Uncapped #50 | Tobi Lütke from Shopify

Tobi Lütke is the co-founder of Shopify, where he has served as the company's CEO since 2008. Under his leadership, Shopify grew from an online snowboard shop in Ottawa, Canada in 2004 to the world's leading e-commerce platform, powering over 4 million merchants in more than 175 countries. The company went public in 2015 at a $1.27 billion valuation and has since grown to a market cap exceeding $100 billion. As a programmer Tobi has served on the core team of the Ruby on Rails framework and has created many popular open source libraries such as the Typo weblog engine, Liquid and Active Merchant. We discussed building Shopify over more than 20 years, what it takes to sustain a life’s work, and why founder-led companies can move faster through major technological shifts. We also talked about how AI is reshaping software, entrepreneurship, and team building. Along the way, Tobi shared his views on originality, product craftsmanship, the future of work, and why he believes AI will create far more opportunity than scarcity. --- Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:49) A problem worth solving (5:58) Building products people love (10:14) Why originality matters (11:47) Conformity in Silicon Valley (15:47) Founder-led companies (18:44) Shopify’s AI transition (23:52) Building with urgency (26:52) AI for small businesses (35:18) Raising the standard of living (41:11) Predicting the future with AI (48:14) Changing perception on talent (55:34) Reading and curiosity --- Links: https://x.com/tobi https://x.com/jaltma https://www.shopify.com/ https://uncappedpod.com/ --- [email protected]

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think in a way like people are all somewhat overestimating the founders of companies. And then they are really massively underestimating what you can do when the founder is still present and in charge. It's my best way to help the mission. Everyone gets to complain about, uh, you know, a crazy founder, which is like, great. Um, it's like, do, do whatever venting you want. And then you do, uh, very often some of the best work of your, uh, careers. You know, that's why people I think flock to these type of companies because you're surrounded by other people that you can go on such crazy journeys.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  I am so excited to be here today with Toby, the CEO, founder of Shopify. Toby, before we start, I will say, um, when I was running my company Lattice and now you were one of the founders that I sort of most looked up to. And so many things about the way you operate, the way you've run your company, the changes you've made over time. It's the top of the top for me. And so I feel super lucky to be doing this with you. Before we get into AI and Shopify, I want to like, learn a little bit about you, just and more like your psychology. You've been running Shopify for over 20 years. And from what I see about you, it seems like you love what you do. And it seems like you're as energized by it as ever. It seems like you are as passionate about the future as ever. And I think that's really hard. Like, I think having like life's work is sort of like this romantic dream for a lot of people.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  And I just think it's very hard to do in practice because people either fall out of love with their work, they get bored, they get tired. And on top of that, I think being a founder CEO of like a, you know, a big company is not even the easiest type of thing to have life's work. You know, like my work now as a VC will be much easier to do for 30 years. So I guess I'm interested in how you are able to bring and seemingly grow sort of your love for what you're doing after two decades.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  That's such a wonderful question. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast. I'm super excited to get to, get to do this. Um, part of the reason why I wanted to start a company is because I have found before in my teens, that I have extraordinarily hard time learning, um, things that I don't have basically experienced the problem that they solve. Like it's just like the way like in school, how math was taught, basically here's just sort of like the steps for to like, I actually had to really go and like figure out, okay, well, um, what Exactly is trigonometry useful for? Um, and I I just had to like, I started with um tricking myself into finding like a useful

• 2:21Speaker 00

  uh problem that involved trigonometry, after which I felt I could learn it significantly faster than uh like everyone else, because I just was so motivated, right? Like Karl Popper said, one of the joys of life and one of the best things in life is like to find a beautiful problem that uh might occupy you or you of your life, um trying to solve it. And if you're so unlucky to um uh at some point do solve it, that it will have uh plenty of uh delightful problem children that you can dig into, right? First of all, I think that's a beautiful way of thinking about um um Life's Book. Um but also it just works specifically well to uh for me, because I love learning things. I love challenging myself.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  I find myself to myself very, very interesting. I just like, because they're almost my favorite thing is when I want to do something and I can't. Because it's just like you kind of find the limits and then you can have this conversation with yourself about what, you know, because there's a very simple recipe to success. It's just that everyone, I think, sort of into it or or knows, but maybe not spent too much enough time sort of following through on, which is success is really, really simple. It's just you have to figure out what it costs and then you have to be willing to pay it, right? Like, and very rarely is this comes in the form of um um uh money. It usually comes in the form of uh time commitment and.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Discomfort.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Discomfort and these kind of things. So like I seek problems. Um um I uh, you know, love compute, love computers. Like to stay with example, trigonometry turns out um the very early uh, you know, video games like Wolfenstein 4D are basically just trigonometry. Once you realize this and like play with these things, uh they become delightful and you learn the next thing and the next thing. So I wanted to start a company because I was just like, um, is that the right time of my life? I uh I I just moved to Canada from from Germany. I didn't have a work permit, so I couldn't work for anyone. I needed something to do. My wife had uh lots of uh, needed lots of time for her degree and I'm like, like, this is a good time to try it and it's probably not gonna work, but like I I love, I've learned a lot.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  And so this has been a just powerful way for me to motivate.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  I'm curious about, as you think about this, you know, are there things that? Other people can do to more likely stick with and enjoy their life's work. I think there are a lot of people who enter a career, a profession, whatever, and they love what they're doing. And then as time goes on, barnacles kind of attach to the ship and cruff builds and responsibilities grow. And your job evolves and you end up doing something that you didn't start doing. And so I think people sometimes don't know how to shed all of that weight. And obviously you, as much as probably anybody in the world, have the potential to have all of that around you. You're a public company CEO, you've got, you know, tons of employees, you've got all these responsibilities. So it's possible that you could be encumbered by all these things, but you somehow haven't been.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  So I'm curious if there's learnings for everybody, no matter how many or few barnacles they have. Like, what can you do to keep loving what you do?

