Echoing other commentators' sentiments that Shopify is a remarkable company:
Last year, we found out that a group of folks at Shopify were using my company's product, iDoneThis, when Tobi Lutke (CEO) emailed me about a customer service issue. They were by far our highest profile customers and we were super amped to have them. We thought, how cool would it be to visit Shopify up in Ottawa, get to know them and see how they were using iDoneThis?
I emailed Tobi and basically invited ourselves up there to visit with them. He not only said yes, he got excited, told me that he thought it was an awesome idea and that he wished he'd spent more time with customers in the early days of Shopify. They made space in their office and everyone on the team made time to talk with us, and we ate lunch and hung out with them and talked iDoneThis and Shopify for a week!
My co-founder and I were blown away by how good those guys are. Meeting the team was the kind of experience where it's just like, man, those guys are really good at their jobs and they're doing it their way. The culture had a distinctiveness and authenticity that made the concept of "culture" real to me. Shopify is an original. I joked that we had to leave Silicon Valley and go to freezing cold Ottawa, Canada, to learn about how to start a company.
And we became friends--I still play Starcraft with one of the engineers there and email and hang out with others when they visit the states. Because of the Shopify guys, we have a bunch of Ottawa-based companies that use iDoneThis and when we raised a round, Tobi invested in us, too.
Our visit counts up there as one of the best learning experiences as a company and it opened my eyes as a founder to what entrepreneurship could mean.