this entire book you actually capture it and you revisit it because again the world keeps changing and by the way your appreciation of inputs are that you considered end up evolving as well and so you should actually at any
moment we run a function over the inputs and uh be fairly neutral to the uh to to to what that says like I did that with I decided we built a lot of offices we did them extremely well I think they got very good at building offices but then a change happened in a
world and and one of the variables was like well can are people allowed to go to it like like uh for officers I don't think I had that that was an unstated input that wasn't a stated input but it was one we won't get flipped we decided like okay no offices anymore
right uh and then another input was like where is our current staff like are they all close to officers and then they said like another decision was should be higher now outside of these places and after we made that decision for variable on like where people live
changed not everyone is close to offices and I I think it just said okay well you're gonna go digital by Design and like this these decisions actually went very quickly because you could see how one leads to the other and then we just called it early for instance the
software we did very like 2000 like I think in May or so I did like a okay we are done with officers we're going to be probably the biggest role no and you were the first to come out basically and we thought it was valuable to people first because again I think
um removing bad ambiguity is a very important thing and I think a lot of people want to know like like some people were like just waiting to get back to office which I appreciate but many people were saying and and people at Shopify were in this stage should
know that that's not something shop if I could buy it in the future or would not and um people in other places which were clear that they will go back to offices and actually liked this thing or like the ability to you know move wherever they want to live like engage in more
lifestyle design than what you can do when you have a desktop um for sure for them it should first important for me to like for them to understand that Shopify would be a fantastic company to join and uh I think that was very good for us
so I think it's fair to summarize what you sort of said about decision making as being easy in the sense that the source of all errors in decision making is basically blind spots or other blind inputs where you're blind to the effects of your decision how do you think
through the primary secondary third order effects of your decisions and then the the broader impacts yeah I mean I think you develop a little bit of an intuition for the second third order effects I but I don't think they are you can't plan for them
um you do tend to make the things on primary effects and you communicate on your primary effects I think in a smaller team you might talk about okay this by way will actually cause this other thing the trend will cause this other thing and it's it's a I think that's sort of expert level
decision making as being able to have a fairly High batting average oh idea of how this is going to continue because you're saving future headaches by being aware of them but I would say this is like this species get really hard right most people in
really only concerns of the primary effects secondary effects are very very um hidden on opaque of all I think Governor wrote a lot more than people realize um um very very often the secondary effects are and and tertiary effects are um are vastly more of societal impact
and the primary effects like I mean primary effect was people like people didn't like lose their power it's like it's like entire different conversation about how that might have happened but I mean I think I think I mean if you if you look at causal requirements like
it's probably because all the green parties in the world which I actually appreciate for what they do um somehow ended up embedding nuclear power being bad as one of their founding myths and organized around this and therefore it was like awesome to get out
of their platforms later on when this became sort of silly uh and um uh so there's like an import like which I mean moved to best of knowledge when these parties were created in countries like Germany um uh maybe that was thought to be true um
like I mean I I think sustainability and uh environmentalism and so it's meant something different back then we didn't really understand fully the Royal carbon plate in the air it became a huge problem and and so anyway um but vedaven didn't do is like after
they got more data they re-ran the function of their their position on nuclear power and they just kept the fit because that was like convenient um I think um where you don't rerun it you just dismiss the input the the change in variable void becomes just I think
that's actually more accurate sadly uh uh it's probably just it's written into the set of again it's a founding the funniness can't be Revisited like I mean this is like you this is why you better end up with a really good set of you know initials like like rules
because once the people who write the initial rewards are gone very often there's going to be a great set of definitely great deference to them because again no one will ever reach for legitimacy of the front integral founding fathers are like I mean there's
a there's entire piece public think about how few funny flowers there were and how many constitutional lawyers there are now interpreting how there's like a crazy discrepancy but this is one where it's super important that we find a way to rerun or get rid of or change how do we
do that yeah I mean I mean the the actually um so talking about secondary effect sometimes we'll use a very often secondary effects are really flexible opposite of a primary effect so I like um a lot of our carbon issue introvert comes from uh the environmentalists
convincing the world that is involving we're building a um economy that required Luca power we could somehow do it with colon Instead at hand um in the oil now I think we got the scorecard for that this really worked very poorly um and I don't I still think it's an
expense but pad of needed to run but like we did and um um until maybe a year ago it seemed like we actually were really not looking at this um because service I mean what I should make this explicit this secondary effect of us not building nuclear
power plants is but now we have climate change right so um primary effect is environmental movement secondary effect is climate change like chew on this for a bit um uh again everyone in the this movement wanted to do about what's best um so best of information but like the
secondary event matter now take another one Russia invites Ukraine which seems to be a recurring topic here everything in primary is bad secondary effects many many many of them are bad like there's a secondary effect of everyone having to look at the energy policies
and realizing holy health should be probably defeat nuclear power plants back so you know we actually um you know in a really odd way um Europe's dependence on Russia for natural gas pipelines Plus the act of aggression by Russia may actually cause climate change to be
solved which is like an unbelievable story when you're looking at this and and honestly this is the danger with secondary advert but tertiary effect thinking his it really lends itself to cynicism um because because um sometimes you see these connections
