Shopify is a public company and thus subject to far more regulations and expected behavior of the CEO.
I also specifically did not merely say that being controlled by one person was bad, but that it was bad in the context of also being slow at decision making. In many cases having a single decision maker is a must for being dynamic.
Regulations maybe, but CEO expectations? Doesn't seem to be happening.
Shopify's CEO was in the news just recently for arguing that rich people should be able to cast more votes. That's the most naked anti-democracy stance I've heard in ages.
(And this is before we get into funding "deport-the-foreigners-and-minorities" DHH's Omarchy.)
Or just don't use these hacky solutions and just make a gd ecom website. It's 2026, use claude if you have too. There is no reason for shopify to exist (or wordpress for that matter, but at least wordpress isn't for profit). They say AI should kill SaaS, but it should actually kill all these dumb abstraction PaaS.
I say this as someone who has recently helped a few friends move their ecom stores off shopify, and wow, I didn't know such a horrible paradigm could exist. I genuinely think it would be easier for someone to learn a web stack in 2026 than learn to piece together whatever spaghetti monster shopify, and similar hacks are.
It always makes me so sad to see companies like this where the founders don't think twice about what they're building and just go straight for the cash grab! Can't we use technology for good and not to build a dystopian surveillance state?
What about Rails, What about Rails, What about Rails
etc
but in all seriousness good points Jared.