Harley Finkelstein

There are things I do in my life that are fun, that are strictly for enjoyment, and I enjoy the craft of it.

But storytelling in particular is something that when I look at all the different things I've done at Shopify, it's a thing that I think has added the most amount of value to the company.

And this also speaks to my dynamic, this yin and yang dynamic that I have with Toby, which is that I've sort of always, in hindsight now I can sort of see this, but I've always sort of viewed my role as he is the greatest product person I've ever met in my life.

He's this incredible tech visionary, especially when it comes to commerce.

And my job has kind of always been to take the brilliant things he's built and tell the world about it, tell investors, tell the media, tell our merchants, tell partners.

And it gives me great joy.

I love doing it.

It's that, you know, when your Saturday morning feels like your Monday morning, you know, you're onto something really great, which is sort of the opposite of, you know, what people describe as like Sunday scaries, which I've never felt my whole life, but I know people do find that that to be a real thing.

It's storytelling.

Those are harder things.

very difficult to ping the satellite and get a ping back to know whether or not that's actually happening.

With storytelling, I can get third-party objective feedback.

Being a world-class father and husband, it's more difficult to track that.

But those are things that are very important to me.

It is very important to me that my kids believe that I'm a world-class father and my wife thinks I'm a world-class husband.

And that comes actually less natural to me than storytelling.

Storytelling is sort of my ground state.

It's the thing that I would do if I didn't have anything else to do and I was left to my own devices.

I would tell stories.

I like telling stories.