The Inside Scoop on Innovation & Entrepreneurship, w/ Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering @ Shopify

On Wednesday 24th March, Founders Pathway hosted a fireside chat on Clubhouse with Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering @ Shopify.

We picked his brains on all things innovation and entrepreneurship.

Be sure to see what events we have lined up for the near future.

Moderated by Shayan Mashatian and Alice Giuditta.

Q: Farhan, tell us about yourself and why Shopify? 

I Grew up in Toronto, it had a lot of diversity which was not familiar in other areas.I focused on developing in the early stages of the Toronto community and changing the narrative of how Toronto was perceived. Toronto became a risk taking place. In 2013, I started working with “Experiment lab” that created a mobile power house that incubated companies. Then moved on to “Helpful”, a remote engagement company, and worked there for 3 years; shopify was a customer and that’s how we got together.

On innovation when it comes to management techniques, recruiting, engineering, designs and products.

Q: Why start a company and for what goal? Did you plan to sell it to Shopify?!

·No one should ever start a company with the goal of being acquired. The goal of a company should be to help customers and tend to their needs and reduce their pain.·Assign certain interest areas, an “idea” list, and narrow down the list into one’s area of expertise. Then, study ideas and tackle each one on its own.

         Q: How can someone stay innovative and come up with new ideas?

·        Two main categories for innovating:  1 Testing things and checking what works best for investment.2  Building the correct infrastructure allows innovation to flow in.Don’t patch around the problem, fix the root cause. People don’t consider that innovation but in reality it enables innovation and creates the right infrastructure that helps build something of significant scale.

Q: What are things you focus on when creating something?

·     Always satisfy merchants.  Build things most merchants need most of the time. Merchants are in the center of our world.

Q: What are the most important resources?

·       Time and attention.Trying too many things is not a good way of innovation and prevents success. Instead devote your time and attention to a couple of ideas, give them your all. Don’t put too much on your plate.

·         Q: How do you pick yourself up and keep going when things don’t work? How do you find motivation to start something new?

·         External motivators such as buying a car are not as motivating/interesting as the internal motivations such as learning about new cultures and moving abroad.Working with the right people helps us deal with problems. Also, how to win even when we lose? Even when we lose investors’ money and a project fails, we don’t really lose because it helps us better understand the market and gain experience from analysis. Winning and losing should not be measured by the gain or loss of money. External motivations give people depression once they achieve the goal. Hence, work on internal motivation. Focus on the feeling rather than the having.

·       Innovation involves a lot of perceived risk, which scares people off.

·         Q: How do you deal with or harness the pressure to innovate within the tech space which is constantly evolving.

·         Not caring about looking stupid and trying weird things to learn from them. Working opposite to the standard of wisdom is innovation. It is not pressure, the primary goal is learning; because you can measure learning and build upon it. It is important to let go of the need to create the next big thing, holding a title or impressing people. I go for Pay cuts rather than pay raises.

·         Q: What percentage of your time is dedicated to inventing and bringing new ideas to life versus maintaining and sustaining existing projects?

·         A: The planning is useful, the plan is useless. It is good to sustain and maintain the already existing projects but adaptation is very important. Hence, build new things based on pre-existing things or use the pre-existing things and create new things to better them.

·         Q: What is the future hold of online shopping based on the COVID-19pandemic?

·        This helped people change their priorities in life. Humans are generally social animals but also a lot of people like and benefit from the “new way of doing things”, so things will probably be somewhere in the middle between e-commerce and in store shopping. Kind of like restaurants.

·         Q: Since you are not super focused on someone’s experience on paper, what is it that you are looking for when hiring people?

·         Understanding the person outside of their resume. A resume tells you what someone did but not Why they did it. The process is designed to answer the why and a find a deeper meaning and reason behind someone’s work. Diversity is very important for our merchants, hence diversity is very important for us. No requirements for degrees and GPAs but rather why.

·         Q: The elephant in the room, will you bring Amazon down?

·         Everybody is playing slightly different games, Amazon’s goals and ours might overlap but they are definitely not the same. Amazon’s goal is centralization where everyone can go to one place to find different things, our goal is decentralization where we want everyone to be able to have all tools necessary for online presence and own that presence. Our goal is not a one stop shop, it is for merchants to build their brand and connect with their customers.We are not competing, shopping local is on the rise and growing tremendously.

·         Q: If you don’t own your code then you own nothing. What do you think of that?

I don’t know if that is necessarily true to me, I can understand why that might be assumed, but it is possible to build significant value without owning IT because some people don’t see it as the appropriate way to build a software. It depends on what you are building. Try to work on giving as much access as possible to as many people as possible until you get to a point where you can develop a business. There is a lot of value in testing your idea in the world rather than keeping it closed.

·         Q: How are you learning? By doing or by watching?

·         Everybody learns differently, so people need to figure out what works for them. Many things work in theory but also many things work in practice. The more you can build and try the better. Test the waters and figure out what works best for you. Learn through experience. 

·         Q: How do you drive entrepreneurship within the organization? How do you live up to that purpose as a team and company?

·          Always question fundamental assumptions. Doubt the data and ask questions, test theories and try to know what employees and systems need. Try to create a system where employees are not limited and don’t need managerial approval for access. Be very careful because data can tell any type of story, but judgment on top of data is what matters.

·         Q: What are your main focus points for employee experience when it comes to working from home or hybrid work?

·         A few things have to be true. Choose certainty over uncertainty. The curve is showing that remote work is on the rise, and we decided to embrace that and go fully remote. This allowed us to lay out a few things such as: separate work and personal life, have reliable internet and webcams or provide these to employees. It is necessary to rely on the right people and test things to know which works best. It is important to stay connected while remote and put the appropriate tools to use for better connection.

·         Q: Did you tap into new behavior in the “new normal”?

·        We defined new work tools (as mentioned above) and time zone synchronization but also everything is still under construction to see which works best. It is a work in progress, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

·         Q: How do you suggest people figure out which path to go to when they don’t know where to start?

·         The overwhelming advice is to never start a company before having a problem to solve. There are many ways to become an entrepreneur, don’t take anyone’s advice; figure out what works for you and test things out to see which path is meant for you.