 Hello. How's everyone doing? Thank you for joining me here today for this conversation. I'm so excited to be here in Helsinki. It's so inspiring to be around so many entrepreneurs and founders, all of you building and scaling your businesses so passionately. It's something that I take pride in getting to do every single day. My name is Shimona Mehta. I'm the managing director of Amiya at Shopify. And I've been here for six years now, building actually on both sides of the ocean. First in North America, as we build and scaled our first commercial organization over there. And then since 2019 in Amiya, building our organization here from scratch. And I can tell you that with what we've done over the last decade or so, we've been able to build and scale to over 10,000 employees globally and scaled our revenue across 175 countries and across all of Europe with millions of merchants using our platform. Now, not all of you will be where Shopify is at today in terms of scale, but I can promise you, I've been and we've been exactly where you are today as you're thinking about growing, building and scaling your organizations. No matter the product or service that you're offering, at the end of the day, people are actually what companies are made up of, highly engaged people who are working towards a common goal together. Engaged humans are what makes a company build and grow and are the key indicator of long-term, fast-skilled growth and success. So today, I want to talk to you a little bit, but how you as founders and entrepreneurs can ensure you're putting in the right foundation into your organizations to ensure an innovative, high-growth, exciting organization that builds for the future. So as you're thinking about building your organizations, you're probably asking yourself a few questions as you're looking at hiring all the right people so that you build the right machine and the right culture in order to be able to build and grow. And they're probably the same questions I was asking myself just a few years ago as I started to build. Maybe you're asking yourself, what kind of tools can I build in order to get the most out of my teams? What kind of work environment do I need to put my teams in front of? Is it remote? Is it office-first? Is it hybrid? What do I do to make sure that I'm building the right environment for my team to succeed? Importantly, how do I pay my employees? How do I make sure I'm attracting the right talent at the right time and ensuring that they want to come on board and attach themselves to my mission? How do I make sure I'm offering them the right pay? And then lastly, and I think actually most importantly for long-term success, how do I motivate my teams once I've got them in the door? How do I make sure that they're engaged and working towards the goal that we have in front of us, that they feel engaged? You know, I think that we're seeing around us every single day, you know, examples of organizations that maybe aren't building the right culture and the right environment. They're not valuing their employees and what they bring to the table. And I can tell you that that's the foundation that you start from in order to build a high-growth, long-term successful organization. Now, I'm not going to be able to give you all the answers to these questions here. I wish I could. Probably wouldn't be standing here if I knew unless I had all the silver bullet answers. But what I can do is share with you my experiences and Shopify's experiences in how we've approached some of these, what's worked for us, as well as some of the mistakes that we've made along the way that perhaps you can avoid if you can learn from some of my lessons and where I've tripped up in the past and what you can potentially do a little bit differently as you're building and scaling from where you're at. I also often know that as you're building and scaling and you're so busy doing all the things that you're doing today, that sometimes it can feel like investing the time into building the right teams, you just need people in the door. And sometimes it feels like taking time to find the right people is a problem for another day or a problem for when you're a little bit bigger. But I can promise you the easiest time for you to do that is now at the size you're at. It only gets harder as you scale. So if there's anything I can get across to you is everything we talk about today, start now. So if you don't know who Shopify is, we're founded by a German, Toby Lutke, who founded Shopify in Canada about 17 years ago. He was actually simply just trying to start a snowboard shop online with a couple of his friends at 26 years old. And he couldn't find any great e-commerce software in order to do that. And because he had a programming background, decided he just build it himself. And as he built that, it turned out that a lot of the entrepreneurs in the community that he was in in Ottawa, Canada wanted to use and leverage the software that he just built. And very quickly, he saw that he could have a greater impact on the world by following the path of Shopify and providing the software and the platform that we do to help all merchants be able to start, build, grow and scale their businesses than simply with a snowboard shop. So that's how Shopify was born back in the late 2000s. And since then, we've hired thousands of people. Our aim is to be a hundred year company. And that aim drives every single decision that we make from the type of software that we build to the type of people that we hire, to what we invest in. I know a lot of you are probably investment planning right now for 2023. It drives what we invest in as well. And for those of you who have been in the room, you know, we've been in your position. I know the choices that you're making. Make sure you're clear on what your mission is and what your aim is and allow all of your decisions to be driven from that. I know it can feel scary and hard to pick the right path sometimes, but let's talk a little bit about some of the steps that you can take in order to do that. So the secret sauce that I think it takes to be able to hire and retain the best talent in your organization is one, being mission-focused. Being a mission-centered organization will talk about what that means and the steps you take. Ensuring that you provide, then, your awesome rock stars that you bring into your organization agency over how and where they work. And then lastly, ensuring