Farhan Thawar joined Shopify in 2019 through the acquisition of Helpful.com, a company he co-founded. Since then he has led a team of over 3,000 engineers through periods of rapid growth, multiple acquisitions, and a fundamental shift toward AI-first engineering. He spoke to Open Source CEO about acquisition lessons, Shopify's product principles, and what it means to create "10x engineering environments."
What did you learn from being acquired by Shopify?
I've been lucky. This is actually my second acquisition. What I've realized is that every acquisition is different. My last company had 350 people and was acquired by a larger company. This time, we were just eight, so the scale and context were completely different. One of the most impressive things about Shopify is how Tobi embraces the founder mentality.
A lot of his executive team and leaders are either acquired founders or previous founders. He really believes in what he calls 'agentic people,' people who take initiative. Whether it's starting a product, a company, a community, a newsletter, or a podcast, these are people who naturally act and build. That's exactly the kind of person Shopify looks for. This approach matters even more in a remote company. You want people who are naturally inclined to take action.
How do you ensure an acquisition delivers value and integrates well?
People often forget that M&A is not just about the acquisition. The merging part is just as important. When you're acquired, you are not only bringing in people or a product. You are also bringing a unique set of knowledge and experience, and that should actively influence the acquirer.
A great example is Kevin Scott, who was the CTO of LinkedIn when Microsoft acquired them. He later became the CTO of Microsoft. That kind of transition, where leadership from the acquired company takes on major roles within the acquirer, adds huge value. The same thing has happened at Shopify. In my case, I went from leading a team of eight at my own company to leading teams of up to 3,000 at various points in my career at Shopify. It is a strategy more companies should consider.
“At Shopify, our incentives are actually aligned. We only make money if our merchants make money.”
What makes Shopify successful?
One thing that sets Shopify apart is how much we care about making our merchants successful. A lot of companies say they care about their customers, but at Shopify, our incentives are actually aligned. We only make money if our merchants make money. When a merchant finds more buyers, sells more products, and grows their business, we benefit too. That alignment puts us on the same side of the table.
We also take a very long-term view. For example, when there was a lot of excitement around NFTs, we could have added basic NFT functionality quickly. But instead, we built infrastructure that would allow anyone to add NFT features in just an hour. That took more time up front, but it gave us a foundation that will last much longer. We try to build tools that others can build on top of, not just one-off features.
What does your day-to-day look like leading engineering?
Because product is our top priority, a lot of my day is spent thinking about the infrastructure behind what we're building. When we do product reviews, we do not just look at what something does for the merchant. We go deep into how it is built. We want to make sure we are not introducing hidden ceilings or creating friction in the user experience.
We also spend a lot of time in the weeds of active projects. Every four weeks, we do what we call six-week reviews, now split into two batches. In one cycle, we review half of the company's projects, and in the next cycle, we review the other half. The goal is to make sure we are working on the right problems with the right people. If something is no longer a priority, we stop doing it and move on.
“If a project is taking too long, our instinct is usually to reduce the team size. It sounds counterintuitive, but sometimes a larger team creates overhead that slows things down.”
How do you balance gut instinct with user feedback?
We think of it this way: merchants are experts in their problems, but they are not necessarily experts in the solutions. They live in the problem space every day, so our job is to learn from them; to understand the problem as deeply as possible without jumping straight to their suggested fixes. They might say, "Just add a button here" or "Change this layout," but instead of building what they ask for directly, we try to dig deeper.
Tobi has a great line: "There are an infinite number of bad solutions and probably 10,000 good ones. Your job is to find the right one." So when we find one possible answer, we keep going. Often, it's only after building a working version that we realize there is a more elegant, scalable, or flexible path. At that point, we are not afraid to throw out the old solution and start over. We call this green pathing — continuing to explore until we find the best path forward.
What product principles guide Shopify?
We actually have a document internally called the Product Principles. At the top of that list is: build the best product. That's number one. Number two is: make money, but only to support number one. And number three is: never reverse those priorities. The idea is that if we keep building the best product, everything else will follow.
Tobi often says, "We've only been doing this for 21 years — why would we think we've already solved it?" That mindset keeps us focused. People ask why we don't expand into new categories, but our response is always, "Let's keep getting better at what we're already doing."
“Build the best product. Make money, but only to support that. Never reverse those priorities.”
How does goal-setting work at Shopify?
Instead of traditional goals, we work with themes. The reason is that themes have no fixed end; they are ongoing. For example, one theme from last year was "Shopify keeps me on the cutting edge." That means merchants should never have to worry about staying up to date with the latest AI developments because we're doing that work for them. Another theme might be "Shopify must be reliable," which is something we pursue endlessly.
These themes guide our work year-round. They get updated once a year, every January 1st, when Tobi announces them. But internally, we operate on a weekly cadence. Every six months, we do a public-facing release called Editions. It rolls up all the work from the previous six months — often over 100 features and infrastructure updates — so merchants can see the progress in one place. But the internal engine is running and shipping every single week.
What's different about Shopify's engineering approach compared to other tech companies?
One thing that sets Shopify apart is how intentional we are about both our tools and our culture. We choose a small set of core technologies — like Ruby, Rails, React, and React Native — and we go deep. We become core contributors, push improvements upstream to open source, and use those tools consistently across the company. That way, engineers can move between teams without needing to relearn tech stacks.
Culturally, we talk a lot about creating 10x engineering environments. That means building systems and infrastructure that help people build the right thing, the right way. Engineers don't just work with what's already available. We encourage them to imagine the ideal infrastructure for a feature, even if it doesn't exist yet. They prototype as if it does, and then we work backward to create or modify what's needed.
How is Shopify using AI, and how do you measure its impact?
We were early adopters of AI. Just two months after ChatGPT launched, we released AI-powered product descriptions. Since then, we've added background image removal, smart image placement, and Sidekick — an AI assistant that helps merchants generate reports, create discounts, build collections, and more. Our help center also uses AI; merchants can screen share and get live guidance.
Internally, we've used AI in engineering since the early days of GitHub Copilot. We track code completion acceptance rates — about one-third of suggestions are accepted — and monitor developer happiness and productivity. We also use AI across ops and go-to-market. For example, we turned a 90-minute onboarding checklist into a two-minute automated flow, increasing output 45x.
What do the best founders and companies have in common?
For me, angel investing is about learning, not making money. I invest to get close to founders and learn from how they think. The best ones usually share two key traits: curiosity and patience. Great founders are deeply curious. They follow problems, ask questions, and explore where things lead. And the very best ones are relentlessly patient. No matter how difficult things get, they stick with the problem and keep pushing forward.
The same goes for companies. A great company is often just a long-term exploration of a single problem space. Shopify, for example, exists to answer one question: how do we make entrepreneurship more common? Everything we do stems from being obsessed with that problem.