which are like Felix trying out the inconvenient for for for for the main story if you tell ourselves um but I I also think facts are friendly uh I mean I mean and also those are not Factor facts they are like compounding systems that feed into each other and
loops and Cycles there there all of this is just like yes and then 100 things besides but it's really good to figure out so you do the same thing I hope in a in a microwave in the company right like it's uh you know like this if you are um in a company everyone is allowed and
actually encouraged to be an intelligent actor in their own sort of local and Center sister um the system should be designed so um that people sort of individualistic um efforts level up to the society level benefits for road map the mission you know
bureaucracy very often ends up being the grinding between those things like the local incentive system and the needs of a company or the needs of another group so designing things in such a way that they are an alignment of service is is really important and for bad you will
have to go analyze um uh you know these things so I think that's to me those are interesting challenges um and again it's interesting again because there are no right answers no one is to get the stuff out properly I think partly because we had to build
every company before reputation really from very basic building blocks which is policy um uh rules uh process and story and both like hosts take the between like those are like software for humans um now with computation impactual Computing I think we can Implement more complex
systems that are more auditable be able to provide some of the analysis if things are going in the right direction and so in in a macro sense um and and will actually make it much easier to implement uh in a more complex incentive systems or like it will make
it easier for everyone to know if they are like doing both that's actually helpful to all the um her company and then and the mission I think that's completely unappreciated right now as as a source of um business thinking value uh and um uh I
find I find it's very very interesting this is really what I mean with applied computational thinking in a applied computational philosophy being almost the higher order click academic Department that should exist on the campus and by way it should probably have the nicest building
um uh and then this sort of computer science hacking Tech like engineering are like sort of the super applied versions of this but like I think a lot of other fields should have moved into this particular faculty as well now I'm not engaged in redesigning Academia it's
not something I'm interested in in any shape or form I I I've never been in order to in the University outside of getting talks there so um I'm I'm doing it I'm a little bit outside of server there although I am looking at what's going on with a little bit of
exasperation because I think Academia and fundamentally is a uh one of those areas where all that set the systems are incorrectly designed for societies um interests I I I I I and I wish maybe we would have more founder-led academic institutions that could engage
in some redesigns and their subtractions or figure out some different means by which we could enable some good thinkers of when legitimacy needed to make some changes there because otherwise we are just going to get paper citing papers and rings and and um I I think procus has
from Academia is like slowed down too much for given the amount of sort of like off like 50 resources if you if you sort of look at IQ dedicated to like if you believe in IQ as a heuristic for uh potential which is not necessarily a discussion like uh put my signature on
no but like for simplicity's sake man you're devoting a lot of people into Academia snort sniping them thinking about the string theory and I I just like man there's a lot of practical things you need to solve here and I think we should go and like solve those
and you did some of that during copit right with the rapid crowds yeah I mean rapid trans was great I invested entire sort of emergent Fields uh led by a bunch of like non-academics uh or sort of academic adjacents sometimes founder Builder types called
Focus studies um which uh says a very basic thing about hey we should probably study how progress happens like because it's probably slowing down a lot right now and we should kind of have a theoretical framework by which to just like you know like meter academics is
probably almost a better term there um people watches for Watchmen so to speak and um I don't I think that's pretty nascent and probably not like University loved and potentially um would I don't know if it can get off the ground but like that we did some
experiments with fast grants and some other things maybe just said like hey with enormous time pressure give us a proposal and we'll tell you if you better get money for it in like a couple of days because that was really needed the beginning of covert um because the
granting process is too Byzantine and kafka-esque and and I don't think and this was sort of my opinion proxies to societal scores uh very often what have you learned so far about how progress does happen I mean like a fast grants was incredibly successful it's unbelievable it was like
but like um the amount of uh times that things had made a real difference ended up uh being the recipient of like if it was like a clear Mark of like for people who really want them but trying to make the system work but like they're stuck behind areas and um I
think that was good I don't know how reproducible is it is and um um because it was a unique moment um I think there was also unexpected springing like these ideas on people is very important sometimes because the problem is in any other case you reward the most prepared
and the most prepared I usually familiar with most time and feel the most time are not usually people were broken unimportable things right like as a sadly too um so it's very hard to build academic environments or even processes that rewards for that that
the people who have can have make the biggest difference um that's a very complex problem in incentive system design and and and and um again systems design well especially once you with a part of part of it it's um sadly the people the most capable tend to be
the busiest you said in the past that I want to read this so I get it right people should make decisions based on the decision they assumed the company in 10 years from now wishes they would have done can you expand on that I I love having this question says one
of the governing like like putting it as an input there um um or at least as a sort of a a linting rule if you were on the quality of a decision it's very easy to do what's popular right now and and and and commit yourself to more pain in future it's um
it's it's this is almost like almost every important decision that just doesn't have automatic ends up being a little bit of a do we do what's right or do we do what's easy right um whatever only real decisions that people get hung up on outside of uh have you seen no path
forwards we will have to eat which is like which is for pi we should start enabling on it's like that's that exists too I mean especially in times of Crisis or sort of wartime um um both people also end up becoming um discussions but like usually it's where
it's in the form of um I'll be allowing ourselves to do what's expedient or easy and I want to have good heuristics for skewing towards best decision overall in the long term um ideally again at especially if a strategy level and the people systems levels uh which these
things should be along those lines of a long-term benefits and inclusive of some of the secondary and fertility effects that are predictable and so this is why I try to ask people hey I found this question to be clarifying for people um because often I mean or you know on
