What happened at Shopify after that memo

Plus: politics and tech will always be intertwined

Author

Ted Goas
August 06, 2025

🔖 What I’ve been reading

I’ve long advocated that fast-loading software is a safe bet that will never go out of style, so it warmed my heart to read Catherine Jue’s article on the topic.

We ask for features, we ask for volume discounts, we ask for the next data integration. We never think to ask for fast.

She offers so many practical arguments for making software:

Fast signals simplicity, which is even rarer in a world where code and content are commodities.

10 years from now, no one is ever going to wake up and say “Gee, I wish my software was slower”, but it’s often hard to convince leadership that performance is something worth investing in.

We all remember Shopify Tobi’s tweet about Ai in April right? Yea, that one. We all saw the headline, but wondered what happened next? Well, there’s an article for that.

It’s clear the company went all in. Access for everyone, no token limits, default “yes” to everything, and internal Ai tools galore. The sales engineer’s “What should I do today?” page is clever!

Most interesting to me is the bit about hiring more entry-level people and getting them to prototype with a beginner’s mindset:

Shopify is hiring more interns because they’re the ones who are using AI in the most interesting ways and have a beginner’s mindset by nature.

I still believe we need seasoned professionals in the loop to prevent mistakes from less experienced folks, but I love to idea of teams balancing newcomers (not shackled by traditional thinking) and experienced folks (able to spot and avoid mistakes).

I highly recommend this for anyone trying to put their head down, do their job, and ignore politics.

Nothing is apolitical, especially tech. Some in tech see democracy as a drag on innovation, favoring a “tech-friendly” strongman to cut through regulations.

The basic pitch is seductive: democracy is messy, slow, and often staffed by people who don’t understand technology. Wouldn’t it be better to have someone in charge who just… gets it? […] You hear Trump promising to “cut red tape” and “unleash American innovation,” and you think: Finally, someone who gets it, someone who will stay out of my way.

Tech folks have always had a soft spot for less regulation, but we can’t do that by ignoring the nuances and complexities of reality.

It’s not just about cutting red tape—it’s about the fundamental belief that techbros like themselves shouldn’t have to deal with the messy compromises that democracy itself requires. They’d rather sweep away all those pesky democratic institutions and let the “smart people” (spoiler: they mean themselves) run things.

Democracy is slow and imperfect, but it creates the open, stable conditions innovation needs. Fascism does one thing well: it makes everything worse.

Why we still ship bad products is a gut punch for any product team. “Teams often rush to meet deadline-driven ‘MVP’ goals without pausing to validate whether what they're building actually matters.” I couldn’t get past the first example without saying to myself: “Oh yea, I’ve been there!”

Jira introduced deep research into it's chatbot, which is pretty cool cause honestly sometimes a single Jira ticket feels like a research project 😂

I love Judd Antin’s First Researcher Starter Pack, a playbook to succeed as the first researcher on a team.

While I don’t live in one myself, I love seeing how other folks optimize small apartments for both living and storage. I love this Paris flat in particular, described as “a female version of a bachelor pad”.

28% of professional investors prioritize sustainability in their investment decisions, up from 17% last year. However there’s a deepening divide between those who feel strongly that sustainability does matter and those who don’t.

Every Level of Wealth in 13 Minutes, from the poorest countries to Elon Musk. Includes a few interesting stats, like the fact that since 2000 global wealth inequality has actually decreased 🤯

🏛️ A favorite I periodically re-read

Figma’s not a design tool — it’s a Rube Goldberg machine for avoiding code. Published only a few months ago, I’ve already re-read this several times. Even with the explosion of tools the last two years, I’m amazed at how many designers I’ve seen still spending endless hours polishing design details in Figma without realizing they passed the point of diminishing returns a long time ago.

💅 Nice Site

Adaline has such a nice homepage, balancing nice artwork with a text-based, technical design. They push the scrolling animations just enough not to get annoying.

Adaline homepage depecting their app in dark mode in front of some dark, grassy hills.

Thanks for reading ✌️
- Ted (@tedgoas)