How to Advance Your Career Without Managing People | Sam Gregg-Wallace

We're not a OKR driven company. Instead we have a founder who sets a green path for where the company ought to go. All of HR and talent at Shopify is in low distraction mode. And don't interrupt the people that are working on Shopify the product. Unless you absolutely have to find people that actually give a shit and put that concept or that like that drive of giving a shit into everything they do, then the outcomes are just going to be phenomenal. What we've done is built this super cool rewards wallet that allows them to select how much equity versus cash they want to do. This person got an amazing far exceeds rating and it's just beautiful. I've got such a soft spot for high agency people. We see almost 2/3 of our engineers using cursor every single day.

Okay, welcome everyone. My guest today is Sam, VP of talent at Shopify. Really excited to talk to Sam about creating possibly the most radical career system in tech that includes elevating individual crafters to the same level as managers, making AI usage mandatory, and building a distraction free talent operating system. So welcome Sam.

Thanks for having me, Peter. Super excited to be here.

All right, so let's get right into it, man. How is Shopify kicking down the traditional career ladder?

Yeah, sure. I mean Shopify was built with a commitment to craft that's at the core of everything Shopify does. One of the amazing things about Shopify is it was founded by, by Toby with a, with a real, like, with a real dedication or philosophy. That craftsmanship is at the core of every, every great product. It's the load bearing property of every great product. And as a result it's also necessary for building a world class company that, that craftsmanship is the core thing. And so what we have, what we have endeavored to do is really kick down the traditional corporate ladder and give crafters the ability to be just as important or more important than managers. Or said in a totally different way. Companies hire people for the skills that they have developed over their careers and their own life journey. And then quite often they attach. They, you know, if they put them to work, they, they start to reward them. But in order to get the most important rewards, they quite often have to go up that corporate ladder, probably move into some adjacent career path and become a manager to get either the recognition or the responsibilities or the rewards that, that they're looking for. When in when what we want to do is allow those crafters to cook, allow that commitment to craft to shine through everything we do. And so what we're doing is trying to build as much of a low distraction as. As as much low distraction, but meaningful careers and give those crafters as much responsibility as possible with as little process as absolutely possible. So that's what we're trying to do by kicking down that traditional corporate ladder is put craftsmanship right back to the heart and at the forefront of everything Shopify does.

I love that. I think, I think people who, you know, people who give a shit about the craft and quality of the product, they don't want to spend all the time thinking about career layers of promotions and all this other stuff doesn't want to make the product better, you know.

Exactly.

And I think you call this system the mastery system, Right. So maybe you can give us a demo of what this looks like. Yep.

Yeah, sure. I mean, just to sort of repeat that, like, craft is at the core of everything we do. And so we. While everybody's career journey is. Is different, we're trying to attract the best crafters in the world. And that's people who have honed their skills in other. Other. Other careers. Other. But it's also brand new people to. Brand new people to the journey of being an engineer, developer or product manager. And so we get people in who are quite late in their careers or through say our apprentice product manager program. And. And then once you are at Shopify, everybody has. Is part of our. What we call a mastery system. And so why don't I just show you what that. What that looks like. Who's a C6 software engineer? This is a crafter who, you know, Andrew doesn't quite work here yet, but he will. Everybody at Shopify has a. Has a mastery number. The goal here is that this is to approximate the progress in the craft of their job. So that should be a combination of the impact they've made to the company and to the mission and to our merchants and. And the skills that they've developed along the way. And so what you're seeing here is that all promotions are based on this mastery system. And there is a combination of net impact and calibrations, but it all comes back to the craft. To the craft of, in this person's case, of a crafter at a level 7 software engineer. And everything in this system is all of the unlocks of rewards of titles of new responsibility are based on that mastery system.

I love the Pokemon card. The gaming.

