Learning to Infinity
Farhan talks to Jesse about the doors he has opened in his career and life by viewing learning as an “infinite game.”
How do you maximize learning and personal growth in your career?
How do you choose between good career paths?
What is your connection between personal growth and community building?
How does your community contribute to your success as a builder?
How can asking stupid questions make you a more valuable member of your team?
Episode Notes
For Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering at Shopify, learning is an infinite game and the driving motivation underpinning his career. He shares his early dislike for school and early influences that helped him discover a love for math and computers. He talks about his parents’ objections to his degree in computer engineering instead of studying accounting. Farhan shares his evolution as a student--first in school and then in life--and his philosophy for ensuring he is surrounding himself with people who will maximize his learning. He discusses how his natural desire to learn has created opportunities to be a builder in his companies and his community.
Farhan shares his personal philosophy of learning as his primary currency and how he thinks about career moves in terms of learning compensation instead of monetary compensation. He comments on the power of looking stupid and always being willing to be wrong. He shares his perspectives on community building and being a strong contributor to his community. He discusses personal decision frameworks and how to maximize “kilojoules per minute” in his work and interpersonal interactions to get the most out of everything.
Guest Bio
Farhan is an engineer by training, everything else by experience. The desire to always be learning has driven Farhan’s career from technology giants like Microsoft through to small startups, running a tech incubator, and ultimately to his current role at Shopify. Farhan is a prolific writer and speaker, and loves to share what he is learning with other people. Farhan is currently the VP of Engineering at Shopify, an advisor to 3 startups, and an angel investor for over 20 companies. He has been published in Wired and TechCrunch magazines, was honored in 2010 as one of Toronto’s 25 most powerful people, and has spoken at a number of conferences including TEDxToronto. Farhan lives with his family in Toronto.
Twitter: @fnthawar
Medium: @fnthawar
Building Blocks
Write down two things: First, what is something that you would really like to learn? It can be a new language, a way of sleeping better, a even just some things you could do to keep your life more organized! And it can be a long- or a short-term thing. One thing you really want to learn.
And then, what are three things, one tomorrow, one by next week, and one by next month, you can do to move yourself along on this learning journey? Get specific. What exactly will you do? Who can help you? What will your goals be? Maybe you have a bunch of ideas. Jot them down, and run them by somebody. And get some input. Be ambitious, but be practical and honest with yourself too. And remember that Farhan, like Robert Chatwani in episode one, talked about the importance of a framework for knowing who you are and your purpose, and building around that. So if you need some inspiration on that front, go back and check out that episode too.
Helpful Links
Farhan’s TED Talk: “Refining Mobile Application Technology”
Farhan on making decisions: “Do it. Most things are reversible anyway.”
Farhan on asking questions: “Why looking stupid is my superpower”
Farhan’s Wired Magazine article on pair programming
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
Range: Why Generalists Succeed in a Specialized World by David Epstein
+ Episode Transcript
Farhan Thawar [00:00:07] So I think about learning as like an infinite game and all the other games as finite games, right? So I want to go work at Google or I want to be a director of engineering or I want to make a million dollars. Like all of those things are finite games, because when you get there, then what? Like, that's the goal. And people then realize, guess what? It's not all it's cracked up to be like. That wasn't the thing that you really needed. And I think of learning as the infinite game because you can always learn more.
Jesse Purewal [00:00:52] From Qualtrics industries, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts and ideas fuels some of the world's most amazing products, brands and experiences. I'm Jesse Purewal. Today on the show, how a choice to pursue infinite learning and a willingness to try anything twice have take it Farhan Thawar on a remarkable journey as a builder of technologies, teams, companies and communities.
Jesse Purewal [00:01:31] I am here with Farhan Thawar, our foreign. Thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here. Yeah, I'm really excited for this conversation. Although the dimensionality of your talents is certainly not restricted to the X and Y dimensions, I think there are going to be at least two great dimensions to this dialog. The first is your sequential professional experiences and the attendant learnings you've earned and accumulated along the way. And I think those are quite instructive to people who want to think about the arc of professional growth as a builder. But the second dimension is this wide array of learnings that you then distill into perspectives and into points of view, and you've become really adept at distilling and communicating to people who choose to enter your orbit. So I think of this conversation today is really more like applied wisdom, some great critical and logical discussion, worthy thinking. So so let's get into it.
Farhan Thawar [00:02:21] Cool. Yeah. I haven't heard my experience ever describe it this way as like not two dimensional, but let's go with it.
