"if you do the hard path and it doesn't work actually you still kind of win because you've now done something hard you've probably worked with smart people you've learned something along the way that i..."

"to delete code and simplify we have a delete code club we can always almost find a million plus lines of code to leete which is insane I found this great quote from you not everyone can look stupid in..."

"incredibly interesting company because they have over 10,000 employees are fully remote and even though they were founded almost 20 years ago they continueed to operate with urgency velocity and a ver..."

"much more he also shares his experience with indexing towards choosing the harder option when you have multiple options to choose from and why that ends up making your life easier he also shares a bun..."

"furhan th foran thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast thanks for having me as I Was preparing for our conversation I talked to a bunch of people that you've worked with over the ..."

"three of those things came from um and I think that it is uh something that if you look back on my career I've like hit points on each of those things but I I don't think at the onset I knew that that..."

"intelligence solution designed by Leading researchers including Those Behind the Dora and space Frameworks it combines quantitative data from developer tools with qualitative feedback from developers ..."

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"Toby this decade maybe yourself next decade if things go well other than what you've shared or maybe it is what you've shared is there a thread across these three folks that have been really successfu..."

"actually sat down and wrote a list of all the unreasonable people that I knew in Toronto and I went down the list and met every single one of these entrepreneurs to figure out are we API compatible an..."

"point of like I actually sent my framework to a recruiter one time and I said hey this thing because they kept going back and forth to me and I go hey this doesn't align with my framework right so it ..."

"completely um uh you know not aligned and then I just told the team hey I plan on resigning and and uh that by the way LED to Great other things because I'm an investor and new companies that have spu..."

"I just want to try to get as much done as possible during the time versus is expanding the time and I can give you an example right I I used to work at a company where you know it was like I work 12 h..."

"at scale instead of you know if I give you an hour to do something a good per a really good person can get a high quality output in one hour I want to talk about how you create an org that operates th..."

"able to be written in 1 hour and so pair programming I mean that's an extreme version of it but even at like pivotal Labs if your pair was sick that day and you wrote a bunch of code the strong versio..."

"this and so actually I ran the biggest pair programming shop in the world so on that note so what percentage of shop like Shopify do this is this how you all operate yeah so Shopify I mentioned that T..."

"to be a PA programmer yes exactly in the future okay I want to come back to what else you have done at Shopify to create intensity and I think again it's important to highlight the intensity is meant ..."

"there's so much there uh I have been through through those six Monon reorgs and uh I'm trying to like I think that context you just shared of we're at a volatile company uh we're changing things it's ..."

"if we had bigger and then they were like oh we don't have this is undocumented but like we'll just enable it right now for Shopify and so that kind of created the intensity of the team be like oh we c..."

"I don't want to overuse the pairing Paradigm but it is really much like can I pair with you and I learned this actually very early in my Shopify tenure because Toby would these one-on on with me and I..."

"something more like uh like a river of information that I can dip my toe into versus like I and chat um everywhere that is super interesting so it's specifically things that are just updates where you..."

"example was we we started seeing that it was taking a lot of time to develop in our admin like engineers at Shopify developing in the admin so we called like what's called like code yellow which is be..."

"nft gating is one thing one use case but if you spend the time to build out the infrastructure layer he calls it putting gas in the tank if you put the gas in the tank people could drive on that gas f..."

"course you know who knows what can flourish from there it's interesting and it makes sense that so much of the way you all think is about building the best possible platform versus the necessarily bes..."

"one we should be gunning for number 100 right like we want to be not on this list right someone else can take the crown this episode is brought to you by vanta when it comes to ensuring your company h..."

"streamline Security reviews get $1,000 off vanta when you go to v.com Lenny that's v.com Len wait talk about more about this so there's been a drive to delete code and simplify what's kind of that wha..."

"else becomes uh like easy to build on top of and so we routinely we have like a have a delete code club we have hack days which happens two or three times a year where there's always one team that is ..."

"us being long-term infrastructure thinking um we really do care about that I love this in part because it connects to the topic we're talking about which is speed velocity intensity smaller codebase c..."

"get into this mode it is super super hard and I would say like Toby is the secret sauce here because he he pushes us to think about things as infra almost all the time I mean one of the things that an..."

"that goes back to the beginning right like choose the hard thing don't just build the feature go make the feature easy to build I feel like there's just more and more good stuff what else what else is..."

"Fidelity of the feedback you're getting because you know famously some of our PM team will create a friction log they'll be like I I'm walking they'll just create a a screen share create a video and g..."

