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a hundred billion dollar company. This is a pretty exciting time for entrepreneurship.

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You're at that point in your stage like this gets important. The cost of failure

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of starting a business today is by far the lowest it's ever been. Business advice to Harley

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10 years ago you got one thing to tell me. Welcome everybody to the game. I got a special

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episode for you guys today. As you know, I do not have many guests on my podcast. I don't

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like sharing the spotlight. So somebody's going to be on. They've got to be really, really special

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and have true expertise to give. And I think the person I have with me today or that we'll be

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joining us today definitely meets that in spades. And so Harley is a God amongst men, a legend

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in the making and runs a small company. You may not have heard of it. Shopify, which right now

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is a public trading company. It's worth right now. I think it was 80 billion. If I'm not mistaken,

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probably correct me there. I think it's close to 100 billion, but I was 20 billion. You just

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ran it down by 20 billion dollars, which for someone like me, like, you know, this is, I don't come

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from this world. This is, you know, I'm a tourist here. That's a lot of money. So a hundred billion

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dollar company. So that's 10 figures is a billion, 11, 12, a 12 figure company. There you go.

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And just the only thing that rivals the business success that he has is at the humility that he

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brings to it. He was willing to hop on a call with me before this and we hit it off. And I was like,

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I just, I know my audience would love to talk to you and just kind of hear your perspective

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of entrepreneurship. And you have such an interesting story that I think will relate to so many people

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in my audience from the people who are just trying to figure out what they want to do to make money

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all the way to, you know, right now, the 20% of my audience is, you know, winning entrepreneurs with

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you know, large companies and so forth. So we definitely have the gamut from an entrepreneurship

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perspective, kind of a beginning, middle and end. And yeah, so thank you so much for taking time

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to join us today. It's a great honor to be here. Alex. Thank you so much. I'm a big fan of the pod.

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And I think what you're doing is making business and entrepreneurship. I mean,

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very similar to the mission and shovel, you're making it more accessible. And I think that is

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the coolest thing in the world. This idea that business was out of touch for most people both

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financially from a capital perspective or because of knowledge and inside and experience.

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I think those days are long over. And I think we're going through an entrepreneurial

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renaissance right now. And I think how people like you and your community is leading the way on

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in that front. Well, I appreciate it. And I mean, everything that we do is just for everybody

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on the pod is, I know the hardly not agree on this is to just try and break down as many barriers

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between where people are and where they want to be, right? A lot of people have this vision for

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their lives that they want and there are things to get in their way. Some of them are between your

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ears, some of the between your hands and keyboard. And so Shopify is taking a lot of that between

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hands and keyboard out of the way that it's decreased the friction of actually getting a product

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launched, get it online, actually get customers and you can do it from anywhere in the world,

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which is again, something that 30 years ago just wasn't really a thing. And now everyone can

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have access to this stuff. So I'm going to go, I'm going to kind of break this pod into three

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kind of sections loosely. So first kind of I want to talk about looking back and I think that

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will relate to a lot of people who are listening or watching right now. Kind of like zero to hero.

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Like what? What got you to hear and all the things that come with that? Second chunk will go

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which hero to superhero? What's the forward look like? What's the future look? What do you see?

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And I'll dive into some more specific details around that stuff. And then at the very end, we'll go

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kind of like final nuggets and wrapping it up of like forward and backwards. What are kind of like

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the principles and truths that you would try and pass on to the people who are listening?

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Cool. Let's do it. All right. That's our roadmap. So I know a little bit about this story,

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but my audience doesn't. So you have this really unique thing of being employee one and customer one.

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Can you walk us through like just the beginning of shop like even the decision to jump into Shopify?

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What what the risks that we're associated with that? What was life prior to that? And then like what

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were the the factors that got you into that? Step one, because I think that's where a lot of people

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are right now. Yeah. So I was born in Montreal like born in Canada. I moved to South Florida with

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my parents and my sisters when I was very young. I was always entrepreneurial. My parents did not

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have a lot of money, but my father to his credit. My dad's an immigrant. He came to Canada from

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Hungary in the revolution. My grandparents are Holocaust survivors. I mean, we were poor immigrants.

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And although my dad never had much money to give me, because I always had these little silly

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business ideas when I was a kid, what my dad did for me, which was very valuable was even like when

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I was like 10 years old, every silly business idea that I had, he would validate it by actually

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making me these business cards that would say the name of the business and my name on it. And

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I'm now a dad. I have two daughters, Bailey and Zoe who are five and seven. And now that I think

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about parenting and stuff, I'm like, I think a lot more about that story and those stories of my

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father making those business cards because at the time, it didn't seem that profound. And in hindsight,

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now as a father myself, I realize these small things that we do for our kids have this massive

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impact. And so even though these business were all very silly, trading like trading cards and

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lemonade stands and eventually a DJ business when I was 13 years old, I was always an entrepreneurial

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kid. And partially, because I thought entrepreneurship was this fun activity. Like I wasn't really into

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sports, playing them or watching them. I wasn't really into video games. I was kind of into like this

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idea of like, you know, selling something. And that was always fun for me. Move to South Florida,

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went, finished high school there and moved back to Canada when I was 17 in 2001 to go to McGill

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University. McGill is in Montreal where I live now. I went to McGill because it was cheap. My

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parents didn't have much money. And so because I was born in Canada, I kind of got this like in-state

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tuition thing. Unfortunately, very quickly. And once I moved to Montreal to sort of McGill,

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my dad got some trouble and our family lost everything. And once again, I sort of pulled out

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this tool that I'd been tinkering with throughout my life called Entrepreneurship to make some money.

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I started a t-shirt business when I was at McGill, made t-shirts for a bunch of universities across

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Canada. Like the promotional t-shirts, you got the first day of school, throsh or orientation

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stuff. And I loved it. It was great. I wasn't necessarily passionate about t-shirts, but I loved

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this sort of idea of being able to support myself and help my family. I was really...

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I'll get on with you real quick, because I think I'm going to jump in anyway.

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The point that Harley just made, I just want to underline, which is that the first business he had,

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one, I don't think that you thought this was going to be the business I will have for the rest of

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my life. This is my dream. This is my vision. You were trying to make money, right? It's all this.

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And I think a lot of people who are aspiring are trying to find this perfect puzzle piece that's

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going to fit all of these things. It's going to be my passion. It's going to be fulfilling. It can

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be the next Amazon. A lot of times, I think it's a big fallacy because the first business just

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gives you a little bit of light to show you the next step to take is because you learn a bunch of

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stuff from that first business. And so I just want to just take the pause for the audience that

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everyone's like, I got to find the perfect thing when promo shirts for freshmen and sophomores.

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It's glamorous. It's not glamorous. And in fact, the only unfair advantage that I had was that

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I was selling t-shirts to a customer who I also was part of that demographic, meaning like,

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I was selling t-shirts to the student council, treasurer, or procurement office,

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so they can give them out to students. And I myself was a student. And so the pitch that I made was

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that one I very low overhead because it's just me. I was a CEO and the janitor. I was printed

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in t-shirts myself. So one, I'm going to be cheaper too. I'm going to care a lot because I really

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need this to work in three. I am going to make t-shirts for people like me. And so I kind of know

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what your students want because I myself am one of your students. But just to go step back,

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because I make you so super interesting. So I sort of skipped over this. But when I was 13 years old,

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the business that really got started, like started me in entrepreneurship. A real business was,

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again, I was 13. So, you know, I wouldn't put too much, you know, credence on the fact that

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there was a real business. But it was a real thing was I wanted to be a DJ. I was, I'm Jewish.

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I went to a lot of bar mitzvahs when I was 13 years old. And I thought the DJs were the coolest

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people in the world. They were sort of magicians in my mind. They would take a group of people that

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were sitting down eating some rubber chicken dinner in some hotel ballroom. And like three minutes

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later, using their voice and using lighting and music, there'd be a congal line. I just thought

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they were just, they were like magicians. I called around a bunch of DJ companies to ask them if they

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would hire me. And of course, they said, no, because I was 13 had no experience and didn't know how

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to DJ. But because I had this sort of, you know, like silly confidence that these business cards had

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provided for me, I had this idea to start my own DJ company and hire myself. So that was sort of

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when this idea of entrepreneurship as a tool to solve problems was sort of cemented in my, in my

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very, you know, immature young brain. And then when I needed to make money again at 17 as an

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undergrad on college, I once again, I didn't even think about, you know, I should go get a job

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somewhere. Immediately, my thought was, all right, I got to start another business to make some

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money here. So it began, I began to form this what what is now effectively my shining a

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Shopify mission. It's also my personal mission, which is an entrepreneurship is this incredibly

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powerful tool because it's democratic and it allows anyone and anybody around to start something

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with very little. And it doesn't matter who you are, what your last name is and who your parents

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are. My parents were nobody's. It matters how much value you add. And so I ran this teacher

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business all throughout college and developed a really good set of mentors along the way. People

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that I sort of met and some people were lawyers and others were these random entrepreneurs and,

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you know, Dove Charney from American Apparel. Now he's sort of, I guess, disgraced, but at the time,

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he was a very big deal starting American apparel. He was another Jewish entrepreneur for

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Montreal. And I met these people along the way. And one of those entrepreneurs, one of those mentors

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convinced me just when I finished college to go to law school, not to become a lawyer, but rather

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to become a better entrepreneur, almost like finishing school for entrepreneurship. And I was

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incredibly impressionable. I was 21 when I was finishing college. Again, I had a little bit of money

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from the teachers, but not much. And he said, look, I'm going to teach law next year at the

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University of Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada. Why don't you come to Ottawa? Go to go to

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law school here. I'll be in town. I can sort of help you navigate the city. And you'll go to law

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school, not with the mandate to get called to the bar or ever litigate or practice law, but rather

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as a way to accumulate more skills that will be very valuable as you think, but scaling a business

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longer term. And so I was 2005 moved to Ottawa. No friends, no family there. And by this point,

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entrepreneurship was a part of my identity. And so like I always did when I moved to a new place,

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I asked where the entrepreneurs hung out. And very, very fortunately, very luckily, I was

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directed to a coffee shop. And I was told that there's a group of entrepreneurs that hung out

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to this coffee shop every Friday evening. And they called themselves the young entrepreneurs club,

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the YEC. And I started showing up there every Friday and meeting these young entrepreneurs.

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And one of those entrepreneurs was this brilliant programmer named Toby, who had just moved to

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Canada a couple of about a year earlier from Germany. And he moved to Canada because he met a girl,

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and he wanted to go be close to that girl. He was very good. Love is always a good reason to move

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somewhere. And Toby had moved to Canada from Germany. He didn't have papers to work. And so

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he was told that even as a new immigrant, he could start a business. And being in Canada where

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it's very cold, a lot of snow. He loves snowboarding. He decided he wanted to build a snowboard shop

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on the internet. In 2005, there were two ways to sell a product on the internet. The first way was

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to sell through a marketplace. At the time like eBay was really the most prominent one.

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Amazon, I don't think at the time alive for third-party sellers, it was still a first-party

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marketplace. So you'd eBay and you had a bunch of these sort of very nichey marketplaces,

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but eBay being the big one. So you could sell on a marketplace or you would pay a company like

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IBM, they had WebSphere or Oracle or AT or SAP. All these big enterprise companies had some sort

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of e-commerce functionality for very large enterprises, for like Walmart. And that would be like

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a couple million bucks. And Toby did not like the idea of renting customers from a marketplace.

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And he did not like the idea that we didn't have a million dollars to spend on enterprise software.

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So that was impossible. So we wrote this piece of software using Ruby on Rails where he was a

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sort of core developer of Ruby on Rails in the early days with DHH and a bunch of really

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interesting people. And he wrote this piece of software to sell his snowboards. And that's run

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time where I met him. He was like just selling these snowboards and it was a really neat little

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business. He was making real money. And around that, and again, I'm in law school now. And so I'd

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ask him if I can use the software to sell my own products, which in my case would be T-shirts.

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And by that point, he'd already sort of figured out that the snowboard business was a good idea.

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But the software that he'd written to sell these snowboards was a great idea. And shortly

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thereafter, I ended up building a store on Shopify. This is 2006 at the time. And I became one of

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the first people to use what would become at the time it was called Jaded Pixel. It was actually

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called Shopify originally. And I would be one of the first people to use the software. And I

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built this, I ran this t-shirt business as direct to consumer license t-shirt business,

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all throughout law school. And that was sort of my first entry into Shopify meeting Toby.

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And then when I finished, I finished grad school, I called Toby and said, look, like,

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I love entrepreneurship. It's everything. I think it's the greatest thing for me. It's my

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passion, my hobby. I want to increase the surface area for more people. And honestly,

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what I experienced building a beautiful, scalable store sitting in my tax law class on Shopify,

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I think more people should experience that. And I joined him about a year later in 2009 or so.

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And I was like the first non-engineer to join the company. And it was amazing. It was one of

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the greatest, I mean, I just, I have really fun memories of those very, really days. But that's

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a long answer for a question of how I got to Shopify.

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No, this is perfect because this is a great pause point because I was writing down some

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notes just for the audience. And then I want to definitely we're going to go from like, okay,

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you're now in Shopify and what are the trials and tribulations? Because of course, I'm sure

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going from that to 100 billion was probably just straight line, very smooth sailing. You

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haven't had any issues. And I'm sure everyone will be glad to hear that very short story. But

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we'll get to that one. But just everyone who's listening. Now, number one, the first business

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that Harley started was just for money. And it wasn't just some magical thing that was going to

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be perfect. He did what he had to do. And he learned a ton of skills that really valuable along

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the way. Second thing is that, and I want to emphasize this is people a lot of times are like,

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man, I don't know what to sell or what business should I start. And I think the easiest one to use

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is just solve your own problem. Scratch your own itch. Or like, almost every business I've had,

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well, every, every really good business I've had has come from that, which is like, like, I mean,

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even the, the furthest one we have now, because it's not a complex family office and I wish I had had

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this available to me when I was scaling up our companies, like somebody who'd already been there

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sold multiple times and like had a vested interest, et cetera. But scratching your own itch.