Jesse Purewal [00:02:28] Farhan please take me back to the start. Where did you grow up, where did it all begin?
Farhan Thawar [00:02:32] Sure. So I'm from Toronto, which is in Canada. I think people know where Toronto is now and I grew up like middle class. And I would say probably relevant for this conversation is when I got interested in tech and technology, it was actually my uncle. My dad's actually my dad's cousin, who one day just came to my house and dropped off like a modem. And this is in the eighties. And my dad's like, what? This is like, don't worry, your son will know what it is. And I would say that started my journey into getting, like, super excited about technology from a pretty early age and pre Internet.
Jesse Purewal [00:03:05] And if I run into 10, 11, 12 year old Farhan back in those days, who who's the person I would have met?
Farhan Thawar [00:03:13] Not this guy. You would have met a very shy, extremely shy person, kept to myself very introverted, actually a big worrier, actually. I read a lot as well. And one of the formative books of my young days was a book called How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by the famous author from another book, Dale Carnegie. I don't actually remember any specific worry, but I've always been like a thinker from an introversion perspective. Like even today I consider myself an introvert, meaning I get my energy from being on my own. And even when I was younger, I was just being like by myself thinking about things, reading and not really talking to anybody. And but I don't remember anything from that book. But I do remember it changed a lot of how I thought about worrying after reading that book. So I do recommend it actually to a lot of people who feel like they're under some sort of stress. I actually still recommend it.
Jesse Purewal [00:04:12] And Farhan talk about some other influences that maybe you encountered in your early years. What influenced the way that you thought about the world and what you would go on to study?
Farhan Thawar [00:04:23] Yeah, a few things. So one was in grade six, math teacher really picked up on. I was never a good student until about high school where I think I got interested in school. But in grade six, a teacher, Mrs. Graves, gave me a book called Math for Smarty Pants. And I think she saw something in my work that I got interested in math. And I remember reading that book fondly. And for some reason that got me started into like this exploration around mathematics. And I did end up doing a math degree for my undergrad and actually my grad. So I think that that maybe started me on that path. But it was the one thing that I was good at that I was interested in, still interested in it, that among everything else, I really hated all the other subjects, some computer game stuff. But really just how Internet like networking worked and babysitting and community building. I just got super excited. And that, of course, did play lots of video games like any kid. But that was influential for me. Even the early ideas of like programing. I got interested in programing. I had a VIC 20 and my monitor cable broke, so I had a VIC 20 with no display. But I would program audio programs like I'd have to type with a display and I would just type programs that would produce music because that was the only thing I could do. And so I, I just I guess again, in my introverted days, I was very interested in just math programing and for some reason I really felt like I could connect with the computer somehow.
Jesse Purewal [00:05:58] Talk to me about maybe the foundation that you built or the way that you enhanced some of those initial passions by way of your studies before you got out into the working world.
Farhan Thawar [00:06:09] Yeah, again, I think you get super lucky sometimes with some people who you can be mentored by, like Mrs. Graves for math, my uncle who gave me the modem to connect me to the world. I got lucky as well. I went to a new high school. It was called it's called Melika. Mills is still around, but because it was new, they took a technology forward stance, meaning that even in high school, I got to take courses in electronics, computer hardware, robotics, and I was able to spend time in those areas against my parents wishes. By the way, my parents did not want me to go into computers because back then there was no industry for computers, like it wasn't a field that you should spend time in. My mom worked at a bank. My dad worked for the government, and they wanted me to go into accounting or actuarial science because those are real professions. And so I kind of, against their wishes, spent time there in those areas in hardware and software, which then led me to do my undergrad in computer science and electrical engineering because I always had that view of hardware and software as being something connected.
Jesse Purewal [00:07:13] Yeah. And then within a few years of leaving University Farzan as a software architect, you start on the path of doing what I'd characterize as an incredible range of work generalists over specialists. If I borrow the Norman culture from David Epstein, you're doing an incredible diversity of things and getting to a wonderful alchemy of outcomes. But I've heard you say that it wasn't necessarily part of the plan, that maybe you had some missteps in your first role or to out of school. So can you talk about how maybe some of the setbacks you had early on helped you frame things in the positive and some of the story behind how you got your start?