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Look, I certainly collected barnacles around certain times in my career too, where just like I sort of fell into the,

• 5:22Speaker 00

  you know, trap of like trying to live to like, people had particular expectations, not really like, more like in the department of aesthetics, like I can only call it an aesthetic because people say things like, this is what CEOs are like, this is like the behavior that a CEO should display. You're supposed to be a statesman, you should travel and kiss babies and all that. I'm like, well, that sounds pretty inefficient from my perspective, but like, I guess at some point, you know, you just sort of get riddled down and like you try all this kind of things. My life was miserable too. Again, this is a sort of junk science a little bit, but like what I'm pursuing here is trying to make

• 6:03Speaker 00

  a beautiful product. I just think like we need to create products that are just like joyful. And like one of my favorite quotes is quoted by Cathy Sierra of like, don't make better cameras, make better photographers. Right? Like, and it's just like very deep to my psyche. I feel through beautiful tools and through beautiful,

• 6:21Speaker 00

  you can just inspire people to be the best version of themselves, actually become like induce more ambition, induce more skill, or at least induce more ambition for yourself to develop skill beyond what you otherwise would do. Okay. And so I think that I want this to exist and that's just like sort of my guiding post here. And it throws off all these problem children, which are interesting, which then challenge me. You're talking a little bit about sort of calm, like I'm not a terribly calm person either, but I actually don't want to like. Dial down my calmness. I want to channel it into building something. Yep. And so I I have just found that almost all the mediocre products in the world, they remind me of room temperature, right?

• 7:01Speaker 00

  There is like, it's just like, it's sort of middle temperature of like, this is what you get and then then then no one like. No one really cares. Yeah, exactly. It's a default setting of a thermostat. Almost every great product is forged in some kind of furnace and some kind of temperature. And like you got it put up into every energy source to to produce that kind of heat. Do you think that that basically has to start from like love for the customer? I don't know. I don't know because. You seem to love your customer. I I the greatest gift, people make great products, like I think without that crutch. I think if you have it, it should be an incredible boon. You think you can be a great CEO and not love your customer?

• 7:40Speaker 00

  It depends on what great CEO like like I I don't know. I'm an engineer. I I I read lots and lots of books about how to make great software. And you know what? Like many of these books, it's really funny. I like when you actually check what was the project that they all looked on? Then they figured out the design patterns of modern software. It's like, it's like the Pennsylvania payroll system, right? Like, it's just like, not the most inspiring project. And and but like, it turns out, I think just work is what you make out of it. And I think you can, like, if if you just default to like, hey, let's actually build something that's like really, really meaningful. And we all learn a lot about it. I think it can be done in any way.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  I have a massive benefit and really one of the greatest things, and I tell people this, then, you know, in interviews, then then people are thinking about coming to Shopify. I point this out. It's like one of the greatest gifts that this company has is all of our customers are inspiring. They are just like remarkable people on on on on doing incredibly courageous act of starting a company themselves. The people who flock to then come to look for Shopify, the people who actually have experienced starting a company or have maybe a family member or or at least a deep appreciation or in fact. People who've been with your customers. Yeah, in many cases. It's just something wonderful also about. You know Shopify feels hopefully very, very fresh as a company and there's no like tree rings that you can sort of read about its age, but like it has been around and so

• 9:03Speaker 00

  therefore then we do our annual summit or so where we all get together in Toronto for a week, there's going to be people who work at Shopify who weren't born when I started the company. And it's just like, oh yeah, this is like been like a little bit of an institution.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Especially now, like people are being, kids are so capable at young ages of being productive.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah. I think like finding the challenges like is useful and tapping into like I, I found like it doesn't work when I'm trying to be different, but what definitely works is if I take the energy of that I have, like by my deep dislike, I have such a discontent with bad products and software and so on, and I can, I can like want to solve this problem. I want to like you, you worked for a long time on HR software. We, we build HR software inside of Shopify because then we can't find the one that we want to use and because we see ourselves as toolmakers and we solve these type of problems. And so that comes like, that also means I'm going to spend half a year learning everything there is about how to build this type of software.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I can work with a small team on the side to, to make something better.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  And I imagine now you're able to do so much more of that with AI coding.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  And now it's like crazy.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  One last thing here that you know, you talk about wanting to build great products, but you've also spoken about like wanting to be original, probably to a degree where I imagine you'd rather be original and good rather than mimicking and great.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. I mean, no, in fact, what's even better is like be different because like again axiomatically, if you are building the same thing other people build, it can only be similarly good. It can't be actually much better. It can maybe make slightly look nicer, but like you're bounded a couple of percentage points either direction. If you want to build something great or much better, it has to be different. Now, if it's, so this has to be a starting position. If it then either converges on the same, same thing, you have learned something potentially from first principles about why the solution is the one that everyone has converged on. If it gets worse, you actually learned something more important because now you know, hey, you're.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Theory here was wrong. You you something about the world like you you had an assumption which now has been validated. That learning is the thing from which you're gonna pull so much value in every other realm now because like, hey, you you now have a clearer idea about how things actually work. I think it's like the null results in um science are massively underrated. And so um ideally, then you don't ship it because the the world needs better, not worse, right? Like so um and I think that's actually. We we have tried to eliminate the term uh failure in Shopify and just call it the successful discovery of something that didn't work.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  I'm curious if you've experienced this. You haven't lived. I mean, you obviously spent a lot of time in the Bay Area, but um I wonder if it's different for you, you know, being in Canada. But for me, over the last thirteen or fourteen years in, you know, the Bay Area, I have definitely felt a trend towards herd mentality. I think there was more originality in twenty thirteen when I moved than there is now. I imagine there was more in two thousand and three. I bet you there was more in nineteen ninety five. Like, I would feels like the trend line is professionalization of the industry and the mindset. I'm curious if you experienced it the same way. And I'm curious if there are things that people can cultivate to free themselves from the sort of mimicry shackles.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  I mean, like, look, you can't help but be um uh affected by what you see around you. And if if if like, it's the best and the worst about the valley is that everyone's working on interesting things. But of course, that causes um priors to be pre-installed when you start on a project. What's amazing is like, and you see children interact with things like AI and they you they will use it so different from how you imagine. Like, it's worth aspiring to uh having this like um like free mindset of like, just like try to take orthodoxy or the obvious path off the table when you start because the forces of especially teamwork will always cause a convergence on the safest path, right? I think it is an advantage to be outside of um a a valley. You just have fewer pre

