Cheeky Pint - Tobi Lütke is still captivated by internet commerce, 20 years later

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke joins John Collison to discuss the philosophies driving one of the internet’s most foundational companies. Tobi shares his perspective on why companies are a form of technology, how internal tools and "opinionated software" shape an organization's culture and accelerate its evolution, and why the best gift is finding a beautiful, unsolvable problem.Show notes[Buy] Momax: 140W Universal Travel Adapter[Read] Benjamin Bloom: The 2 Sigma Problem[Buy] Ikigai: vitamin cases [Read] Kevin Kelly: 1,000 True Fans[Read] Erich Gamma: Design Patterns [Read] Charles Calomiris: Fragile by Design[Listen] Business Breakdowns: Formula One[Watch] Netflix: Formula 1: Drive to Survive[Read] Mark Robichaux: Cable CowboyKey Moments(00:00) Intro(07:07) How internal software shapes culture(16:32) The Shopify vision(27:49) Peak transaction capacity(34:36) Agentic commerce(49:15) Shop Pay(55:29) Stablecoins(59:20) Stripe + Shopify(1:12:23) Learning from the Coinbase board(1:17:23) Is Tobi ungovernable?(1:25:02) Entrepreneurship(1:31:50) Advice for Mark Carney(1:36:40) Motor racing

The best gift in life is finding a beautiful problem that you can never solve. And even if you accidentally solve it, if you're so unfortunate to solve it, hopefully it has like plenty of enlightened problem children. Consumerism is like a thing that like is being thrown around, but where does it come from? They throw away things because they hate the things they have. The thing that solves consumerism is quality products. A personalized ad is a wonderful thing. I am scrolling past something that's monetizing the free application.

that I appreciate using. You should tell the EU this. Yes, well, I do, actually. Some people fall in love with solutions, some people fall in love with problems. And I just, like, fundamentally, I'm a person who appreciates with people who fall in love with problems.

But, like, it's very hard to know who is who, because, well, if you don't change anything, they look exactly the same. I'm disappointed you only have half an Irish problem. Oh, this is our MVP, when we weren't even sure this would be a thing. Toby Luca launched Shopify in 2006. We've been working closely with them for over a decade,

and I always enjoy getting together with Toby, and I always learn a lot. Cheers. Cheers. Okay, many places I could start. What's the size of the code base in as much as, you know, different vendor stuff, whatever? I think the sort of core part of Shopify,

with all the, like, minus stuff like the identity system and these kinds of things. It's like 20 million lines of code, and then the type script-written admin interface is like another. I think eight, nine, ten. I have a reason, it's apparently one of the largest TypeScript applications and definitely the largest Ruby applications. So we're pretty, we pushed it into pretty uncharted territories for our tech stacks.

It does so much. Like it's like a full fintech business in there with capital and these kind of things and all the work we are doing together. And my company adopts the complexity, the real, real life messy complexities of the commerce world into itself to then front it with approachable interfaces, things. that don't, you know, just making all of the pieces fit together. And so that requires a lot of work. So there's like thousands of projects going on in any given time.

So going through all of them is work. But we have a good system. We have like a product operations team that prepares for it. We have an internal system that's just for the reviews, which is actually kind of cool. How does the system do? So I'm fascinated with companies. I think companies aren't that appreciated for the,

like just we don't think of that, It's like they, you know, companies are technology, and they're themselves, they are technology by which you create, part of what they create is social acceptance for, you know, people, maybe tens of people, hundreds of people, thousands, tens of thousands, people depending, to spend all their day pursuing a mission together. You know, it's like, it's really just like universities exist

through giving you time that you can use for like, hopefully intellectual inquiry, to some topic and everyone's cool with that. Although if you try to do the same thing, you know, just with your laptop on the internet all day long has not nearly the same social acceptance, may also be valuable. And then companies are ones that allow people,

a lot of people together to try to make your car, like a pursue a mission or create something, hopefully work class. So I think companies are understudied and also this sort of incentive system behind companies tends to be that there just, there's no absolute absolute need for perfecting them. There's just like you've got to be better than everyone else. And at some point, in many industries,

like if you get ahead, it's really, really hard for others to catch up and so. So there's just sort of a point equilibrium at which point. Because you're good enough. And so there isn't pressure to get better beyond some point. Yeah, I mean, I just take an absolute example. I talked with some executives in the gold mining space.