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Also, I want to highlight some people kind of get segments in one thing or the other. Like,

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you did a physical product business, but early you've done a DJ thing, even though it was not,

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yeah, you made money. So you made a profit. And so like, in my mind, like, self-employed whatever,

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like it was a service-based business. So you had a service business and you also had a physical

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product with super flexible in terms of how you were willing to make money. And I was

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asking to what I was selling. And to your point, you know, I think one of the easiest ways to

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figure out what to sell, you know, you said scratch your own itch, another way to do it is simply

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just to like tell a bunch of people that you're thinking of starting a business and just leave it

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out in the ether. The reason that I started selling t-shirts universities was as I told people that

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my dad wasn't around anymore. Mom had no money. I needed to make some money and you sort of

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business. The more people I spoke to about that, a lot of the ideas that I got were dumb. But more

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and more people started telling me, Hey, what about this? Hey, what about that? Most of the things

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that they mentioned were not great ideas. But then someone randomly, his name is Jamie once told

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told me that, remember, this like they perfectly clear it. He said, Hey, just so you know,

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McGill spends $25,000 a semester on t-shirts, on printed lice, on printed promotional t-shirts.

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It turned out he was wrong. These universities spent a quarter million dollars.

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Yeah, it was going to be way harder than that, right? But because I was putting it out there,

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this thing that I was looking sort of business, a bunch of people sort of became almost like

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my idea generation machine. And so this whole idea that like, I know there's a lot out there

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about like, don't tell people your goals and keep things to yourself. I call bullshit. I think

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do things and tell people is super important, even at the early stages of starting these things.

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One would be, I mean, my second book, 100 million dollar leads, advertising is the process

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of making them. And so if no one knows about your stuff, no one can buy it. They must first know

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about it in order to buy it. And so if you just think about it from a first principal's perspective,

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ain't no customers if they don't know. So it's right to do that. So two things that I also

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want to highlight. So you talked about two different types of people that you surround yourself with.

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One was mentors, so just for everyone in my audience, we're talking people I had, right? And the other

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thing was the community of peers, right? The coffee shop we met Toby who ultimately got you into

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this thing again by chance, but both of those things increase your luck surface area. The amount of

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different potential opportunities for exposing opportunity. Well, yeah. And so I just want to

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highlight that because a lot of people feel like entrepreneurship is lonely and it can be, but to

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a degree, it is a choice, right? And if you can't physically move environments, you can do it online

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now. And that wasn't available back then. But now we've got online communities, we've got school,

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we've got, you know, all these things where people can connect. And when I say school,

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skol.com school, people can actually connect and meet one another, all right? Now the last one is

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resourcefulness. And so this kind of ties well into kind of the next, the next chapter of this

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journey, which is that like you did all this stuff like you. Toby wrote code so that he could

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so you could sell us snowboards, right? Like it's there's just there's a there's this whole like

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everything. Of course, our whole mission is to make things easier, make things more accessible to

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people. But on some level, like it's the fact that it becomes difficult is what makes the goal

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worthwhile, right? And if everyone could do it, then everyone would do it. And then it would no

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longer be worthy, right? Everyone can tie their shoes. Everyone can get dressed. And so no one's like

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congratulations. There's this whole, I think Chris rocks kit where he's like, what do you want to

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cookie? He's like, man, I ain't never been prison. He's like, you need supposed to go to jail,

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right? And he goes to something. And so right now, like the fact that it's difficult is just

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another barrier that somebody might have to compete with will have to go over. And so it gives

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you yourself a little stripe that you can show yourself about who you really are. All right, also

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remember, remember this, you kind of think about like if you kind of go back to you, I don't know,

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go back 200 years, when you think about starting a business, the one thing that besides some

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capital to get started and knowledge and understanding and technology to help you do it, forget

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all that stuff for a second. One of the big risks of starting a business historically was that

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the cost of failure could affect your life in a very adverse way, meaning when my grandfather came

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to North America from Eastern Europe, he started an egg business. He had a little egg stall at a

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local farmers market, which actually still stands today. My uncle currently runs it. But he had to

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take a loan out on his home in order to afford the fee and the cost of actually renting this particular

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stall. If this did not work, the result of that would be no food on the table, no roof over their

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head. And that is effectively how businesses were built so that people with more capital were able

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to take more risks. People that had more capital were able to invest more. People that had more

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capital were able to have, you know, be able to mitigate the cost of failure. Well, one thing that

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has changed dramatically, and I would say today, like literally right now, Alex, you and I are

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talking about this, the cost of failure of starting a business today is by far the lowest it's ever been,

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whether you use a product like Shopify or use whatever you decide to do. The cost of failure is

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effectively $39. If it works, you scale it literally like three feet from me. I have a gift from

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Ben Francis, who's the founder of Jim Shark. And it's a Christmas gift he gave me a holiday gift he

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gave me. It's the original screen print from the original Jim Shark, the first t-shirt he made.

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It was it was Ben's been a big part of my life and I've been the big part of his life. And so

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his gift was the original screen that created the first t-shirt for Jim Shark.

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When Ben started, it was 2012 out of his dorm room. If it would have gone, if it would have failed,

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it would have gone back to class. I mean, he was literally also delivering pizzas. I think for

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pizza Hut at the time, if I get that right, or some pizza company. But if it worked, he would go

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on to build a multi-billion dollar company called Jim Shark. So think about that. The upside,

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and that was 2012, that was like, you know, 12 years ago, the upside today of starting a business

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is effectively infinite growth. If you do it well and you're smart and you're adding great value.

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The downside is a couple less cups of coffee or a couple less Starbucks for that week. That

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is remarkable. And I think that, I mean, if there's anything that I hope that there's one

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underlying point here, it's the it's risk-adjusted return, right? Is that everyone here now can get

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endless shots on goal right now because of how accessible entrepreneurship is? You basically just

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keep taking lottery tickets. And if you lose, then you just buy another scratch off, right? And you

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try it again. And so you still have the upside, except the thing is, it's not rigged for you to lose.

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Like there actually is a lot of people who want you to win, and there's an entire economy around you.

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Not just that right now. What that's created is nearly a quarter, 25% of US consumers in 2024

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are considering starting a business. That's the highest, I believe it's ever been. Number two is,

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since 2021, there's been 15.5 million new business applications in the US in 85% increase

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from 2004 to 2021. The White House put out a bunch of stats on this recently. I mean, that is,

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the reason that is happening is not just because technology is getting better and not just because

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of great podcasts like like and content like you're putting out there. It's because people

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are realized that entrepreneurship may be the vehicle for them to actually find their life's work,

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make their life better, create independence, do the thing that they love most. This is a pretty

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exciting time for entrepreneurship. And I think the cost of failure thing is a big part of it.

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So now you're employing number one, non-developer employee number one. You've used the product,

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you fell in love with it, and this is now aligned with your calling. So walk me through kind of the

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stages of growth. And if you can give kind of like internal external. So this is what was

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happening externally, maybe revenue levels, customer levels, things like that. And then mirrored,

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what does that look like internally? So I'm shifting a little bit towards my business owners right

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now. All right. So now we're talking like, okay, we've got the business, we're generating revenue,

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or is it cash flow positive? Do they have investors? Like how, yeah, just give me the scoop.

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So we were bootstrapped. We had a very, very small angel investor in early on, which

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his name is John. He's now a multi-billionaire, I believe. And so is his wife,

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separately, because she also puts some money in. But it was a very small amount of money.

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We were bootstrapped. We were profitable. And when I joined, we didn't have a CFO. We didn't have

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a CMO. I mean, part of what I viewed my role as, and anyone who's listening who is joining a very

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early-stage company as a non-engineer, like the person not running, you know, writing code,

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or building product, the role that I wanted, that I felt I should play in it, and that I think I

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did play was this Swiss Army knife. Let me figure out everything and anything that is going to be

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valuable to the people that are writing code. And whether that's commercialization, or sales,

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or support, or I mean, literally figuring out where we're going to work out of, like figure

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negotiate the lease for it, or figuring out, you know, what are we who we're paying for? I think

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we're paying rack space at the time, like negotiating a rack space contract. I think at the time,

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we only had one payment integration, which was PayPal, negotiating the PayPal revshare.

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But that was very early days. This sort of Swiss Army knife type model, I think, was really,

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really important because I mean, you can be the greatest salesperson or marketer in the world.

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If you have a great product matched with a great ability to sell and commercialize,

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that's where this thing gets really interesting. And I deeply believe that Shopify, even back,

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you know, in 2010, had this incredible product. Leaps and bounds, better than all the competition.

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The competition at the time was like, yeah, who stores? Or a couple other like that. But very,

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very few competitors. And so this idea of being a Swiss Army knife was important. And that's what I

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did. I, you know, if there was an opportunity for me to tell the story publicly to a local newspaper

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in Ottawa, Canada, I would take that opportunity. If there was an opportunity for me to help someone

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get a job done internally, I would take that opportunity. But that Swiss Army knife was,

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that sort of model of that was very, very helpful. And as part of that, I think I earned the trust

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of, of Toby in particular, but also, you know, the other engineers, because I was just there

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to add value. That's it. In fact, I'd actually been called to the bar. And so I think my, like,

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I was, I was also the company's lawyer. And again, I, I'd been at a law school for all of 10

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months, I think, at that point. But whatever I could do, I was going to do that. And it was only

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a couple years later, we raised our series A about a year later. I think it was a $7 million

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investment from Bessimer, who led it on a $25 million, I think, post. And then, and that's

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really when we began to realize that, okay, there is a real there there that this company could be

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something remarkable, large, scalable. And we can really make a dent on at the time. It was really,

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but we were focused on SMBs and e-commerce only very different than today where we do business

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ball sizes and retail everywhere. But it was SMBs and, and it was, it was e-commerce only. And it

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was only until, you know, after our series B and C that we began really figuring out like, okay,

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what are each other's superpowers? And, and this idea of rather than all of us become these sort

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of well-rounded objects, these sort of river stones, what if we all were very precise on the thing

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that we think we could be the best in the world at and spend our time. And you start doing that.

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So if we're walking through this, because right now, probably, probably like around the series B

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or series C, we begin, we hired a CFO, we hired a CMO, we hired a head sales. It was around that time

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where we felt we were well capitalized. I think our our series B was about a hundred,

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a hundred million dollar evaluation. This is like 2013 or so. Around that time. So like,

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I mean, don't, I don't know, I mean, it was, yeah, and not sure. A lot less than, than a hundred

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million dollars. You mean employees were around that? Just, I'm just trying to get a gig. Probably,

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probably 50 to 100 at that point. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Got it. So like, small midsize. Got it. Yeah.

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Okay. Cool. And, and a lot of what we were trying to do then is like find, you know, find,

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at least a lot of how I spend my time is find new channels. This idea that, okay, we can only sell

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so many people on Shopify, but there's this massive ecosystem of web agencies and freelancers and

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developers who are in Oklahoma and are in, you know, places like South America and they're in Singapore

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and they're in Vancouver and they're in, you know, New Mexico. And what if we actually created

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something whereby if someone walked in to their agency to their business and said, I need an

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online store, what could we do to actually make it so that they would say, by default, great,

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we'll build it on Shopify. That's sort of on the referral side. On the product side,

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another thing that was really that we created around that time was the Shopify App Store,

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which I believe today is one of the largest ecosystems of third-party developers on the planet.

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I mean, if you were building an app for commerce today, the best, most effective go-to-market

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strategy is to put it in the Shopify App Store because you have millions of customers for

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applications. That now seems, you know, polished and a really healthy kind of flywheel of

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ecosystem. But originally, the reason that the App Store is really set up was all these different

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merchants were coming to us and they all had a very unique and a very particular business. And so

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we really focused on, let's make Shopify's core offering what most people need most of the time,

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checkout, payments, inventory, marketing, analytics. Let's make that like a world class,

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but everything that is very specific to a particular merchant's business,

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let's invite third parties from all over the world to build apps on top of it,

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which meant that no matter what the particular needs of your business might be,

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you would find 100% product market fit using Shopify because this app ecosystem

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and we didn't have to build everything ourselves, which would have been impossible.

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And so some of these things now in hindsight seem like, wow,

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Shopify's ecosystem is really cool and the App Store is humming. But originally,

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it was done because we couldn't build every feature ourselves nor should we.

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So what were some of the like absolute key decisions or like business principles that you learned

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kind of scaling through this focus was really important not being everything to everyone. I mean,

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today, you know, last week was was the National Retail Federation's big show literally like

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the most important conference in enterprise retail. And I sit on the board now of NRF with like

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the likes of the CEO of Brian from Target and John from Walmart and like, you know,

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these amazing people that run effectively all of retail all over the world.

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And so now we're really obviously, you know, getting some of the biggest retailers to Shopify.

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But there was absolutely no way we were even considering that in those days because fundamentally,

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we wanted to win our particular market, which was SMBs in English speaking countries that

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want to sell on the internet. And so one thing that was really valuable was like focus don't sort of

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and a lot of our competitors by the way ended up going out of business because they kind of ran

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up market way too soon. And they left the entire base of SMBs available. They didn't like the idea

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that SMBs, you know, some churn and not every business succeeds. And we thought, well, what if we

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just slightly increase the chance of success and mitigated the risk? If every single person thinking

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about starting a business like in a shower in the morning, then did so with Shopify, even though

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not all will succeed, as long as the ones that do stay with us indefinitely, they will offset

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the cost of ones that leave. And so one was really making sure we were very, very focused.

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The second thing that was really important to us, I think, was that the product was super simple.

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And now companies like Mars or Mattel or Staples or Glossier, Allo Yoga View or all these

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amazing brands, all your Shopify skims, like what's neat even today, but Shopify is that the

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complexity of the product almost reveals itself over time. Rather than simply being in a data with

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every single feature and functionality, Shopify can be used by someone just setting up a store,

375
00:31:51.200 --> 00:31:57.120
their mom's kitchen table. It also can be used by Trina who runs Figs, which is a publicly traded

376
00:31:57.120 --> 00:32:03.440
company. They make uniform scrubs, uniform scrubs, hospital scrubs. And the fact that the same code

377
00:32:03.440 --> 00:32:08.560
base can make those things was something that was always important to keep it really, really simple.