• 13:06Speaker 00

  uh like prearranged priors. In fact, a really funny effect was when I went to like a valley as a visitor and met with people and took a coffee and we were talking about, I was trying to figure out what how a company should work and I. Ask questions and then I went home and like I had been tired flight to make my notes and like I again have sort of a bias towards do it differently. So I take what I hear and try to figure out, okay, well, what would the Shopify version uh look like? And what would be better of the system and sort of make it different because I felt that it's what you have to do. But then I realized um uh only very late in my career that like I never actually got the real story from everyone about how they work internally. I got everyone's ambition or highlight reel, right? Like, because that's what they really share.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  That plus the ability to then make edits to try to prove it further like meant that very often we actually found ourselves doing uh the things that before someone else invented. Actually, we might not never actually have implemented it. Maybe that was just the thing that they just had the most previous meeting over. And so I think that helps a little bit uh distance. I mean additionally, I should say, I think the world fundamentally uh Silicon Valley specifically has the has now for decades and a bit um declared war on any kind of distinction. All the talk about diversity was very much about eradicating kind of eccentricities and distinction and we, you know, just like, like people, people are not allowed to be just quirky or funny with off colored uh humor.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Like, so I think, I think the interest of world that is a little bit more intact and you just kind of like encounter characters. And there's like often the like more appreciation of like, you know, so and so is just like a little bit crazy and you know what? That's really good. I think that's coming back again a bit, and so that's gonna, I think, help a lot.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there was a big moment there. All tech leaders had to sort of go through the sort of political back and forth and sort of what are we talking about at work? And are we focused on work? Are we focused on other things? That was not easy for anybody, I think. It was easy for employees. It was hard for everybody, I think.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  It was hard because everyone, like literally everyone wanted to do the right thing and we generally all agreed even on the sort of identified problems, but just not the solutions that they had. They're just like, they just, they just cost. Distraction and also like erosion of this thing. I'm a company I think should resemble like an island of misfit toys much more than sort of a convergence on one sort of preordained truth. I think it's totally worth exploring any alternative on this idea on the spectrum. And then I think the results will just tell us what works best. I I I just didn't like when people were saying, hey, I we are deciding for you.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  If if if we can have distinction in this company and that that didn't work for me.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  You've gone through another sort of like employee mindset change in the last couple of years with AI. From at least what I recall, you were one of the first sort of CEOs to sort of say, everybody, we need to like, however hard you think you're adapting, like triple it, quadruple it. I'm curious, like that journey, how did how did that go? Is it still going on? Like, do you have it where it needs to be? Is there an end to how AI-pilled we should be?

• 16:10Speaker 00

  I I I'm actually really proud of Shopify with this. I think this worked extremely well. I made I made a choice. There's a type of situation that you get in running companies and a lot of like, I think any large group where something becomes clearly true. And then you need to make a decision on like, are you first of all, are you do you act on it? And sometimes people are just like already feeling bad, right? Like, in fact, very often people fail to figure out what's true. But, you know, like I'm sure BlackBerry thought they were doing really, really. I think they had the best year of sales ever when the year iPhone was released and thought they were pretty safe.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  I mean, and sometimes it's not that people are just not smart enough to see it. Sometimes they don't want to believe it or want to see it.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  I know the implications are.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  They're not predisposed for it and they're kind of maybe for no fault of their own created an organization. They're like sort of every layer inside of a conversation, like just sort of. Prioritizes kind lies over hard truths, often because people just, it's not because there's a culture of everyone being nice to each other.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  There's also, when you have a big enough organization, you talked about this with sort of like teams, you know, make originality difficult. I also think big groups of people, it's hard to get everybody to agree to go through an uncomfortable change.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  I think in a way, like, people are somewhat overestimating the founders of companies. And then they are really massively underestimating the, what you can do when the founder is still present and in charge. It's not so much about the individual, as in about the, almost the piece of infrastructure, the slot of having the founder slot filled. And it's a odd distinction, but it's actually, as a founder, you get so much social credit as having started a company. But like, you can just invest this.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  It's a bank.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  It's a bank. And it's just like every day, every time someone onboards, like they hear how the company was created, and that just deposits a little bit of credibility tokens, I suppose, into a virtual bank account that is hard to reason about, but sort of virtually exists. And then I get to cash that in.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  You can spend it on big, important changes.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  And change management, right? Like, it's like, that's one of the best ways. I can, I can speed up something that would take years of small culture change or like internal training with sometimes a memo. And so in this case, like, I find, I take that really seriously. It's like not the easiest thing for, it just like leads to, you know, just like, I mean, more work or some unpleasantness. I just find that is what I owe the company, right? Like, it's, it's, like, it's my best way to, to, to help the mission. And so when something like the AI thing becomes true, and we're saying, hey, we have like two people, they're both equally good programmers 15 minutes ago, but one of them, like, is just then, like, completely onto the AI train, and just like, as sort of, back when I wrote this, it was really hard to actually get real value out of AI. It was more like the

• 18:58Speaker 00

  premise of AI was, like, what do we do in performance reviews? And we just, like, the moment we said, like, it's, like, we can't, it's, it's impact rating, it's called, like, net impact reviews, they're called with Shopify. So like, what's your net impact on a company and a mission? And so like, it's just like, very demonstrably true that one of the people was more, of more impact. And the moment that is said, it feels like incredibly unkind to not tell people. So just like, hey, let's write it out and send it to everyone.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  It's like unfair if you're like, this person has an exoskeleton on and I'm not going to point out, hey, that exoskeleton being.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, if we act on this thing, we should tell people. And so we did. And like, I included a bunch of other things that are true. Like I've invested lots in making sure that everyone has everything they need. They have an unlimited token policy that I'm sure your brother is thrilled with.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  And so, and so, you know, like we want people to tinker. We want people to play with this. We want people to use it much. And it's super good. It skyrocketed the second this message came along. But what Shopify did with this, the speed of diffusion of this truth was like remarkable. And I think Shopify is like, I'd like to think Shopify is like predisposed for this. We have thriving on change is one of our core values and we really mean it.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  It's good that you talked about like, you know, net impact. I think one of the sort of blunter instruments that's getting used a lot right now is just like tracking token consumption. And people are like, I want to see token consumption go up 20% a month. You know, I think there's founders that say that, which is, it's not an obvious terrible idea. In the same way that, you know, judging people by lines of code, like we could debate, is there anything to it? Like probably something, but.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  I think it's fine. I mean, at some point, the like had a leaderboard and so on, right?