strategy it's like a lot of what people call strategy is actually called the market and a lot of code to markets um involves um trying to figure out if you want to pull future profits forward at a discount right and so and how big that discount is and and sometimes we discuss
are enormous right like absolutely crazy like 90 discount but you can finish a quarter right like I'm not talking about like here's a Shopify card for 90 off I'm talking about if you have a product called shop pay which I think a lot of people are familiar with because it's
big I mean it's the kind of thing that makes checkouts coach so you don't have to uh type your address of your funds um uh and um that thing is like increasing conversion rates to the degree but not having it is simply makes it a mistake too like like
you're basically committing a strat like right now you make a strategic Mistake by not using Shopify if if you go list to sell products on internet because it's it's it's it's it's that's how high the number is I'm super gratified to be let me go to this point the attachment
rate is massive the value is insanely high of this they exists a lever inside of the company obviously it does I don't think I'm really really anything but this like basically when you build products that extend it's really valuable you have
like a dial which is like what your monetization diet it's like set to zero that exists in a room full of monetization dials or diets like that exists uh that that asked like you roadmap tries to build more dials for that room your long-term strategy ought to be to
use as few as problem as possible because I could walk up to the one attached to Sharpay and just say you know what like if you charge for Sharpay we should say Hey you know like cost an extra percent it's like utterly worth it it's like again increa like
conversion is like 20 better um like everyone in the world would probably pay this yet I think that would mean that people will like they could create all these incentives for this intermediating with product um it will create competitive landscape
things it would um yeah you know it's just like I think Shopify all in like over the next 10 years so we would be a very diminished company for not giving our best feature like to everyone um to make it like a fundamental like um you know like flag in the ground about hey you
come to Shopify because we work on fix like this and then we have them they become available to you and um uh because again for the period of time that involves us not like the web doesn't have identity built in in a good way you don't have like this autocomplete but
that's really hacky solution to a problem um uh I think even pre-internets like uh yeah btx and and and other things had uh your identity as part of what the platform just supported it's like your name they had transactions built in and um AOL right like had all this um so
so it's kind of surprising that the internet doesn't um but it doesn't and and therefore a certain period which is still ongoing requires us to sometimes enter audit just with our firms um and Shop pay is a the 45th one missing Intel platform feature in a way
right and um so this is valuable for this period of time and it'll be something else super valuable if this is solved at some point and um but we want to play the role of like democratizing the best features to as many like minutes maintenance or small businesses
because we are pro-vis we want the small business to compete on equal ground of the biggest companies and so um the mission like obvious to say um this diet is not just a dial of like monetization this style is a dial of um how much the observable deference to
emission uh you know how much we invested into this and I think it's more valuable for us to build a reputation of of doing this way than it would be for us to you know absolutely kill it for 100 quarters right so when I got an example a little bit I want to talk with
you about two ideas that have left an impression on you the first one is Paul Graham's essay on conformism can you talk to me about what insights you drew from that okay so let me see if and reproduces this um I mean I have to say like Paul's essays are
like they're kind of this wonderful like I found that all this inside for like they're always gems and and and um I find even sometimes the same essay actually like this is valuable reading it at multiple stages like I I think so so so so his writing is brilliant um very often he um
does this thing there uh again he does the thing that's language is best at for like putting a couple of labels to things that are being observed in general but like afterwards they may come easier to reason about and here was like builds up these pretty arguments
around them which can serve as almost onboarding to about the year I guess it's like I mean mental bottle faking them that's what I'm saying um I I find um so in in this he uh draws if I remembers right um uh like a one of us uh four Pena grids where one axis is um
how independent um am I that you are and or how conformist you are on the other side and then sort of a passive aggressive standard separation and and um you know I think this is It's valuable because I think um uh you you can you can sort of put a
relation density crowd um like over this and and you would serve I think he makes the argument um that that most people are probably passive to begin with and um um which I think makes I mean I think society would kind of like for the body that's potentially not true
um and um then there's um more people are significant more people will be on a com um on on the conformists uh side which I mean one thing to acknowledge conformistic really like I mean maybe or maybe it's all right for me but it seems like a very negative uh connotation uh
in there um like this just means like people were willing to like work on great ideas really like it's like especially passive conformist it's like it is something that um you know some of the greatest people are probably can be described this way
but people who are like I always have a Specialists people who are making a choice I'm like I'm going to really go super deep into this one topic and um I'm going to go like I I I will I'm I'm okay be like working based on what I know on like
like a company gold right like it's like this is like very sort of I this um on the aggressive side the picture kind of uh changes right like and and um um because those are people who are trying to like I guess get everyone else to go to their websites and I think
there's a you know like the aggressive uh Independence are clearly entrepreneurs um like babies like they also look a little bit different um and the aggressive conformists and I think that's that is what the essay gets at I think it's important that they sort of
talk about them in a little with a little bit of like hey there's probably a lot going in there but like we should also like really understand the downside effects on uh here because aggressive conformism is a uh thing that is gonna make it very very very hard to innovate
it's gonna be a thing that um certainly um makes a lot of people's notable people's life living hell on places like Twitter and um you know they're a good deal of industries that are deeply um invested in in this sort of as an art type again I would say like generally
but bureaucracy is like especially sort of a the the sort of bad part of her oxyto Kafka as part of hypocrisy usually involves um aggressive conform especially for very often the comic book villains but like the blend in really well so like it's
