100-Year Thinking

Make decisions oriented toward long-term company success, accepting short-term trade-offs

Archie Abrams
Growth and experimentation at Shopify

100-Year Thinking

"Embedded in all of our principles are make the best product in the world, make money to do more of one. Never reverse principles two and three. In every kind of executive meeting, every town hall, that slide comes up... it's an important reminder job is to build the best product for merchants over the long period of time." - Archie Abrams

What It Is

100-Year Thinking is an organizational philosophy that frames every major decision around what will make the company successful over the long term (100 years), rather than optimizing for near-term metrics. It requires accepting short-term trade-offs, different ways of measuring success, and empowering founders or leaders with strong product taste to make decisions that metrics alone couldn't justify.

At Shopify, this manifests in three key principles (in order):

  1. Make the best product in the world
  2. Make money to do more of #1
  3. Never reverse principles 1 and 2

How It Works

How it changes decision-making:

  • Product decisions are driven by "what's right for commerce 100 years from now"
  • Technical architecture is prioritized over shipping speed—"the how determines strategy"
  • Core product teams don't have KPIs or OKRs—decisions are driven by taste
  • Big enterprise deals don't override focus on entrepreneurs (today's startups are tomorrow's big brands)

The three product groups at Shopify:

  1. Core Product - Building the right things for commerce 100 years from now (no metrics)
  2. Merchant Services - Building tools like payments and shipping (medium-term horizon)
  3. Growth - Optimizing the customer journey (shorter-term metrics, but with long-term accountability)

The accountability mechanism:

  • Every 6 weeks, all R&D group leads meet in person with Tobi (CEO) to review every single project
  • Discussion focuses heavily on technical architecture and "how we're building this"
  • A small number of people (Tobi, Glen for core) hold the quality and taste bar
  • No project ships without explicit approval from the group lead

How to Apply It

  1. Establish first principles - Document your version of "make the best product, make money to do more of it"

  2. Accept different time horizons - Allow different parts of the org to operate on different time scales

  3. Invest in long-term measurement - If you're thinking long-term, you need systems to track long-term outcomes

  4. Prioritize technical architecture - "The technical architecture determines strategy in a technology company even more than the what and who"

  5. Require strong taste - This only works with opinionated founders/leaders who hold a consistent quality bar

When to Use It

  • When you have a founder with extremely strong product taste and vision
  • When you're building a platform or infrastructure that compounds over time
  • When short-term metrics could lead you away from long-term value
  • When you're willing to lose some enterprise deals to maintain focus
  • When you have the financial runway to sacrifice short-term for long-term

The Trade-off: Taste vs. Metrics

"I think you either have to use metrics as accountability, which is the most common kind of way to drive accountability and focus. Or extremely strong founder or set of folks who have extremely strong opinions on what good is and what taste is."

The worst case: "Let's just go build a bunch of cool stuff in kind of a haphazard way"—no metrics AND no strong taste.

For most companies, metrics are the right answer. 100-Year Thinking with taste-based decisions requires a rare founder archetype.

The "No Wizards" Example

Shopify has a "no wizard principle"—avoiding onboarding carousels that bypass the actual product. When growth wanted wizard-like functionality:

Instead of: "Enter a few things, and we're going to generate these sections for you" (wizard)

They built: Pre-filled sections based on what they know about you, placed directly into the product experience (not a wizard)

This preserves the principle (users learn the real product) while achieving the growth intent (reduce friction).

Source

  • Guest: Archie Abrams
  • Episode: "Growth and experimentation at Shopify"
  • Key Discussion: (00:42:18) - How 100-year thinking shapes Shopify's culture
  • YouTube: Watch on YouTube

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