Guy. Exactly. We're a remote first company and I think with that means is, you know, a career journey can both be very personal and very serious and contributing to the mission is really important, but at the same time it can be delightful and also feel a little bit more like a video game. And we, we try to build a lot of our, A lot of our tools to also be delightful. Right. This person got an amazing far exceeds writing and it's, it's just beautiful treatment.

How do you. There's just like a, there's like a graph there. But like, how do you define what craft is for like a software engineer or like a pm?

Yeah, totally. What we're trying to do at Shopify is know what excellence looks like in every role. And so we have, we start from first principles for a developer. What are the, what are the things that an individual developer, what skillset do they need to have in order to contribute to the mission and deliver for our merchants? And so you can elucidate those things, you can lay those things out and then start to evaluate people on it. But every single, every single journey, every single individual is different. And that's why mastery is designed to approximate the cumulative sum of that person's impact and craft skills. And so while this is a. So while there is a mastery number and everybody has one, that individual journey is totally different and evaluated based on the, the things that are, that we would be able to say, show, point to and say, this is what excellence looks like in that job or in that role.

Okay, like, like depending on the, like the function and the product and everything else. Right? Just like a bunch of.

Exactly, exactly. So each of our, each of our roles have a list of sort of scope requirements that lay out what excellence looks like. And people can see those, can compare against other roles, be able to see what those scope requirements are in other levels and all that sort of thing, and be able to sort of strive for those things.

And do you mind if we do like a little bit of a deep dive on like product managers? Because.

Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, what, what I think is most interesting is, is the entire system together. But we can, we can go deeper on, we can go deeper on that specific discipline or craft.

Yeah, yeah. So like, I find that like, it all comes down to incentives. Right? And like, I've, I've worked at like a lot of different companies and a lot of times PMs are evaluated based on, for example, you get a lot of peer feedback. Did you let stakeholders feel good about you or did you push some number this quarter which might not be tied to craft? Or maybe how many people did you align to go in the same direction on this big prop project? When in reality A lot of times a small team that just has a bunch of autonomy can actually improve the product a lot faster than trying to align like 50 people. So I don't know, have you thought about this? All this stuff is pretty grand nuanced, I guess.

Yeah, absolutely. What we try to do aligned incentives is show me the outcome and I'll show you the incentive. What we try to do at Shopify is really focus on the mission. We're not a OKR driven company. Instead we have a founder who sets a green path for where the company ought to go. We have a mission that's super easy to fall in love with, to make commerce better for everyone, to make entrepreneurship more common by removing the complexity to entry into success. And then that green path translates into product themes and goes to every product manager, engineer, designer, data scientist, and then they make progress on the projects that actually move us towards that green path. And the goal here is to have every incentive aligned so that every person at the company is working on that green path.

And I think, I love that. And I think you can kind of. So a lot of the calibration discussions happen around like, you know, this person did ever a great product. Like do the merchants love this product? That kind of. Yeah.

I mean what, what we do is because we are a software company, a lot of the things that, that most of the things that are delivered to our merchants are observable. And so we know who has worked on what great products and we know what impact that's had on merchants or on the company. Right. And so that, that component is, is really observable and we have really great homegrown tools for one called GSD or get shit done that tracks all of our, all of our projects and makes sure that they're mission aligned and makes sure that they are aligned to exactly what that green path that was set by.

That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. Because I think a lot of the issues comes from when you spend so much time on polishing some internal document or having a good review of Toby and they don't deliver anything like that. That, that is kind of like the stuff you want to avoid. Right, so.

Exactly. And that gets right back to craftsmanship.

Yeah.

Let crafters cook. Right. What, what, what is the biggest slowdown is seeking internal alignment or writing doc instead of just, just doing the work prototyping and shipping code.

Okay. Yeah, I, I feel like, you know, honestly I feel like, I don't know why, but like I feel like 90% of companies don't more focus on the Internal stuff than the actual product, man. I don't know why? Is it like too much bureaucracy or what? It's hard to get around.