378
00:32:08.560 --> 00:32:14.080
And credit to Toby and his sort of vision around product because that's really what he drilled

379
00:32:14.080 --> 00:32:18.880
in all of us was that the product has been incredibly simple. So first is focus, second is simplicity.

380
00:32:18.880 --> 00:32:25.280
And the third one was we really tried to run a really tight business, meaning we knew what our

381
00:32:25.280 --> 00:32:30.560
sort of CAC to LTV ratio is. So cost of customer acquisition on one side versus lifetime value.

382
00:32:30.560 --> 00:32:33.520
And as long I don't know if you're I want to make sure I define all the acronyms.

383
00:32:36.640 --> 00:32:43.360
So we knew what our CAC to LTV ratio was. And once we got it above one effectively, it meant that,

384
00:32:43.360 --> 00:32:47.440
okay, now it's time to go raise money because the more dollars you put on the left side,

385
00:32:47.440 --> 00:32:52.880
the more dollar 80s or whatever the ratio was we got on the right side. And so by being meticulous

386
00:32:52.880 --> 00:32:56.480
and thoughtful about that, I think it was really helpful. Maybe the last thing I'll say,

387
00:32:56.480 --> 00:33:01.280
which seems a little bit soft, but it's important to say is we were really, really patient, meaning

388
00:33:01.280 --> 00:33:06.640
we want like even today, we want to build 100 year business. We're now about 20 years into it.

389
00:33:06.640 --> 00:33:12.320
We got 80 years left to go. But even then we were, you know, 5, 8, 10 years in. We still thought

390
00:33:12.400 --> 00:33:18.000
about this like really long term business focused, which meant that we were not willing to pull

391
00:33:18.000 --> 00:33:24.080
forward future profits at a discount. Like pretty much most of our competitors, I think we're doing

392
00:33:24.080 --> 00:33:30.560
at that point. So what were some of the key growth kind of levers that you were able to

393
00:33:30.560 --> 00:33:34.960
pull throughout this process that like really accelerated like if you had to name the three biggest

394
00:33:34.960 --> 00:33:39.360
things in the first 10 years of Shopify that like man, if we hadn't done this, we wouldn't have

395
00:33:39.360 --> 00:33:42.720
been able to get to the next level. I mean, I think the app store ecosystem was really important

396
00:33:42.720 --> 00:33:47.840
both on making sure the product had a product had a 100% product market fit and also in the

397
00:33:47.840 --> 00:33:52.880
referral. So I think that was really important because it meant that we had we had effectively

398
00:33:52.880 --> 00:33:58.800
distributed sales force that wasn't on our payroll. And just something small on that that

399
00:33:58.800 --> 00:34:06.400
really matters. I remember at the time the Apple iOS store had an 80 20 rev share split. So if you

400
00:34:06.400 --> 00:34:11.760
built something on on app, excuse me, had a 70 30 rev share split. So you built me an Apple,

401
00:34:11.760 --> 00:34:17.760
you as a developer keep 70% 30% goes to Apple. And I remember when we were talking about our

402
00:34:17.760 --> 00:34:22.720
rev share for our app store, we actually said 80 20. Not that we were competing with the Apple,

403
00:34:22.720 --> 00:34:27.600
the iOS store. I mean, we were we were a small little nothing company in Canada. But this idea

404
00:34:27.600 --> 00:34:33.520
that we would be more generous than the incumbents might be was very important. And the truth is,

405
00:34:33.520 --> 00:34:38.720
the additional 10 points didn't really change it for us. But it just meant that when you built

406
00:34:38.720 --> 00:34:44.000
on Shopify, you deeply understood that you were going to get a very fair and a generous rev share

407
00:34:44.000 --> 00:34:50.480
split. And that was one. I think the second one that we really hammered hard was this thing called

408
00:34:50.480 --> 00:34:56.400
the build a business competition. It was like our big aha moment. And it was, you know, we had an

409
00:34:56.400 --> 00:35:02.320
article in New York Times about it. But it started in a very kind of simple way. We had met Tim

410
00:35:02.320 --> 00:35:09.200
Ferris think in 2009 or so. And he became an advisor. And Tim is now a very good friend to both

411
00:35:09.200 --> 00:35:14.080
mind me and Toby and and we've done his pot. He's a great guy. But Tim looked at Shopify and said

412
00:35:15.280 --> 00:35:20.080
great product. You guys are missing something. Most people, even though your product is great,

413
00:35:20.080 --> 00:35:24.400
easy to use and you're making entrepreneurship more accessible, most people have a risk adversion

414
00:35:24.400 --> 00:35:28.000
to someone's entrepreneurship for one of two reasons, either too expensive or they don't know how to

415
00:35:28.080 --> 00:35:33.920
use it. And he had this idea that we should create a competition whereby someone would start a

416
00:35:33.920 --> 00:35:41.120
brand new business on Shopify like Jan one. And six months later, the store with the highest sales

417
00:35:41.120 --> 00:35:46.960
would win. I think we said $10,000. And then Tim said, it's got to be $100,000. We did not have

418
00:35:46.960 --> 00:35:52.080
$100,000 to give out that way. But our heart was that by the time the competition ended, we would

419
00:35:52.080 --> 00:35:57.920
actually have the type of money. And we launched the the first build a business competition in 2010

420
00:35:58.720 --> 00:36:02.560
and it got us, you know, I think the article in New York Times, I have to go check, but I'm sure

421
00:36:02.560 --> 00:36:06.560
your listeners will keep me honest here. But I think it's like a startup starts their own startup

422
00:36:06.560 --> 00:36:10.880
competition, like launch their own startup company. It was kind of a silly thing that we ourselves

423
00:36:10.880 --> 00:36:14.000
were starting competition. The winner of that year was a company called Dodo Case. They made

424
00:36:14.000 --> 00:36:20.320
these beautiful beautiful leather iPad cases. The year the iPad was coming out. And so that was

425
00:36:20.320 --> 00:36:24.560
one of those ways where if you sort of read the sort of the Jeffrey Moore, I think it's Jeffrey

426
00:36:24.560 --> 00:36:28.720
Moore crossing the chasm book where he talks about, you know, technology adoption cycles go from

427
00:36:28.720 --> 00:36:33.840
a really adopters to mainstream. It felt like the build the business competition helped us

428
00:36:33.840 --> 00:36:38.960
cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream. And over I think we did the build the

429
00:36:38.960 --> 00:36:43.840
business competition for like five years after that. And ultimately the stores were getting like

430
00:36:43.840 --> 00:36:50.640
Jim Shark one one year and like some Nick Swear one one year, these big companies ended up winning.

431
00:36:51.440 --> 00:36:54.800
But so we couldn't give out 100,000 anymore. So we had to come up with these new ideas like

432
00:36:54.800 --> 00:36:59.280
how do we incentivize the creation new businesses. And we did things like the winner would spend

433
00:36:59.280 --> 00:37:03.360
a week with Richard Branson on Necker Island. And the winner would go and spend like go have lunch

434
00:37:03.360 --> 00:37:07.120
with Seth Godin. And so we created this really cool stuff. But I would say that's probably the

435
00:37:07.120 --> 00:37:11.600
second sort of vector in terms of growth. We found a way for us to cross the chasm.

436
00:37:11.600 --> 00:37:16.400
I just want pause right there. I'm a huge fan of the build a business competition.

437
00:37:16.480 --> 00:37:20.880
Oh, you know about it. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Super super well acquainted with it. Oh,

438
00:37:20.880 --> 00:37:27.120
that's so that was that was something that was really, really important. Maybe the third thing

439
00:37:27.120 --> 00:37:32.960
that I think was probably really valuable was we began to look at what are the other things like

440
00:37:32.960 --> 00:37:37.520
what is the relationship that our product has in the lives of people that use it. And the relationship

441
00:37:38.720 --> 00:37:43.760
started to look like when someone said they were going to work in the morning, what they

442
00:37:43.760 --> 00:37:47.760
meant was they were opening their Shopify admin on their laptop or on their on their desktop.

443
00:37:48.720 --> 00:37:53.280
So if we were becoming the center of like their day to day work where they added products and

444
00:37:53.280 --> 00:37:58.080
fulfilled orders and added new skews and and ran marketing campaigns, what else can we do to be

445
00:37:58.080 --> 00:38:03.120
valuable? It could be helpful there. One thing that most people don't realize today, which is the

446
00:38:03.120 --> 00:38:07.120
case. I'll bring it back in a second is that if you were to pretend today that Shopify was a

447
00:38:07.120 --> 00:38:12.160
single retailer, like if you were to aggregate all our stores just in the US alone, we would be the

448
00:38:12.160 --> 00:38:17.360
second largest online retailer in America after Amazon. Okay, why is it important? Because

449
00:38:18.320 --> 00:38:23.280
if you were the second largest online retailer in America and you go to negotiate rates with

450
00:38:23.280 --> 00:38:27.680
payment gateways and shipping companies and banks and all these different types of and

451
00:38:27.680 --> 00:38:34.400
salary services, the economy of scale that you have is so massive. Well, even in the early days,

452
00:38:34.400 --> 00:38:38.880
back going back to, I don't know, it's a 2013, 2014 or so, as we were thinking about adding new

453
00:38:38.880 --> 00:38:42.960
features, new functionality, we call merchant solutions. We began to think of it in that way,

454
00:38:42.960 --> 00:38:48.800
whereby could we go and negotiate the best rates from payment gateways as if we were the second

455
00:38:48.800 --> 00:38:53.200
largest retailer. We weren't second, we were the 20th at that point or the 30th at that point.

456
00:38:53.200 --> 00:38:57.840
But we were able to get economies of scale because of the aggregated size of our merchant base.

457
00:38:58.320 --> 00:39:02.480
And instead of keeping those economies of scale for ourselves, we gave them directly to the

458
00:39:02.480 --> 00:39:06.960
merchants. We took a little bit of margin because we want to make money. But we gave, so using

459
00:39:07.040 --> 00:39:13.920
Shopify to buy a domain, using Shopify to figure out who's going to process your credit card payments

460
00:39:13.920 --> 00:39:18.960
in your merchant gateway, it became much better to do it through us than do it on your own.

461
00:39:18.960 --> 00:39:24.160
And over time, that has turned into things like Shopify Payments and Shopify Capital and Shopify

462
00:39:24.160 --> 00:39:29.840
Shipping all these big parts of our business today. We're built on this philosophy that we have

463
00:39:29.840 --> 00:39:33.680
an unfair advantage because these economies of scale. And if we give it to merchants, it means

464
00:39:33.680 --> 00:39:39.360
that Shopify plays an even larger role in their lives. So the three big growth strategies,

465
00:39:39.360 --> 00:39:43.360
the first one is you had referral partners. So you made it easy for other people to basically

466
00:39:43.360 --> 00:39:48.640
work on the platform and promote your platform because if you're a web agency and people want to

467
00:39:48.640 --> 00:39:52.240
store, then if you make it easy for them and maybe they get some sort of financial incentive to do so.

468
00:39:52.240 --> 00:39:54.640
And they got, they got a revshare for it. Yeah, we get in the revshare, I think at the time,

469
00:39:54.640 --> 00:40:00.640
in perpetuity, like 20% of whatever we took they got. Which is awesome. Which sort of agency is a,

470
00:40:00.640 --> 00:40:04.800
as you probably know, like recurring cash flow is king. Yeah, and it's on, and what's interesting

471
00:40:04.800 --> 00:40:10.000
about it is it's on a business, right? So it's like, so basically as long as the, as long as the

472
00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:16.160
cool customer continues to sell stuff, you're going to revshare basically forever on the business,

473
00:40:16.160 --> 00:40:21.280
which is a great long term. I mean, it's an incentivizing offer. And also these, these agencies

474
00:40:21.280 --> 00:40:24.720
are not going to build their own e-commerce stack, right? So they needed someone not as well,

475
00:40:24.720 --> 00:40:28.400
you Shopify. And I bring this up because a lot of the business owners that I have, you know,

476
00:40:28.400 --> 00:40:31.360
they're like, how do I, how do I grow? Right? And that's why I wanted to really zero in on

477
00:40:31.360 --> 00:40:34.640
some of these gross strategy. So one is, you had referral partners, you brought in, you, you were

478
00:40:34.640 --> 00:40:39.680
generous with them to the app developers and to the web stores, they got 20% of the, of your cut.

479
00:40:39.680 --> 00:40:46.000
Awesome. The second one was you, you had a really sexy competition. And so I, I talk about this

480
00:40:46.000 --> 00:40:50.000
in terms of like making offers to, to an audience is like, how can you make it so good people feel

481
00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:55.120
stupid saying now, right? Like, and so for, I would say that obviously it worked. I mean, I've heard

482
00:40:55.120 --> 00:40:59.200
about it. We've modeled it at school.com. I just made the large investment. I've been into a

483
00:40:59.200 --> 00:41:02.720
platform. But also amazing. We saw all that and so we had the school games. And so we really looked

484
00:41:02.720 --> 00:41:08.320
at a lot of the stuff that you guys did there. Try to make it fun. And, but the, the key point is

485
00:41:08.320 --> 00:41:13.440
that you made it fun. You made it competitive. You got, you got customers to compete against one

486
00:41:13.440 --> 00:41:19.280
another, but they're all winning. And the major, and this was one point I still wanted to ask.

487
00:41:19.280 --> 00:41:24.480
So it was it was the New York Times, the only promotion that you did for that or was there other

488
00:41:24.480 --> 00:41:28.640
things that you did or like, was it all worth of meant like, how do I have to at this point? Like,

489
00:41:28.640 --> 00:41:32.960
when we started this, like, Tim was just sort of coming out the four work week, I think, was in

490
00:41:32.960 --> 00:41:37.920
its second edition. But he had his massive audience is a part of the cool part, part of the,

491
00:41:37.920 --> 00:41:41.840
the, the, the beauty and the value of working with Tim was not just to give us a great idea.