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Of token.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, that leads to immediately bad like effects. And then we don't have that. Like on world is our internal system, like is of internet, probably not a term that anyone's ever heard, but like it's, so it's our internal wiki and everything. And on your profile, it shows you how, what you're talking uses and which percentile you are in your department and group and so on. Just like, because that's interesting. I think again, also because we are tracking it, we have to be, because we have to actually, I mean, at some point, we have to allocate finances to OpEx and whatnot. And so just therefore we show it to people so that I know.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  This is probably different numbers because you're at such scale, but there are, there are private companies whose token spend as a percentage of revenue is going into pretty. Wild places right now. I kind of think that's fine if you're an earlier stage company and you're just trying to win the market at all costs. But I am curious how this might play out. I'm sure even you're seeing token spend at numbers that are probably not a huge deal relative to your revenue, but are.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  It's a huge deal compared to revenue. It's like, it's unbelievable.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  It's like many percentage points.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  It's extremely high.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  It's many tens of percentage points for some of these private companies. And so I am a little curious. You know, right now, we're in that part of the journey with AI coding where it's just so valuable that people are just like, I have no choice but to spend because it's too productive. I do think that that won't, we can't spend 70% of revenue on AI tokens forever and have valuable companies. So how do you think this might go?

• 22:07Speaker 00

  It's complex in a way that like, I'm very, very grateful for the state Shopify is at because we are a profitable, public trusted company. And right now, it's, it's, it's just like, we really, really, really like the tokens we're buying. It's very incredibly valuable and we are doing incredible things with, with them, like accelerate, it accelerates us in roadmap and therefore ambition and all. I think it just causes so many good things.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Like you're getting leverage on your spend.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  It's just like, it's, it's, it's like, it's a no brainer. I have very, very high opinion of markets. Markets are extremely good. They, they will figure out what the correct clearing price for these tokens is. And right now there's few providers and maybe there'll be more in the future. And there's all sorts of interesting moves around distillation and so on. Like I think companies will now how to wield these tools within their budgets. We are actually doing a good deal of this kind of thing as well, but we are still just like charging ahead because frankly, we like the tokens we are buying. It's like, it's, it's that simple.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  I agree. And my instinct is that, you know, it should go down, but there are possible worlds where it goes up or price goes up.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Honestly, I don't, no one knows. It really, no one knows. We are certainly, I think we are 10x the amount of tokens we want every year right now. And I'm sure that's going to go up and we are free xing the amount of GPUs that we are putting into the world. So that is, uh, yeah. Those lines are not converging anywhere with at, at price savings.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  So given that AI coding is dominating so much. What are the biggest changes to like team design? Like, you know, there used to be this EPD triad and it worked a certain way. And there were, you know, certain ways that, you know, roadmaps were built and reviews happened. And, you know, people would go out and talk to the customers and bring that back. And what is it now? Like, what is sort of like the, the sort of, you know, most fundamental molecule?

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the small team is my bet. Like, it's like the three, four, five people team, which actually is like, funnily enough, has always been Shopify's bias. This is quite gratifying to like, um, um, the reason why we had to very often go past it now is because you just need a lot of specialized skills, at least for, for certain moments on the teams. Your example is a great one, talk to the customers. It's just like having someone who's like, actually like does the, you know, customer research and just like talks with people. Or like, um, I, what we always did is like, located people from the support org. We're looking, we're looking at, we routed them all the tickets and put them on the teams, which was an amazing way to do it. Now, just like the, the sort of agentic harness around our teams is actually routing like really, really good summarizations

• 24:35Speaker 00

  of what our customers say automatically, basically, uh, back. And so that's now available to everyone. And then everyone can do more skill. Like again, everyone is a seven out of 10 on every skill now. So that's like really, really helpful because it allows to make teams smaller. The thing that we are, um, working the most and thinking the most around at Shopify is that, um, I'm, I'm, I'm big on pace. Like pace has to be induced, otherwise it's received. Parkinson's Law is one of my most recommended books and I have a 1970s, 60s copy of it that I give to everyone, my executives. I, I own many of them of the original run because it's like so meaningful.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  And the law is basically?

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Uh, time, uh, work expense to the time allocated to it. Uh, is, uh, the book is 60 pages and full of these kind of wisdoms. This is the most important one.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Basically, one of the most important functions of a leader is to just compress time windows.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, to, to the, to the plus. It's not that you just give any deadline and anything happens, but like if this is why it's really, really helpful to be very technical and understand all the like sort of tasks and skills. You can ask for something that has like a 50%. Percentual chance of being the right ship date. Then everyone gets to complain about, you know, the crazy founder, which is like great. It's like do whatever venting you want. And then you do very often some of best work of your careers. And, and, you know, that's why people I think flock to these type of companies because you you're surrounded by other people that you can go on such crazy journeys with. The main point here is like, I, I, I run the company by the six week review cycle where, where, where we go for the projects and spend with time with engineers and champions and PMs.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  That existed to set a pace, like a pace ceiling, I suppose, ceiling floor, floor of a six by six cycle, which was faster than we instituted it. Because if you don't do it, you are run by a quarter. Sometimes you see like the moment, like the moment you see in a PowerPoint, first of all, first flag. Second flag is someone uses the word H two or H one, which means, you know, first, second half. You're actually fucked. You, you, you, you, you actually really have to do something drastic. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So as you do this, and now I think actually a six week review is actually way too limiting. It's just like we can do so much more and we're trying to figure out how to, like, what is replacing this.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  I want to talk about sort of your customers and what AI means for them. You know, we were talking a little bit earlier about how like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of young people right now who have sort of fears of permanent underclass. And how I think basically the idea being like, you're just entering the workforce. You don't have any like accumulated skills or, you know, credibility yet. And now you've got, you know, this AI thing, which in some ways is empowering and some ways seems scary. The net is that there's become this meme of, you know, people are afraid of, you know, ascending through sort of the career and financial heights that they want to. And you sort of talked about how like, that's not necessarily the experience that your customers are feeling.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  No, I, and again, our customers are wonderful and they're entrepreneurs. They're courageous people who are pretty much out there. They build businesses, they create employment. And it's like, in one way, it's like a. It's clearly like a particular slice of people who would do this, but like it's actually much bigger than people think. First of all, it's incredibly diverse. It's like, it's like really, you, you, you put like, like Shopify's customers go exactly with a population map. It's like great businesses in the most, in the smallest communities. It's like, well, it's, I mean, it's a point of sale stores in the town center of tiny, tiny, little townships as well as, you know, Allo Yoga. And so it's, it's, it's incredibly

