What if the world's problems didn't need a grand tech solution? They just needed people to show up for each other. @DavidSpinks co-founded @CMX, helped define the community-building industry in Silicon Valley, and wrote the book Business of Belonging, reflecting on what the world could look like if everyone just took care of the people around them. Watch the full conversation with @DerekjAndersen, link in the replies.

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)

This week on @Divotdotorg I interviewed @DavidSpinks, author of The Business of Belonging and one of the world's biggest experts on building community. We talked about success, loneliness, ambition, why high performers often feel inadequate, and if making a dent in the universe is worth the cost. Timestamps: 03:11 — What Community & Belonging Really Mean 04:34 — The Loneliness Epidemic & Social Media Addiction 06:40 — What It Truly Means to Feel Like You Belong 12:33 — Can Businesses Ever Replace Real Community? 15:39 — How Communities Mirror Human Nature & Leadership 19:40 — Silicon Valley, Success & the Need to Prove Yourself 23:51 — Why Success Never Makes You Feel “Enough” 24:19 — The False Tradeoff Between Ambition & Happiness 28:00 — Elon Musk, Steve Jobs & the Price of Greatness 31:37 — Is Making a Dent in the Universe Worth the Cost? 36:20 — Why “Saving the World” Often Starts at Home 41:04 — The Hardest Lesson: You Are Already Enough 44:22 — The One Idea David Wishes Everyone Believed 45:19 — Best Advice for Overcoming Fear & Hard Things 46:03 — Fatherhood, Presence & What Really Matters 47:27 — Why Measuring Your Life Can Be Dangerous

Decades of studying and teaching emotional intelligence, condensed into a single page: