Harley Finkelstein

What do you want to spend your time on?

Who do you want to spend your time with?

Where do you want to spend your time from a geographic perspective?

And I think if you try to do all of it all the time, you end up being very mediocre.

It's especially hard, especially if there's an element of things that give you joy.

I don't think you can live... I don't think if you use the lens in your life of how you do anything is how you do everything, you have to be very careful about...

like how you do things.

Because if you want to do everything well or you want to do everything with intentionality, you just have to be selective.

I don't know anyone who is great at everything.

The mentors in my life, the role models in my life, they tend to be spiky objects.

Shopify is a team of spiky objects.

We often joke about it as like the island of misfit toys.

But

What we really mean is that there's no consultant in the world that would have put together a team at Shopify.

In the early days, kind of in the sort of the middle, you know, post-IPO days, and certainly modern days right now in 2025, there's no team that, like, there's no one who will put together this team.

But it works.

Why?

Because there is this commitment there.

on our team that whatever, whatever the thing you're responsible for, you are going to try to be the very, very best in the world at that particular thing.

Product design, sales, storytelling, finance, legal, whatever that might be.