Yeah, yeah. When you focus on craftsmanship, I think a lot of that gets out of the way. And what we're trying to build is, what we're trying to do is put all the other pieces into low distraction mode. All of HR and talent at Shopify is in low distraction mode. And don't interrupt the people that are working on Shopify the product unless you absolutely have to.

Can you talk a little about that? So let's take an example. Like the performance review process, right? Like it takes like a lot of bigger companies, like the entire company takes like a few weeks off to do this stuff every quarter. How do you make this load to this distraction?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, what we try to do is, as I said, put Shopify HR and talent into. Into low distraction mode so that crafters can focus on the thing that they need to do. And so what, what we try to do is have. Is in our review or mastery cycle is required the least amount of time from those crafters as possible. So it's a super important step where we are trying to, where we're trying to get as much signal as possible on what excellence looks like and how people have done in that during that period. But from crafters, all we really need is, hey, tell us some of the things that you're proud of, tell us how you've grown and then give us some reflection on the other people you've worked with, who inspires you, what has been great from your peers or, or who. Or the opposite from your peers and the people you've worked with. And then get back to work and in a couple weeks, back comes your manager with a. Their. What you just saw Andrew's mastery report, which sort of shows you, based on the, on the work you've actually done, the skills you've grown over that period, whether you've gotten a promotion, whether, whether you've gotten more rewards, whether you've unlocked a title, whether you, whether you should be working on something on some new project, for example. And so for crafters, it's actually a very small amount of work, but it's a really important, it's a really important step because we want to reward the most impactful people to the company. I mean, for managers, it's a little bit more work because that's sort of core to the craft of management, right? If you have chosen to go into that management craft, this is, this is what comes with it. And so those managers will be calibrating their, their teams, seeing who has the best, the best craft skills in that job. They'll be, they'll be writing reviews, pulling 360feedback from, from peers, and then making the hard decisions about, about distributing rewards and, and other other unlocks to their teams.

And how do you, Let me ask you a hard question. Right, so like let's say you have two PMs. One is like a crafter solving a complex problem and another one is like a manager of like maybe three PMs under the like. Or do you, do you, I guess, do you evaluate the managers separately from the crafters or is it like.

Yeah, absolutely. We think that management is a craft in its, in and of itself. You, you definitely cannot, cannot manage PMs if you are not a, if you are not in product yourself. But it is a different job set. And when I referred to sort of scope requirements and determining what excellence looks like in every job, we have laid out what excellence looks like in the craft of management in the product craft. And so those folks would be evaluated in a different way because it is a different job.

Yeah, I mean that, that makes a lot more sense, man. Like that trying to combine everything together because yeah, like you said, it's a completely different. In fact, when you become a manager, you're make a conscious decision to in some ways kind of step away from the craft of building products to the craft of managing. Right?

Yeah, I, I mean we, we want everybody to be as close to the work as possible. But the job of, of a manager is primarily to make sure that the people on, on their team are working on the right things, doing it at the highest quality level and making sure you're getting the most out of those people so that they are, are able to focus on the right things, are able to grow. But that's a fundamentally different, different craft than being a, a crafter or an individual contributor yourself.

I love that. And, and how does this all translate to like job titles or compensation? Right? Because like some people just want to get the director title or you know, this one. How's that?

