I recently dug up an archive of Shopify founder and CEO Tobias Lütke’s old blog, which linked to this interview with Signal v. Noise. Given Shopify’s impact, if you’re an entrepreneur, founder, or programmer, the whole thing is worth the read, particularly how well Shopify — at 28 people in Ottawa — adapted to constraints.
For example, Shopify was based in Ottawa, where there weren’t as many senior business development veterans on the job market. Instead, Shopify aligned its incentives with design companies for referrals and sales:
Our financial pressure and lack of experience in traditional BizDev also required us…
On Technology and Social Mobility
In Toronto Life, Steve Kupferman writes of surviving an illegal rooming house in Kensington Market. I’ll leave the descriptive bits to him, but what’s notable is how he actually got out of that situation [emphasis added]:
My landlord patched up the bathroom, but he never fixed the roof. The leak spread to my bedroom, forcing me to set up a system of catch basins and cardboard shields to prevent tea-coloured ceiling water from dripping on my bed. The aura of neglect began to affect morale in the house, and our communal chore wheel fell into disuse. …
Shh, church is in session…
On Thursday, July 22, 2021, Kanye West set up his sanctuary at Mercedes Benz stadium, a listening party for his upcoming album Donda. The event sold out a few days prior, with a capacity of 42,000. Trapital’s Dan Runcie does some napkin math and sums it up well, “Very few artists can pull that off.”
Dissect’s Cole Cuchna writes, “Man I love album rollouts from the heavyweights. Nothing like seeing so many people excited about MUSIC. I can’t really explain it but witnessing that really makes me happy. Like just knowing you’re in the middle of a MOMENT.” …
Our one-sided connections with celebrities and social media influencers can have surprising benefits
I forget the year, but Facebook was only starting to catch up to Myspace, YouTube was shiny new, and I had just started blogging. Sometime around here, my friends and I watched one of Ryan Leslie’s videos — probably this one, with him playing all the instruments he needed to make a song. He had produced the classic, and incredibly catchy, “Me & You” single with Cassie. He had a presence in the mainstream and social media. …
Don’t just do it yourself; do it FOR yourself.
One of the traps and tragedies of creativity is the narrative of making money doing the thing you love. The quickest way to suck the fun out of something is to ask some version of:
- How will you make money from this? (See Dave Bennett’s blog post, and Molly Conway’s article.) 🙁
- Who’s the audience? 😖
- What is the purpose of this? 🤬
Most of the time, the best answers emerge organically; otherwise the process becomes contrived. If you knew the answers all from the beginning, there’d be no point in doing the damn thing.
There is no magic question…
The best career path might not be the ideal one you imagine
Earlier into my career, it was easy for me to buy into the labels. I was either an “entrepreneur,” or I was an “employee.” The reality of the situation was more amorphous. For example, while I ran my own business and had a team staffed with self-employed and part-time colleagues, I actually worked with clients in all sorts of different ways.
For one, I would go into their office two days a week and work as a fractional marketing lead. For others, I would work remotely as a consultant, or an editorial director with my own writing team or as…
Read this if you need people to notice your work but hate self promotion
Art critic Jerry Saltz publicly turned down a $250,000 deal Substack offered him. The self promotion was a dealbreaker. In his words, with some typos I couldn’t make sense of, here’s why:
I think it’s fishy to always be barking to your readers to subscribe. I think it is not my real work to write [for] “subscribers.” My only work is to write for the reader.
I do NOT want a ore-screens paying audience who already reads it likes me. I want to reach strangers; be loved and hated by strangers; talk about art to anyone any where any how…
Kanye West is proving how lucrative his quasi-religious appeal can be
On June 8, 2021, Kanye West turned 44. Yeezy Gap made the first product from its collection available for a pre-order: the Yeezy Gap round jacket. It was widely available, for a limited time; another time will come in autumn of 2021. All official traces of it at the Gap website and social media have since been scrubbed from the internet, to keep the excitement (hype!), but its footprints still exist. Many people follow Yeezy Gap’s collection and products closely, but I’m much more interested in the organization and the business. …
Best of Books
A look at why you may be feeling overwhelmed at work each day
In the early days of my career, I worked in communications at Xtreme Labs. A significant part of my job involved interviewing people at ghostwriting blog posts for them. I learned a ton of stuff like this, and it also informed the collaborative writing process at my editorial studio Wonder Shuttle. In one of these conversations, I sat down with our VP of Engineering Farhan Thawar, and we ended up writing this blog post, which we polished up and sent to VentureBeat. The point that resonated most with me was the one on context switching:
“In multitasking, the time it…
Best of Books
Why facts ≠ truth, and why we need to find them anyway
On June 5, 2018, Bill Gates announced that he’d give away Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness as a gift to every person graduating college in 2018 — making it available to 4 million associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor’s degrees cumulatively.
In an age where manifesting, motivated reasoning, and self-deception are in vogue, Rosling makes the case that when we see the world based on facts, we can also make better plans to create the futures we would want to live in. The challenge is, as humans, we’re not wired to process facts by default.
Why Our Instincts Get the Best Of Us
Rosling introduces the book with the news…
Herbert Lui
I write about personal and collective growth. Author ‘There Is No Right Way to Do This’ herbertlui.net/reps/