492
00:41:41.840 --> 00:41:46.080
Or like, great Tim. Now you got to help us tell the world about it also. So if we would have gone

493
00:41:46.080 --> 00:41:50.720
to Tim with this idea, I don't know if he would have said yes. But the fact that it was like,

494
00:41:50.800 --> 00:41:55.120
Tim's that we got Tim to generate an idea for us. It was his idea. He felt personally

495
00:41:55.120 --> 00:41:59.760
invested. And in fact, he's, I've heard him say this on his, on his own show where he'll say,

496
00:41:59.760 --> 00:42:03.360
like, you know, he's one of the co-founders of the build the business competition. I love that

497
00:42:03.360 --> 00:42:10.720
because we created a, a real vested interest in him to actually make this a success. And it

498
00:42:10.720 --> 00:42:14.080
wasn't just New York Times. I mean, there was a lot of articles written about it, but it also,

499
00:42:14.080 --> 00:42:18.560
it gave us a narrative thing that we were able to go around and talk about. It was difficult for

500
00:42:18.560 --> 00:42:22.880
me to go around and talk about. I'm like, you know, I'm shot by his chief storyteller. It's,

501
00:42:22.880 --> 00:42:27.680
it's, it was difficult for me to go around and talk about like software. We're beyond rails or

502
00:42:27.680 --> 00:42:31.760
the simplicity of e-commerce. But it wasn't as difficult for me to go around and say, hey,

503
00:42:31.760 --> 00:42:36.480
we created this thing. We think we think everyone has, you know, Nike convinced the world that if

504
00:42:36.480 --> 00:42:41.840
you have a body, you're an athlete, like my, my blood. So, so brilliant. We were trying to go

505
00:42:41.840 --> 00:42:46.400
around convinced the world. If you have ambition, you could be an entrepreneur. And so I had now this

506
00:42:46.400 --> 00:42:52.000
new, beautiful asset piece of ammunition that I was able to go around to media and to the,

507
00:42:52.000 --> 00:42:56.560
anyone that would listen to me to blogs to celebrities and say, there's a thing here we'd love

508
00:42:56.560 --> 00:42:59.680
you to talk of. And I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool. That was really helpful.

509
00:42:59.680 --> 00:43:06.160
And so for the business owners at home, one big one obviously was Tim got involved. And so if

510
00:43:06.160 --> 00:43:10.800
you're like, how do I promote my business finding a brand champion or finding somebody who, I mean,

511
00:43:11.360 --> 00:43:16.640
there's, if you've seen, I think is it, is it error? That movie that's a, it tells a story of

512
00:43:16.640 --> 00:43:21.920
Jordan's like, yeah. So like, sometimes you need to find, like, if you're, like, if you have an

513
00:43:21.920 --> 00:43:24.640
audience awesome, then you already know what you're doing. But if you don't have an audience,

514
00:43:24.640 --> 00:43:27.840
you're more of a product person and you're like, shoot, how do I get this to the world?

515
00:43:27.840 --> 00:43:31.840
Sometimes finding your Michael Jordan. And in this instance, like, Tim was probably the Michael

516
00:43:31.840 --> 00:43:35.760
Jordan for that era for that entrepreneurship. It's definitely right for entrepreneurship at that time.

517
00:43:36.720 --> 00:43:41.920
And so being willing to, and I'm sure that Tim had a good deal with Shopify for, you know,

518
00:43:41.920 --> 00:43:46.320
I'm sure that there was a deal with Tim that worked out. That he's profited a lot from.

519
00:43:47.520 --> 00:43:50.320
And so sometimes you just got to be really generous. Like the Michael Jordan deals.

520
00:43:50.320 --> 00:43:55.760
First of its kind, it was, it was kind of crazy. The founder, you know, the film was like, I don't know,

521
00:43:55.760 --> 00:43:59.360
this, like, should I really go wall in on this person? And sometimes you got to make bets,

522
00:43:59.360 --> 00:44:03.440
right? And obviously this bet paid off, Michael Jordan bet paid off. And so you come up with

523
00:44:03.440 --> 00:44:07.920
something really sexy. And then you find somebody who's the perfect fit for it. And then you put it

524
00:44:07.920 --> 00:44:11.520
together, right? And so just it's like, and there's always a perfect fit, right? There's always

525
00:44:11.520 --> 00:44:15.600
someone out there. There's someone who, if you're, if you're, if you have a product, physical

526
00:44:15.600 --> 00:44:19.680
product or a piece of soft digital product, there is someone out there that's purchased from you,

527
00:44:19.680 --> 00:44:24.640
even if you're a small business, who probably has some sort of leverage, meaning they have an

528
00:44:24.640 --> 00:44:27.920
audience, they have a community, they have a big newsletter, they have a big following,

529
00:44:27.920 --> 00:44:32.800
they know a bunch of people, if they have bought your product organically and they have a connection

530
00:44:32.960 --> 00:44:38.960
to organically, you asking them, point blank, hey, I had this crazy idea. You seem to like my,

531
00:44:38.960 --> 00:44:44.480
my, my tea. And I would love to feature you in a promotion. Would you be interested?

532
00:44:44.480 --> 00:44:50.160
That is very different than cold calling them and saying, hi, I'm Harley from this tea company,

533
00:44:50.160 --> 00:44:54.640
from FireBelly tea. And I'd love you to be a spokesperson. Like I think the days by the way,

534
00:44:54.640 --> 00:45:00.400
especially go back, like to come to present day for a second, the days of Brad Pitt Hawking

535
00:45:00.400 --> 00:45:06.720
Colgate or toothpaste are over. Nobody wants these artificial connections or sponsorships.

536
00:45:06.720 --> 00:45:11.600
When you look at what Jimmy and Mr. Beast has done with feastables or Emma Chamberlain with coffee,

537
00:45:11.600 --> 00:45:16.480
or you see what Kim Kardashian is doing with, with skims, because these are all on Shopify,

538
00:45:16.480 --> 00:45:22.560
I have a very deep understanding of these businesses. These are authentic, real products that were

539
00:45:22.560 --> 00:45:28.400
built curated, organized by these credible celebrities who care so deeply about the product.

540
00:45:28.880 --> 00:45:34.320
Like so the days of artificial sponsorship paid a play thing, I think are over. And I think,

541
00:45:34.320 --> 00:45:39.600
I think what we did with build the business was almost like showcase that, hey, Tim's,

542
00:45:39.600 --> 00:45:43.440
for some reason, interested in our business, hey Tim, how do you think we can grow our business?

543
00:45:43.440 --> 00:45:48.080
Oh, that's a good idea. We'll do the competition. But by the way, we need your help for this competition.

544
00:45:49.280 --> 00:45:52.560
And it's, it was really meta and I want to, I just really want to hit on this because this is

545
00:45:52.560 --> 00:45:56.320
what a lot of, a lot of businesses need growth, right? They've got a product and they're like,

546
00:45:56.320 --> 00:46:00.800
how do I let people know about it? And obviously you can, you can run ads or if you already have

547
00:46:00.800 --> 00:46:04.800
an audience, then you already know that stuff. But if you're like, well shoot, how do I do it scrappy?

548
00:46:04.800 --> 00:46:10.400
Right? And so like making an incentive that gives people a big reason to say yes, right?

549
00:46:10.400 --> 00:46:15.680
Finding a brand champion that already has distribution can, can be the unlock because all of that

550
00:46:15.680 --> 00:46:20.160
acquisition is really just based on the negotiation you have with that one person. And if they can

551
00:46:20.160 --> 00:46:24.720
bring a lot like every, you have the opportunity to make a true win win and obviously Shopify want

552
00:46:24.720 --> 00:46:29.680
and to want and the main one, all of the people who built stores were the real winners here.

553
00:46:30.720 --> 00:46:34.400
And I'll bet you some of the winners on the stores also did the exact same strategy that

554
00:46:34.400 --> 00:46:40.240
of course I was also doing. And so you've got a T company and they find Mrs. T on, I don't know,

555
00:46:40.240 --> 00:46:45.120
I think on Instagram who just loves tries to use all day. It's like if she really did like the product,

556
00:46:45.680 --> 00:46:49.520
then she would be a spokesperson. And so just finding that out. Okay, cool. And then the third one,

557
00:46:49.520 --> 00:46:53.680
you said, and I want to see your own on this was, it was the con, so you said growth strategies and

558
00:46:53.680 --> 00:46:57.040
you talk more about the economies of scale. Was that just that? Because that seems a little bit more

559
00:46:57.040 --> 00:47:01.200
product force it. And I'm, I'm game for that. I just want to make sure that I, yeah, I think on that one,

560
00:47:01.200 --> 00:47:06.720
I mean, it's product focus, but it's also just simply like business focus. My, my ability to go

561
00:47:06.720 --> 00:47:12.160
and negotiate with a large payment gateway every year got easier and easier. Why? Because I was coming

562
00:47:12.160 --> 00:47:18.320
to them as a much larger merchant. Now, if you just take a very simple, you know, a very simple example,

563
00:47:18.320 --> 00:47:21.920
10 individual merchants go to negotiate with the payment gateway on their own. They're all

564
00:47:21.920 --> 00:47:26.640
to get some rates. But if I do it in aggregate with all 10, my rates are going to be much,

565
00:47:26.640 --> 00:47:32.000
much better. And I can literally give those 10 merchants the exact same rates, you know, less

566
00:47:32.000 --> 00:47:36.000
maybe, you know, a couple basis points that I want to keep at myself from, from, from a profitability

567
00:47:36.000 --> 00:47:39.920
perspective. That kept getting bigger. It doesn't mean by the way we can talk about, you know, shop,

568
00:47:39.920 --> 00:47:44.880
like, you know, like our whole shipping thing because we divested shop by shipping, what's called

569
00:47:44.880 --> 00:47:49.680
SFN, shopping and filming network a couple months ago, but there go at this point. Because there are

570
00:47:49.680 --> 00:47:54.400
sometimes we have gone into areas that were not main quest. We sort of called them side quests

571
00:47:54.400 --> 00:47:58.720
that maybe we shouldn't have done on our own. In fact, in the case of shipping, we found another

572
00:47:58.720 --> 00:48:04.560
company called Flexport whose main quest is an end to end logistics platform, which is what we

573
00:48:04.560 --> 00:48:08.720
were trying to build ourself. And rather than build ourself, we're like, you just do it. And that,

574
00:48:08.720 --> 00:48:12.560
I mean, what we can talk a bit about the value of what some companies are very, very good at

575
00:48:12.560 --> 00:48:16.800
partnership. I think shop is one of those companies. If you look at what we've done with a firm

576
00:48:16.800 --> 00:48:21.760
for Binopay later or globally around cross-border payments, we've really, we pride ourselves in

577
00:48:21.760 --> 00:48:26.800
being a company that is a really good company to partner with, which is very unique in tech,

578
00:48:26.800 --> 00:48:31.920
which is sort of all kind of frenemy-esque. Yeah. And I want to, and I want, I'm going to bring this

579
00:48:31.920 --> 00:48:39.040
to the the brick and mortar chiropractor. Like, so just just down to home base. Those relationships

580
00:48:39.040 --> 00:48:43.040
don't need to be these massive billion dollar deals. Obviously they work at scale. But, you know,

581
00:48:43.600 --> 00:48:47.120
I think about my, I think, okay, so if I'm a chiropractor, what are all the things that

582
00:48:48.400 --> 00:48:53.360
anybody who's my customer also gets? They might go to the gym. They might like smoothies.

583
00:48:53.360 --> 00:48:58.400
They might like yoga, right? They make other things that are ancillary. And I think, okay,

584
00:48:58.400 --> 00:49:03.600
well, what if I go to each of those businesses and say, hey, with every smoothie, just put a

585
00:49:03.600 --> 00:49:08.080
coupon, you can slap it on there for a free adjustment. So they're going to get a free adjustment

586
00:49:08.080 --> 00:49:11.520
and a smooth, like you're going to enhance the value proposition that you have to your customers

587
00:49:11.520 --> 00:49:18.000
at no cost to you. But then I get free leads. And so they get a win. And then I get free customers

588
00:49:18.000 --> 00:49:23.040
or at least a free shot at a customer. And so these partnerships and, you know, this has been a

589
00:49:23.040 --> 00:49:27.600
huge chord at every business that I've built is, I mean, I think I've built almost the same

590
00:49:27.600 --> 00:49:31.840
amount of revenue from partnerships and affiliate relationships as I have just from actually,

591
00:49:31.840 --> 00:49:35.280
you know, direct sales and generating them ourselves. Because you were known as, like, I mean,

592
00:49:35.280 --> 00:49:38.160
you know, you and I know each other sort of from the community or our own community is like,

593
00:49:38.160 --> 00:49:43.360
you were known as being a good partner, meaning you leave enough on the table. So your partners

594
00:49:43.360 --> 00:49:47.360
can make money from it. You know, doctors actually does really, really well on their own referral

595
00:49:47.360 --> 00:49:52.560
side, meaning if you go to see a doctor and that doctor can help you, great, they'll work on you.

596
00:49:52.560 --> 00:49:57.520
If they can, they'll recommend someone else. If you, what I've noticed is that a lot of them

597
00:49:57.520 --> 00:50:03.520
recommend, like, it's almost like a closed loop circuit where doctor A, if they can help you

598
00:50:03.600 --> 00:50:08.720
always recommend Dr. B who always recommends Dr. C and Dr. C always recommends Dr. A and sort of

599
00:50:08.720 --> 00:50:13.920
this, I think if you're a chiropractor, for example, you, if you sort of then diagram out, meaning

600
00:50:13.920 --> 00:50:17.760
you look at your customer base and you ask them, you know, where do you go? Where do you work out?

601
00:50:17.760 --> 00:50:21.920
What clothing do you like to wear? What, where do you go to get your smoothies, for example?