Farhan Thawar [00:07:50] Sure. I think there's many setbacks in my life that have helped me either reframe something that I probably held as true, but was not like a constant. For example. I almost failed grade eight. I should have kept back. I should have been kept back. Actually, in my parents being the immigrant parents went to the school and said, it doesn't matter if he's failing. Like, just let him go to grade nine and we'll take responsibility if he fails grade nine. And that made me reframe a bunch of things about myself specifically around who I spend my time with, how I approach the work. And I had another setback again in first year university where I hit the wall in second term, where I almost like failed a bunch of stuff and tried to change things about myself. And then again, in my first job at Trilogy, I was on a PIP performance improvement plan within the first three months or so because I wasn't again doing as well as the other people in that first job. And I think each of those cases I had to kind of reassess how I worked and how I wanted to spend time. I didn't have to, like, double down on a bunch of things many times in this in the early days, I think as a kid and as an early adult, a younger adult, like in your twenties, you can just work harder. You know, I figured out for myself, you know, I don't have to be actually that smart. I just have to work everybody else. And so I just spent way more time on problems that people didn't spend as much time on, I guess. And that's what I credit to a lot of how I got through those those things is I just spend more time on it, right. When when somebody says, hey, you can't do it or you fail items like, I'm not going to fail, I'm going to spend way more time. And so that was really my mentality in those early years.
Jesse Purewal [00:09:39] And so what allowed you to be able to spread your wings so broadly, even within those first five, six years of your career and work on so many different things? You know, you the modal story you tend to hear is I worked on one platform. I worked on one device for 12, 18 months, and then I moved on to the next thing. You seem to have gotten involved in a lot more things, a lot more deeply, a lot sooner. How did you make that happen?
Farhan Thawar [00:10:05] Yeah, it's a good question. I think for me, I've had a few lucky breaks from a maybe personality perspective. Like one of the things I tell people often is like, I don't I don't care about looking stupid like I never did. I'm happy to go into a new domain. And I had this funny line where I will say I'll try anything twice, like, I'll just try it. And I'm not worried about looking dumb in that trying even among experts like I really am not good at chess. But that doesn't stop me from talking chess with people who really do know chess, because I find that being around smart folks and learning about their opinion is actually a way to learn. Even if I look dumb. And I I think there's also something around this idea that there's always an angle. Right. So when I was in Waterloo, for example, at the beginning, I remember this fondly. I was sitting it was second year and we had gotten our first assignment, one of the math courses, and people would come by my desk and drop off answers to. On the assignment and my friend was sitting beside me, he's like, what's happening? Like people are coming by and dropping off the answer to question one question for question five. And what happened was in first year, people realize that I'm not the smartest person, but that I was really good at talking to other people and figuring out who was who in the class and who had the answers so that I could be the person who had the answers, not because I knew the answers, but because I could get them all. And so in second year, people would give me answers because they knew if they gave me answers in the early part of the term, I would give them answers in the later part of the term. And so my angle was I could be around all the smart people because they knew to come to me if they couldn't figure something out or if they want to talk to somebody, I would know who they could talk to. And that was the angle. And I think that has served me well in a bunch of these examples you bring up around work or school, because I always figured out what was my unique contribution to the group. If I could not be the smartest person, but I could be somebody who was still valuable. Right. Like in Shawshank Redemption, the Morgan Freeman character, I can get things. That was me, but it allowed me to be in that group of really sharp, exceptional folks and learn the most because I'm just learning from all the domain expertize. But then I had my unique angle to that.
Jesse Purewal [00:12:31] Well, there's so much there. So let me drill into this a little bit. So when you talk about learning and you say I'll do anything twice and you think about the organizing principle being you're going to get something out of an interaction with a person, out of a project, out of an engagement, out of a dialog. I think although all of us would regard learning as a noble outcome, it seems to not be the organizing principle by which many builders even. So there are efforts out that it's about making it to a certain role. It's about getting into a certain organization. It's about doing a certain thing. And and learning becomes the how to get to the what. What I hear you doing ostensibly is flipping that and saying learning is the objective. Learning is the end goal. And it's not the mechanism by which you achieve a thing.
