[kunzhi]

I know some folks who work and have worked at Shopify and their experiences track with this statement.

I was told that within Shopify there's something called a "Tobi Tornado" - basically when Tobi swoops in on a program / feature and demands significant change in short order. Carefully planned initiatives can be blown up and then it's maximum effort expected to turn it around.

What everyone had in common was saying that Tobi is quite a smart person and often not wrong, but he's still human, and so there's simply no way he can make 100% good calls because he can't always have full context.

[skrebbel]

Fwiw this is exactly what I'd expect a product founder to do. If I wanted to work at a bank I'd go work at a bank. It's so easy for groups to over-cover-their-asses, go for maximum safety everywhere, design-by-committee all the things, etc. I think this is almost unavoidable in a large org. It's the task of a decent product minded founder to add some balance to this.

I've no idea whether Tobi gets it right, just.. this isn't necessarily a bad thing!

[ketzo]

I mostly agree that the benefit of a product-focused founder & CEO is the ability to make judgement calls, even corrections, and get things moving faster

However, I think the more work you blow up when you do this, the more it’s reflective of a poor management style; even if it’s the right call under the circumstances, that call should almost certainly have been made earlier.

Of course we don’t live in a perfect world, and if something’s 75% done but really bad, you press the red button and stop it, even if people will be upset.

But if you’re consistently being described as a “tornado”, that says to me you’re not applying your founder judgement early enough in your company’s development process.

[jen729w]

Shopify store owner here. It’s my entire income.

This is terrifying.

Shopify is well past its move fast… phase. It powers a vast percentage of ecommerce. If not in dollar percentage, certainly in human.

Please, I beg you, pretend like you work at a bank.

[dismalaf]

Amazon and Ebay operate more like banks. Which is how Shopify carved out their market share. This is a fairly mature market. It's just that the incumbents aren't great because of how slow-moving they are...

Shopify is good because of how they operate.

[zachthewf]

There are certainly slow-moving ecommerce platforms that I'm sure would be happy to take your business. Yet Shopify has the best product. Why do you think that is?

[yladiz]

Why don’t you just say what you are trying to insinuate in the commenter’s mind, rather than asking the “why do you think that is?” question?

[notfromhere]

Blowing things up like that is mostly for people who want to feel important. It's a bad leadership model and fairly disrespectful to your employees IMO

[hbsbsbsndk]

There's a kind of survivorship bias to people saying "he's very smart". I was in a neglected part of the engineering org far away from his micromanaging. If he had been showing up and complaining about my projects I wouldn't have stayed for years.

[rchaud]

The PC term for this is "founder mode".

[ryandrake]

I've heard it called "Seagull Management." A manager swoops in unannounced, shits all over and disrupts everything, and then swoops out while the rank and file have to deal with the mess.

[ohgr]

Got one of them. I ignore him most of the time. This has generated more ROI than his initiatives would have. Evidenced by the teams who do them generating a loss every fucking time.

His nickname, which he wasn't worked out, is the first half of a sexual lubricant brand because he's such a wanker.

[mathgladiator]

And that is the rank and file's job. Chaos is important for breaking organizational bones.

[psunavy03]

And there's the bootlicking take of the day.

[mathgladiator]

maybe, but I retired early at 40.

When you go to work, you trade your identity to be the person that earns as much as possible. Everything else is just noise.

[psunavy03]

Keep telling yourself that. I'm sure you'll still be thinking that at 80 when you look back at whether or not your life meant anything anyone after you would give a shit about. Money doesn't mean shit when you're old and alone. My family also has "fuck you" money; don't think retiring at 40 overawes me. Beyond a certain point, it doesn't hide being an asshole.

[ethbr1]

EA, eh?

[AbstractH24]

> he's still human, and so there's simply no way he can make 100% good calls because he can't always have full context.

This is a good thing for all us humans to remember

[jasondigitized]

This is also called "Swoop and Poop" or "Show up and Throw Up"

[flappyeagle]

What if he’s right more than 50% of the time?

[senko]

He can be right 100% of the time, this is no way to run a company.

You hire passionate people who pour their soul and overtime into a thing then you parachute in, override half their decisions, micromanage other half, then leave leaving them to live with the mess.

After a few of these stunts, you end up with disillusioned, cynical, burnt out people who just don't care any more, and either quiet quit or leave for greener pastures, or the kind of folks who crack the game and fail upwards while caring nothing about the company and the products.

And as soon as the word spreads out that this is your modus operandi, smart folks who have neen around the block a few times will avoid you like the plague.

It can work if you're willing to churn people (khm Elon), for some definition of "work".

[phillryu]

You could be right, but in the hypothetical world where he's 100% right, and the current path the project or feature is taking is heading towards a dead end or is broken in some way. I feel there is a real cost that can be more easily ignored, e.g. working on a dead end or slowly failing thing that isn't set on the right trajectory is ultimately demoralizing and ends up in hindsight having been an opportunity cost and waste of your time vs. working on something else. And conversely if he's right about something like this, there should be positive feedback when it is turned around and starts performing better for the team involved?

[senko]

Yeah I don't mean to say founders, CEOs, etc, should ignore problems when they see one (let's assume they correctly identify the problem, ie 100% right): quite the opposite!

But there's a (slower, harder?) way to right the ship and make the team better, and (quicker, easier?) way to swoop in like a Marvel Avenger and break everything (and everyone) in the process.

I feel Founder Mode should in theory be the former, but is in fact excuse for many to do the latter (I've no evidence for this, just what it looks like to me).

[phillryu]

Ah ok yeah I see where you're coming from there. It's kind of like the question of did Steve Jobs need to be an asshole to be as successful as he was. And it can be tempting to think that they are intrinsically linked, but I also like to believe there is a world where he grew more on the empathy side but was still able to lead Apple perhaps even better.

[nebula8804]

I fell for this fallacy during the early days of the Tesla Skeptics wave. I thought no way this nonsense management style will keep them going once the competitors catch up. OEMs know how to make good reliable cars. Tesla is a shitshow.

Turns out the incumbents repeated many of the EV specific mistakes Tesla did early on, and Tesla continued to innovate in what they thought matters (electric powertrain, software, infrastructure etc.)

Even today if you watch some of Tesla's old battery day presentations, I am amazed at the level of care they put into their operations. The systems integration goes down to even the little things: https://youtu.be/Hl1zEzVUV7w?t=3761

People really see this with how far ahead SpaceX and Starlink are.

How does Musk keep getting the top people from the best schools to want to come to his companies when it is well known that prior groups get ground down to nothing and then tossed aside?

I tried to figure this out by confronting Starlink employees directly at DEFCON conference a few years back.

Essentially they are so driven they just want to work with A players. They dont tolerate B players or they will leave. Musk is sometimes wrong to the detriment of the team but sometimes he is really right and he pushes the team to perform their best and to think outside the box(or first principles as he would say).

[jimbokun]

> (khm Elon), for some definition of "work".

In that case the definition of "work" being "become the wealthiest person in the world".

[senko]

Bah, that's overrated, I'd be quite happy with just a few $B :D

[geodel]

Not good enough until I get to fire tens of thousands, turn their life upside down and gaslight them on their way out. And I am sad because these laid off people can 't even praise my genius while cleaning out their desk. So I am just leaving.

[flappyeagle]

Shrug? I disagree strongly. If he was 100% right I would just double the estimate of every project and build in the assumption of a pivot

[dghlsakjg]

Seagull management too.

Fly in, make a ton of noise, shit on everything, fly away.

[TZubiri]

This sounds like any normal privately owned company or hierarchical organization to be honest.