• 28:18Speaker 00

  different and it's cosmopolitan. It's big business, billion dollars business. It's, it's, it's the people who are trying to build a thing in the lunch breaks to make ends meet. Or actually because they have an ambition that they want to become entrepreneurs. So what's so funny with the way the AI, the conversation is projected, how it's reported and, and sort of what you see on social media and so on, is like, it just doesn't like, we can't access it anywhere. Like in anywhere we, where we look.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  You're saying Shopify's data and experience doesn't map this Dummer stuff.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  It absolutely doesn't. What we hear from everyone is like, hey, you guys fix computers. It's like they, they, they like, you techies talked about computers being these incredible things that can do anything and just like.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  And it was so complicated.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  And so, and then we try this and they like, I don't know what you guys just sound unhinged. And now we have, we can talk to it and it just does the thing. And it's incredible. It's like, just works with me. And it's like, I've like, like expanded my business and I've like hired all these people now. Like just like, and, and, and so, I mean, it fits into Shopify's vision because we want lots and lots and lots of small companies. And by the way, 60, 70, 80% depending on country of people in the economy work for small businesses. They're incredibly precious and important.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  So what should AI mean? If you're a small business owner, you're starting a new small company, logically, what should the change be as a result of AI from 2023 versus 2029? What's the fundamental change?

• 29:40Speaker 00

  I think you should sign up for more. Like you should, you should, you can follow your ambition further. I think our customers are. Like if you would poll, like I think, I think they they believe in a in a permanent upper class. I think they are just gonna like, I think there's we're gonna get to a point where just many, many, many people can self actualize. There's two, two pieces of data that I just find incredibly meaningful. One is like every thirty six seconds, someone has gets their first sale, which I just think is it just while we are talking here, think about what that means for how many people just became entrepreneurs. The other one is more like a higher level observation, but every single time we ship something where we know it meaningfully changes something about the early journey, the signup, the

• 30:24Speaker 00

  kind of complexities, the questions, the friction in the business. Each of them can be best thought of as a hurdle that someone has to jump over. And every single time we manage to make the hurdle slightly less high because we made something just vastly better. We know that you register domains or whatever, or easily transfer them, or in fact, these days have an AI that like you can share your browser tab and it helps you set up GoDaddy, right? Every single time we do this, more cost actual business come out of it, right? Employment and so on. It's people churn out early in process if something happens that this ends up being a governor on for them and then they null out, they give up and they stop and then the entire business doesn't exist. AI is just, it never, ever has there been such a thing that it can take people so be so supportive.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  It occurs to me that last year, I, on this podcast, I asked somebody this question that, you know, they were fine person to ask, but you're probably the number one person in the world to ask this to. And it's something that I've been thinking a lot about, which is what has to be true for us to be in a place where you can like prompt, build me a business? Like, how far are we from, hey, I need this widget, please go make me a million dollars. Thanks.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  I mean, it's my favorite replacement, like idea as a replacement for a Turing test, which we of course sailed past without oddly very little notice, I think.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  It is crazy.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  I, I, I think acting in the, in the real world, starting a business and that, that people find meaningful enough to vote, to vote for to the tune of a million dollars.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Marketing it correctly, getting the right sourcing.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  It's a wonderful, wonderful test.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Knowing what things to prioritize.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  The shipping matter.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  I think we are actually getting there. I want to be into the proviso of, well, like, like you can obviously use Shopify without having products. We help you find manufacturers. If that's what you want, we have you. There's an entire thing called Collective that manufacturers offer their products that you can then use to in your Shopify store. So if your particular skill set is the marketing, you can come to Shopify and like you can try your hand on entrepreneurship. And again, very often, I think about half of Shopify stores end up being created by people who have done an online store, at least a business before. So people are just like, you know, trying to build things. People should have a product that the world wants.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Ideally, come up with some unique take on something and there's so much white space out there.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  But you think AI could do everything else?

• 32:47Speaker 00

  I think AI should then do absolutely everything else. In fact, it's actually literally what our product ambition is to be like the, maybe the vessel for AI being the brain or the exoskeleton around a model to basically like conspire to just like do absolutely everything. So that if you show up with a product, you can start a business.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Just to extend the idea a little bit more, not to go into like too crazy of a sci fi place. Is it possible that it could also do the make a product? Like, let's say I wanted to say, hey, just go make a million dollars.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  I think the, I mean, anything in a digital products.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, like make me some eBooks.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Exactly. You know, actually books, you know, best print on demand for books, for T shirts. Like honestly, additive manufacturing is getting extraordinarily good now. And there's lots and lots of great contact manufacturers for this kind of thing, like CNC and 3D printing. And then we are like looking at humanoid robotics, which kind of like, there's a lot of tailwinds here to the fact that like making the products is going to become lots more tractable.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  There's probably 10 years till I'm asking guests this, but the prompt like build me a house and then the robots just go dig up what they need and then put it all together.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  I think it's a world we're looking at. Like I think, I don't, I don't see how it couldn't get there, right? Like, and I just think that's just like, this is what's so, what I dislike about the Duma conversation or the permanent underclass or whatever people want to call it.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  How are we not headed to a world of abundance?

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's like, and frankly, it's, and that then goes into this sort of, you know, like we eliminated all the jobs. It's like, you know how good we are at making up jobs?

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  You know, like there's so many examples of things that are just like delightful. Like I just like, I have like friends who are. You're like, open clock came around, which we didn't need, we need, which we didn't think we needed. And then it ended up being one of the most compelling things and like one thing led to another. And now I have like, they have a warehouse full of 3D printers and things because it's just like, like suddenly you have a Jarvis that you can say, I would like to do this project and I have this, I bought this crazy 3D