Farhan Thawar [00:13:26] So you're your phrasing something in a way that makes sense to me, but not in the way I've ever heard before. So I think about learning as like an infinite game. And have all the other games as finite games, right? So I want to go work at Google or I want to be a director of engineering or I want to make a million dollars. Like all of those things are finite games, because when you get there, then what? Like, that's the goal. And people then realize, guess what? It's not all it's cracked up to be like. That wasn't the thing that you really needed. And I think I'm learning as the infinite game because you can always learn more. You can always be around more exceptional people. You can always put yourself in an uncomfortable situation to be a Shopify talks about you can figure out a box and then try to move to the next box. And so I've maybe overweighted to the extreme learning. Like in many ways I've done things that are not like you should like most people wouldn't do them and would seem risky. But to me, it's risky to not be in learning mode. So for example, in twenty fifteen there is this guy in Toronto named Daniel Debow, serial entrepreneur. I wanted to work with them and the only way to work with them was he was starting a company. And even though I have three kids and a mortgage and my wife's not working at the time I decided to quit a job, take zero salary, actually write a check into the company so we could hire people and rent a space and everything, because I felt the riskiest thing was to not be learning at the fastest rate possible. And the only way to do that was for me to work with Daniel. And only in having these kinds of conversations do I realized that not everybody thinks about their framework in the same way. And maybe you're right. Maybe people think about the what and I'm thinking about the how. But it is strange to me to think any other way because the only way to be robust against the market is to put yourself in those uncomfortable, risky situations. I don't think they're risky, but learning situations,.
Jesse Purewal [00:15:31] What I love about this infinite game, framing it takes me back to another thing I think is really interesting about your perspective is around community. And you talked about being the Morgan Freeman character in Shawshank, being read in Shawshank and sort of the cultivator, the Gitter of Things. And I know you do a lot in community, which is another infinite game. Community is not a game that's going away. The players may change the shape of the board and the rules might even change. The community is also not going away. Talk about the way you have participated in and in driven and and drawn energy from the various communities that you've been a part of in your career.
Farhan Thawar [00:16:11] Yeah, and again, almost everything that I focus on is in pursuit of learning. So communities in many aspects of, I think, how I spend my time. Some of it is local community like Toronto and the tech community and the startup community. Some of it is investing in companies, advising companies. That's community because I'm hopefully learning and sharing information. But again, I think what most people would think as a community building or even mentorship, I look at it as learning. So when someone reaches out to me, I again flip it around and think, what can I learn from this person? And there's probably something there. And I will probably take more of those meetings than most folks would at the onset, because maybe they look at they use a different lens or whatever, and I'll take most of those.
Jesse Purewal [00:16:59] So Farhan you are a busy person. You are a high velocity person. You are a high agility person. You manage your time carefully and you commit to it. Well, how do you think about that? If you say no to nine out of ten things or eight out of ten things, how do you go about doing that? How do you learn to say no as a builder to the eight things that are going to distract you and the two things that are going to accrue learning at the velocity and at the steepness that you're looking to accrue to.
Farhan Thawar [00:17:31] So you've hit on a very interesting point, which is that in my view and everybody's different, but in my view, single tasking is the way to win and multitasking is the way to failure. This idea of continuous partial attention of having notifications that will distract you or there's that Nassim Taleb quote, sprint or walk, never jog. Like I'm a huge fan of that quote, because the idea is that when I'm doing something, I want to be doing it with the maximum amount of kilojoules per minute. But I would say in general, I try to use Parkinson's law as much as I can, which is that the amount of time you a lot to something will be the amount of time that it will take. And so if I only have half an hour with somebody, I want to make sure I'm spending the right amount of attention and the time the time goes by anyway, right. For 30 minutes with somebody, why not be in full beast mode for that thirty minutes and get as much from the interaction out as both of you can like mutually, not selfishly, but mutually. Can we make it high impact for both of us? And then move on to the next thing, it's really hard to do, but I find that by setting things up in this way, it forces me to be present in the moment. And I know there's a lot of like stuff around being present and meditation and all that kind of stuff. I'm not thinking about it that way. I'm thinking about it as pure kilojoules per minute, like learning and extracting between both parties as much as you can.
Jesse Purewal [00:19:03] And you also have a covenant that you ostensibly demand of people that are coming into your orbit and helping you learn. I've heard you use the phrase give away all your secrets, give away all your secrets, that there is a philosophy of if we are going to go on the learning journey in this infinite game together, we can't have things that we know and we pretend not to know or things that we choose not to share. Can you talk about how you deploy that philosophy specifically on your learning quest and you're learning path?
Jesse Purewal [00:19:35] Yeah, so I think that, again, these are some counterintuitive things that I've tested, I guess. And I realized for me, don't hold true. So, for example, that there is some secret way to working that other that if I tell people, will make make it worse for me. So, for example, programing is a good example you brought up earlier. I'm a huge fan of programing. I think it's probably the number one underutilized tool for engineering, productivity, information sharing, fast velocity management, all the things. And I could have gone down a route of just keeping it to myself and start companies and work at companies and just do this special thing with programing. And then nobody else could do it or could do it as well, because I'm kind of at a faster learning rate for whatever reason. Maybe I have the larger team, but instead I'm out there talking about it all the time because I think that everyone should use that secret and everyone should get that benefit, because in working together with others, there's probably some other secret we will uncover as part of that. And that, again, it sounds weird, but I think that there are there's no advantage for me having the secret. I think actually I wouldn't be able to test the idea against the world and make the idea better if I kept it to myself. And then I'll get feedback on it, which again, turns into that learning loop between me and those people. And I think we're both better off. And so, yeah, I'm very against any sort of secrets just because of that. That loop is not complete. In that case.