just like I don't know I don't I don't know if one person is like one of those things always or in different contexts but I what I like is like hey this is useful like this this feels like what's going on why are people like having so different opinion on looking
at the same thing like here's something that changes things um and and some people automatically say well that's quoting some people say that's clearly something I'm going to fight and um I think it's important that companies kind of state what kind of groups they uh like
like a company that makes no choices of what people they want to uh look there make I mean again you you end up with a full-on bell curve and therefore you're going to end up fall on average results um because the potential for agreement
is extremely tiny if you are fully an implementation of like every like every other set of ideas right because if you combine everyone's favorite color you end up with mother only there's no legs and uh that's sort of uh um thing you're going to end up with so if you are
wanting to build an innovation Innovative company um you should not be very deliberate with where you put your con uh like conformance or aggressive conformists like they play a very important role in some groups but you have to be clear about which rule
because the consequences of that kind of thing are um likely they will cause a thing to happen that you need to want to happen because we will definitely make it happen it's not about the output you want when you you should treat carefully the other idea is the infinite game
which we've talked about a little bit earlier that's a big topic I find uh James cause uh book Finding fan of games to be really profound and underestimated um I think poor crab could do us all the service by making a single essay free page for packaging of her idea because
he seems to be able to uniquely be able to simplify complex ideas to this point for everyone else you have to read James because book which is somewhat dense but actually I think it's wonderful he gives you this real sense of like what he like
the difference between long-term um yeah well okay let me let me take a step at it okay yeah yeah but um it is important to delineate Finance in finer games what's the difference finite games are like things that have a goal like anything that has that a goal is not is not uh
can't be an infinite infinite game anymore um they uh have a winning condition and the winning condition is usually met when basically participants agree a little bit in competition as a matter this is sort of a convoluted way of saying um tennis is a very finite game like
tennis exists um in a world of uh the grooves it's been defined it's as probably a governing body of aggressive conformists that keep tennis away tennis is and um and um like the match goes to a couple of sets and you know as a referee was a participant in the game uh that people forget about
but it's actually like the game is won because all the players like all the participants agree that the winning condition has been met which is what someone want uh three or two sets um and then educrows and it's the same game of tennis that's played over and
over and over and over again right so that's a finite game an infinite game is um something that has no goal it's actually interesting let's let's let's try to make this happen with tennis because that's the example I've used um an infinite gun game is actually
let's say um Fitness it's like this is not a destination there's no this is not a there's no winning Condition it's a journey it's like it's a it's a there is no defined thing that happens spare like it's actually um um the goal of the game the only goal of
the games keep playing it's the the you are trying to say I'm gonna go into some direction the direction of Fitness but you can make the opposite to say the decision you know but you could make a decision to go towards sloth if you wanted uh I guess but you made bad
decision and that that you have to compromise on this every single step along this way is going to be different what you're allowed to do though along the way is play fighter kids so um and this is where things get really really interesting because people's like
everyone should think about their infinite games what is the infinite game they do and maybe you have multiple ones that happen to be in reasonable alignment and you should make your life decisions largely based on your uh infinite game like again I talked about
Michael my infinite game as um I I I I love Computing I I have a computation and technology has huge potential I really love people I guess it's like they have huge potential and frankly we are people and therefore we should look out for each other like will
it be we should have each other reach our full potential species and individual level and and and and and you know design and systems and organization and all like my goal is well for everything I do is try to like get people as much power from technology like like you see a
little bit on that fridge and um so Shopify is awesome for me because um you know like I I it's it's bad and it costs resources it's like my my infinite game is in 100 alignment with my or all the finer games I play Within the company of like doing Financial calls
uh you know I don't know like you know build a company worth looking for and and and and and you know all these things are fine at and have goal is um filling the role of CFO you know like it's a game that's recurs every you know hopefully not too many years
um and so um so so that's I think uh uh here important I think the world of bay often confuses this um because for instance school is such a great example um I'm really down on academic and school here I mean this conversation is funny we all have like I think an
infinite goal for being educated right like we want to be educated if we want to acquire knowledge um so that we could we can turn it into wisdom right like that's sort of like a Pursuit I think everyone's on I hope but when we then when we explain this to
kids the way we tell them to do this is like you play the game of great one and there's a test in the end and you are passing or not passing in the end at least solve a return system you repeat the entire class and uh when um the yearbook first prices you play a
great again and this time it's called two and then you do this again and then you the two and underneath there each subject is like math is like we start on page one and we do a page of a book and uh we saw the current topic and then there's a test and you solve the test it's like it's a
fractal of finite games and everyone's forgetting about verification because if if you remember the education being the infinite team I think there's a whole lot of fire games we're playing even in schools that are not leveling up to the infinite game
we are we end up obsessed with testing over testing Road memorization random things that are just like kind of so beside the point and um I think very often um Michael this isn't the score and my observation my biases before having kids on my observation with having kids is
about um some of it is really really good and some of it is totally random and just because it's something you're doing because you're doing it and be a falling out of alignment okay so what does all this mean favorite rubber hits the road uh for finite and infinite games it is
the following and actually we talked about this and this is actually um potentially sort of a theoretical sort of frame of the Knowledge Tree to hang these sort of leaflets of interesting ideas from earlier on the biggest difference is the attitude to change