Yeah, I mean these, these are all incentives, right? And, and we think really deeply about incentives. It. If I Here, I'll, I'll show you another cool thing here. Go back to, to Andrew's mastery page. Andrew did really great. He's gotten some really good feedback from his team and he's been given a promotion of some, some more money, more mastery points, and, and he's actually unlocked a new title as a result of that. And so he can go in and select that new title and that will be, that will be there on, in, in all the places where he shows up. But he also gets to go to his, another internally built tool, which is his, his rewards wallet. So maybe I'd talk about. This is a very cool, a very cool thing that we've built at Shopify, which is Flex Comp. And this is a, this is a product where what we try to do is give our employees as much agency as possible. This person's unlocked a, a great salary. But we don't want to say, hey you. We actually think you should divide that between equity and cash in the following way or, or lock you in for a certain number of years. We want to give you the agency to do that. And so what we've done is built this super cool rewards wallet that allows them to select how much equity versus cash they want to do, whether they want that to be in reward, in options or RSUs. And then if they want to take that out every quarter or actually maybe they want to build their own boxcar grant in the same way that we reward our, our executive levels and we give them a bonus for putting it in Shop Cash, which is an incredible program. If you're not on, on Shop yet, Peter, you got to get on there where they can take more, more Shop Cash. We'll give them a bonus and they can be buying from great independent Shopify merchants when they need that, that stroller or whatever, whatever the thing is. Or if they're a little bit more, more sustainability minded, they can also put some of that money towards carbon removal. So again, this is, that's how it translates to rewards at Shopify. And we want to give people agency to do it.

That's incredible, man. I don't think I've ever seen something like this anywhere.

Yeah, it's super fun. It's super fun. And people like, you know, every time they get a new, a promotion, then they come in here like you saw on that last page, and, and they can adjust it when, whenever they want. And then the changes get picked up and, and there's sort of new features all the time. It's super cool.

Wow. And this must be hard to build, right? Cause it has to work with the backend systems and like everything. Right. Like this is.

Yeah, a huge what, what we've, what we're building at Shopify is almost all homegrown. And so I think what, what we've realized is that if you want something that's aligned with the principles of the company. You likely can't buy off the shelf third party software for company building. And so we put a lot of energy, a lot of energy into doing those things. So the employee experience is phenomenal and it's all mission aligned.

What do you mean you don't like Work? Workday is like the best software? No, there, there's, yeah, no, I, I, I think it's really important to invest especially for this like employee happiness, career growth stuff. Like investing your own software makes total sense. I mean Shopify has so many employees now.

Yeah, that journey, career journey is super personal. And you know, if we're, if we're implementing software from that, it applies to a hundred different companies. It's not going to be 100% aligned with the mission of Shopify. And so we've learned that and we build, we build really amazing stuff. All of that mastery cycle tooling is for calibrations or for impact reviews is all homegrown and works on our own stack.

That's amazing. So let's talk about, let's wrap up this section by talking about how do you find people who actually give a shit or how do you reward people who actually care about the craft and the product? I think it was a recent example from Julia or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean we, rewarding people that give a shit. Like the concept of giving a shit is like I think super undervalued. This is something that, that Toby has really put, put into my lexicon of like yeah, if, if you're able to give a shit, find people that actually give a shit and put that concept or that like that drive of giving a shit into everything they do, then the outcomes are just going to be phenomenal and it becomes a bit like a feedback loop where as we try to recruit and bring the best crafters into the company that actually give a shit, they, they want to work with people who inspire them and also give a shit. And so it becomes a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. And so how, how do you know? I mean there's two things I, I referenced earlier that as a software company we know the products that people are working on, we know the contributions that they make. That, that is observable and that's really good signal about how good someone is. The quality, the quality of their output is, is, is measurable and observable. That's, that's incredibly powerful. But then there's the second part which is like, is more, is more about other people being inspired and Wanting to work with you. And so we ask crafters to calibrate against, against other people who have, who they have worked with to say who, who are the people that give, give a shit the most, that put the most into these products? And like, you know, who would, if you were starting something today, who would you want to work with? Who has the best skill set, you know, in the following scope requirement of their job or of their craft. Right. And so we ask people and those signals together of the more quantitative as well as, as the, as well as the things that like are harder to quantify but incredibly important. Those things together become like the inputs to where you, where you put your rewards and the status and things that you unlock for people. And I think all that comes down you, you referenced that, that cool example of Julia, but it all comes down to like people who have real agency and, and are high agency individuals who over cycles hone their judgment spend and are able to have like incredibly great output. This was a cool example of like we, we don't really have internships that are non engineering or non R and D at Shopify. But this, you know, this student Julia, we should, we should link the, her, her sort of tweet storm. But she basically said well I'm, I'm sort of the perfect fit for Shopify. Why wouldn't, and she's incredibly high agency person. Why wouldn't you make room for one more? And of course within 20 hours we had interviewed, assessed and hired her because that she gave a shit. She really gave a shit about everything she was doing about her journey. And we think she's going to be able to turn that into a love for the mission and real value for, for our merchant.