602
00:50:21.920 --> 00:50:26.480
You probably have your own version of that. But also the people hanging out in the smoothie bar

603
00:50:26.480 --> 00:50:30.720
are also asking the smoothie person, hey, do you own any good chiropractors? And the yoga instructor

604
00:50:30.720 --> 00:50:34.640
is also saying, hey, I think you need a chiropractor as well. And so creating your own version of an

605
00:50:34.640 --> 00:50:38.400
affiliate program, even if it's not called an affiliate program, it's sort of your own

606
00:50:39.040 --> 00:50:45.360
migration of it actually is incredibly affected. And if you over-deliver, meaning every time

607
00:50:45.360 --> 00:50:50.880
the chiropractor recommends a yoga instructor, the, you know, the yoga instructor's client comes

608
00:50:50.880 --> 00:50:55.200
back and says, man, that yoga instructor you recommended is amazing. You see, you can send more clients

609
00:50:55.200 --> 00:51:00.080
to that yoga instructor. And so there is an opportunity to sort of over-deliver to create even more

610
00:51:00.080 --> 00:51:05.200
leverage in this sort of closed ecosystem of reciprocity. And I'm going to give everyone three

611
00:51:05.200 --> 00:51:08.320
quick tips on this. Number one, if you're going to create one of these relationships, give them

612
00:51:08.320 --> 00:51:12.880
customers first. If you give them customers first, they're way more like send them five people and

613
00:51:12.880 --> 00:51:16.320
then make the call. Be like, hey, by the way, I thought maybe it makes sense if we did some, now

614
00:51:16.320 --> 00:51:20.000
they're going to want more of what you jave just gave them and they're going to be happy to talk.

615
00:51:20.000 --> 00:51:23.760
Second one is in terms of generosity, like if you know what your cost to acquire customers,

616
00:51:23.760 --> 00:51:28.000
you should be willing to give at least that for a four or two-way referral partner because like,

617
00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:33.360
you either pay Zuck, right, or you just pay another small business owner. And I can almost promise

618
00:51:33.360 --> 00:51:37.840
you that a referral from a partner is going to be worth more in LTV. So you still get a better LTV

619
00:51:37.840 --> 00:51:42.720
to catch ratio by going to a stronger channel with like a referral partner. And one little thing

620
00:51:42.720 --> 00:51:46.880
that Layla is really good at this and she has just drilled it into me over time, which has been

621
00:51:46.880 --> 00:51:52.160
helpful for partnerships. She says, never count the other guys' money. And so just because you're

622
00:51:52.240 --> 00:51:57.840
making someone else a ton of money, like it has nothing, like if you take out how much that person

623
00:51:57.840 --> 00:52:01.600
makes and you just look at your side of the table, make the deal make sense for you. If they make a

624
00:52:01.600 --> 00:52:05.920
killing, awesome, they're going to be an amazing partner, right? And so I just want to

625
00:52:05.920 --> 00:52:09.680
underline that for because some of the mistakes I made early on as I wanted. I saw how much I would

626
00:52:09.680 --> 00:52:13.120
make, but I've lost deals because I got too greedy trying to say, well, he's going to make even

627
00:52:13.120 --> 00:52:17.120
more than me. And I would encourage you not to think that way because if everyone grows,

628
00:52:17.120 --> 00:52:21.040
it's such an amazing reminder. So I don't, I don't watch sports. I don't really play sports. So

629
00:52:21.040 --> 00:52:25.760
my Sunday project, this is a little bit weird and nerdy, but I have this project. It's called

630
00:52:25.760 --> 00:52:30.080
Big Shot. It's an archive that I'm creating of the greatest stories of the greatest Jewish

631
00:52:30.080 --> 00:52:34.640
entrepreneurs of the last half century. And so I'm meeting these people. Most of them are in their

632
00:52:34.640 --> 00:52:38.400
80s and 90s and I sit down with them and I record it. I put it on YouTube. It's not a big podcast,

633
00:52:38.400 --> 00:52:42.560
just it's mostly a personal project, but it's fascinating. And I've sat down with people like

634
00:52:42.560 --> 00:52:47.840
Izzy Sharp who's the founder of the Four Seasons Hotel or a guy named Larry Silverstein who's the

635
00:52:47.840 --> 00:52:52.080
owner of the World Trade Center. These were poor kids. I mean, these people grew up with nothing,

636
00:52:52.080 --> 00:52:58.000
zero or friend Weisler who's the queen of Broadway. These are very poor people that grew up and

637
00:52:58.000 --> 00:53:03.760
and eventually created, you know, the billionaires and the created empires. When you ask them at 90

638
00:53:03.760 --> 00:53:09.040
years old, and so yeah, I think Izzy Sharp in the Four Seasons Hotel is 95 years old. When you

639
00:53:09.040 --> 00:53:14.160
ask these people, tell me one or two things that I don't know. I'm, I turn 40 this year. So Izzy,

640
00:53:14.160 --> 00:53:19.680
tell me something I don't know that I should at my age. Almost to the, I've done about 12 of these

641
00:53:19.680 --> 00:53:25.600
interviews so far with these like older, you know, icons and legends on Titans. Almost all of them

642
00:53:25.600 --> 00:53:32.960
to T. Say, make your partners really, really rich. Now, the reason I bring some now is because

643
00:53:32.960 --> 00:53:37.520
these are people in their 90s, in their 90s who they got nothing, you know, they're not trying

644
00:53:37.520 --> 00:53:41.920
to have swagger. They're not trying to like flex. They're so on. And the reason I love

645
00:53:41.920 --> 00:53:46.720
interviewing them is because they're so transparent. But to it T, every single one of them,

646
00:53:46.720 --> 00:53:52.800
from these Titans of industry and real estate to the queen of Broadway has always made their

647
00:53:52.800 --> 00:53:58.320
partners incredibly rich. And that is not something that is intuitive, but it's something that I think

648
00:53:58.320 --> 00:54:09.680
like is legitimate. I love this entire line of thinking because, I mean, it goes down to just

649
00:54:09.680 --> 00:54:12.560
more of a abundance mindset. Most of the people that I know they were wealthiest in the world just

650
00:54:12.560 --> 00:54:16.800
don't see businesses zero, some game, right? It's just like everyone actually can win,

651
00:54:16.800 --> 00:54:21.600
whereas in a lot of games, is it, is it, it isn't structured that way? Whereas like even just the

652
00:54:21.600 --> 00:54:25.760
build a business competition you mentioned earlier, like sure there was one winner. But do you think

653
00:54:25.760 --> 00:54:31.360
that number two to number 100 and on the list was like, oh man, I'm so bummed that I only got

654
00:54:31.360 --> 00:54:36.320
to 100. That's the craziest part. Number two, number a number 100 have built million hour brands

655
00:54:36.400 --> 00:54:40.480
also, right? And that's this idea of like positive. I'm thinking I think it's so important. I know

656
00:54:40.480 --> 00:54:44.000
there's like, you know, like I'm an optimist. And I know you were, you were also Alex, but one

657
00:54:44.000 --> 00:54:48.080
thing that I think people misses, often when you go to raise money for those of you that are looking

658
00:54:48.080 --> 00:54:54.000
to raise money, one criticism you often get from investors is this concept of tam total address

659
00:54:54.000 --> 00:54:58.560
market. How big is your market? And effectively what they're trying to say is that if you look at your

660
00:54:58.560 --> 00:55:04.560
market, it's a pie. And your tam is effectively the pie. And your, your, your market share is a slice

661
00:55:04.560 --> 00:55:09.040
of the pie. I think that's very flawed thinking. And I think if we would have done that at Shopify,

662
00:55:09.040 --> 00:55:13.840
we would not be a hundred billion dollar company. Our version was not let's take a piece of the pie.

663
00:55:13.840 --> 00:55:18.160
Rather, let's grow the pie itself. And so we'll get to the IPO in a second, but we took our

664
00:55:18.160 --> 00:55:23.760
company public in 2015, May 2015, on the New York Stock Exchange. It was a billion dollar company

665
00:55:23.760 --> 00:55:30.000
at that point. So, but, you know, one percent of the market capital is today. At the time,

666
00:55:30.960 --> 00:55:35.600
every, when you, before you go public, you went this road show. We did 93 meetings all over the US

667
00:55:35.600 --> 00:55:39.040
and you're meeting these investors and you're meeting these funds and they, you want them to invest

668
00:55:39.040 --> 00:55:44.160
in these big funds that have trillions of dollars under management. And this idea of tam would come

669
00:55:44.160 --> 00:55:49.600
up over and over again. And I needed to have an answer for what the tam was. And I remember it off

670
00:55:49.600 --> 00:55:55.920
by heart. It was, there were 46 million retail SMBs on the planet. I think at the time we had

671
00:55:55.920 --> 00:56:02.480
100 or 300, 200,000 of them. So big, big growth opportunity. Ironically, if you sort of, you know,

672
00:56:02.480 --> 00:56:08.000
we're now nine years past the IPO, if you look at Shopify today, a lot of our customers are not

673
00:56:08.640 --> 00:56:12.960
just SMBs. We have very large companies. We're also well beyond e-commerce. We have tons of

674
00:56:12.960 --> 00:56:18.480
merchants uses for point of sale, physical retail. We have a capital business, a payments business.

675
00:56:18.480 --> 00:56:24.400
There was no way for them to actually, for me to give an answer about tam in terms of like

676
00:56:24.400 --> 00:56:28.960
foreshadowing what we would become. And so I love this idea that you're talking, which is like

677
00:56:28.960 --> 00:56:33.680
positive some thinking and optimism, where share the wealth of other people around you,

678
00:56:33.680 --> 00:56:38.000
because rather than sort of thinking of the pie as sort of this finite space, think about the

679
00:56:38.000 --> 00:56:43.040
pie as infinite and encourage more people to participate. That's how you build these like

680
00:56:43.600 --> 00:56:49.600
generational 100 year multi billion dollar companies. I talked to a fund manager the other day.

681
00:56:49.600 --> 00:56:53.440
And he was, and he is a public, a public fund. And he was, he was saying, you know, one of the things

682
00:56:53.440 --> 00:56:58.000
that I really like is that I've got 10,000 people praying that I win every night.

683
00:56:59.520 --> 00:57:02.960
Is that great? Yeah. And I think it's the exact same thing to the degree of like you can have

684
00:57:02.960 --> 00:57:08.320
whatever you want in life as long as you have other people get what they want first. And I just

685
00:57:08.320 --> 00:57:13.040
really, really believe that because I've, so I actually feel like I've actually put some numbers

686
00:57:13.040 --> 00:57:17.680
to this, but I think that from an entrepreneurship perspective, it's about one tenth. And what I mean

687
00:57:17.680 --> 00:57:22.480
by that is like, you get to keep about one tenth of the wealth that you generate for other people.

688
00:57:23.120 --> 00:57:27.040
And so I've just seen that from like the number of entrepreneurs that I look at like how much

689
00:57:27.040 --> 00:57:32.400
the market cap, like not markets, the like total revenue that's run through their platforms versus

690
00:57:32.400 --> 00:57:36.720
how much their equity stake is and what it's valued at. Like the amount of times that I've seen

691
00:57:36.720 --> 00:57:41.120
that equation done where like it's 10x. Like you have to make 10 times the amount of money for other

692
00:57:41.120 --> 00:57:46.000
people as you'll be able to make. It's just been really cool. And I think framing it that way is like

693
00:57:46.000 --> 00:57:50.960
how do I make everyone else that ton of money? Like everyone loves doing business with someone who

694
00:57:50.960 --> 00:57:54.800
makes the money. And then they will, like, and then they will want you to keep doing business with them.

695
00:57:54.800 --> 00:58:00.720
So 2022, our 2023 numbers are not, yeah, Q4 earnings are coming at soon. So I can't talk about that,

696
00:58:00.720 --> 00:58:08.080
but I'll tell you last year in 2022, Shopify's revenue was about 5.6 billion dollars under 6 billion.

697
00:58:08.720 --> 00:58:14.720
Our merchants, the people that you Shopify made almost 200 billion dollars in GMV and revenue

698
00:58:14.800 --> 00:58:21.200
in sales. That is, I mean, that is amazing. I'm very proud of that. I love the fact that our merchants

699
00:58:21.200 --> 00:58:27.360
made 200 and we made 5.0 something. Like that is the, that the reciprocity that I think is important.

700
00:58:27.360 --> 00:58:32.560
We, I also love the fact that our, our ecosystem partners made more than 6 billion dollars last

701
00:58:32.560 --> 00:58:37.360
year. That matters because it means for 2023, they're going to come back and work with us again.

702
00:58:38.560 --> 00:58:41.920
And so I want to, this is a really good line of thinking for I think a lot of the people in the

703
00:58:41.920 --> 00:58:46.960
audience. So one is, we've got this big theme of reciprocity. And what are, what are some of the other,

704
00:58:46.960 --> 00:58:51.360
because I'm skipping one ahead, but I think, I think, I think it's worth it. So what are some of the,

705
00:58:51.360 --> 00:58:54.160
you asked, you put this question, which is, what are some of the things I don't know what should,

706
00:58:54.160 --> 00:58:58.400
which is actually a question that I asked people to. So I like that you asked that question.

707
00:58:58.400 --> 00:59:02.400
What are some of the other things that came up from those conversations or just things that you would

708
00:59:02.400 --> 00:59:07.360
share as comes of the big breakthroughs and like really ones that you were like, I really thought

709
00:59:07.600 --> 00:59:10.960
this and I was dead wrong. And I see this now and it changed everything.

710
00:59:11.840 --> 00:59:16.560
All right, let me go a little personal for a second, because I think these conversations don't

711
00:59:16.560 --> 00:59:23.360
really add as much value unless you can sort of take off the facade. I have, I turned 42 months ago,

712
00:59:23.360 --> 00:59:27.600
my wife turned 40 a month ago. So we've been doing a lot of like reflection on our life and,

713
00:59:27.600 --> 00:59:31.840
and you know, we're grateful and we love what we do. We're doing our lives working all that.

714
00:59:31.840 --> 00:59:36.800
But one of the things that I really believe on a personal level is more true to me now than ever,

715
00:59:36.800 --> 00:59:43.280
is this idea that vulnerability is actually this incredible superpower. And my life has gotten

716
00:59:44.000 --> 00:59:48.320
dramatically better when I became a lot more vulnerable. And I'll give you a quick example.