• 34:53Speaker 01

  I know.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  scanner from Facebook Marketplace and I just put it there. I don't even have a software for it. But you just go hack it and you figure out how to help me.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  And it's just like, holy crap.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  I asked Kyle Vogt from BotCo, I was like, will we get to a place where like, I can just like text my robot to like order Instacart? Like get the steak, you know, prepared, like serve it, you know, slice it up. He's like, put, clean it all up. He's like, yeah, that'll happen. At Benchmark, I spend probably three quarters of my time in software land, but sometimes I do step back and I think, okay, to actually like, you know, and this is maybe a little easier for me when I'm like not in San Francisco and I'm like touching grass in some other city or something. I'm like, okay, what's actually going to raise the standard of living for everybody in the world? It's things like, we need more and better houses. We need better transportation. We need better food.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  We need like better healthcare. We need good education. It's like all these things that aren't software. And then sometimes I think about like some alien watching us all and we're just like sitting behind our little boxes typing. Everything's going better in typing land and it's all bopping about in software land, but we do really need it to get into the physical world to like, because the standard of living, it's all, it is all on some level, physical.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Absolutely. It completely is. And I think this is actually the missing ingredient, right? Like, because, I mean, people talk about the, you know, what was looking at the incredible infrastructure we used to build in the 60s. So it's like, oh, just even before that, look, there's a Hoover Dam, like, you know, this kind of stuff. Lots of individual stories about this infrastructure project, how quickly we built subways and now it's hexed like forever and so on. Like there is a observed degradation of like a lot of these kind of projects and it's multifactorial. There's not one reason behind it. But one of them that really is true is because we are building the modern wonders that are no less impressive entirely in software. Like the web browser, Linux.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  All these kind of things are like, like projects at a scale beyond what the permits are. And so easily and without compulsion and just by volunteers. Sometimes people who have never met each other in the open source world or at companies building these, I mean, like something like Google or or or the social networks is like they're incredibly incredibly impressive pieces. If they would have physical benefits.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  They would be the most impressive.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  You would, again, you go to something like a like a like a refinery or so. And and you see the pipes and so it's so impressive. It's not even in basis points territory in terms of complexity compared to a browser.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Compared to like a browser.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Exactly. And just so we we don't appreciate that. And so and neither that's not our problem.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  I don't think I appreciate a browser. Is a browser near the top of complexity?

• 37:31Speaker 00

  I would put it on it. It's one of the wonders of the world. I mean, for so many reasons, like it could never ever be introduced today.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Can you give a small flavor? I'm sure it's hard to even explain why it's so complicated. But what what can you give a flavor of what makes it such an unbelievable thing?

• 37:46Speaker 00

  In so many ways, like we just like, okay, you got a website. It's like, we don't trust that website. We just run code. We but like also just like, it's like actually a computer in front of you magically reconfiguring itself into a someone else's vision for what should be there. And like without limits, it's actually like you download software, but then just like exists for this one one moment to do literally everything. And like what it's it's self responsible, like Shopify is a hundred, like it's over a hundred billion dollars market cap company. With hosting like millions and millions of of of business that might otherwise not exist. And all of this just happened because anyone can just put a server online, gets an IP address by like automatically. And then just like, it's like.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  And then it all hangs together and doesn't come down more. Why doesn't it not all crash?

• 38:35Speaker 00

  It's like, it's the most reliable thing. It's it's it's just. And and no app store on Plaidorf would allow the web browser if it would be introduced today, if it didn't exist, right? It's just like it would like no one would allow this because it just doesn't even sound like it's it sounds like an insane pitch.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Exists and we just don't think about it. And so it's it's just also like the font rendering alone is one of the most complex like like the font alone is a true incomplete system that like just just because we want to be able to read text slightly more better than our displays can allow them. And it just like it just keeps going, going. And and it's like, I can go full nerd core on this, but like the larger points that you're following, um, we have not stopped as humanity, building incredibly impressive infrastructure. But it had changed as the infrastructure that needed building over the last thirty years. And the reason why other infrastructure didn't happen is because the people who quit.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  It's just so much went into this.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Into had the planet Earth needed for us was a digital infrastructure.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  And it's like if all those people worked on robotics.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  It it's like this is and this is happening now, right? And it's like we are we are we.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  This happened with AI.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  It will be happening with like this AI, like all the software we built was a bootstrapper for AI. Software becomes um due to this achievement, something that can be become personal again and become like, um, now you can have basically a web browser, but the websites don't even need to exist um uh for that you would like to see.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  The browsers, it's so true. When you say it like that, the easiest to identify with example for most of us probably is like an iPhone. Like we've probably all just like randomly one day look at your iPhone, you're like, how the hell does this thing exist? It's crazy. And I'll just, you know.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  But as beautiful as it is and as like as reliable as it is, and it's like it's personal as it is. And so I think um I think the uh like iPhone is a lucky exception in that you can appreciate it as a physical because it's not the fault of like everyone is right when they say, why is everything just like kind of standing still or not getting better around me? Because from the perspective and from the ability for us to observe, it is like because all the infrastructure digital, but we are almost done with this. We are at the end of the opening chapters of of all this. And so now I think we will see vastly more impact.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  We put all the energy against this thing because it was the foundation, but now all these people in some sense be free to not write software.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. And so I think we will have a huge influx of uh. The brightest and most creative and driven people to make things which are going to be much easier to relate to and have much more direct impact on people's lives.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  How important for you is it as CEO of Shopify to have an opinion on where AI will be in like two years? Like, you know, like there's one worldview you could probably take, which is like, this is so unpredictable. I'm going to take it as it comes. I'm going to try to know six months ahead, but like I'm going to do what I can do. And then there will be another, which is now I'm actually going to spend a lot of time with the labs. I'm going to try to have an understanding of like two, three years out and try to care about the furthest out I can see. What do you think is the right position?

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, if my friends would listen to this question, they would laugh just because like it's my predominant obsession is to like try to have as many data points on as many people that have been can try to match to the right, you know, super linear or linear or sublinear curves. So just like figure out how they all connect and what they, what, what sort of therefore will happen in the future, right? Like it's basically, I mean, to me is the most fun game in the world is like have a pretty clear idea of what the future is like.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  And what in particular are you trying to figure out?

• 42:06Speaker 00

  I mean, the AI memoir is like a good example because like again, it was probably slightly too early to write it. But now if you read it now, it like, it says nothing that would be surprising, right? Like, so being able to give my company the gift of like a head start is, I mean, that's what we are trying to do, right? Like, and because the moment then I can tell everyone something that does not quite clearly to know about the importance of these systems. And we can rebuild our systems to really, really reinforce this and support everyone in their own tinkering exploration. That means that our view of the future is going to be more accurate in things we are building because you're always building for future point. You're like software is getting faster to build, but you still have to aim at a future point of value. It's not our customers' job to tell us what they need.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  It's our customers' job to tell us what the problems are that they're experiencing. And we fall in love with those problems or like adopt those problems as our own and just solve them in an ideal way. But that's our job to figure out what the ideal way is. That comes into contact with the customers and they give us further feedback for refinement. But it's in my mind, it's a complete application to just build what the customers asked before. It's an application of product responsibility. And so it's hugely important. And it's kind of like almost everything, every decision I make, I try to make on an understanding of. Like, I try to live in everyone else's relative future. So this is, I do a lot of it. Interesting, while it's incredibly fun and helpful to talk with the labs and sometimes like there's some

• 43:34Speaker 00

  really important information that you can get from this. What I found, and we sort of touched on it earlier, is one of my favorite things, especially for, you know, product teams and so on, and then engineering, is to hire people who actually know Shopify really well for outside. People who are merchants, some of my best product managers, because they actually understand what the software feels like, feels like it's being used. And, you know, same with people who build apps on the Shopify platform to help come to Shopify and help make the app platform better. It's like, I actually don't even think being in a lab is actually the best position. It's actually being like using everything and paying a lot of attention of how everyone else uses what the sort of gifts that the labs release.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  And then being in the sort of conversation which usually happens on X, on what everyone's figuring out, maybe actually building something and seeing everyone finds it useful. It's like, I think this sort of learning by doing is just, that's actually how to get the most clear view of how everything works.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Does that give you a clear view on the present or does it also give you a clear view on what's coming in a year or two?