Yeah, she made a, she made a marketing video right. Talking about how she'll add value to Shopify and. Yeah, exactly. And I think I got this, I think you sent me this internal slack fair with Toby. I think he was actually on vacation and you know he shared his.

I got a message and our head of, our head of marketing as well saying hey, this is a, this is a pretty cool, this is a pretty cool application. And you know, basically Toby saying I've got such a soft spot for high agency people. And we were like, yeah, we can make room for one more here for sure. And, and really quickly stepped into gear and you know that, that inspires other people in the company and it creates you know, more opportunity for people to people to actually step up. So Julie is joining soon. I can't wait, dude.

For some reason it Keeps happening. Shopify, man. Like on, on, on Twitter. Like, I always see like these people paying Toby or like, I think it's because Shopify is building for all entrepreneurs. It just keeps happening on Shopify versus Other.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The, the whole goal is to, like, reduce the complexity for people to, you know, choose entrepreneurship as a path that. But it's also like, how you do anything is how you do everything. He'll be super engaged with the community because it's his community. The entrepreneurship community is his. Right. And, and, and so being engaged and actually talking to people all the time is, is, you know, it's not a chore. It's. It's what we do. It's super cool.

And I also think it applies to existing employees too. Like, I like one of my pet peeves when someone says, like, you know, oh, I don't own this, or like, that's not my problem. Like, that's like, what?

Right, right. Well, I mean, one of our values at Job Fight is, is, you know, act like an owner. It doesn't matter what your, what your role is. You gotta act like an owner. You're part of the company. You've got, you know, you maybe in your wallet, you chose equity. You're an owner in this company. You. You've gotta act like it. Yeah.

And it probably leads to a bunch of like, candid conversations about company priorities and stuff. Right? It's like people are more authentic.

Yeah, totally. Totally. People are definitely themselves at this company.

Okay, great. All right, well, let's talk about. We talked about AI. A lot of other lead leaders recently, and Toby released the memos saying, like, AI usage is baseline expectation at Shopify.

Right.

And I think that's a great memo from the CEO, but how do you actually put that into practice? How do you actually make sure people use this stuff?

Yeah, I mean, I won't, I won't speak for Toby. I think that memo caught fire because it speaks for itself. It's. It's pretty phenomenal. But I will say how it's. How it's sort of inspiring me and my team for sure. What it, what it really did is shift the responsibility from. Onto every individual to get better, to grow and to get better. Right. And, and setting the baseline expectation. That sort of AI fluency or reflexively reaching for AI is sort of. That baseline expectation is, is basically what it did. I mean, we're, we're super fortunate to have a founder who is a first mover on, on everything and always tinkering with the latest tools. But and so he's been building in the open and sort of tinkering in the open, trying to inspire the whole company. And it's been working. But we're a couple years into this sort of AI revolution and you know, it's time to start holding everybody to the responsibility of, of getting better and growing and starting to reach for these tools. One of my favorite parts about the memo is actually the reflexive language because you can build reflexes, you can, you can build that muscle memory and just by using and by tinkering. And so, you know, I think what, what we've been, what we've seen at the company is like, who's benefiting the most from this memo? It's Shopify itself. Because everybody has shifted to start, to start taking that responsibility themselves instead of it. Instead of that just being sort of a, a build in the open and, and inspiration approach. It's now on all of us to get better every day and start using.