that you're building the right environment to retain those people once you've got them in the door, because retention is actually a big key to fast rocket ship growth. Attrition only slows down an organization, so you want some systems in place to keep those folks engaged once you've got them there. But let's start with being mission-driven. Mission-driven companies hire the best talent. And I can't underscore how important this is. Now, when I say mission-driven, what I mean is those that act on their mission or their purpose at every step. I know I've worked for companies before where the mission is a bunch of nice words that are actually just framed on a wall when you walk into the office, but it's actually not how decisions are made or how they operate on a day-to-day basis. Being truly mission and purpose-driven means being willing to make decisions at every step that lead towards your greater mission or your greater purpose. For us, our mission at Shopify is to make commerce better for everyone, to remove roadblocks and friction from people being able to start build, grow, and scale businesses. And every decision we make, as I said before, in what we code, who we partner with, how we hire, drives right back to that particular mission. And we attract the best talent who wants to attach themselves to that. In fact, what we're seeing more and more is that is what people are looking for when they're choosing a company to work for. Gen Zs at 42% would prefer to work for a company that has a purpose where they feel like the work they does has an impact in some way, shape, or form, versus one that would just pay them a ton. And that's higher than any generation that we've seen before. So ensuring that you're attracting people with how their work will have impact, what are they going to be doing that serves or betters the world in some place? And it can be a small mission, it can be a small purpose, but showing and demonstrating that what they're doing will serve a greater purpose or mission. And like I said, we're seeing this more and more now with the newest folks that are entering the workplace. So ensure that what you're doing is serving towards and your decision-making towards that. A couple of examples of how we've done this or experienced this. Tiktail is actually a Swedish-based startup. Their focus was on directly connecting brands to consumers in a marketplace-type environment. They built and grew so phenomenally well that for Shopify, we actually ended up acquiring them. Because we were looking to build what we've called our shop app today, which is creating that exact same environment. We've done that and focused on that in every single acquisition that we've made over the last decade. We continue to work to hire and implement and inject founder entrepreneurial mentality and mission mentality back into our organization even as we scale. So keeping it fresh. And Tiktails, because Tiktails employees were so focused on their mission, we actually were able to retain them at Shopify even as we acquired them into a larger organization. One of our merchants who uses our platform, a good company. Again, Nordic company that's focused on helping people make better eco-friendly choices in the consumer goods that they buy, does that at every step in how they brand themselves, in how do they talk to the world, the types of sales they run, how they think about shipping and delivery options. And the people that work for them believe so deeply in that, that they have one of the highest retention rates that I've seen. And they continue to succeed this year alone. I know they've been able to donate two million Kroner to green causes that they believe in. And so they continue to inject things right back into what their mission is. But any opportunity to be able to inject your mission back into your culture is incredibly important. Okay. So talking and speaking about your mission and making decisions around it is one aspect. Diversity is a key part of how you do that. Mission alignment should be foundational priority, the hiring, and ensuring that you're building the right building blocks of your organization from the beginning is key. At Shopify, we make it a priority to approach diversity and inclusion via all dimensions of this wheel here you see there. And it's from every aspect, whether you're talking about gender, sexuality, nationalities, languages, culture lines, or diversity of thought and personalities and socioeconomic standing. It is important from the beginning to ensure that you're putting together the building blocks of an organization that reflect the world that you're trying to serve. Because if you don't, you're gonna have missed opportunities in the code and the product that you develop, in the markets that you enter, in the go-to-market strategies that you build, if you don't have in there with you the ability to build the right products with the right perspectives at the table. One of the first things that I did when I was hiring my team over here in Amia, being a Canadian who moved to Europe in order to build an organization, I made sure as I was building my senior leadership team that I had multiple nationalities and multiple languages at the table so that we learned how to communicate with each other so that we built better go-to-market strategies. We thought about how we built an engaged organization when English isn't the first language. And so I've got 11 different languages and seven nationalities represented on my senior leadership team. And that makes sure when we're working to make sure that we communicate together, all of that thought goes into how we build our organizations to make sure that we're pulling all of the best engagement and ideas out of our people who are on the front lines. It makes sure that we think about the right case studies and communication, value proposition, go-to-market development for our front line, for our merchants and in all of our markets as we venture Germany and France and Italy and beyond. Now, this could seem like a nice to have as I'm talking to you about it, but let me tell you there's a couple of mistakes that I found that founders can make a little early on that I hope that you'll avoid. One is not addressing diversity right at the beginning because it might seem like you just need people, you need butts in seats, you just need people to fill some roles, you're growing so fast, you're busy, you're hardly sleeping. But