Farhan Thawar is VP & Head of Engineering at Shopify, where he leads a team of roughly 3,000 engineers building the infrastructure behind one of the world's largest commerce platforms.
He joined Shopify in 2019 when it acquired Helpful.com, the company he co-founded; the same booking software StartWell now runs on.
In this conversation with StartWell's founder Qasim Virjee, Farhan breaks down why Shopify builds almost everything in-house (including their own alternative to Jira), how their AI tool Sidekick is reshaping the merchant experience, why "heightening the misalignment" makes for a healthier remote/IRL culture, and what it actually takes to run the world's biggest hackathon! (7,000 People, one week, zero rules on what to build.)
We also get into Farhan's own founder story: three pivots in three years at Helpful, getting acquired by Shopify, and why he has written checks into over 100 startups (even though he says he's "not a lucky person" when it comes to picking winners.)
Advice Farhan offers in this episode:
- Re-test AI tools on a schedule, not just once. If something failed six months ago, try it again — the gap between "not there yet" and "better than humans" can close in a single quarter.
- Choose infrastructure over the one-off feature, even when the feature is faster to ship. The infrastructure enables things you haven't thought of yet.
- Make your work culture legible, not comfortable. State plainly whether you're remote, hybrid, or IRL — ambiguity does more damage than an answer someone might dislike.
- Don't build what you can buy — unless you have an actual opinion about how it should work differently. Building for its own sake is waste; building because you disagree with the default is strategy.
- Protect focus by making it harder to start distracting work, not easier to finish it.
