From left, Arati Sharma, Chris Grouchy, Effie Anolik, and Roger Kirkness. This story is available exclusively to Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.
Shopify calls itself “the entrepreneurship company,” as its software powers over 1.7 million stores.
Many of its employees end up becoming entrepreneurs in their own right.
Here are some of the most notable companies founded by former Shopify employees.
Shopify often refers to itself as “the entrepreneurship company.”
And that’s with good reason — Shopify’s e-commerce software is used by more than 1.7 million merchants selling their products online. Its app store is home to more than 7,000 applications that merchants can install on their stores, which help with functions like store design, product sourcing, search-engine optimization, marketing, and shipping.
Shopify also encourages employees to start their own Shopify stores. The idea is that by experiencing what it’s like to use its products to run a business, they can experience more empathy for Shopify’s merchant base and discover areas for improvement.
Even the company’s president, Harley Finkelstein, runs his own Shopify store, Firebelly Tea , which he cofounded with the DavidsTea creator David Segal last year.
“We have long said that Shopify is a company for entrepreneurs, built by entrepreneurs,” a Shopify spokesperson told Insider. “We promote a spirit of entrepreneurship internally and encourage our employees to pursue their passions and side projects.”
Shopify hosts internal business competitions and allows employees to expense up to $1,000 in business-related costs per year to encourage entrepreneurship. Those expenses could include tech equipment, domain names, design fees, and sample products, the spokesperson said.
A number of former Shopify employees — members of the so-called “Shopify Mafia” — have gone on to found or focus full time on startups of their own, from direct-to-consumer snack brands to software companies focused on parenting, renting, and the creator economy. Like the “Paypal Mafia” before them, many of these former employees have gone on to become influential figures in the startup world.
Meet some of the most notable entrepreneurs in the bunch, and learn about the startups they’ve worked on since leaving Shopify: Michael Perry and Mike Taylor, Maple
Michael Perry with his son. Perry said becoming a father a couple of years into his tenure at Shopify radically changed his outlook on his career.
“My purpose was not to be a senior director of product, with titles and money and all these things,” Perry said. “My purpose became incredibly singular, which was to be a caregiver to my kids.”
Perry and Taylor joined Shopify when the e-commerce company acquired their earlier startup, Kit, in 2016. They decided to leave Shopify in 2020 to work on Maple , a tech company using software to make parenting and household-management easier. With Maple, parents can make customized schedules for tasks like paying bills, planning family trips and birthday parties, and coordinating chores.
The idea was inspired in part by Shopify’s work to lower the barrier to entry for people starting a business, Perry said.
“Somehow, the home, our most important business, our most important office, and how we take care of our most important products, had remained pretty much untouched,” he said.
Maple wants to eventually grow its partner ecosystem to feature products and services from a group of brands. It has already partnered with companies like the baby-food brand Yumi and the pajama brand Pika Layers (cofounded by Atlee Clark, the director of operations for Shop at Shopify) to simplify product discovery for its users.
Maple has raised $5 million in venture funding from investors including Inspired Capital, Shasta Ventures, BoxGroup, G9 Ventures, Finkelstein, and other Shopify-affiliated angel investors. Erin Chan, Rhenti Chan and her husband, Tomas Ronis, founded Rhenti in 2017. The idea behind the platform is to make it easier for property owners to find renters, and vice versa, through marketing automation and leasing software.Chan joined Shopify in January 2018 and continued working on Rhenti on the side for more than two years. At the time, she was a senior product manager working on Shopify’s point of sale.”There’s a lot of pressure when you’re a product manager at Shopify because it’s a role that people look to for guidance on what to build and how to build it,” Chan told Insider. “But also, my husband and I were really passionate about this idea, so we had to grind it out at night and on weekends.”Chan said working in product management at Shopify prepared her for the challenges of building a startup.”They think about product discipline more there than any company that […]
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