and between those two games if you pull a lever somewhere and you change gravity down to 0.7 G um on planet Earth if that would be a thing pick fight games of tennis cannot record a tennis depends on gravity being 1G no it's not something that is going to be
edited hopefully um but it is not possible to have a game of tennis ever again if planet of Earth just doesn't have 1g of gravity um you can potentially invent a new game but then um maybe even one which is more fun and Tennis frankly um but um you have to end forever this game and
you have to invent a new game it seems to me that the only people who seem to have ability to reinvent the game based on changed information however people were actually the infinite players on along some other Journey maybe the infinite Mulligans
would like just Again Fitness or a set Mastery or something or uh you know just actually sort of a need for physical entertainment it's like like whenever it is um but if you are on an infinite Journey change is actually welcome change is clarifying changes a new bit of
information because you actually have no opinion to like do you want to try to get a horizon but like you're not because this is a goal like there is no goal in an infinite game but only reason why you want um that you you have this vision of
wanting to get towards the horizon is from Horizon for something else and I think that's uh I think that's poetic that's beautiful and I think it's describe like I I I feel I um this I read this book twice now once and it sort of roughly came out and once uh
like 20 years later almost um and um um I I realized maybe maybe the first helped me in this way myself but I I feel I just always had more to do with the infinite game uh games um and and I've learned to translate the tasks that need to be done along an
infinite game into finite winnable quantifiable sort of higher more fast-paced games because a lot of people ask me to right it's like most people are just not okay on the full like sort of raw like you never know how you're doing you sort of like even progress is not
there's a lot of ambiguity it's not satisfying because like it's like there is no nothing you're working towards it's just trying to it's its own like it's progress for its own sake it's not even progress for like an outcome that you're hoping for um um it's almost a little bit
spiritual but pursuit of this it's like it's it's you're doing this for your own purposes and um nothing in society tells people that this is anything worth doing or even but anyone else I think you you can't have a career unless the client some kind of ladder which is
finite and and one run and one job up and one title change and like therefore people's identity gets tied into the finite like I'm currently crushing the finite game of being a senior ux developer or a subject like this and um um you think that's yourself worth and
you're like and someone comes to you and saying hey if you don't do would you step up because we just moved to extra but like like that's actually an engineering job because it's part of engineer discipline we move them you fall over there that's like
crushing to some people and delightful to others and um I I was always wondering trying to figure out like how to separate people and I I do find you you can sort of spot it in the language but people that people use talking about their own career and you
know Shopify hires through um uh previously talk about just your life story a lot and and I feel like we can find a lot of um predictive artifacts in in the life story about which kind of type of pursuit you're on but I think the key is just invite
people like I actually think this is one of those like a lot more people would say holy hell this is that sounds like a lot more reasonable as a sort of way I'm going to structure my my career and my life then this sort of meal to uh like to do the same thing
over and over and just trying to like I don't know hit record close slightly better with slightly higher number um you do that if you actually want to become the most persuasive people or platter if you'll actually give if that's a thing you want to build
or if this is your craft through which you make comments better for everyone and and make entrepreneurship more available through our products you know like maybe if you can find the alignment between the ancient goals of a company and your infinite codes of uh the fix that you
really want to acquire for yourselves and when you pick your finite games as things that have a second order effect to help you along your actual Journey there's a Harmony that's unbeatable and I think when you study really really successful people you invariably find
people who are on some kind of uh intrinsic sometimes unacknowledged to our third world um journey of their own and a um Airbase structured where the time Management in such a way that they've spent most of their time um doing things that are I'm a valued by
Society potentially for the purpose of a job but actually spent uh play dual Duty towards their own goals we'll switch gears talk about a couple personal questions one of which is you recently tweeted that you had fixed your sleep I'm curious what did you do to fix your
sleep you have to admit I uh when when one thing one compromise I made and Corbett started is um the head of prescription for sleeping pills which I had just for um some international travel like so I could um I just ended up like I I was really worried about initially
because it's like that's speeding that's a pretty stupid slippery slope um it's easy to create a depends on but like the other side was if I can't do red eyes then I can just lose one day with my family on each side of international travel and I just
like that felt like an easy easy decision to make so I had this um when covet started come in as you can maybe spot if like spools up chronologically here at the top I the things I shared about um you know going for all roadmap and looking at and canceling a lot of things
and doing a million other things besides covet um for me meant 14 16 hour days every day all day like seven days a week uh for probably a year and a half three extra two years probably almost like I think I started taking weekends after a body and a half again
um well at least one day um it was just like I I I I lots of my Executives turned over um who ended up just like um that wasn't for them to go into those times and um so so I I you know for obvious reasons anyway if the this is sort of um you're not making excuses
it's just I'm like I can work two free jobs uh my time management skills and and background um if I'm reliably sleeping uh six and a half hours actually precisely um by the way I thought I needed much more so um then so so I took sleeping pills
all it was to say I looks ridiculous um and I was like okay I gotta get office because I'm not gonna stay dependent second first and so I I imagine this is gonna take me a very long time but I'm saying like one of my first questions I ask is like if we know about this go did this and
what can I learn from there I'm like clearly a lot of people are good at sleeping like this is some this feels like a course good for a lot of people like um and um um you know what you know what the like because when you go on to sleep hacking and you're like
okay melatonin plus like uh you know redshift on your screens and like routine and always the same and temperature you know when you talk with people who are good at sleeping they don't know of any of these things they just sleep like it's like it's it's very like it's
