#118 with Harley Finkelstein (Shopify's President) - Why You Should Drop Out Of School and Start a Shopify Store

**Sam Parr** (0:19)
We are here. We're live. Harley, what's going on?
Shaan, how are you?

**Shaan Puri** (0:23)
I'm doing great.

**Harley Finkelstein** (0:24)
Hey, Shaan, hey Sam, good to be here.

**Sam Parr** (0:26)
We're gonna get to intros in a second. Apologies if my internet is gonna suck.
I'm recruiting this guy who lives in Philly to be a writer at my company, and I'm currently living in New York, but he was like, you know, I'm not sure, so I just got in a car, and I went and rented a hotel for two days, and I just showed up at his house, and I was like, to recruit him and convince him to join my company. And so that's kind of why I'm at this hotel.

**Harley Finkelstein** (0:50)
I used to do, I used to do fake trips, by the way, to Seattle. Like just fake, like I had to be in Seattle.

**Shaan Puri** (0:55)
I'll be in town, yeah.

**Harley Finkelstein** (0:56)
So I'll just be in town, and actually the person that runs Ecosystem is probably the greatest leader I've ever recruited, came from one of those meetings where every year, for like three years, I would just happen to be in Seattle, and we'd happen at breakfast, and eventually he's like, all right, I'm ready to jump ship, so I get it.

**Sam Parr** (1:13)
Yeah, so I did one of those trips, and I booked a hotel for two nights, because I was like, if he doesn't say yes the first day, I'm for sure here the second day, so I'm going to show up again.

**Harley Finkelstein** (1:20)
Totally.

**Sam Parr** (1:21)
So we're here.

**Shaan Puri** (1:22)
The trick is, if you can get the partner, significant other out with you to the dinner, it's a done deal, because I used to talk to you.

**Sam Parr** (1:30)
That's what we did.

**Shaan Puri** (1:30)
You did that.
Yeah, so I talked to Scott Harrison, who's a co-founder of Charity Water, and his big thing was he's trying to recruit world-class talent to come work in a non-profit. And he's like, how do you convince somebody to leave their million-dollar job at Google and come work for one-tenth of that for me and save the world? And so he'd always be in San Francisco. We'd catch up and I'd be like, so what are you in town for? And it's always that. He was like, I'm taking the person I want and their husband or wife out to dinner, and I'm gonna tell them the Steve Jobs line of like, stop selling sugar water and let's come change the world.
And it was pretty effective. I gotta say, he was closing a lot of good people.

**Harley Finkelstein** (2:10)
It works. I mean, the key to this whole model is, you have to be so long-term, right? If you're gonna be at a company or you're gonna be running your business for only a year or two, you can't plant those type of seeds. But when you sort of use a 10-year, or to be honest with you, I use a 100-year horizon on most of the stuff we do at Shopify and most of the stuff I do personally, which I know sounds extreme, but it's a good lens to use.
You begin to say, it doesn't matter if I don't close this person or get this person for a year or two or three. At some point, this may work itself out and it always does.

**Shaan Puri** (2:39)
And so we should explain. So Harley, you are the big dog over at Shopify. I think that's the official job title. Some people call you the COO.
How long have you been there? So you said you're taking a long-term view. When did you join Shopify?

**Harley Finkelstein** (2:52)
Yeah, so I joined Shopify 11 years ago. I was one of Shopify's first merchants. I was born in Montreal in Canada, grew up in South Florida, and moved to Montreal to go to McGill when I was 17 That was 2001 Frankly, the world went sideways in September 2001 Stock markets crashed, and my parents lost everything. And I sort of became an accidental entrepreneur through that process. I wanted to support myself and want to help my parents and started a t-shirt business, started making t-shirts for universities. A mentor of mine convinced me to go to law school, not to become a lawyer, but to become a better entrepreneur. His hypothesis was that it would provide me, it'd be like finishing school for entrepreneurship, teach me how to write, how to think, how to be more articulate.
And he happened to be teaching law at the University of Ottawa in 2005 And so I applied to one single law school, it was Ottawa, and moved to the University of Ottawa, and had no friends or family here in town, started to look for the entrepreneurs, hung out, met Toby, he was transitioning from being a snowboard entrepreneur to being a software entrepreneur.