Shopify VP of Engineering Farhan Thawar on keeping the platform alive at $4M/minute: regional failover, year-round planning, and the Shop app

from Intercom.

Up next, we have uh Farh Hunt.

Farh Hunt from Shopify in the Reream waiting room. Now, TVP and Ultradom. How you doing?

Congratulations. If you're here, who's keeping the servers online?

[laughter]

I thought you had to per personally fan the GPU.

Is this is this Shopify's like advantage is the the the infra team is in Canada. So it's just a regular is so the servers don't go on fire.

You guys don't do normal You don't do like American Thanksgiving, right?

Oh yeah.

It's true that we are not on vacation today. I mean we would not be on I mean a lot of our American employees are not on vacation today either. [laughter]

But this is why they won because they're in Canada. It's cold up there. So the servers don't match

during the Super Bowl. The servers don't match. They're locked in.

Yes.

And I'm trying I'm trying to match you guys with my green sweatshirt.

Fantastic. You look fantastic. Thanks for taking the time out of a busy day to come talk to me. Um what what what are the biggest uh learnings, changes uh to how Shopify is doing Black Friday or just infrastructure or technology this year? Has it been the diffusion of AI or or other stuff? What what are the big macro trends in your world?

Yeah, so a couple amazing things. One is like we don't just like roll into Black Friday, right? It's an all year round thing. We start planning like tomorrow we'll start thinking about or I mean after the weekend we'll start thinking about Black Friday 2026. And what's crazy about how Shopify's growth is and really it's all about our merchants. It all comes from the fact that they're doing such an amazing job for by creating great products um for all of their buyers. And so what happens is there's Black Friday, it's crazy. You see our sphere, you see the globe, we're showing you all the crazy sales. And then by April, May next year, it's just going to be a regular day at Shopify because that's how fast our brands are growing.

Yeah. And the yeah, the way we handle it is we do lots and lots of scale tests, man. Like it's crazy. We can we build up our infrastructure so that if an entire region goes down, we can just shift it to a completely new region and have no impact to buyers merchants.

That's amazing. Um talk Yeah, I guess talk more specifically about uh like what what part of the business at Shopify is getting less attention than it should right now? Obviously, people are focused on big headline numbers. They're focused on the sphere and some visuals, but like how much of a role is like the shop app and just like shop pay playing this Black Friday as a product that's now been in the been in the wild for a while now? I think everybody listening to this will have used it uh probably multiple times at this point. Um but how big of a role is that or kind of other parts of the business playing?

Yeah, I would not sleep on the shop app. It's amazing. started off as just package tracking and now I know lots and lots of folks including myself where I just start at shop app to search for something from an amazing brand that is building something specifically for you. I mean one of my favorite brands right now is this uh weights company called Motivate Motv8 number eight and it's got these adjustable dumbbells from like 5 to 80 pounds beautiful matches my gym doesn't roll away and uh I found it on shop. I would not have found these adjustable dumbbells any other way and so yeah you should you should look it up right now. I want to I want to see. So So we we we hunted around and we found a yacht for sale on a Shopify store, a 28 million euro super yacht, mega yacht. Uh somebody set up a Shopify site and they are trying to sell this yacht on I love it on on Shopify. And I want to see if the shop app has it. We're going to dig in there. We're going to

We should check. And then I mean you mentioned Shopay. You mentioned Shopay, right? I mean Shopay is the you know the fastest way to check out. And we see, for example, if you just have the Shopay logo, even if you don't click it,

conversion goes up because people trust the merchant.

Is does that give me some buy now pay later uh opportunities potentially?

You can. Yeah. I mean, obviously, as you know, we have lots of buyers who want to do a buy now pay later. We have shop pay installments, which

I'd love to just pay 1 million euros a month for 28 months to pay for my 28 million euro yacht. That would be fantastic. Uh this is this is the future. I love it.

Yeah. What? Um, uh, yeah, Shop Pay I still notice even though it's I've been using it for years at this point. Like the multiple times probably a month that I'll I'm willing to actually just buy something on my phone because I know it's going to be so fast when historically I'm like if a store is not on Shopify, I'm just not going to buy I'm not pulling out my credit card to buy your thing. I don't want to do it anymore.

Yeah. It's just it's made uh really really anything that speeds up that you know there's always those famous studies about like you know if you cut down the time it takes to do something on the internet you'll see massive conversion and we look at it in very like abstract kind of quantitative 3% gains for one one millisecond over here whatever. Um,

yeah,

but just the pain of actually having to, you know, go and find your credit card and stuff, it's it's it just brings actual delight to the entire process. And you have an entrepreneur who's focused on like building a cool brand, promoting it with cool people, and like the customers feeling cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, and then miserable. And so, if you can pull that out, like it's a it's a huge huge advantage. Um, but

yeah, and we see and we see, for example, especially on your phone, right? Like over threequarters of those checkouts happen on the phone. And you just want to be able to quickly check out. It's a trust builder. And by the way, imagine buying from a site that's not in your region, right? You're buying from Europe. You're in Europe and buying from the US. You want to make sure that's a seamless experience. And Shop Pay will do that for you. It'll show you your shipping rates. You can feel like it's trustworthy. You can see the delivery times. You click, you get the package tracking right away. You get the order confirmation. You get the little chuch-ing in the shop app. And everybody's feeling good.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, giving us the update. Ching.

Awesome day. Nice [laughter] day. Uh, congratulations.

Thanks for uh, yeah, thanks for keeping everybody online.

We appreciate it.

Keeping the the orders coming in.

It's not easy what you do and we appreciate you.

Unsung hero.

A good one.

We'll talk soon.

Thanks for having me on and back back to the war room.

Back to the war room. Love it.

We'll talk to you soon.

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