These tools and have you. Like, like I, I can tell from experience, like there's a few barriers, right? Like one barrier is like a lot of the tools are not approved internally. That's one barrier. Another barrier is like people just don't know how to use this stuff. So like, do you have like internal education programs or like try to speed. Unlock a bunch of these tools? Like how, how do you.

Yeah, I mean, barrier. The barrier to access for AI tools at Shopify is zero because we've built those directly in to our development environments and not even just for engineers, but for everyone at the company. I mean, some examples here is that we're, you know, we've, we have our own sort of chat surface that, that we've wrapped every model that's available. You can be playing with those. And you know, Cursor and Copilot are, are and Claude are just like natively embedded here. And so what, what we see is just like people start building that into their flow when you, it's, it's just like Shopify. When you reduce the barrier to entry or remove the complexity from trying. People just build it into their, into their habits. And you start to build a reflex for immediately or you know, immediately reaching for those tools. Um, I mean it's, it's certainly paying off. Like we see, we see almost two thirds of, of our engineers using cursor every single day. And so it's when it's natively built in and there's a responsibility that it's on you as an individual to grow and start using these like you Just see explosive, explosive use.

And do you also have like training or education or like you just like Slack channel? People are sharing tips?

Yeah, yeah. It, Shopify is like, it's interesting. When you say training or education, that sounds pretty corpo to me. Like, Shopify is more of a learner's environment. And so what I immediately went to. Well, almost every team has like the, the sort of demo or let me build in the open type of channel for AI. So one of the teams that, one of the teams that I work with is our recruiting team. And you know, we've got recruiting AI right where people are just sharing everything that they did in that day or, or trying to, trying to share the latest tools as they're tinkering with it. That happens across the board. And so it's, it's much more of a like, you know, build in the open, try things out and share, do things, tell people as opposed to, hey, here's your mandatory, you know, professional development two hours over lunch. And make sure you check that box. And so there's, there's that like people are really, are really spending the time to share what they're doing in open public, you know, Slack channels and that sort of thing. But they're also like, there's, there's also sort of, it's less like here's, here's a great example. We have like a library of prompts, we have an internal wiki that we use and we, we've got this library of great prompts to use or agents that folks have built that help with, you know, a specific task or help with, you know, make sure you are speaking in, in a specific tone. And so all of these things are shared. Like nobody's building in, in secret or in hiding here. All of that stuff is shared. So the collective memory or the collective knowledge of this company, which when it's a learner's company as well, it's just like rises, all boats.

Yeah, that makes sense. And like the fact of the matter is like, once you use this stuff, well, like it helps you do a job. Like, so why would you not use it?

Exactly. That's exactly right.

Okay, let's talk about the low distraction internal work OS that you're building. Right, so you showed me the performance management stuff. But like, how, how else are you guys eliminating distraction?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, It's. I mean, what we're trying to do at Shopify is have the lowest distraction, most meaningful careers possible where we give crafters the ability to focus or to cook. Focus on what? What we hired them to do which is get better at their craft, make an impact on the mission and our merchants. And so anything that's in the way of that, we try to get it out of the way. And so one way that that HR is, is doing that is really is this sort of concept of patch notes or really well timed releases of changes or improvements to the gameplay. That is having a career at Shopify. And so that means as little as possible. Like as I said, HR kind of sucks. Like get out of the way. Just absolutely allow crafters to do the work and only distract when absolutely ne. But then taking a step higher, we, we've also built this, We've also built an operating system for the company that allows us to remove more distraction from sort of, you know, strategic planning or talent planning and all these things that really slow a company down. You referenced bureaucracy earlier. What we do is sort of encode a foundational set of, of rules or principles around what it means to be the world's best commerce software company. And you know, that's principles about Shopify's mission, about the size, the shape, what it actually means to be a crafters company and making sure that all of the work that the company does is aligned with that mission and with Toby's vision of how the company should run. And then that OS is basically implemented much more, like much more in a way or sort of how in engineering thinking as opposed to HR or operations. Right. That means that you can model the company. You have version controlled, it's version controlled, it's testable and reduces the need for the sort of political planning processes and change management required. Um, so all of that together with our operating system as well as, as well as sort of the, the mastery system that I just talked to you about, ideally allows people to do for as much time as much of their creative time in a day allows them to focus on building for our merchants.

