A family and a festival: How Vancouver’s Lapu Lapu Day tragedy unfolded

“It didn’t feel like a real company,” says Jessica, a former Shopify employee. It was 2016, about a year after Shopify had one of the best-performing tech IPOs in North America. At the time, the Canadian-founded company, which helps businesses from mom-and-pop shops to Mattel manage their online storefronts, was growing as fast as its share price was climbing. So Shopify upgraded its marketing and product teams into a 35,600-square-foot office in a century-old heritage building in downtown Toronto and imported the requisite trappings of Silicon Valley: ping-pong tables, free lunches...