Consumerism is driven not by buying, but by buying low-quality items that fail and are discarded. The solution is creating superior, durable products that solve a user's problem permanently, eliminating the need for replacement.
Companies are a technology for organizing people toward a common mission. Unlike software, they're rarely perfected because the incentive is only to be better than the competition, not to reach an absolute ideal of operational excellence.
Employees attached to solutions are rigid during platform shifts. Those who love problems are adaptable and create lasting value. While they look the same in stable times, periods of change reveal their true nature.
Frequent organizational change, such as reorgs, serves as a natural filter. People who are uncomfortable with flux will self-select out, leaving a team that is more adaptable and aligned with a fast-moving company's needs.
Having a centralized internal system where every project, goal, and update is tracked—like Shopify's GSD—sounds too simple to be a game-changer. However, it's a surprisingly effective foundation for organizational legibility and alignment at scale.
Developing internal tools, like a project management system, evolves a company's environment and workflows much faster than rolling out new policies, which require extensive communication and buy-in for adoption.
When a company adopts third-party software like Workday for HR, it's not just buying a tool; it's implicitly accepting that vendor's philosophy on how a process should be run, potentially limiting strategic flexibility.
When a customer's flash sales repeatedly crashed the platform, Shopify treated the problem as a "gem"—a real-world stress test that forced them to build the high-scale infrastructure that became a core competitive advantage.
VCs in 2008 rejected Shopify because the existing market of 40,000 online stores was too small. They failed to see that Shopify wasn't just serving a market; its friction-reducing product would create a much larger one.
Platforms like Shopify have enabled small businesses to have faster, higher-converting, and more technically performant online stores than many large, established brands running on clunky, homegrown legacy systems.
The world's best products, like programmer Eric Gamma's VS Code (his fourth editor), are often the result of a creator dedicating their entire career to a single problem space, achieving a level of craftsmanship impossible for newcomers.
A mentor taught Shopify's CEO that you have about two years to get an important piece of software's architecture right. After that, it's as if "cement gets poured in the codebase," making fundamental changes nearly impossible.