717
00:59:49.600 --> 00:59:55.120
I became, I was, I was the Chief Operating Officer of Shopify between pretty much 2015 or so

718
00:59:55.120 --> 01:00:03.680
in 2020. So post IPO until sort of the pandemic. And I love being shopplised COO. It was a big role I

719
01:00:03.680 --> 01:00:10.080
had. Thousands of thousands of reports and most like pretty much all the non-engineering organizations,

720
01:00:10.080 --> 01:00:14.080
you know, rolled up to me. And I thought that was cool. I thought that was really fun. And I felt

721
01:00:14.080 --> 01:00:20.560
good about that. But I wasn't, I wasn't happy. I didn't feel necessarily that I was the best COO

722
01:00:20.560 --> 01:00:25.520
in the world. But there was no way in hell I was ever going to raise man and say, this is not the

723
01:00:25.520 --> 01:00:29.520
right role for me. This is not what's going to keep me at Shopify for a long time. And it was only

724
01:00:29.520 --> 01:00:34.800
until I had a really good chat with Toby. And I was like, look, I was like, um, like there is

725
01:00:34.800 --> 01:00:38.480
someone who's better at this role than I am. I'm certain of it. And it turns out it's Cas who's

726
01:00:38.480 --> 01:00:43.200
our current COO. He was, he initially was running product for payments for us, our money product.

727
01:00:43.200 --> 01:00:50.160
But he's now, he, he loves being the COO and running operations the way that I love storytelling.

728
01:00:50.160 --> 01:00:56.400
And I never would have had this new sort of this next year of, of my career at Shopify.

729
01:00:56.480 --> 01:01:01.600
Had I not had a little bit of like just gotten over my own, my own shit, my own crap to say,

730
01:01:01.600 --> 01:01:06.480
this is really not for me. And I think this idea of vulnerability, showing weakness as being

731
01:01:06.480 --> 01:01:12.640
this like weird bravado insecurity thing. I think the more you show vulnerability, the more you

732
01:01:12.640 --> 01:01:17.760
ask for help, the better things become. And I recognize that it's easier for someone like me to show

733
01:01:17.760 --> 01:01:22.720
vulnerability at my stage than it would have been for me to show 10 years ago. Um, but I actually,

734
01:01:23.280 --> 01:01:27.680
as I get older, I believe that lesson less that I actually believe in any stage being really

735
01:01:27.680 --> 01:01:31.200
honest with yourself and being honest with the people around you about what you want to do,

736
01:01:31.200 --> 01:01:35.520
what you love doing, what you're really good at. Like this idea of, I've mentioned the term

737
01:01:35.520 --> 01:01:39.520
life's work a couple times. There's a great Japanese term, which is ikigai, which is effectively

738
01:01:39.520 --> 01:01:42.400
like, what do you love? What is a world need? What can you, what can you get paid for?

739
01:01:43.600 --> 01:01:49.600
That idea of, of finding your thing at a stage in life, which, where you're not 95,

740
01:01:49.600 --> 01:01:55.040
like, is he sharp in four seasons, but you're 40, like, like I am or you're 50 or 60 or 30.

741
01:01:55.040 --> 01:02:00.560
I think is a great gift. And I think you're able to find your thing a lot easier when you simply

742
01:02:00.560 --> 01:02:06.320
are a lot more vulnerable about that. And, and more, more than ever, I really look at that

743
01:02:06.320 --> 01:02:12.160
today as, as a real strength. That's the first. The second thing I would say is even, uh,

744
01:02:12.160 --> 01:02:17.760
Shopify is, you know, we have, I don't know, eight or 9,000 people at the company. Shopify is very

745
01:02:17.760 --> 01:02:24.000
much a founder led company, but also the people that work at Shopify have this incredible founders

746
01:02:24.000 --> 01:02:30.400
mentality. They act like an owner with every expense that they spend, um, the speed and agility

747
01:02:30.400 --> 01:02:38.080
they use, um, they reject like best practices, quote unquote, they reject processes that don't

748
01:02:38.080 --> 01:02:42.000
make, don't make sense, don't make, don't make it faster. And not just that, we encourage that.

749
01:02:42.000 --> 01:02:47.120
If you look at the most, like, the, some of the biggest areas of Shopify, they're ran by founders

750
01:02:47.120 --> 01:02:52.400
of companies that we've acquired. And they've stayed at Shopify long past the earnout dates,

751
01:02:52.400 --> 01:02:58.880
because we've created the sort of crafters and founders paradise at this company. In many ways,

752
01:02:58.880 --> 01:03:05.600
it is like this, this incredible, like, um, collective of founders and, and, and entrepreneurs.

753
01:03:05.600 --> 01:03:11.280
And I think that you can do that at any stage of company. But if you, but if you're not careful,

754
01:03:11.280 --> 01:03:17.920
it goes away really quickly. And there are very few companies in our size today that feels like

755
01:03:17.920 --> 01:03:22.320
a founder led entrepreneurial, everyone calls themselves the largest startup. Like it's, it's almost

756
01:03:22.320 --> 01:03:26.480
a, you know, it's such a common thing to say, but it's, it's bullshit. Most of them are not like that.

757
01:03:26.480 --> 01:03:30.640
And I think one thing that you can do as the founder of your company is instill this founders,

758
01:03:30.640 --> 01:03:34.960
this founders mindset or founder mentality. And you can keep it there if you work at it. And I

759
01:03:34.960 --> 01:03:40.080
think the results are almost always unequivocally better. What do you do tactically in order to keep

760
01:03:40.240 --> 01:03:45.520
that? So a couple of things are very simple. In most companies of our size, the way to,

761
01:03:45.520 --> 01:03:50.800
to get a promotion is to go into management. There is one track. It is, and it's, it,

762
01:03:50.800 --> 01:03:58.000
it always leads to a manager type role. Um, we don't do that. There are other tracks that

763
01:03:58.000 --> 01:04:01.760
shopify. There is a manager track. There's also an individual contributor track, or we call

764
01:04:01.760 --> 01:04:07.200
the crafter track. There are these other tracks that allow you to state our company for a long time.

765
01:04:07.200 --> 01:04:13.440
And if your craft is engineering or it's product or it's sales or it's storytelling and it's,

766
01:04:13.440 --> 01:04:19.360
it's sort of brand building, we are absolutely, in fact, not even okay with it. We are going to be

767
01:04:19.360 --> 01:04:25.440
super happy if your mandate for your career is to get really, really good at being the world's

768
01:04:25.440 --> 01:04:32.240
best marketer or the world's best sales rep or the world's best, whatever. Um, so one is we created

769
01:04:32.320 --> 01:04:37.200
these different tracks that shopify and we create, which is sort of, you know, like, the way I like

770
01:04:37.200 --> 01:04:40.800
toward is like, Shopify is really a crafter of paradise. That's one. The second thing that is

771
01:04:40.800 --> 01:04:48.720
really important is we also encourage like real disagreements. We invite people to actively

772
01:04:48.720 --> 01:04:53.760
disagree when something just doesn't feel right. Um, now if like, if we've made the decision,

773
01:04:53.760 --> 01:04:57.920
we beat it up, you know, disagree, you know, disagree and commit sometimes has to happen also.

774
01:04:58.000 --> 01:05:03.760
But instilling a place where like, you encourage open debate is really, I think super important.

775
01:05:03.760 --> 01:05:09.120
I think most companies talk about transparency and they talk, but it's, it's, it's total bullshit.

776
01:05:09.120 --> 01:05:13.280
Maybe the things to encourage that I just, I always get into the weeds, but like, yeah,

777
01:05:13.280 --> 01:05:19.440
the tracks makes a ton of sense. Like, that was like for me, you know, with, with our companies,

778
01:05:20.080 --> 01:05:25.200
like, I will, I will, that'll probably my number one takeaway from just my tactical takeaways.

779
01:05:25.200 --> 01:05:28.320
Like, interesting having individual contributor tracks because one of the big issues that a lot,

780
01:05:28.320 --> 01:05:32.560
like, when you have a star media buyer, right, in a company, yeah, that guy usually doesn't

781
01:05:32.560 --> 01:05:37.440
want to then manage media by like, he's used like that person. And why do you want that person to,

782
01:05:37.440 --> 01:05:42.560
like, you want that star media buyer to be a media buyer? And what if our media buyer is a seven

783
01:05:42.560 --> 01:05:46.400
and actually wants to become a nine or a 10 at some point? Now, all of a sudden, you have like,

784
01:05:46.400 --> 01:05:50.240
the world's greatest media buyer. So one thing is, I think you do have to have a conversation with

785
01:05:50.240 --> 01:05:54.880
people, um, no matter what size of company is like, what track are you on? Are you in a managed,

786
01:05:54.880 --> 01:05:58.960
like, there are some people who are just so great at management. You want them to manage teams.

787
01:05:58.960 --> 01:06:01.920
They just, they, they're really good at that stuff. But I think having a conversation,

788
01:06:01.920 --> 01:06:05.840
say, what track are you on? Really, really matters. The second thing I think that's also,

789
01:06:05.840 --> 01:06:12.720
yeah, that's also really important is, um, I know every company wants likes to talk about things

790
01:06:12.720 --> 01:06:18.080
like, you know, transparency and, and opening communication. Um, we write a letter to our board,

791
01:06:18.560 --> 01:06:22.720
every quarter, we share that letter with the board, the whole company. We, and it's not

792
01:06:22.720 --> 01:06:26.560
redacted. It's exactly the letter that, even at our size, that we share with the board,

793
01:06:26.560 --> 01:06:31.600
we share with the entire company. A small, now, not every letter is going to be this holy shit,

794
01:06:31.600 --> 01:06:36.240
mind blowing, you know, uh, piece of content. They're always really interesting. But sometimes,

795
01:06:36.240 --> 01:06:40.000
you know, it's more like making sure the trains are, are, are on time and stuff like that.

796
01:06:40.800 --> 01:06:45.600
But what it does do over time is it, it really brings everyone into the same page of like, hey,

797
01:06:45.600 --> 01:06:49.280
the things we're telling the board, we're also telling you that there isn't these like two different

798
01:06:49.280 --> 01:06:55.120
versions of the narrative of the company. And, um, I think that's something that is, is, it's,

799
01:06:55.120 --> 01:07:00.880
it seems simple, uh, but it's really, really impactful, especially if you do it really consistently.

800
01:07:01.680 --> 01:07:05.280
I'll give, I'll give, I'll give listeners a tactic that we have done for this, which is, um,

801
01:07:05.280 --> 01:07:10.240
we actually run open book financials in all of our companies. And so when we do quarterlies,

802
01:07:10.240 --> 01:07:15.120
it's like, here's where we made money. Here's where this, like, we spend money and it didn't work out

803
01:07:15.280 --> 01:07:21.200
well. And so that's helped for everyone feeling like they're on the same page that we're not

804
01:07:21.200 --> 01:07:23.760
hiding anything. And if things are going really well, they can see it. And if something doesn't

805
01:07:23.760 --> 01:07:28.480
go as well, like, some of the decisions that happened down line, we're like, well, that was

806
01:07:28.480 --> 01:07:32.880
suffering. And I guess this, this does make sense that we decided to divest in this kind of

807
01:07:32.880 --> 01:07:36.800
endeavor that we were doing. And I know I love Susie, but I get it. You know, like, even,

808
01:07:36.800 --> 01:07:41.200
even if people aren't like stoked about it, like, they get it. Um, so I, I was just, I love,

809
01:07:41.280 --> 01:07:46.640
this is great. By the way, um, and so acting like an order, you, you operationalize that, um,

810
01:07:47.360 --> 01:07:52.480
by creating individual, uh, contributor tracks and by having managed tracks really so people can

811
01:07:52.480 --> 01:07:56.080
be honest about what they're really good at. And the one tidbit I'll give for people who actually

812
01:07:56.080 --> 01:08:00.320
aren't owners are just like, uh, entrepreneurs, uh, sorry, uh, employees and businesses is

813
01:08:01.360 --> 01:08:06.800
no one can fault you once you own your flaws. Like if you're like, Hey, I really suck at

814
01:08:07.520 --> 01:08:11.920
project management. And if you say that upfront, then people were like, they don't, they don't

815
01:08:11.920 --> 01:08:15.520
talk behind your back about it. They'll just talk to your face about it because it's not a secret.

816
01:08:15.520 --> 01:08:19.840
You're like, I know I suck a project management. And so the more it's like M and M's whole thing,

817
01:08:19.840 --> 01:08:24.160
it's like if he claimed every single deficiency in flaw that he had, no one could say anything

818
01:08:24.160 --> 01:08:27.120
back to him in rap battles. And even though, you know, hopefully corporate America is a little

819
01:08:27.120 --> 01:08:31.760
bit nicer than a rap battle, maybe it isn't. Um, yeah, I mean, it may not always be, but I think

820
01:08:31.760 --> 01:08:35.920
you're right about that. I think also the thing that what happens is when you say to someone,

821
01:08:35.920 --> 01:08:39.600
look, I don't want to be a river stone. I don't want to be well rounded. I want to be really,

822
01:08:39.600 --> 01:08:44.960
really pointy at this thing. And that means that this other things around me, I'm going to hire

823
01:08:44.960 --> 01:08:48.640
or I'm going to find teams who are really good at those other things. Now you're beginning to

824
01:08:48.640 --> 01:08:53.440
actually put yourself in a position where if you're not like the world's greatest, I don't know,

825
01:08:53.440 --> 01:08:58.000
writer, for example, um, but you're really good at like coming up with like, you know, great

826
01:08:58.000 --> 01:09:01.520
slogans or you're not the world's great ad, you know, you're not great at writing ad copy,

827
01:09:01.520 --> 01:09:06.400
but you're a great media buyer. Now if you say, look, I'm not good at ad copy, but I,

828
01:09:06.400 --> 01:09:11.920
I'm so good at finding opportunities for, for great exposure. If you say you're not good at that,

829
01:09:11.920 --> 01:09:16.800
that means it invites someone who may be really good at copy to come and be your, like, you're,

830
01:09:16.800 --> 01:09:20.480
you're, you're, you're, your buddy, you're best, you're, you know, your best friend at work.

831
01:09:20.480 --> 01:09:24.560
That stuff really, really matters. And I think, um, I think that stuff really is really good.