Jesse Purewal [00:21:09] I want to go back to the career chronology point. You took a job with Microsoft, with MSN in thousand five after a couple of years into your career. Really significant role. It's Midnight's Portal is still the dominant way of accessing the Web. Moistens right there in the top two with Yahoo! You're looking after huge content marketing budgets, building product to improve search quality and so on. At the same time, there is this incoming tide, some of what would later become the hyper scalars, the aggregators with the Googles and the Facebook's of the world. Did you make a conscious choice around whether you would let me say it this way, go with the old guard or step in with the new or was that not the calculus for you? And it was something entirely different?
Farhan Thawar [00:21:55] Yeah, you give me way too much credit that I would sit down and evaluate a market and make like a good prediction. So the way that I think about companies and being in roles at companies and then switching companies is very much back to the earlier conversation around learning velocity. For me, the riskiest thing is to be in a job or role or company or around work colleagues where you're not in rapid learning mode. Like that's what happens to me. And that thinking causes me to then go out into the world and figure out who are the people I want to spend my time with, how do I get around smarter people? And it is literally that level of anxiety and stress that comes over me and my wife has seen it many times, or she's like, you're not learning and you're not working at the pace you need to be working at. Actually, after being at Celestica for four years, my dad actually said to me, I remember this and I'll never forget it. He said, You have lost your edge. And that was brutal. He was right and it was brutal. If you're not around the smartest people you could be around, then really everything else is really hard to get. Right? The learning, the impact. Forget about role and all that other stuff is just super hard to get. Right. And so I just, you know, my short form version of it is like, how do you just follow the smart people and hard problems?
Jesse Purewal [00:23:19] How do you then become a magnet to people once you identify something or someone, an idea, a person, an opportunity, and you think, you know, there's a there there and it meets the right quotient for me in terms of risk, it's the right time. I feel like it could be something. What are the heuristics that you step through and then how do you make yourself magnetic?
Farhan Thawar [00:23:44] The way that I think about it is that if, you know, networking, community, meeting people in different parts of their career, getting to know people outside of your domain like that is not something you can turn on and off. I hear this all the time. I need to find a new job. I'm going to start networking. Who should I meet? Like, that's not how it works. You have to be doing it all the time. And it may sound like a chore to people, but learning is not a chore to me. It's a thing that I are really hungry for. And so in order to have actual people want to come to you, the only thing I can think of is, again, figuring out your name and where you can be valuable to them. Right. So if, for example, you said you are super interested in Tesla and want to get beside Elon Musk, right. You probably wouldn't just email Elon one time or message him on Twitter one time and then stop there. There's probably all sorts. Despite a hundred things you could do to get closer to Elon, you could try to figure out all the technology that you could build on your own to get a self-driving car off the ground. You could modify your Tesla. You could try to find people to hack the software. You could try to, of course, interact with them on Twitter and email. You could give them feedback on features for like there's also there's so many things you could do. And I think most people don't do all those things in order to try to get beside something like that, if that's their number one goal. And so for me, whenever I have a target in mind around, I need to learn from somebody. I will figure out a way to get beside them in a way that is valuable to them and me. So, for example, you know, if you wanted to, let's say, work at Shopify and get close to Toby, you could, of course, email Toby a million times or tweet at him a million times. But that doesn't help him or you. But what if you built a Shopify app or you exposed some interesting features that we're not thinking of or you met with merchants and got feedback? All of those things you did are not only useful to Toby, they're useful to you because you now learned how to build like maybe a product roadmap or write a Shopify out like you're going to. There are things that are valuable to you and Toby. So I think that what people miss is that it's not like an outlay just to find a job. It's a way of thinking about how you can make yourself more valuable. But to me, that's community building because you're you're being helpful to them and to yourself in a way that you may have a long, ongoing relationship with them over time.
Jesse Purewal [00:26:08] Well, let me talk to you a little bit about, if I may, that that role when you became CTO at what you describe, I think I've read as Y Combinator style incubator, extreme venture partners. You became an investor and then a mentor. And I think while you're doing that, you're leading engineering at a sister company called Extreme Labs. So what was that recipe like and what was that experience? What were you trying to concoct and create there?