• 44:41Speaker 00

  If you do it over a while, you get trajectories. And the trajectories are the point. If you're exactly on the state of art meta of the best thought on stuff and you have other data points, it's just the future gets very simple to predict. Now, it's the hardest time ever to do it because like right now, the time horizon is so short. I did this very same thing throughout my entire life. And it used it used to be that the future was absolutely trivial to predict. It's like you just like, I mean, you just looked at

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Like the first couple of numbers on on on mobile browser usage and you just knew what's happening on a cellphone. And but we needed to make mobile websites, which just sounds insane now, but like, yeah, that was at some point. People didn't believe that. And so.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are there parts of AI right now that you think are underhyped in terms of capabilities? And are there parts that you think are overhyped?

• 45:32Speaker 00

  So obviously, the labs really care about programming because that's the problem they need to solve for themselves. And again, it's always easier to put.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  And then for various reasons, so like, like, Opus is unbelievably good at programming. And right now, it's easy to go from that and then just like assume it's equally competent in everything else. And quite often it isn't. If you want to discuss like how to do like a like a like a public talk or something. It just doesn't have great like theoretical routing of this. And why? I mean, it it knows about all the different sort of ways to construct tension and so on. But like, it's it's it's not able to then look at something and make it meaningful better. Where like even a incredibly well optimized piece of code, it often finds like abilities to go and do better. What is happening a lot is that we're bringing more types of problems in the domain of programming, which is really what OpenClaw is, if you really think about it.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  It's like make it a file system, give it like tools like a programmer uses and make a couple of file, like in the files, just tell it the soul and the memory and so on. And then it uses the normal programming tools to interrogate this. And because it stays a little bit in domain programming, it now actually is remarkably better at this other out of domain thing. It's just really, really funny. I think we should assume though that we are going through the entire, you know, radio chart of things that are valuable and bring them to the same point of of home programming. So I think there's a bit of overhype in like having to work so hard on bringing things in in programming domain. Because like all of this is just going to get much, much more more natural and easier as the models appear.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  Where it's underhyped is just in deployment in companies, I think. And just like like what role it should play is like as a huge. Huge, I mean, like.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  No one's using it enough.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  No one's using it enough, partly because everyone just starts with like, hey, let's, let's help me do the things that I've been doing all along slightly better or actually vastly better, which is valuable, um, obviously, but like, if you do with more first principle things like, hey, if AI would have been around ever since Alan Turing first wrote about it and would just have looked and we were just in the presence of these super targeons all the time. And we would just invent the job we are thinking about right now, like, how would we do it? Like, just invert the whole thing?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  And, um, you know, when, when you're like, it just, it's so much more fun to have those conversations and, um, I think it'll be like, I mean, I'm exceptionally excited about this because I think it will create the environments that the most creative and best people will really, really appreciate because everything just around them happens at the speed that they want to work. And that has never been true for any company that requires some bureaucracy for doing stuff.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  On the point of talent, have you changed anything about the types of people you're looking for? Like pre, post AI, are the same people who were successful before, are those still the same most successful people? Or is there any attribute that you are scanning for in a different weighting than you used to?

• 48:27Speaker 00

  It's fascinating. So this is actually really changing all the time. And actually I've had to change my mind a couple of times. But I think the best distinction point is, um, you know, Shopify is 20 years old. I think average age of Shopify is somewhere like late 80s, 30s, which is, I think, still pretty good. But like, I mean, like this is one thing you have to look out for, like as a company, if you, there's some companies which just age themselves 12 months of a year and, um, uh, for various reasons. And, you know, that's, that's probably a problem at some point when a lot of new things happen. So like, just like massively restarting the internship program has been really helpful, right? Like, just like, um, uh, we take a thousand interns a year from, we have close to Waterloo and Waterloo. So it's great.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  And, um, just, um, making sure that the interns are not just the students now, but also the teachers. Because like, again, they are just like so AI native that it was really, really helpful. It's also interesting because, um, initially I, I, I had the thought that, you know, there's like fluid intelligence, intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Basically, knowledge and curiosity driven willingness to learn. And often early career, you have more fluid, you have no knowledge, therefore you have all, you're all fluid. And, uh, Then I was super new, we were the first people who just flopped to it, right? Like an immediate value of it, and that was super, super exciting. I had the thought that maybe that really tilts into their direction.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  But then, as we started, like the more of the systems sort of got firm to the around the coding harnesses, Cloud Code, Pi and all these good things, really, programming is so much not the type of typing, task of typing, it's really understanding the problem deeply. And I think every program in the world massively underestimates how much they're doing when steering in AI right now.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  And how much that was really them being creative and actually just like, like it's uniquely theirs what they're coming up with. They're like, just like having seen the movie before, like it, you can sort of spot the AI just going the wrong path. And you just like one, two words can completely like just change everything. There's a very, very long answer to say, I kind of don't know, but I actually just think good people are good. Like it's like, there's a bit of variance how quickly people adopt the tools. But once they did, it's like, everyone just like, yeah, falls back onto their.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  So that I guess that's the sort of like, what do you like side of the question? I guess to flip it to what a candidate's like, have you felt any change in competing for talent in this market? And you know, maybe it's, you know, you've got a lot of variables at play here that, you know, you're public, you know, many of your sort of competing for talent companies are probably private, you're, you know, in Canada and in Silicon Valley. You know, there's all these different factors, but I'm curious, how does the sort of like AI wave change sort of what you do to sort of attract and retain the very best people?