I can tell you, it only gets harder. Once you've built the foundation of your organization, it will continue to grow beyond your influence solely. And if you haven't put the right building blocks in place early, what you hire is what will get scaled. So hire diverse early and know that you'll allow yourself to scale diversely as you continue to grow. The other, especially as you're growing and you're trying to figure out where to find the talent because maybe you don't have a big talent acquisition or HR function is yet to help you with that. I've often found that founders could just start to hire from companies that they admire, right? Because you feel like there's great quality people at some of the companies that you admire or other companies that have gone before you that are larger. And that could be a mistake as well. They've been building their organization for their business maturity, their size, and for their mission. Make sure that you don't try and just pull from other organizations, particularly scaled organizations, right? The VP of sales at Shopify probably isn't the right VP of sales for you because we're at a different size and scale. It's more about scaling right now and operationalizing. You want builders. You need people who are great zero to one, who are ready to roll up their sleeves. Same goes for hiring from schools that you think are high quality. Similar thing with Ivy League, right? You get a very narrow set of parameters and profile of folks at certain schools. And so you want to make sure that you've looked at different education types, different universities and different schools. Thirdly, ensuring that you continue to hire for something that I think is one of the most important. If there's anything else you remember here today, hire for slope and not intercept. I'll explain what that means. Hiring for intercept means you're hiring for someone who's a great fit for this moment in time. They're a perfect fit for the problem sets you have today. And for all of you that are building and scaling, you're gonna fall behind in your talent very quickly. One of the most important things that we've always done at Shopify is ensure that we're hiring for slope, which means people who have continued growth potential. They've got a growth mindset. They have a learner's mindset. They come with a passion for the mission. They're great learners. They're team players. They might be deep in one particular area, but we also know that they probably have an ability to go wide and continue to grow and scale with our organization. This is one of the most important parts of scaling an organization quickly. Do you have people that you're putting in that can scale with you in what you're doing? That you can develop, particularly as you strom up new teams, new experiments, new functions. You're gonna need to move context around your organization. You're gonna need people who can go in and experiment with new ideas that you have. Maybe you wanna throw them into new markets. Let me tell you a little bit about my journey. I started at Shopify six years ago as one of the first sales leaders. In fact, I was the head of sales enablement at the time, building commercial organization. Within 10 months, I moved into what we made up and we called the head of revenue acceleration. I was looking for ways for us to continue to grow and scale our revenue at a faster pace. I then took on being the head of Shopify Plus for EMEA, which was our enterprise or larger business option, and a year later took on being the MD for EMEA for all of Shopify commercial. It was because I was committed to Shopify's mission and what Shopify saw in me was growth. Mine sent my ability to grow with the organization. They saw that I'd continue to grow and learn at the same pace that they were growing, and that allowed me to be able to grow with the organization. Imagine if they had to hire for that role at every single step rather than be able to plug and play someone into the next role that was needed. One of the first things we also did at Shopify, when we first started our sales organization, we didn't have the money to be able to pay salespeople appropriately. We also, it was the first time we were building sales. We weren't an attractive place for salespeople. So what we decided to do instead, we hired new grads and we decided we'd teach them how to sell. And so there's no way you can hire for experience in that moment, right? We had to be scrappy, we had to figure it out, we had to teach them how to sell. So we hired for attributes, competitiveness. Had they played team sports before? How did they perform in school? Were they team players? Did they seem intelligent? Did they have a growth mindset? Hire for the attributes you need to be able to scale your organization, teach the skills, everything else will come with it. So you figured out your profiles, you got the right people in the door. Now you've got those rock stars there, you need to be able to give them space to grow. Don't cage them up, allow them to roam and to roar. One of the things that we've learned is that providing people with the agency to be able to do their work in the way that they feel best is incredibly important. But providing them agency to work how and where and when they want to has to come from a place of trust, right? It's about outcomes and productivity and not time logged in or hours in an office or face time. And that's what you're all about as you're growing. You need outcomes, you need productivity. Trust your people, if you're gonna take the time to hire great people, trust them to be able to produce. Great people want to do great things. They wanna have impact, give them the space and the agency to build the right environment to do that. So let's focus on a little bit on first on the where and the when. At Shopify, we believe that the future of work is built around a mission and not a headquarters. We were a very co-located organization up until a couple of years ago, but early on in the pandemic, we made the decision to go digital first and launch what we call digital by design in 2021, where our people have the agency and ability to be able to work from home, from a co-working space, from wherever they are and to be able to own their time. And we did that for a couple of reasons. One, it allows us to hire talent from anywhere they are, not just in big city hubs around the world. Access to talent is a really great advantage