Mark MacLeodFounder, Limitless.ceo · The Startup CEO Coach | Helping ambitious CEOs & founders scale world-changing companies without sacrificing their health, happiness, purpose, or humanity

Glen Coates from Shopify: Advice for founders

7 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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Glen Coates, who founded Handshake, wishes he'd stayed closer to the product instead of stepping away from coding. His board pushed him to become a pure CEO and delegate R&D, but he now sees that as a mistake. Staying technical would have kept him connected to what customers actually needed.

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The thing that I've learned just in terms of the way that I did the job, one of the things that I wish I could do if I could do Handshake again, I, one of the things that I would do is I would stay much closer to the product than I did. And one of the mistakes that I made was, you know, I did need to step back from doing quite so much coding. That was true. Like I needed to spend more time on other parts of the business. I mean, I don't know if boards still give this advice, but at the time this was sort of the playbook, right? It's like, oh, you need to be a real CEO now and start building a business and let the R&D team do R&D things and don't spend so much time on that.