Harley Finkelstein

At a 7,000 or 8,000 person company, like a small number of people sell a lot of people.

But yeah, that was, okay, so a couple things on that and a couple different sort of levels of abstraction, I guess.

I do believe that there are different phases of companies.

And I think at the early phase of companies, it's just mayhem.

Like, everybody do everything.

It's like Swiss Army Knife time.

And in those early days of Shopify, there's a photo that every couple years I put out on social media of me, like, mopping the floors.

You may have seen it.

But, like...

I may have mopped the floor once or twice, but it's a metaphor for those early days.

The floor is dirty.

You do everything.

You do everything.

That's kind of how it works.

And then I think as the company begins to operationalize, you begin to have teams and organizations and general managers and divisions and all that.

I became chief operating officer just post-IPO until around 2021, I think, for six years.

I did it because that's what Toby asked me to do.

We'd never had a COO before, and it was sort of this way of me looking after operations, specifically business operations.

it didn't come naturally to me.

Um, but back to sort of the, you know, lifelong learner and the global maxima thing and Toby pushing me into different directions.