[00:26:33] Well, so here is a good example of my predictive abilities being, like, horrible. When I when I first was thinking about joining Extreme Labs, I wasn't super excited because I was already leading the engineering team at another startup. And the two just switch running engineering team from company to company B wasn't super exciting because I'm like, it's around the same size. It's a different domain. But how different can it be, really? My buddy Roemer, who I went to school with, who started both those companies, he said, oh, no, no, you're going to have the day job as running extreme labs. But the night job is running this incubator and you're going to learn a ton about venture capital investing, being around smart entrepreneurs who are pitching us their ideas and working with them week to week on helping them get to market. And I was like, whoa, I'm going to learn a ton doing that. Who cares about this extreme thing? But what was funny was a few things. One was, yes, I learned a ton from the venture capital side. We had some great companies come through the incubator, including Pays Your Duty With, went on to Y Combinator and Data Bricks, which of course went on to do amazing things. And we didn't end up working with them that closely. But I learned more on the extreme lab side, like I didn't know I was going to learn that much because we were growing so fast. We were in mobile, which ended up taking up a significant part of my career. We were building upon agile practices in a non-religious way, like. Programing and shipping every week and learning about building apps for clients and again, if I had predicted that right, that would have been fine, but I predicted the opposite. I said, I'm not going to learn anything here. And over time, I have to actually leave the extreme entrepreneurs post to focus fully on extreme lives. And I would say that was quite a formative time of my career in terms of leading large teams.
Jesse Purewal [00:28:14] Well, when you're running engineering, they're at extreme. You start to create what I think is a pretty incredible technical flywheel. You start hitting some really important human metrics as well, that at the same time your energy team is shipping forty five builds a week. You're also getting to female male ratios in engineering of like one to four, and you're essentially hanging on to all of your talent. So, again, in the spirit of learning, what were you learning about growing people and teams in this role?
Farhan Thawar [00:28:45] Yeah, so I think the genius behind extreme labs has to be with Umur and Sunny, who were the co-founders. Like, the amazing thing about them was, I think twofold. One was they had seen pivotal labs and how they approach engineering as a framework that they wanted to try. And then secondly, they really after getting to know me a little bit, I knew Omert. I didn't know Sunny that well over time. They just said, you know what, let's let Feron do all his crazy experiments, like they must have had some meeting because they're just like, let's just let them try it, like, really crazy shit, because we did try really, really weird and crazy shit. And some of the things ended up busting some myths that we thought were universal. So, for example, I talk about this one a lot, which is that interviews are a good predictor of performance. Right. We just said, what if we shrink our three hour interview to two and a half hours to two hours to 90 minutes to an hour to 30 minutes to 15 minutes? Does it change the quality of engineers we get? Right. And short answer for us was no. Can we hire interns and have them do a real work? Actually, a lot of our competitors at that time would actually tweet out and tell our clients, you have interns working on your projects, like you shouldn't be working with extreme Loudy, you should be working with our company. And it was our early employees, like the young employees coming right out of school, the interns who helped us build part of this amazing machine that was extreme labs. And at a company of three hundred, having sixty five interns is insane, but was part of our flywheel. So we busted a lot of it was just we were trying something. Not everything worked, but a lot of things did. And it was against conventional wisdom for whatever reason, that they let us try it. And sometimes we're like, wait a sec, this works. Right? And sometimes we saw weird things like you mentioned, like many more women joined our engineering team because of these weird things.
Farhan Thawar [00:30:40] So Farhan what's the story behind how you ended up in your role at Shopify after what you said a couple of minutes ago? I'm quite certain it wasn't because you tweeted four hundred forty times that Toby and just finally had a reply to you. What what was that journey like?