So like let's take, let's take some examples, right? Like, like strategic planning, like takes up a lot of time, you know, writing strategy documents, reviewing like different levels of management. Yeah, you have a system to streamline that. All right.

Yeah. What we do is start with the mission from there. There's a set of themes that our, our founder Toby works on with, with his top product and engineering and, and R and D folks. And that sort of, that gets set, goes into our, our internal wiki and every single. And then we have built our own, as I said, sort of GSD or get shit done system where every new project needs to be attached to those, to those themes. You need to be able to show how what you're working on is ladders up to the themes and the mission of the company. And so that's how it all starts from there. As opposed to starting from the position of I need the following number of dollars or the following number of people in order to do something. Instead, it always starts from the mission and the themes and where the product needs to go. And then the rest sort of happens as a result. When you make the most important thing, the most important thing, the rest happens. And our OS and sort of low distraction mode HR helps make that happen with as little change management as possible.

So basically like Toby says, the themes and then there's a bottom sub approach to match the themes and then you kind of meet in the middle somewhere. That's kind of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. And you know, because there's only so many things you can focus on, we only focus on the things that are attached to that mission in those themes.

Makes sense. Okay, so just to. Just to wrap up this conversation, like, you know, Shopify is like what an 8,000 plus person company, right? That is a big company is trying to be a crafter's paradise, which I think is amazing. It's like the. Usually like the larger a company gets, the crappier it gets to work. So, so like, but, but like, you know, based on discussion, like what. What's your best three pieces of advice to. For. For like teams or companies to kind of stay focused on a craft. Um, and his culture.

Yeah, I talked about it a little earlier, but mission. Shopify has the easiest mission to fall in love with. And what I find is people. The longer people are at the company, the more in love with that mission and more dedicated to it they are. We're trying to make commerce better for everyone and make entrepreneurship more common. That is so important to the world. And it means that everyone at the company gets to focus on that instead of. Instead of other things. So one is mission focus. And everything that I talked about today is aimed at making sure as much of our time and as much of our energy is focused on the mission as possible and not the other bullshit. Okay, what's another one? I think going back to the corporate ladder, what we've done is reject the traditional or the orthodox corporate ladder, saying you have to go into some adjacency in order to get the status, the responsibility, the rewards of, of a manager. Instead, we've gone with the unobvious but absolutely correct thing which is to say craftsmanship matters and def. We will. We will prioritize being a crafters company. Other people, the best want to work with the best. That means you need at your core craftsmanship and to reward those crafters so that other craft great crafters want to come and work with them. The last one is about distractions. We talked about this a bit. But get out of people's way so that they can focus on what's most important, which is building and shipping code for our merchants. Get everything else out of the way as much as possible so that there's only so many hours in a day. You want people to be able to be focused on that mission and on shipping for merchants. Maybe a bonus is find people that give a shit. That's the last.

The people who give a shit will probably DM Toby on Shopify. That's the way to do it.

Yeah, exactly. Maybe it's like a result of those other things. Yeah, they will find us because the product is magical, the environment is awesome, the mission is super important.

I love it, Sam. I love. I never worked at Shopify, but I love how the values and how opinionated everyone is about some of this stuff, which I totally agree with. And hopefully you can change the culture for the rest of tech too.

It's what we're trying to do. And Peter, it only takes potentially 20 hours. So if you want to join, we're here. Yeah.

Maybe I can have another assigning job.

Exactly. Yeah.

No. Thank you so much, Peter.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.