to a digital first environment. And two, it's provided us an opportunity to give people a level playing field. Everyone is operating the same environment, which means we now invest in all the tools that we can to build the best possible remote environment to make it engaging, all the right tools. And everyone actually has the same access to opportunity this way, rather than those that are in office have all the face time with the bosses. But it's not about being digital only. There's an intentionality behind bringing people together because being together in person is incredibly important as you build an organization. So we use bursts, which are intentional times that we bring teams together for relationship building, trust building and strategy setting. Then they can go and do their execution work asynchronously. We have ports, which actually used to be some of our offices that we've transformed into spaces that people can come together for these bursts or when we bring customers in or studios for recording and event spaces. And we have them scattered around the world so that we have a great place for our people to come together. We offer Destination 90, an opportunity for our employees to work anywhere in the world. So you might be an employee of our UK entity, but maybe you wanna go work in Alicante in Spain for a few months in the summer with your family. You can go do that too. It allows you the flexibility to be able to do that. And lastly, of course, flexible time management. People are productive at different points and times. And so we wanna provide people the opportunity to be able to work how and when they want. It's about production, not time in. And then I wanna talk a little bit about one of our learnings. Something we've launched most recently is what we call Flex Comp. We realize we needed to give people the agency over how they get paid because everyone is at different stages of life and have different needs. And so we just launched this in the last quarter where we provide our employees every quarter the option to actually pick their pay mix between cash and stock. And so if you're a young person looking to put a down payment on your first house, maybe you wanna slide that slider over to all cash that you've got that in hand. If you're someone who's more settled, you're focused on the mission and long-term investment, you might wanna flex a little bit more to stock. For whatever stage of life our people are at, we wanna give them the agency over their pay to do that. Now, this is something we just started thinking about recently. Let me tell you it was a massive haul and it was very difficult to do. You can imagine with how many countries we operate in, how hard that was from a compliance perspective. So my advice to you, start thinking about this early and now. How will you give people agency over how they get paid? It's been a really great retention policy for us. All right, so you've brought the best in and you've got them engaged and they're focused on your mission. Now the key is retaining them. And there's two key ways that you really need to focus on I find to make that happen. Because again, attrition is one of the greatest things to slow down an organization. When you spending time spinning up your losing context and you're spending time having to hire, keep your people motivated and engaged. The first is focus early on building what we call a jungle gym. Careers are no longer linear anymore. There's no ladder that people are trying to climb. And what we find is that people are looking to be able to grow, learn and develop in many ways. And so turn your startup into a jungle gym. I'm gonna read something to you here. Over 70% of high retention risk employees want to leave because they see no future advancement in their current job. And on the flip side, when it comes to retaining talent, the number one predictor of retention is when your employees are able to see a career path for themselves and they can anticipate their growth. Think early about how you will take your highest performing folks and throw them at new problems. Give them new places to grow and to learn. And then spread that across the rest of your employees as well. Offer people and think early about career and growth path. Lastly, this is one I know that usually gets left till a little bit too late. So I'm gonna ask and encourage you all to focus on this early. Focus on leadership development and the craft of leadership early and as immediately as possible. I know it's something that usually comes up in developing leaders once you've got two layers of leaders in and you've probably promoted that frontline person up to a lead of leads within a few months and now they're trying to figure out how to build and lead an organization. But organizations need to have three types of leadership in them and thinking about it early. One is ensuring that there's the visionaries in place which is probably you. Thinking about the long-term in the future. You need active leaders in place. Those that are getting everything done, executing on the plan, makes you sure the teams are rallied, collaborating and challenging well. And then lastly are the teams and system builders. Those that are thinking about setting and holding high standards. Thinking about everyone's career paths. Ensuring there's psychological safety there so that people continue to challenge, debate and work together. Being great storytellers so that you share your mission with each other. Think and focus early on the craft of leadership. It's a mistake that we made at Shopify. We did it a little bit too late and we ended up pausing our organization at one point for three months and focusing solely on developing all the leaders before going back to work and I can tell you now that it exponentially helped us to grow moving forward. That was in 2018. So, talked a lot in 30 minutes here. But to sum it up, as you're thinking about building and growing great organizations for you as you scale, be mission focused and have all of your decisions be backed by your mission. Give people the agency to work how and where they want and think about pay mix in there as well. Don't make our mistake. And then lastly, think about their impact and scale, think about leadership and think about their career path early. Retain those folks and they'll be engaged and build towards your mission for you. Thank you so much, folks. Great talking to you. See you soon.