Jesse Purewal [00:30:56] Sure. So again, it was playing the infinite game in twenty fifteen. My roommate from Texas messaged me and said, hey, my boss is leaving Atlassian and he's moving back to Canada. And that person is Jean-Michel, who's the CTO of Shopify, and he was moving to Ottawa. And at the same time, Toby was about to IPO and he was just very lightly messaging me, saying, hey, now's a good time to join Shopify, but do you want to have a conversation with us? And I went back and read my old emails on this, actually, after I joined Shopify. And what I said was to both of them, I am super flattered, but I really want to go start my own company. JML started a conference called Canada Tech at Scale. He wanted to get all the engineering leaders together. And I did the first talk like the first keynote talk at that conference. And once a year and maybe a few other times, Gmail and I would get together at these at this conference and we would talk and we did realize we were pretty aligned. And it was in these infrequent mindmeld conversations, again, like many kilojoules per minute, expanded between us in those conversations and a few random emails like they would be your Gmail would message me around. What do you think about mobile engineering? How are you thinking about structuring a team? It led to like a twenty eighteen conversation around, hey, why don't we join forces? And it was it again, a short game. It wasn't like, hey, we should try to sell our company or we're looking for a team. It was years of conversations of alignment around how we think. So some of these things took years. But again, to me it's the same thing. It's community. I would hang out with JML these events. We would talk about Canadian leader and leadership in Canada from a tech perspective, Toby and I, we talk about mobile and that turned into many years later, like I started a company and then they acquired the company and now I would alternate. I'll take it all the way back. As Daniel and I were thinking about the company, we both realized that our learning journeys would be accelerated by joining Shopify.
Jesse Purewal [00:33:02] If I if I step into this infinite game and I maybe stretch the metaphor too far to bring Zino and his paradoxes in, you know, Zeno always posited this funny model where you can't get anywhere. Right, because first you have to go half the way and then you have to go another half the way. And before you know it, you have taken infinite steps and you haven't gotten anywhere. Now, for someone who's on a learning journey, they may say, to heck with Zeno, who cares? The whole point is that you're taking the steps. If someone is curious about what are the right ways to think about early steps with finite time, finite resources, finite choices out there, how would you counsel people to think about the right steps as it relates to their own ambitions and their own objectives?
Farhan Thawar [00:33:51] Cool, I like that, I like that story. I would. It reminds me of the Alan Watts poem, right, where he talks about if it was about the end, like getting the job or getting the title or getting the money. If you think about music, then would just be about playing the last note. And it's not you're supposed to be listening to the song the whole time. Like, that's the whole point. So what I do is the following one. I think we have to acknowledge that everybody is different. What I encourage people to do is I encourage them actually to write down a framework for what they care about. And it sounds funny, but most people don't do that because they don't think that they are maybe going against their internal monologue when they take a new role or take an assignment, like somebody comes to them and says, hey, can you mentor me? Or a recruiter messages them about a new job. If you don't have a framework, in my view, you may end up suboptimally making a choice. And so I have a framework where I write down what are the things that I care about and actually updated. I would say maybe two or every two or three months, like even still not because I have it in my calendar to update, but because I come across some information that causes me to go. Wait a sec. This is super interesting to me and aligns with how I could even more accelerate my learning. I need to incorporate it into my framework so I can even send you. I don't know if I did, but I can send you my framework and I encourage people. I show them mine and I say, hey, what do you care about my framework has you know, I want to be able to be around super smart people working on hard problems. I want to be able to have an impact. I want to be able to be learning quickly. So I think if you do that, it forces you to have this thinking around what do I care about? And, you know, my wife would say is super nerdy to have like a framework like this. Like I have I have a thing written down like what to teach your kids. Like, I write all kinds of things down. But for me, it forces me to evaluate things objectively. And I'm not a fan of of just going off the whim of like a recruiter message me. Let me look at this opportunity like, does it align with my framework? Number One, before I think about it further.
Jesse Purewal [00:35:59] Farhan, as you think about purpose, is there something that sets as the center for you? I mean, you talk a lot about learning and importance of community and hard problems and smart people and OK, to look dumb. There's there's a lot of precepts. Is there one of those or is there a. Anything that sits at the center, as you think about your personal reason for being your personal fire within. Or is it really the point that it's all of those taken together for you?
Farhan Thawar [00:36:28] Yeah, it's a good question. I think the way I think about it is that the side effects of this type of journey have many advantages for others as well. Right. So when we talked about sharing secrets or meeting people because I can learn something from them or going on my own experimental journey, like an extreme labs where we tried all these weird things, the thing that I think is is is counterintuitive is even though it looks like a like a selfish journey for me, it ends up being a very wide community, positive for everyone else in addition to my personal journeys, I think in a very strange way, and maybe it's underlying all that, I just haven't uncovered it for some reason when I do these things, they has all these positive effects that I notice, but I don't write down. And you're making me think now that I have to think about this more deeply because it's not in my in my framework, but it's a real part of it.
Jesse Purewal [00:37:31] One final question Farhan. For the builders listening here, if they wanted to know what's the most important piece of advice they should take from you, given the world as you've seen it, the world as you've experienced it, and the world as you've helped build it, what would that be?