actually almost annoying to the the Simplicity there okay that was a backdrop I'm like okay man what's the theory here so um I eventually found that this like I mean CBT is like a modern package I mean it's if I might be clip here if it's like a modern packaged stoicism right like uh
uh you know cognitive behavior and therapy that is um it's like sort of take stoicism plus um I think a little bit of private Adler and uh a little bit of young and then package it in a potent system that you can study and then it's like brilliant it's
exactly what we need so good stuff um unreasonably effective as a form of therapy um has a lot of subferies one of them is CBD I cbdi is a sub part of that called insomnia it's actually it's all correctly named but actually it's it's correct Han I think the taxonomy is
correct so um finding out by this exists I tried finding a doctor for it I couldn't um because uh there's only like I think all of the United States is a hundred certified um people have been doing it since the 90s um Effectiveness rate is 90 is better at
sleeping pills um they reliably fix everyone's insomnia in a couple in a bunch of sessions um and um kind of somehow we don't talk about it I'm like okay like what how do you like I found a book to read to like I think I think I've read like two books on it or
they were like pretty sort of Pop scythe and I think you can pick any book because it's actually pretty basic um actually found some apps the tab which I think is actually really great um sort of entry point for app based healthcare because I think
what we what the practitioners do is based similarly they just put you on a program if they hold you rigorously to it but these apps actually do a very good job unless I actually have more data because I have wearing an aura ring which was very useful to have data
before I even started with this already I highly recommend oral Rings or apple watches obvious trackers um because having some data about your sleep is important and then web apps can just help you interfere with us okay whatever I learned I'm not going to go for an entire
program because you just have to do it but um I thought this is going to take me a month of a grind I actually sort of pre-registered for Shopify may have to take like full time off to do this um by day three except for a night I have
been sleeping perfectly ever since I mean once a month I maybe like if we walk walk me through this this is like what what are the steps to to do that what app do you use honestly it's just it's like it's mental unfortunately or annoyingly it's like it's I fought
poorly old sleep I've had I have had bad stories that I taught myself like such as if I wake in the morning up in the morning and I feel drowsy I had a bad night's sleep that's incorrect it's like that just means you you woke up in a different part of a sleep cycle right
you cannot just your sleep it's also I add stories like I need eight hours of sleep I don't I I in fact you can I think if you if you've spent enough times forgetting to church whoever was you probably have enough data to figure this out you go into the sleep app you
look at all of history you you get us to put the average of your sleep like sleep is like hunger you like there is no need to train for it like a sleep sleep will come your body takes it like your body like it will tell you when you're hungry and if there's no um your
your body will tell you and you're sleepy um if you're not sleepy that means just exactly one thing you are not sleepy um um there's a difference between sleepiness and fatiguedness fatigueness is like you are running on too low sleeve fatiguedness can lead to sleepiness like
they were often correlated they different things you cannot sleep when you're just fatigued and not sleepy but you can always sleep when you're sleepy um so what to do from it on an effective basis basis is uh you you do create this routine a lot of these tools are useful
um you uh but and this is the hardest part you do not do basically that's some minor allowances anything in your bed better specific it's you see you'll be your best for sleeping you have a chair close by uh that's you take your book there
um you would read there um you do not bring your phone to bed ever even something after doing if it's like convenient and you just like hiding from kits or whatever um and uh like it's just it's it needs to be a little bit more popular and to sleep
um to allow yourself to go um sleep like into a bed if you're sleepy ah you don't go there until you're sleepy you learn how to figure out your sdb you will always get sleep at the same time of the day and if you don't sleep you don't need your sleep you just like
I I'm going to sleep at like I'm going I'm going reading at 10 every evening basically that's sort of like maybe sometimes a little bit earlier depending on how good my book is um and then I'm the go to my bed and I'm sleepy and I I sleep immediately I fall
asleep like my sleep Effectiveness rating on my sleep Checkers is basically 95 now it's like I just that means like on average it's like five minutes and bad weather not sleeping and um then uh okay I I some some nights there's more some next nights are stupid it's fewer
after like over a course a week it averages to exactly six and a half hours which because that is exactly what my what taught me the average amount of sleep that my body takes um is now yeah you can be less lucky like you can be more unlucky here and
you might actually need it um a bit Point that's your number um but this is apparently that people read who actually deliberately needs up to 12 hours of sleep I I that sounds like that's crazy unbelievably if you got that with modern society I really feel for most people
that should be treated as like man big what what a rough card that would be to be dealt with um but results people were fine with uh you know less there's a book which initially I thought was good called why we sleep which is actually very bad um from everything I know now
um I I mean it's it's not bad for Coke as incorrect in the macro sense but it gives you it it I think the book itself is anxiety-inducing um because it makes claims on which I don't think prove out on the um importance of sleep and how everyone's goals should be to
sleep eight hours and there is no variance this is a bizarre claim to make given that the oil were incredibly good trackers now and we have all the data and they just simply know that that's not true um and so I think there's a bit of damage caused by this and I think we
need to change the story okay so I don't know if that's like all content but need to go on a podcast I I actually um I I don't know what to do with this I feel like it's just like it's silly that we have so many people who can't sleep and it's actually something that seems
like maybe this can't help everyone but like it seems to have everyone I'm sending in this direction well that's how I wanted to talk to you about it because everybody has problems sleeping and it seems like the most common problem these days is like you go to bed
you don't have a problem falling asleep but then you wake up at like two or three a.m and you're like wide awake and wired yeah exactly it's a I mean what to do is you get up to your chair for 15 minutes you read and your body is sleeping and then you go back
and um after a while your body just doesn't do it anymore like it's it's I know it sounds crazy but like it's like text to detangle we need a new brain and body for this and uh like if with one of those it's like super not in on the job or not aligned with a with a
football institution of sleep and like you feel about sleep um yeah interfere yeah um two final questions what do you use to spend time on that you now see as a waste of time a lot of travel um I think um I I think it's hugely Pro um spending time with people and I think
