[rubayeet]

Former Shopify employee here. The company loves narratives like this where there is an enemy and there is a cause to unite the team behind it to battle with the said enemy. In my time there, the enemy was Amazon, and the cause was “we are arming the rebels against the Empire”. The had ambitions plans to fight Amazon at their terrain (shipping and logistics), made significant acquisitions (Deliverr, 6 River Systems). But at the end they had to shut down those divisions. In my last year at that company, I noticed the mission moving away from “mom and pop businesses” and towards enterprise. To me this fills like yet another narrative engineering by the execs to sustain the significant growth they have seen in the stock valuation.

[chatGDPs]

That's funny, as Salesforce used a similar tactic when they first started with their 'End of Software' campaign against Siebel. Benioff himself detailed this strategy in Behind the Cloud, where he suggests, 'Always Go After Goliath.'

Tobi Lütke doesn't do these kinds of things just because he likes games and nerdy stuff or because he just wants his stock to go up (who doesn't).

[lesuorac]

Heh, everybody loves to be an army fighting against evil so like as it doesn't involve any actual army or fighting concepts like bullets and blood.

[rubayeet]

Yes, except Shopify is very intentional about us vs them narratives like this. The CEO is an avid consumer of Video games / SciFi / Nerd culture, and the leadership finds ways to inject these themes into the mission statements.

[crowcroft]

Curious if your experience of this is good or bad?

Setting up a clear us vs. them mission at least makes it clear across the company what you should be focussing on.

My experience at bigcos is that the mission is some hand wavey 'we exist to make life better for our customers' statement, and no one ever could agree on what that meant.

[rubayeet]

Neither good or bad to me. Mission is important some people, I have been in the industry long enough to realize companies will change their mission if the business is no longer viable / profitable, so I have taught myself to be indifferent to it. As long as I am working with smart and easy to work with people, on a business that is legal / ethical, I’m good.