Addressing a crowd of 500 members of Canadian tech during the BetaKit Town Hall the CEO of Shopify said the country suffers from a “go-for-bronze” culture.
What’s going on Canada?
Hockey
Football (NFL)
unknown
Football (CFL)
unknown
Baseball
unknown
Basketball
unknown
Soccer
unknown
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:
Shopify CEO should shut the fuck up and pay more taxes to fund our public services including education.
I wish people just come out and say what they want instead making these long ass allegorical speeches. The guy wants subsidies.
Innovation is incentivized with greater returns. Just because those returns aren’t excessively large, doesn’t mean it’s not there. You still get a net positive on innovating. Cigarettes are taxes in such a way that smoking at all is a net negative for most people. That’s what makes it a disincentive.
It’s literally the opposite of taxing innovation. If you reinvest your revenue back into improving the company, you don’t pay any tax. If you use the revenue to prop up stock prices instead, expect to pay taxes on the capital gains.
Jesus… Taxing innovation.
No, we’d be quite happy for you to innovate, we just don’t want you to re-enact the opening sequence of Duck Takes, swimming in a pool of cash while most people struggle to make ends meet.
How about this? You fuck off, and someone else can do what you do without being a greedy parasite about it?
Worked at Shopify for over two years and left voluntarily ahead of wave three of mass layoffs. Watched dozens of great people get shafted for cost-cutting. And I am still close with someone who trains our overseas replacements. To be clear, I have zero bones to pick with our peers working overseas, they’re also great people. What I have a problem with is Shopify’s explosive growth over lockdowns necessitating over-hiring (in their words) and meanwhile the user base nearly tripled over the same period.
They didn’t lay people off because the workload eased up. They did it because they reached peak inflection enshittify status. They trimmed thousands of locals, contracted out for pennies on the dollar, and wall street and the enterprise clients now know they’re willing to spill blood to thrive. Shopify is now part of the tech cool kids club.
It’s not even ironic that they don’t want to chip in for the Canadian tax base. They don’t need Canada anymore. They’re only staying here on paper because our legal system is more forgiving than almost anywhere else. They’re laughing, heartily.
“Just grind harder because I’m not rich enough yet!”
This is the kind of attitude that can turn a relatively minor increase in capital gains taxes into “Get out the guillotine!” by pissing people off.
Canada says that Shopify CEO needs to pay his fair share or stfu