travel is a um instead of a text on doing this which is totally like easily worth it um but I think there was a lot of trouble before that um pandemic I think which was almost like I don't know feels like it was almost Penance for meetings like
it's just like hey there like it's like your sincerity had to be proven at some kind of altar of sincerity by you sacrificing uh days of travel and airports and cross-continent travel um and compromising your time with your children like it's just like see it
sounds insane now but we did this all of us um that shouldn't come back but should come back is like hey the deliberate time spent with people that are important and then it works Nets out I I I fell a little bit into this work through org chart treated as a
trust for you know like uh hire smart people and then get out of their way I think that's a waste of everyone's time it's not even good for the like it's a nice story but it's like dumb it's like one of those would be nice if that would work but doesn't uh
if at least not maybe again if you're going for middle of a BattleCraft outcomes then I think probably it works but and in some Industries that's all you need to do um but like not that mine um we are trying for class um so um I have enormous perspective and
ability to again found the legitimacy to make things happen faster and uh it's something I want to make decisions I wanted like I want to be part of my Pawn decisions because that helps me for my mental model and so now I have a um idea of a trust battery that we talked
about in previous times you talked about and today about um the trust battery builds we work together we work alongside we make key decisions together as a team everyone brings perspective we listen to absolutely everyone but the choice at some point has to be someone's
and um um yeah it's not a good place for Faith like it's like the end of the day if you're trying to make a broadcast product it's all the details that matter and for that you need to have a team of people who are okay to go into all the details um
or at least can talk to the trade-offs that have been considered when we talk about the details and so um I think that's uh it is so really how I always worked on all technology okay I like understanding like many layers below the level I'm working at um um I again I feel very
I don't know why it took me or almost a decade but like it took me almost a decade to allow my the way I've been successful in developing with technology and software to actually fully come to uh fruition and outside of Oakland technology uh like you like maybe there's a sort of a
thing you you're spotting the in our conversation I'm I'm a lot more at ease with the integration of those two things I think it's not even an integration it's actually on collision course and I think maybe it's already happened I don't know
man like I'm looking at some everything there's a lot of good content and something like have a business report but sometimes I read with things I'm like that is some kind of weekend that Bernie's kind of start party you guys are on where you think we'll start still just
like if this is like everything that you're talking and taking as like statements and as this especially mutable truths his utterly in uh invalidated by things that we've figured out in engineering system design 10 years ago and just because that's the Nerds doing this kind
of thing we haven't been pulling out the lessons in the way like from his poker evenings to then get an Open prize for in Game Theory right like we it used to be that Academia was better at pulling uh yeah the lessons out of practitioners and um uh I don't think
that's happening anymore and um if Academia are doing it we should at least the Business Leaders need to do a bit more and so I don't know I've changed the way I work mostly around self-confidence and and in my uh um intuitions either again I think your
iteration is one of the mental models all of you experience the super computer in our brain is absolutely utterly in support not unsurpassed by auditory machines combined um coming to work to produce everything you've ever seen to make the best decision in the moment
um and uh continuing just to build out like the situations I can fold up models to or can say I've seen this before and uh um you know that's that's how I become better at my job and um I'm not putting engineering skills on speed dial anymore they are now the core
of how I make decisions and I I I I just that's been just a fascinating like if I could travel back in time like and just give this as a hey this is this will happen I wouldn't but I would be extraordinarily surprised by this I I really was almost in a like hey I
this skills took me here they will not take me there I actually need to go for a full change of identity and just like embrace me looking for strategy and like a bit more of a sort of old school things a bit um I I thought this is gonna work it's blown up in my like I think it can work
in peace time uh I think it cannot and and and I don't like wartime I think crunch time and like bear like everything matters where all the slack is gone you know like they're they're like very very it's much more of a high high wire Act of track can can you pull this
off like um it's just there's not enough slack in the system then and everything has to be more precise and the feedback loop is much like we're in a recession time potentially uh it came out of code which was like a different like it's crisis into crisis in a way
um of all the weirdest crises of compared to previous ones like just bizarre shape up to them um and uh therefore even less predictive back then you can't even really look at previous ones because we just never had an economy that was also good but inflation
but all this kind of things um so so um um in this time space like no margin for error but like very tight feedback loops it's actually better times for this kind of decision making and and again even more valuable very valuable and very Innovative in the new
seem a lot more comfortable I hope so what technology are you most excited about right now um well I would say out of I mean look I'll say me Diverse and everyone's rolling the eyes I think for me Diverse is like a Hemingway uh um implementation uh it's like uh no uh
and then suddenly everywhere and it's like it's hard to predict where it's going to be we definitely have a platform requirements around glasses but like they are always like the labs are hearing loss um people know how to work I think we know how to make
lasers for the glasses now minus maybe red um and like that like this is really where Academia shines and and then there's a lot of practical um uh industry industry relevant work happening um uh so so that is going to happen and I'm excited about it uh I think that um
it's it'll just be clear that it's openly going to a bad word um it's not as far away as Peter think right now you've got to say like machine learning so machine learning has been unreasonably effective already um but why do Transformer models change
everything like it's another one of us they've Transformer models feel a little bit more of a vocational than academic and like they're probably not as good an analogy to the brain as maybe some of her other like approaches or at least it's up as puplay as some of them
um bad boy back it's crazy what's happening like it's crazy and another thing that I love about what's happening machine learning like his it it feels like uh I mean Delhi types of a mobile details of credit here but really I have to say as a sort of collapsed
