Darrell Etherington
15.4K posts
@etherington
VP @SBS_Comms, ex-OMERS Venture, ex-Managing Editor at TechCrunch. Writer of @theangle, host of @originalcontentpodcast
Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke explains Goodhart’s law and why he doesn’t like KPIs or OKRs “Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric… No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.” For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi explains, this doesn’t mean they don’t value data and metrics. “We are extremely data informed. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips… But what Shopify attempts to do is just not over-fit for what’s quantifiable.” People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up. But Tobi thinks that the most important aspects of a product are rarely quantifiable: “The overlap of the most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable are like maybe 20%. Which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who only look at quantifiable things.” He continues: “Shopify is comfortable with unquantifiable things like taste, quality, passion, love, hate… The sort of deep satisfaction that a craftsperson feels when they’ve done a job well is actually a better proxy if you allow it to be.” They then have robust analytics systems that tell the company if something’s wrong or a new rollout breaks something. “We think about it as a cockpit for a pilot. The decisions are still made by pilots, and we think this leads to better results… I think there needs to be more acceptance in business of unquantifiable things… And then metrics take a support function.” Source: @lennysan (Feb 2025)
Young people massively underestimate how their public social media can kill high-paying job offers I have personally seen 5 offer letters pulled in NY over social media content. All were 300k plus total comp roles. Real cases If you are aiming for 85k forever, you are probably fine If you want bigger things, read this
We’re introducing the Cursor SDK so you can build agents with the same runtime, harness, and models that power Cursor. Run agents from CI/CD pipelines, create automations for end-to-end workflows, or embed agents directly inside your products.
98% of companies don't have a procurement team. The ones that do are stretched thin. Today, they all get backup. Introducing a suite of AI agents to run your entire purchasing process, saving you 46 hours of manual work per month and 16% on yearly vendor spend.
David Silver has a new billion-dollar company that aims to build AI “superlearners.” wired.com/story/david-si…
BREAKING: Tim Cook steps down. Ternus to CEO.