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think the best way to deal with recruiting is to build a company worth looking for for the best, right? Like, so I think, I think people are like thinking about it too much as selling and not enough as marketing in a way, or at least even just like information.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, how do I look, how do I look super healthy? Like, well, you could like, you know, you could use this, you could turn this angle, you could do, it's like, well, you can just try to be healthy.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  Exactly. So sometimes it's just like, things are just simpler sometimes than they seem.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  So what goes into that then?

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Obviously, there's like, you know, being a good business.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  You just don't admire people. Don't like, like, give people the space that uh like to, to, to be creative and uh have them like, allow them to, you know, fall in love with the mission actually and like, and like have them understand what problems people care about and what impact um the work has. I think Shopify has a lot of intrinsic advantages here, but like, I mean, the best way to attract talent is make it so that when people uh sort of try on the idea of maybe coming to Shopify, that, you know, they um come by, they, they, they meet everyone they will work with and both are really, really impressive people that they will work with together.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  As a CEO of a public company for, I think, over ten years, how do you feel about companies being private for so long? Like, obviously, it's like more possible than ever.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Venture markets are a lot bigger than they were back when you were going public. Um, but I don't know. Like, what do you think?

• 52:37Speaker 00

  I've, I, I find it a little bit sad from a perspective of, like, I, I totally understand why the individual companies do it. I just find it like, man, I'm so glad that so many people end up like.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Buying Shopify stock.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  Buying Shopify early.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  For them.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's just like, I, I.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  A lot of retail investors have done really well with it.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's just like, it's remarkable. I can go basically anywhere, like, and just meet people and they tell me that, like, they, they just, like, bought some shares at some point and just, like, it was really, really important to them. And it's like, it's cool. I just want, I want people to make money with Shopify because I'm like, they uh um much not like, I, the sort of one boat, one chair kind of thing, uh, one chair, one boat. Like, sort of the influence part, I'm like, totally, that's what the fuck's that all about? Like, just like, like founder shares, let's go.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  But like, I think they had tickets to uh participate in something you believe in. Like, I, I mean, look, my, my view of money is, money is how you vote for the world you want. Um, um, and when you buy a product, you're voting for that product and everything that caused that product to exist. And that works with shares too. Like, if you want to hop on a company because it does things that you agree with, then uh you can buy them and you can. Like go to another company if someone has a capitalist imagination better. And I think that's, I think that's a wonderful institution. So I just also like, I feel like it came from a meme. Like, I think like, because I have left our side of us, that's kind of easy to go public.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  You're saying the, the state private, it's much better.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  It's just like, I don't, I mean.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  What, what is there? I mean, there are going to be, you don't have the quarterly public scrutiny. Not everybody can see all your financials all the time.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Your employees aren't seeing their stock move up and down.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  Fair enough. I just never really see some of these things as bad things. They're like, they, they, they induce like a diligence and a data drivenness and kind of a little bit of, you know, a set of responsibilities, which I think are worth having. Because you are, you know, you're, you're responsible for thousands of people's jobs and, and an important product, right? So.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  What are the other benefits that like, you know, you just shared one about sort of the joy of, you know, a lot of people getting to share your success, but.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  It helped us in a way that maybe it's not always the case, like in, and especially as a Canadian company listing on, and in New York. We were just very small, like when Shopify IPO, it was like one and a half billion dollars valuation, right? Like so.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  So you've had a hundred acts in the public.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And, um, uh, right. That's cool. And, um, um, therefore I find lots of people who start, who tell me that was a good investment for them, right?

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  It gave us like legitimate seat to then go into like, you know, we, we never wanted to go up and up it. But we always wanted to have a product that can work well for people at all parts of the scale. That just sounds like, and like just words is about a hundred X harder from building a product, right? Building a product that's like actually scales across the entire thing is insanely difficult to do. And has been one of the most, you know, fun challenges to pursue. And so, um, you know, bigger customers, but just like, yeah, you're a public company. That's cool. Like that's, that's, that's different. And frankly, there's really, really, really good people who would only work for public companies. So that's also helpful.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Makes sense. And my last question is, I know you have at least been a big reader. Do you still have time to read a lot?

• 55:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  You got any books I should read?

• 55:41Speaker 00

  There's so many books I love. I mean, obviously like I, I, I'm a huge fan of a sort of short incredible books like Pakistan's Law and Lessons of History. It's just like when people distill like all of their knowledge into like under hundred pages. Then I think that's great. Recently read a really good book on, it's called What is Intelligence? It re-explains basically all of biology from a perspective of how important prediction is and how it probably emerged just in the sequence. I'm like, this is like felt exponentially profound in a way that like, I don't quite know if that was, because it felt obvious part was just to support an argument later. That wasn't actually very important to me, I think. So this is kind of interesting.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  I think others have felt this too, but I struggle. I've been struggling more to read, partially it's a stage of life thing, but partially I think like the internet is making my brain loops too short. And partially I think I am in a headspace where I want every minute to be productive. And so it's hard for me to read a book for joy and I need to figure out how to get through that. But you seem to have figured out how to.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  It's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a job of an author to make you keep reading. Like this is important, like mental switch, right? Like if, if you read a book and it just like doesn't capture you, it's like, it's, that's not because you're broken. It's because the author didn't manage to do the thing that I want, set out to do, right? Like I sort of have a advantage disadvantage, I have probably advantage at this point. I'm like suffer being out of a, a, um, cycle with my, uh, wife who's a light sleeper. So like, I just like go to bed and she wants it just like way too early. Usually like a 10 or whatever, something crazy. I'm like a night owl, so I, I don't need a lot of sleep luckily. So I, I just have like hours of reading time and that's like, you know, the Kindle is not that bright. Doesn't wake her up and before I'm half, couple of hours of reading time.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  And you're not doom scrolling on Twitter like the rest of us, you're.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's important to like using like this. I really, really am a huge fan of a Kindle just because, not because it's great, but because it isn't. Right? Because it's like, it's such a limited, but actually single purpose device. So yeah, like I find that, I find that wonderful. I just, I just, I find books just to be so remarkable.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  And they're like going to the gym. It's like when you read a book, I'm like, I gotta be reading more books. Life just pulls us off.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  It's best to have some, uh, some, some ritual or some dedicated time for it. If, if you, if you can pull it off, um, that's, that just, I mean, that is books for me.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, Toby, this was an absolute pleasure. Thank you for making time for this.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  This was really fun. Thanks so much for having me.