832
01:09:24.560 --> 01:09:27.520
The only other thing I will say is this, um, I know a lot of coming start with mission and

833
01:09:27.600 --> 01:09:32.000
nor start. One thing that we are very clear on, even from, from, from day one till now is,

834
01:09:33.280 --> 01:09:38.000
um, we are a merchant obsessed. And what does that mean? When given any decision,

835
01:09:38.000 --> 01:09:43.760
whereby we have to pick one of two things, we always ask ourselves, what is better for merchants?

836
01:09:43.760 --> 01:09:48.000
Now, by the way, that is different than let's say Amazon, for example, who is very famously

837
01:09:48.000 --> 01:09:52.320
consumer obsessed. They don't, like, that's what they care about. They're very clear about that.

838
01:09:52.320 --> 01:09:55.360
When you work at Amazon, if there's like 100,000 people who work there, they are a consumer

839
01:09:55.360 --> 01:10:01.840
obsessed. By creating this, this very simple heuristic of which allows you to say, given to

840
01:10:01.840 --> 01:10:06.720
opportunities, both seem pretty good. How do you actually evaluate it? Well, what's the one

841
01:10:06.720 --> 01:10:11.600
that's best for the merchant? That means that thousands of people work at Shopify on a daily basis

842
01:10:11.600 --> 01:10:16.480
are making independent decisions that all roll up to that centralized mission, which is we are

843
01:10:16.480 --> 01:10:21.920
merchant obsessed. We care person-formos about the millions of business owners that you Shopify.

844
01:10:21.920 --> 01:10:26.000
And again, it sounds obvious, but most companies totally mess us up.

845
01:10:26.720 --> 01:10:30.240
And where the vision-emission stuff gets really important just for everyone is listening,

846
01:10:30.240 --> 01:10:35.440
is once you get to about 100 employees, that's where you're usually two to three levels away,

847
01:10:35.440 --> 01:10:38.480
like if you're the founder, you're two to three levels away from people who are getting hired.

848
01:10:38.480 --> 01:10:41.680
You're starting to hire people. You don't even know their names. This is where this really

849
01:10:41.680 --> 01:10:45.600
becomes important because decentralized decision-making is the only way you can continue to scale.

850
01:10:45.600 --> 01:10:49.680
And you need people to make decisions that would be in alignment with you. You can't be in

851
01:10:49.680 --> 01:10:55.520
every room to make every decision. And so that's where mission and values create decision-making

852
01:10:55.520 --> 01:11:00.080
frameworks that people can use as litmus tests of, okay, what would Toby do right now?

853
01:11:00.080 --> 01:11:05.440
Well, I know that Toby says merchants are North Star, and merchants would not like this.

854
01:11:05.440 --> 01:11:09.120
Then we don't do it, right? Even though we beg a little bit more, they don't like it. And that's

855
01:11:09.120 --> 01:11:12.880
what correct. So I just want to highlight that because a lot of the people, I mean, obviously we take

856
01:11:12.880 --> 01:11:19.440
businesses on smaller than Shopify. Then we invest it. But we'll go through this exercise,

857
01:11:19.440 --> 01:11:22.720
leadership, because usually when they're at, you know, between 10 to $30 million a year,

858
01:11:22.720 --> 01:11:27.040
this is when this gets really important to get to 100 million a year in revenue and so forth.

859
01:11:27.040 --> 01:11:31.040
And so, like, if you're at that point in your stage, like, this shit gets important.

860
01:11:31.040 --> 01:11:35.280
I also think something you're sort of skating or flirting with a little bit, which has to be said,

861
01:11:35.280 --> 01:11:39.120
is I think that there is a strange thing that, as you grow, so you mentioned 100 people,

862
01:11:39.120 --> 01:11:44.240
there's actually a real thing. It's called Dunbar's number. It's 150 people, right? And

863
01:11:44.240 --> 01:11:47.760
Dunbar's number basically goes back to like the days of like when we're all living in tribes.

864
01:11:47.760 --> 01:11:53.040
It basically a tribe size should never go beyond 150. There's some sort of science around humans

865
01:11:53.040 --> 01:11:58.000
can only really remember 150 people at any one particular time. I went through the 150 mark a

866
01:11:58.000 --> 01:12:02.640
long time ago at Shopify. It does change. And there's no question about it. But the one thing that

867
01:12:02.640 --> 01:12:09.040
often happens when you cross that 100 mark or 150 person mark is you begin to do this whole like,

868
01:12:10.240 --> 01:12:15.280
you know, macro management. You sort of get out of the weeds. And actually, I think this whole narrative

869
01:12:15.280 --> 01:12:20.640
that micro management is bad is total horse shit. I actually think that the best leaders I know

870
01:12:20.640 --> 01:12:25.440
whether they're running like trillion dollar companies, because I know some of those or 100 billion

871
01:12:25.440 --> 01:12:30.800
dollar companies or million dollar companies, the best leaders I know are in the weeds on the things

872
01:12:30.800 --> 01:12:35.680
that matter most. And even, you know, I'm preparing now for my earnings college in two weeks. Like,

873
01:12:35.680 --> 01:12:40.240
I mean, the weeds on this, like, we have an IR team who can prepare all the, no, I want to actually

874
01:12:40.240 --> 01:12:45.600
go through every single word in the script, in the press release, in the narrative. I want to go

875
01:12:45.600 --> 01:12:51.360
like word for word on my own before anyone even takes a look at it because it matters so much.

876
01:12:51.360 --> 01:12:54.880
And if that's my craft, that's what I'm supposed to be responsible for, that I'm going to be in the

877
01:12:54.880 --> 01:12:59.760
weeds on that. I think there's like this, this corporate America, you know, bashing of micro management.

878
01:12:59.760 --> 01:13:04.960
And I think I think some micro management is actually really positive and needed.

879
01:13:05.520 --> 01:13:09.200
We agree. And we have a little saying for this internally, which is when in the weeds.

880
01:13:09.520 --> 01:13:12.560
Yeah, like that's what that like that. You're going to go toe to toe with somebody is like,

881
01:13:12.560 --> 01:13:16.080
you're going to win in the weeds. Like, that's how you do it. And I like, I feel the same way.

882
01:13:16.080 --> 01:13:20.720
If some, you know, some, some, some president of some other company of our size,

883
01:13:21.280 --> 01:13:26.240
is not in the weeds on, on, on earnings on, on press, on partnerships. I'm going to run

884
01:13:26.240 --> 01:13:30.480
circles around them because I am in the weeds because you have the, the visceral knowledge of like

885
01:13:30.480 --> 01:13:34.160
the stuff that really makes it. And one of the things that also helps with this is that if you

886
01:13:34.160 --> 01:13:37.600
were in the weeds when something goes wrong, you know, why it went wrong and you can make a pivot

887
01:13:37.600 --> 01:13:41.120
where if your two levels were moved, you don't know why it didn't work. And then your decision

888
01:13:41.120 --> 01:13:45.360
making of what to do next, then relies on secondhand. And it gets really, really messy after that.

889
01:13:45.360 --> 01:13:51.200
You make really dumb moves. Okay. So we have rest of process is one of the big driving things.

890
01:13:51.200 --> 01:13:55.040
We have vulnerability. And then the downstream impacts of how you kind of implemented that within

891
01:13:55.040 --> 01:14:00.800
Shopify with the individual tracks and encouraging open disagreement among people. And giving

892
01:14:00.800 --> 01:14:03.680
everyone kind of a north star. So everyone's aligned with how we're,

893
01:14:04.560 --> 01:14:08.560
are like what frameworks are we going to disagree around? Like it's not whether we're doing

894
01:14:08.560 --> 01:14:12.960
customer or doing merchant. The disagreement is going to be which of these best serves the merchant

895
01:14:12.960 --> 01:14:19.040
if we're going to disagree. Correct. Right. So I want to zoom out. And so I said we're going to look

896
01:14:19.040 --> 01:14:22.720
back. And I think we took a little bit of a final negative step and moved it forward, which I loved

897
01:14:22.720 --> 01:14:29.120
anyways. So if we're looking forward, right? You sit in this really unique perch that I mean maybe

898
01:14:29.120 --> 01:14:34.160
10 people on earth sit on that you sit on top of this mountain of data and you kind of see around

899
01:14:34.160 --> 01:14:39.840
the corner. And so what's kind of what's what's what's what's what's coming, right? What do you

900
01:14:39.840 --> 01:14:44.880
what are you thinking about for Shopify and just kind of the marketplace overall for retail entrepreneurs

901
01:14:44.880 --> 01:14:48.560
or even just entrepreneurs in general? Like we talked a little bit about the sort of idea

902
01:14:48.560 --> 01:14:52.240
that the cost of failure is trending towards zero. It's never going to be zero because ultimately

903
01:14:52.240 --> 01:14:56.400
like it's sort of asymptotes because ultimately like that you have an opportunity cost like you

904
01:14:56.400 --> 01:15:00.160
could be doing something else. So it's never going to be zero but it's getting close to it.

905
01:15:00.160 --> 01:15:05.440
I think a couple things around the entrepreneurship thing one is I think entrepreneurship now more

906
01:15:05.440 --> 01:15:13.680
than ever before is default global. I think this idea that we've imported physical geographies

907
01:15:13.680 --> 01:15:20.480
and borders of countries in from the physical world into the digital world is really silly. I don't

908
01:15:20.480 --> 01:15:26.000
think I mean you see a lot of great brands behind me that I'm very close with. I put up you know from

909
01:15:26.000 --> 01:15:32.240
kith to supreme to mom spaghetti which is M&M's company to fire belly which is my little tea

910
01:15:32.240 --> 01:15:36.560
side hustle master and dynamic headphones. These are some of the companies that I love that I'm

911
01:15:36.560 --> 01:15:42.160
connected to. None of them have geographic limitations. That's just not how they operate.

912
01:15:42.160 --> 01:15:46.400
I get it. It's more complicated sometimes to sell although frankly we have a product called Shopify

913
01:15:46.400 --> 01:15:51.360
markets and markets pro which makes everything really easy there. But I don't want to this is

914
01:15:51.360 --> 01:15:56.480
the shop like this just I think one like your total adjustment market when you're getting started

915
01:15:56.480 --> 01:16:02.320
is anyone on the planet who wants to buy your particular product first second of all is I think

916
01:16:02.320 --> 01:16:09.680
the idea if you listen to any of the earnings calls from these big big retailers one of the terms

917
01:16:09.680 --> 01:16:15.920
you often hear is this concept of channel conflict which is a very simple thing. It's online is

918
01:16:15.920 --> 01:16:20.240
doing well but it's hurting offline Instagram commerce is doing well but it's hurting my online

919
01:16:21.200 --> 01:16:26.640
store. I when I think about the brands that I admire the most across millions of stores on Shopify

920
01:16:27.520 --> 01:16:33.040
none of them none of them use the term channel conflict why because they are channel agnostic what

921
01:16:33.040 --> 01:16:38.400
they care about is serving their customer in the way that the customer loves to be served or wants

922
01:16:38.400 --> 01:16:44.560
to be served which is very different than pretty much you know the history of retail where if you

923
01:16:44.560 --> 01:16:49.200
want to buy bread you went to the baker in the town square you want to buy shoes went to the

924
01:16:49.200 --> 01:16:55.840
cobbler down the streets in the 80s I'm a you know I'm an 80s kid when I went to go buy a video game

925
01:16:55.840 --> 01:17:00.080
I'd have to line up at the store at this hour doors open wait in line use this credit card no not

926
01:17:00.080 --> 01:17:07.200
that credit card use this one that whole thing was the the concept of the retailer dictating the

927
01:17:07.200 --> 01:17:13.920
process of purchase to the consumer is over and the reason that you're seeing you know things like

928
01:17:13.920 --> 01:17:20.960
shop pay for example become so popular is because seamless simple easy convenient checkout

929
01:17:20.960 --> 01:17:26.320
is what every consumer wants and so modern retailers today one are geographically agnostic

930
01:17:26.320 --> 01:17:32.560
to our channel agnostic they sell across every channel the reason why you see us do things like

931
01:17:32.560 --> 01:17:37.200
we there's a there's a Spotify channel for Shopify so if you're an artist most most

932
01:17:37.200 --> 01:17:41.440
merchants on Shopify are not artists but if you're an artist and you have your M&M for example

933
01:17:41.440 --> 01:17:47.520
and you have a great popular artist profile and fanbase on Spotify now you can sell your merch

934
01:17:47.520 --> 01:17:54.080
directly from your artist profile page on Spotify won't be important to most people but no are

935
01:17:54.080 --> 01:17:58.880
if we want to qualify and requalify to be the retail operating system for these millions of stores

936
01:17:58.880 --> 01:18:05.360
our responsibility is every surface area on the planet digital physical anywhere between

937
01:18:05.360 --> 01:18:10.000
that transaction could happen we have to make that easy so that's probably the second thing I

938
01:18:10.000 --> 01:18:13.120
think that's happening retail and then the third thing that I think is is kind of like a

939
01:18:14.400 --> 01:18:21.360
an interesting thing is that I think businesses becoming at all sizes personal and you do this

940
01:18:21.360 --> 01:18:26.480
very well Alex maybe better than anyone but you know your own personal brand and your businesses

941
01:18:26.480 --> 01:18:34.160
brand they're not separate anymore a couple a little while ago I saw very very high in brand

942
01:18:34.160 --> 01:18:39.360
their online store was down I'll say it was Versace Versace went down I think eight months ago

943
01:18:39.360 --> 01:18:44.720
when I tweeted I said Versace like let me help you out and it ended up leading to some of the

944
01:18:44.720 --> 01:18:50.880
Versace brands coming out to Shopify at that point was I the president Shopify was I hardly the entrepreneur

945
01:18:50.880 --> 01:18:56.880
was I hardly the like two men like I think this idea that that you know work life balance or work

946
01:18:56.880 --> 01:19:02.720
life harmony the separate I think it's I think it's over I think people I think we as entrepreneurs

947
01:19:02.720 --> 01:19:07.600
and aspiring entrepreneurs in 2024 we have to sort of incorporate all these things into our backpack

948
01:19:07.600 --> 01:19:11.920
our businesses our personal life like you know you talk about you talk with your wife Layla right

949
01:19:11.920 --> 01:19:17.280
all the time but being part of like you sort of mix in between total address about market and talk