Apprentice computer programmer slash hacker I love that uh stable diffusion happens and um not even for what it can do over but it's stunning like who knew that so much of a human creativity could fit into 4.2 gigabytes of of binary floating Point numbers h
I mean that's another thing to send back in the bottle like for a time machine and really really stun people with well but we all live in that world where we know but that's true which is like also something that doesn't feel fully reintegrated with our main line human
history um and um uh but what what is so profound I think stable diffusion is that it's gotten released as open source and now what's happening with it is just a wants to it's like all acceleration it has but all like this is already the property maybe minus crypto the fastest
progressing field in the world and um has just found two or three more gears there because if you track like I mean we started like I think first versions on top of a line graphics cards on your own machine you can execute this by this open source
um you could make an image in 15 seconds I think they're down to three yeah and and like with no Hardware changes and just like well because um the tooling behind machine learning was again it's a very academic field it really feels academic it's heck yeah not really an outcrop of the
soundest engineering uh that I've ever seen although it's unbelievable what I've enabled but like it's it's coming from again mathematical Purity rather than sort of develop a experience like this kind of stuff so so that's true and then you
have but now you have a lot of people who can contribute because we have an open source thing that we can all hack on so suddenly you have the people who are good at developer experience suddenly you have people like John Carmack who are like hey everyone we can probably do this
with less precision and here's like 15 ways in order to ever use a computer but I don't know if he actually is saying this but like he will say this because he's that kind of person he's going to tell us how to make computers do this thing significantly easier and a lot of
people who are like grew up on CarMax contributions to video games and and have been inspired and what to do and bring the same thing to this field so um everything changes every time there's like a significant breakthrough in terms of speed and and and and computation
because uh like it is extraordinary how many things we can do with language large language models and uh diffusion models and Transformers and I I just like I wish I think in a more inspired world yesterday's breakthroughs in the world of stable diffusion would be every
single day of the last couple months at the front page news in my newspapers um yeah just we're spending our time thinking about a very relevant and very important but although there's more important things going on in the world that are like a lot more
crazy exciting cyberpunk and optimistic um um and uh I think that's I I think that's incredible I I I just can't wait to see what's coming uh coming from there I'm pretty optimistic about coming out out of like whatever valuable things coming out of the crypto world as well
um now as that went first cycle which is shedding a lot of uh sort of froth that was very obvious and easy to criticize for and um so I find that I I I I'm I am extremely excited whenever things progress um I can watch three four or five different
fields right now or November progressing at Breakneck Pace where I mean especially machine learning is the first time I think I found my total capacity like I actually have to say this progresses so fast but I think my model of what's possible is for him
right even though I'm trying to make that not true I think sometimes I just don't notice that something is accelerating and far behind but then I can catch up there I'm actually having trouble staying staying uh on top of it I mean maybe that's a statement about me
being very busy at work maybe it's a statement normally being in my 40s now um but like um I don't know if like if if if it's a test for machine learning model Builders but first which is clearing it um in a technique of rare monophic very relative quotas for about because I
think we have a lot of writing on this um so that's awesome The Best is Yet to go it is it's and it's gonna be freaking amazing there is no chance like I'll take a long bet for a lot of money on this if anyone wants to take it it'll have to be a real long bet but
like if I'm right I'll have to pay out um but for rest of human history but 20 years before this point I mean 20 years after I'm going to be more studied and will be treated as the coming of eight of our species um they are going to be treated as the
formative years where we went through the questions we had to ask ourselves where we had to um to learn how to organize in a way that we save our planet or at least take things that are available to us and and prioritize them based on something that is clear prioritization for the for
for the for for the global good like where we actually band together I was had very high hopes this would happen around covet covert felt the first time um maybe since uh since since a plague has as a like at all humans got attacked by something
and it might be might be a binding experience we all know that didn't work um but I think we learned a lot about how information travels and and how it you know like the upsides and the downside so yeah we've kind of so much more mature in understanding what the
world is like given all these new possibilities um uh we have and so uh I think these are our formative years in a lot of ways they've involved um a coming of age of I think the one of the greatest bit bits of like if technology is progress the turing machine is the
engine of progress and uh that that almost all like net human purpose is going to be built on uh because everything is going to round to zero um and it was probably mainly needed for bootstrapping the turing machine and uh the uh there like that really
sort of custodians and the explorers of this field and I I just I have man like there's no chance you would want to live through any different times if a future is fantastic and will probably become immortal relatively soon and all these kind of things
um and um maybe not us but our children they think well uh and and so um a lot of what people will be preoccupied with in the future is clearly what's what's next and what's possible and many of the biggest questions will remain to be studied and and to guide our
curiosity but like it's here where it all was like pop on the table and it was being wounded the world thing and I just it seems it seems so incredibly great to be around to be able to study this stuff it's so fantastic to go and um actually be a public like play a tiny
little role like make the title Dent into it like again the the crazy possibility that that you know so many of us um who made these choices to get into this industry or pick up these disciplines and these skills which all really really help making
companies which are the implementations of large-scale coordination which again as I said earlier is like all the problems that are worth solving now are large-scale coordination challenges um you know we get to play up like our part in it and we get to make a dent
into it and I think that means we get to right into the like the the most lit up parts of like of of a historical record I think that's just I think it's humbling and incredible and then we get to or play pattern and that's cool I think that's a great place to end this thank you