The Knowledge Project podcast is awesome. Here are some snippets that I found very useful.
On starting his company in a secondary market:
I do think that there is an almost complete difference between how you build a company in a primary talent market and sort of secondary talent markets. For instance, one of the biggest differences in secondary places is, if I hired someone, the chance that we are going to still work together in a decade from now is super high.
Hiring for future potential
It means that it’s a much better idea to hire for future potential rather than for current skill. Once you do that, what you realize is, a dollar invested into helping to train people or even subtle things like making sure that next to any junior programmer, like for every five junior programmers in a team, you have one person who can become their mentor—these basic ideas all start having way more dividends
On building a hiring process for a learning organisation
..we have a hiring process that really, really finds people of high future potential. And then, we try to help them reach this potential 10, 20 years earlier in their career than they ever thought was possible, through coaching, through book clubs, through anything.
Fixed vs. Growth Mindsets
Everything in Shopify is built around this idea that if someone shows up with a fixed mindset, we convert them to a growth mindset quickly. And then once we have a growth mindset, we fill people with context (i.e. explain what their role is and what they are expected to do).
On the role of processes with an organisation
There are three kinds of process. There’s a kind of process that makes things that were previously impossible to do, possible. That’s good. Then there’s a kind of process that makes something that was previously possible significantly simpler, which is also good. However, 99.9% of all process that exists in corporate America is the third category, which is actually just telling people to behave slightly different from what common sense tells them to do.
So we have lots and lots and lots of examples where we just avoided having to create process by just changing the environment in which we all spend our time in.