"quick feedback if they're moving in the wrong direction and having the leaders pair with those people on those problems not just checking in but actually pairing with them on the problems that they're..."

"their working hours you like Bally don't let no okay no not really I mean yeah not not I mean we're not super firm on working hours from that perspective but I mean we do have like we we have a lot of..."

"notion which is like how much uh you know how much trust can you have between people and it can deplete over time if you're remote so and then we have offices which are like come in if you want right ..."

"exec team which are impatient intense people by Design but even some of the non-founders are just accomplished people who um tend to be pretty like they have we all have this attitude of impatience an..."

"want that why would I want to work with chaos and fires everywhere but in reality if you don't you're business is unlikely to become incredibly successful and that is even more stressful and painful c..."

"Shopify and so job trials I'm a huge fan of which leads me to like intern programs what a great interview process because you now have real work product from somebody for four months they get to see w..."

"in my previous companies I almost like you mentioned I almost didn't interview anybody I almost just said come in and work and it allowed us we had a much higher like in the first 90 days like 20% att..."

"possible because by doing that we can um likely assess the skills that you have in your interview closer to what's happening in the job right so that's one two we have this interview step called the l..."

"so long to realize and funny for me because like I ended up redesigning the compensation system of shifi even though though I'm an engineer so I still thought of myself as an engineer through and thro..."

"different role could be at a different company but that's like a good thing for everybody and then do you actually do work trials with new engineering hires or is it like something you aspire to do ye..."

"fulltime yeah so just to double click on that so you're Hing a thousand interns yes over the course of the year uh that's a lot and the idea there is these folks are actually useful building useful th..."

"over a longer period like it seems like win-win win the other thing that was cool is after I did that tweet a bunch of other CTO messaged me and said hey we're gonna hire a thousand one interns to bea..."

"we needed to do is again restart this notion of uh of early talent in the ecosystem there's one I would say one or two big differences with our intern program one is um we're making them come in three..."

"remote that is amazing for folks that don't know anything about these Coop programs briefly it's just basically while you're in school before you graduated during the summer you go work at a company o..."

"blocked on this we don't have this API we need money for this machine like whatever and so the unscheduled one-on ones ended up being like a real um Clarity clarifying thing for me because I did sched..."

"obviously he a smart guy but he said the right thing which is not this can never work because then I would go into defense mode and explain to him why it would work he just said to me I'm not going to..."

"a one-on-one every week or having to um you know talk about things that potentially a system could unblock and so I tried to figure out ways to to systematize things I love is just another example of ..."

"doesn't make sense to have like three people reporting to and then to somebody and then they only have three people like it you just make a very deep hierarchy we actually do see by the way the farthe..."

"reports per level makes sense okay final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round we have this recurring segment that I call fail corner where generally people come on these podcast..."

"even folks like you fail and maybe what you learned from that experience I have a few I'll say one thing by the way because I think I read I think I read this in Tim Ferris is book or on the podcast w..."

"we didn't have any react native apps in in Market at the time a year later we we launched the iOS version and uh it was a huge success and uh we then spent like another six months building the rag nat..."

"goes but you didn't take the risk and so what I should have done and by the way even now thinking back it would be super hard to do first week get job by right is like take a risk on a platform that w..."

"but it's like obviously you don't want to just take risks there's like a limit of like a risk but like you know informed I guess is there anything you miss there that would told you this was the right..."

"Facebook had a similar mistake early on in their career five yeah exactly and I don't know if you were zuck's interview at the chase Center that the acquired podcast did and he talked about this where..."

"like based on all the pain he's gone through back like since then he's like that was not too bad yeah it's true actually maybe what people don't know is um we were I was at Facebook the like we were e..."

"at because something weird is going on it takes that to an interesting level so I would recommend reading that book it's not long that's fun I think another book that I recommend to people and it's ki..."

"is like the opposite it's very very easy and and easy read I'm excited to read these next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed I read a recent one was a Challe..."

"discovered that you really love I don't know if I want to be like in the in the Zeitgeist right now but like The Meta Ray bands are amazing and the biggest thing about the meta Ray bands was just like..."

"got a lot a lot to teach us and I put on Ray B's while we were doing the interview just for fun you could see my setup I did it two more questions do you have a favorite life motto that you find usefu..."

"thing with my Tesla I used to do it with a non electric car and my wife was always like don't do that screwing it up yes exactly I love that on the an electric car there's no gear you're breaking it's..."

"with them and uh this is one example of like pulling somebody out of that environment I and I have lots of other ones where like I overhear someone and they're a designer or an engineer and I try to t..."