Farhan Thawar [00:37:48] So I think I have this on my Twitter profile, which is I have this quote that I try to remind myself of, which is everything you know is wrong. And the reason I like that quote so much is that. It's happened so often in my career where I figured something out, I think, and then a year or two later I try to apply the same reasoning or the same solution to a different problem. And I realized I was wrong and I missed something or there's a larger world at play or if times have changed and that thing has changed. And so my number one piece of advice for people is to always test like you think something is true, please test it and check. And it's I know it's annoying because I'm always asking people the really basic dumb questions. Are you sure that's right. How do you know?
Farhan Thawar [00:38:44] And I think it's that how do you know part which people are like, what do you mean? Like every manager should only have a maximum of 10 reports. And I'm like, how do you know? And there's there's really like the only answer is like, well, we should try it with different numbers of reports and then figure out an objective framework to measure that against. And I think that's like my takeaway is I'm just always trying. And again, it's super annoying. I am super annoying. My wife hates it because I do it everywhere, even at home. And I think that I like people take that away because everything can be different. You just have to try it and maybe you'll uncover something. Then hopefully people try it and take it and then share it with others. And hey, by the way, I know we thought this was this way, but I just tried this and I learned that and maybe it's not that way. But I think that if people are able to test and try things, I would say the second part of that is probably not being afraid of looking dumb. It is hard to do and it happens often to me where maybe people are not happy or that you should know that, right. Wow. You have this career and have done all this and you don't know that. I'm like, yeah, I don't know that. So like, I'm asking, I'm asking a question. So I don't want to be in the dark and I'll ask the dumb question. And so I encourage people to do that.
Jesse Purewal [00:40:02] Farhan I love this conversation. I appreciate the time you spent with me and the input you gave to me along my own learning journey. So Namaste for that and I look forward to doing it again.
Farhan Thawar [00:40:14] Great. I had a I learned a lot from this conversation are making me go back. I have to write a few things down and revisit my framework to incorporate some of the things that you maybe think about. So thank you for that.
Jesse Purewal [00:40:33] Sincere thanks to Farhan Tower for joining me on the show. I hope all of you enjoyed our talk as much as I did. There's just something about people who are in it for the learning. They might come into a situation saying they want to learn and they do. But they're also the ones I always learn the most from in a conversation like the one we just had.
Jesse Purewal [00:40:53] Curiosity begets curiosity and you can really get into it and enjoy one another and see the world in a little bit of a new way. Now, one of the things we do after every show, since you all are breakthrough builders, is to lay out some building blocks. A building block is an action that I want you to take that's inspired by what our guest on the show has shared. It's a way of taking some core element of the conversation and making it work for you. In this episode, Farhan framed learning as an infinite game, he contrasted it with other pursuits that he labeled finite, like getting that next job or earning a promotion. And I think we can all agree that we're never done learning. But sometimes it can seem like we don't have time to pick up that new book, to take that class, to have that conversation. And we lose the chance to learn as a result. What Farhan has done that's both elegant and efficient is to use learning rather than something like advancement or money as the organizing principle for his decisions. And I think that's something I could do better at and I'm guessing many people want to do better at. So for this week's building block, here's what I'd like you to do. Write down two things first, what's something you would really like to learn? It can be a new language, a way of sleeping better or even just some things you could do to keep your life more organized. And it can be a long term or short term thing. Just one thing you really want to learn. And then what are three things that you could do? One tomorrow, one by next week and one by next month to move yourself along this learning journey? Be specific. What exactly will you do? What would your goals be? Who can help you? Maybe you have a bunch of ideas. Jot them down, run them by somebody and get some input. Be ambitious, but be practical and honest with yourself too. And remember that Farhan, like Robert Sherwani in Episode one, talked about the importance of a framework for knowing who you are and your purpose and building around that. So if you need some inspiration on that front, go back and check out that episode too. If you want some templates and tips and tricks on how to get started. Check out the show notes right here in the app. You're listening to this episode on or over on our website, Breakthrough-Builders.com. That's Breakthrough hyphen builders dot com. You can contact us through the site, too, if you want to go ahead and share any of your reflections. I'd love to hear from you. Take care breakthrough builders and bewell.
Jesse Purewal [00:43:28] Thanks so much for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I’d be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other listeners find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough Builders is a production of the Industries Team at Qualtrics. The show is written and hosted by me, Jesse Purewal. Mastering by Nate Crenshaw. Post-production and music by Clean Cuts Audio, part of the Three Seas Collective. Design by Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon and photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Jeremy Smith, John Johnson and Kylan Lundeen.