950
01:19:17.280 --> 01:19:22.240
about your wife I do the same thing like Lindsay my wife is a huge part of my life and when I go

951
01:19:22.240 --> 01:19:26.080
home I talk about work and I'll talk about our kids and I like I think this there's sort of this

952
01:19:26.080 --> 01:19:32.240
wonderful harmonious situation now where we don't like we're not separating these things we're not

953
01:19:32.240 --> 01:19:37.760
waiting to retire to live our life I think more and more you're able to kind of like have a personal

954
01:19:37.760 --> 01:19:41.440
brand but it's also your businesses brand and you're also an extension of the company but you're

955
01:19:41.440 --> 01:19:47.840
also your own person and I actually think that's a wonderful new thing that new phenomenon that

956
01:19:47.840 --> 01:19:51.760
is very different than our parents and grandparents and great grandparents had you and they don't

957
01:19:51.760 --> 01:19:58.720
really get it as a right I mean Mr. Beast is he a YouTuber or is he a or is he a confectionary

958
01:19:58.720 --> 01:20:03.920
genius with his chalk who cares he's this amazing guy he's a great entrepreneur and he makes

959
01:20:03.920 --> 01:20:08.000
content and he makes chocolate and he makes burgers and he makes cool videos and he's a cool dude

960
01:20:08.000 --> 01:20:13.920
and like who cares how you sort of categorize these people and that's the reason why actually

961
01:20:13.920 --> 01:20:18.720
back to what we said beginning authenticity is going to rule here and if you are if you are full

962
01:20:18.720 --> 01:20:22.000
of shit people are going to figure that out very quickly and they're not going to buy it for you

963
01:20:22.000 --> 01:20:25.360
and they're not going to want to participate in your journey but if you're not full of shit

964
01:20:25.360 --> 01:20:29.840
and you invite people along into your journey and you talk about your kids and your spouse

965
01:20:29.840 --> 01:20:34.800
and your business people cheer for you and it goes back to what I think you said you know

966
01:20:34.800 --> 01:20:40.560
earlier is that that quote about you know you want as many people cheering for you as possible

967
01:20:40.560 --> 01:20:46.000
in your journey I've read the exact quote but if something like that and because I like defining

968
01:20:46.000 --> 01:20:50.800
terms a lot it's like one of my hobbies but defining it from a behavioral perspective so a lot of

969
01:20:50.800 --> 01:20:54.320
people are like well what is being authentic or like I want to be authentic like how do you do that

970
01:20:55.360 --> 01:21:00.400
the best definition that I that I have that's working is behaving is if you could not be punished

971
01:21:01.120 --> 01:21:06.240
and so oftentimes like we censor ourselves for fear of punishment which like the many things that

972
01:21:06.240 --> 01:21:09.680
we don't say or don't do because we're afraid someone's going to say something or someone's

973
01:21:09.680 --> 01:21:14.480
going to do something in reaction and so basically if you're in an empty room you have almost no

974
01:21:14.480 --> 01:21:20.640
no potential for punishment right and so it's how you act as if you could not be punished is how

975
01:21:20.720 --> 01:21:25.840
you are authentically and so we talk about the concept of like you are the niche so it's like what

976
01:21:25.840 --> 01:21:31.840
is Logan right he likes he likes he likes aliens he likes you know weird the government stuff he likes

977
01:21:32.560 --> 01:21:37.360
fighting he likes comedy he likes biohacking he likes taking crazy drugs like he likes all sorts of

978
01:21:37.360 --> 01:21:41.760
stuff and so if you're to say hey I want to start this podcast where I talk about aliens fighting

979
01:21:41.760 --> 01:21:46.960
comedy like like people would be like you're crazy but it's Joe Rogan and so it also creates a one

980
01:21:46.960 --> 01:21:54.400
of one category that only you can really occupy and so I genuinely do believe this that everyone

981
01:21:54.400 --> 01:21:59.280
is kind of unique in terms of their distinct interests and kind of like if they were a chart like

982
01:22:00.000 --> 01:22:04.320
how they're the point of their rock is in one directions versus a hundred other ones and so I

983
01:22:04.320 --> 01:22:08.000
do think there is a thumbprint there that that is unique to the individual where people do become

984
01:22:08.000 --> 01:22:12.560
rounded stones is because they pull back on their pointy bits and so then they do look more

985
01:22:12.560 --> 01:22:17.040
uniform and so people look uniform but aren't in in reality and so looking at these three big

986
01:22:17.040 --> 01:22:20.640
things in terms of what's coming around the corner and commerce and kind of like where the best

987
01:22:20.640 --> 01:22:25.280
brands are indexing number one is that they see everyone has a potential customer around the world

988
01:22:25.280 --> 01:22:30.320
not not not not just their local area just even people who speak their language second was that

989
01:22:30.320 --> 01:22:34.320
they don't really care where the customer comes from like if more people know about your stuff and

990
01:22:34.320 --> 01:22:38.080
you put it in more places more people will buy it and as long as you treat them well you'll make

991
01:22:38.080 --> 01:22:43.920
more sales and you'll be more reaping customers and then the third one is creating allow basically

992
01:22:43.920 --> 01:22:49.920
allowing yourself to be you publicly and being more okay with the association that's going to

993
01:22:49.920 --> 01:22:53.360
happen inevitably with you starting a company because if you really believe in the product it's

994
01:22:53.360 --> 01:22:56.880
going to be invest in your identity like it's going to be part of who you are and rather than

995
01:22:56.880 --> 01:23:01.920
caging these things out or boxing them just leaning into the fact that like you're you and you

996
01:23:01.920 --> 01:23:06.080
own this thing and I think that what we were saying earlier with kind of Tim Ferriss and these

997
01:23:06.080 --> 01:23:11.280
brand champions like those other people can contribute their thumbprints to your product as well

998
01:23:11.840 --> 01:23:16.480
well if you're authentic then other people that are kind of like you like you know I like to

999
01:23:16.800 --> 01:23:20.480
I like to be exothermic like I like to take I'm very high energy I always have been

1000
01:23:21.600 --> 01:23:26.720
I like to add energy to other people in other other situations and rooms and conversations and so

1001
01:23:26.720 --> 01:23:31.040
I'm just gonna like I want to be exothermic and so everything that I do I want to like I want to be

1002
01:23:31.040 --> 01:23:35.680
the exothermic person what that means is people see me being exothermic mean you and I sort of

1003
01:23:35.680 --> 01:23:39.280
connected like you and I are kind of social media friends like I was being exothermic and you were

1004
01:23:39.280 --> 01:23:44.000
being exothermic or like hey let's be exothermic together that that's how you and I that's why

1005
01:23:44.000 --> 01:23:48.560
we're talking right now because I try to be authentically me on the internet and you try to be

1006
01:23:48.560 --> 01:23:51.680
authentically you and the internet and so we connected and we're like yeah we kind of like

1007
01:23:51.680 --> 01:23:57.360
each other that you get tons of people coming at you asking to do stuff together and immediately

1008
01:23:57.440 --> 01:24:01.840
you're like ah something is off here and and I I feel the same way sometimes when people come

1009
01:24:01.840 --> 01:24:07.520
to me and they say like I want to connect I want to do a deal with you when you are exothermic and

1010
01:24:07.520 --> 01:24:12.160
if you are or when you are authentic you actually invite other people that are similarly authentic in

1011
01:24:12.160 --> 01:24:17.040
your way into your lives and you create these amazing communities and friendships and relationships

1012
01:24:17.040 --> 01:24:21.920
and it's it's really fun but you know I mean it's a great sort of place to wrap up I think which is

1013
01:24:21.920 --> 01:24:26.640
like there is a deep optimism I think around the entrepreneurial community and for those of you

1014
01:24:26.640 --> 01:24:30.160
that are listening whether you're an entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur one of the best parts

1015
01:24:30.160 --> 01:24:36.960
of entrepreneurship is that all of us not actually not most of us didn't sort of start with like

1016
01:24:36.960 --> 01:24:41.280
some sort of like we didn't start on third base most of us started at the beginning and we've

1017
01:24:41.280 --> 01:24:45.920
been building ourselves and so when we see other people building on their own whether they're

1018
01:24:45.920 --> 01:24:50.160
chiropractors or they're tech entrepreneurs or they're lawyers or accountants or they're someone

1019
01:24:50.160 --> 01:24:53.920
who's creating you know I love my ember mug I love the guys ember they make these great coffee

1020
01:24:54.880 --> 01:25:00.160
whatever they are I am rooting for them and they're rooting for me and that actually that's sort

1021
01:25:00.160 --> 01:25:05.840
of wonderful like ecosystem reciprocity go back to that that makes entrepreneurship a little

1022
01:25:05.840 --> 01:25:12.400
bit less lonely and also the greatest tool for humans to find their own version of six whatever

1023
01:25:12.400 --> 01:25:16.640
your version successes make a lot of money put food in your table be creative whatever that

1024
01:25:16.640 --> 01:25:21.440
version is entrepreneurship is this amazing vehicle and today it's more accessible than it's

1025
01:25:21.440 --> 01:25:26.720
ever been and there's it's tough not to be optimistic about that. Last question

1026
01:25:27.920 --> 01:25:30.640
business advice to Harley ten years ago you got one thing you can tell them.

1027
01:25:33.520 --> 01:25:37.600
I think a lot of you know a lot of people don't know where to start we kind of talked this a

1028
01:25:37.600 --> 01:25:41.760
little bit earlier we talked about t-shirts but just find a problem that you feel yourself and

1029
01:25:41.760 --> 01:25:47.120
just solve it yeah like it's hard to imagine how to scale and how big it could become don't

1030
01:25:47.120 --> 01:25:53.280
even worry about that but like if there's a hobby like you know one of my best friends is really

1031
01:25:53.280 --> 01:25:57.440
is his name is David Siegel his founder of David's tea this big tea empire he sold the company

1032
01:25:57.440 --> 01:26:03.200
2016 and he was trying to figure out what to do and all along the way David was like coming over

1033
01:26:03.200 --> 01:26:08.320
to my house and you're hanging out a lot and he's obsessed with tea I was like dude like you have

1034
01:26:08.320 --> 01:26:12.480
a thing it's tea why aren't you build another tea company and so that's where fire belly came

1035
01:26:12.480 --> 01:26:17.280
from and I love this idea that like you know the thing that you're searching for is probably right

1036
01:26:17.280 --> 01:26:21.920
in front of you and I know some people say that you know you shouldn't commercialize your hobbies

1037
01:26:21.920 --> 01:26:26.320
but I'm not really I'm not really sure I believe that like if you have this amazing hobby this

1038
01:26:26.320 --> 01:26:31.200
amazing interest this amazing pain point you feel a lot that's exactly what you should be working

1039
01:26:31.200 --> 01:26:36.480
on that's the first thing the second thing I think is like you know I'm this is my 15th year

1040
01:26:36.480 --> 01:26:41.360
at Shopify I'm 40 years old so more than a third of my life has been spent at this credible company

1041
01:26:41.440 --> 01:26:45.920
and if if people if Toby in the board will have me I'll stay there as long as I possibly can

1042
01:26:45.920 --> 01:26:52.000
but finding someone who like from a partnership perspective someone you work with closely

1043
01:26:53.200 --> 01:26:57.200
I think a lot of people start companies and businesses with people that are just like them people

1044
01:26:57.200 --> 01:27:02.000
that they would have been friends with in high school I think it's fun and I get it and you know

1045
01:27:02.000 --> 01:27:05.200
fire belly for example David and I are both kind of similar with our little tea thing

1046
01:27:06.640 --> 01:27:10.480
but actually I think some of the most impressive things I've ever seen built

1047
01:27:10.480 --> 01:27:14.880
were built by people that probably would not have been friends in high school again going back to

1048
01:27:14.880 --> 01:27:19.680
this idea of like a pointy objects they're pointy in their own way but their points are not the same

1049
01:27:19.680 --> 01:27:24.080
and by combining their points they kind of create this like Avengers thing which on their own they'd

1050
01:27:24.080 --> 01:27:29.760
be doing cool stuff but like you know doing it altogether means they can build a hundred billion

1051
01:27:29.760 --> 01:27:34.640
dollar company so those would be some of the things I would say maybe the only other thing is like

1052
01:27:34.640 --> 01:27:38.160
you know one just going back to like life life and work all together

1053
01:27:38.960 --> 01:27:43.920
and one of the most important decisions all of us can make is finding an incredible incredible

1054
01:27:43.920 --> 01:27:50.640
partner spouse wife husband boyfriend girlfriend whatever I think people underestimate how important

1055
01:27:50.640 --> 01:27:56.720
that is and I think I often refer to Lindsey that are for the birthday I said you know Lindsey is

1056
01:27:56.720 --> 01:28:04.480
my superpower that I have this incredible part and I think we all not all but I know a lot of

1057
01:28:04.560 --> 01:28:10.800
people that take for granted how important that particular decision is I think finding a wonderful

1058
01:28:10.800 --> 01:28:16.720
life partner for you whoever you are is just probably the most important decision you're ever

1059
01:28:16.720 --> 01:28:21.280
going to make and I think we all some people think about it very thoughtfully others sort of do it

1060
01:28:21.280 --> 01:28:25.360
have hazardly and I think that's a mistake yeah point seven one correlation with your subjective well

1061
01:28:25.360 --> 01:28:31.280
being so is that true are you making that I don't know let's point seven well relation with subjective

1062
01:28:31.920 --> 01:28:35.760
the strength relationship with your significant other with that I feel like it's a great

1063
01:28:35.760 --> 01:28:41.920
stopping point thank you so much for giving your time like just this is so fun I hope it's

1064
01:28:41.920 --> 01:28:45.840
valuable to your to your community and your listeners I'm a huge fan I'm part of your community

1065
01:28:45.840 --> 01:28:50.880
and I tried to bring as much insight and and and thoughtfulness as I possibly could it's it's an

1066
01:28:50.880 --> 01:28:56.160
honor Alex for me to be talking to you for I don't know the last 90 minutes it's beyond mutual and

1067
01:28:56.160 --> 01:29:00.080
I'll just be half of you know impersonation thank you so much appreciate you