How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng)

**Farhan Thawar** (0:00)
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 is valuable. I meet lots of job seekers. I go, what are you doing to try to find a job? Are you really learning anything from sending out 10 resumes a day? Why don't you look at the API docs and build something? Even if you don't get a job at Shopify, you've learned something.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:20)
First, I wanna talk about another theme, creating intensity in your organization.

**Farhan Thawar** (0:24)
Everyone says, oh yeah, work hard, and do more hours when you're young, whatever. I'm like, what if you just did more per minute?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:29)
The more I dig into the Shopify way working, the more fun stuff I never expected emerges. There's been a drive to delete code and simplify.

**Farhan Thawar** (0:37)
We have a delete code club. We can always almost find a million plus lines of code to delete, which is insane.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:42)
I found this great quote from you. Not everyone can look stupid in public over and over, but I believe it's my superpower.

**Farhan Thawar** (0:48)
I have been in many situations with many sharp people who have said to me, that's the stupidest question I've ever heard. My goal there is not to annoy the person, but is to understand the content.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:58)
I was looking at your LinkedIn in your career history, and I noticed that you worked for a different billionaire every decade of your life.

**Farhan Thawar** (1:05)
They're mostly different people, but they're similar in one thing is that they haven't.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:12)
Today, my guest is Farhan Thawar. Farhan is Vice President and Head of Engineering at Shopify. Shopify is an incredibly interesting company because they have over 10,000 employees, are fully remote, and even though they were founded almost 20 years ago, they continue to operate with urgency, velocity, and a very first principles ways of thinking, which translates into them seeing record usage, blowing away their earnings calls just recently, and building a beloved product. A lot of this is thanks to Farhan, who in our conversation shares very specifically what he's done to maintain intensity and urgency within the engineering team, including their meeting cadences, the counterintuitive power of pair programming, how they run meetings, how they cancel meetings constantly and so 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 bunch of great hiring advice and a bunch of hiring stories which are gonna blow your mind. He also talks about their engineering intern program where they're gonna hire over a thousand engineers just for their intern program in 2025 I've had a lot of people on this podcast from Shopify, but that is for a very good reason because this company and its leaders have a lot to teach us about how to run an incredible business and build an incredible product. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Farhan Thawar. Farhan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Farhan Thawar** (2:51)
Thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:52)
As I was preparing for our conversation, I talked to a bunch of people that you've worked with over the years. There's basically three themes that kept coming up over and over and over. One is hiring, two is creating intensity in your organization, and three is choosing the hard path. First of all, does that resonate? Second of all, does it sound good to talk about these three themes in our time together?

**Farhan Thawar** (3:15)
Yeah, I have ideas on where all three of those things came from. And I think that it is something that, if you looked back on my career, I've hit points on each of those things. But I don't think at the onset I knew that that's what I was doing, but it turns out in retrospect that's what I ended up doing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:32)
Perfect. So this is like the Steve Jobs, everything looking backwards, it all connects.

**Farhan Thawar** (3:35)
Yes.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:37)
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