Harley Finkelstein – Building the Entrepreneurship Company
Colossus
Harley Finkelstein is the President of Shopify. We cover the different dimensions of entrepreneurship, the most interesting trends in e-commerce today, and the lessons learned from Shopify’s transition to public markets.
The luxury of finding something that if you were to borrow the term Ikigai, which is a Japanese concept, which is like life’s work, it’s a reason for being. It’s something that gives you a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, but also a living, meaning someone will pay you for it. We are incredibly lucky that we can even think about that. The reason I think it’s really important is because for past generations, they effectively did a job they didn’t love to eventually stop working if they were able to retire to go do their life’s work, and they were able to pick up all these clues throughout 20 or 30 or 50 years of work providing with an indication that, “Maybe my life’s work is in this direction.”
Leaders should have enough self-awareness and they have to have enough capacity to realize that, “Hey, I’m really good at this thing and I think there’s a chance that I could be world class at it, but these other things I’m just not that good at,” and then to put up their hand proverbially or literally and say, “I need help on these things because this is not where I’m going to excel.” So at Shopify, we want our leaders, and I think if you look at Tobi and I in particular, we’ve tried to do that, sharpen our edges so we can be really, really great and eventually potentially even world class, but mitigate our weaknesses by hiring people that are better, smarter, faster than we are at those sort of things also.
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