It's just like really sort of interesting. Because I'm like, what is your day like? Like the same question is like much more interesting. And what is a gold mining exactly? It's just like, I mean, my conclusion, which wasn't maybe what he was trying to guide me to, was essentially government relations or investor relations. You know, like, if you're, you know, like, you know how much is in the ground, you know, it's a capital play.

But somehow if the investors like you better, then you get a higher multiple, at which point it behoves you to purchase all other gold mines really quickly. So I imagine it involves playing golf. I think that's probably the technology there. Is it one of the conundrums for you, as someone who thinks about companies and organizations a lot, the lack of measurability of R&D, which is probably half of what Shopify spends its money on is R&D?

And so if you're running a factory, it's pretty easy to measure the inputs and outputs and how many widgets are reproducing per hour and what's the labor efficiency and everything like that. It's very measurable. Whereas when you're building software, it's like, I don't know, we put a bunch of engineers on it And hopefully in like six months, they have a great product out there in the market.

But the intermediate measure is, yeah, you can measure like pull requests per engineer per day or whatever. And everyone knows that's like a very broken proxy. And lots of thoughts on this specifically. I would love to actually know how you think about this too. So traditionally, when you look back in business history, about when people got like a little bit scientific about business, or like actually started to improve them. Like clearly it all started sort of vibes based. And then, you know, Friedrich Taylor came up and, you know, brought the wonderful new technology of a stopwatch to the,

production line and like timed the various steps and of course produced business I think Bethlehem steel and end of 1800s and drove massive efficiency gains and so that's like the hero's journey of business books. And it's still so much of the corporate culture today right? You know it's how org charts tend to be structured. It's how the financial statements are. It's what the kind of business that financial statements are optimized for is kind of a factory. In a world where almost no company was terribly conscientious and no company was like metabolized all the value available to them, someone starting to hill climb some source of, you know, efficiency gains or just like becoming better company was like a breathtaking change, right?

Like once someone starts hill climbing, everyone has to or like gets, you know, gets left behind. So that became the story. And it's remarkable to think that that was probably good enough for like, probably 80 years or 90 years of like from this point on, right? Right? It's a lean, basically, which is kind of the 2.0 of that. Exactly. So you said the car industry with exactly Toyota and so on. We just, there's some new ideas came on, but they were all around the sort of drive for efficiency.

The downside of a drive to efficiency is that it requires you to act on quantifiable. You can only measure what you can measure, like, schematically. So that's not the entire space, like the space of how to make. better companies. Like there's a huge amount of things that are unquantifiable. But taste. Like quality is hard to quantify. Well, not really that, because those are the obvious examples of unquantifiable. But the big one is, I'm curious, like, there's a team at ChopFi that's doing a great job of their product, and there's a team that's lost and has kind of a woolly direction, and actually their dev tools suck.

And so it's very hard for them to make forward progress and they're thrashing, there's lots of keep the lights on work. Just how do you distinguish between the team that's struggling and the team that's executing really well. Yeah, I think that's, I mean, this is why the question, my answer, I should go to, I don't know, here's what I found works is have rituals by which we talk every, I mean, at the latest, every eight weeks. And so let the teams talk about the progress against the goal. It's like the new, like we have an internal system called GSD getting shit done. It's the central registering,

registry clearinghouse. It's our wiki. It's our, like, feeds and stuff like this. But it also has every project in it. And so it's built around, you know, teams updating everyone else, registering, like, here's something we learned. And so, like, that was step number one.

Let's get all, like, get the actual state of a business into a legible internal system, where that you can reason about it. Where is every project? what's the deadlines, what has changed. And so this is what we have about. So we go, like, this is what we have on the screen.

They get a little TL draw that we can drag images and mockups and everything into, but that's their area. But like, all the metrics and all the things are like around the edge on the screen right in front of everyone. And we can talk about what, that and how many people are on a team and this kind of stuff. And giving everyone an opportunity to just talk to me for, even if it's only quickly, it's incredibly valuable and I just learned tons of things about it and there's something that's in the calendar and it's exhausting and a lot of work but I don't know how to do it in any other way because

that is the thing by which people can say hey it feels like progress is really well and here's what we're building and here's something we learn what should we do about it is it like people who want to get into running the couch to 5k programs start with get off the couch yes go walk down the block go walk down two blocks you know and things like that it turns out that from an organizational point you having a centralized source where you track all the projects and you list out your goals and you post updates based on it. That sounds too simple to work in the same way that getting off the couch is too simple as a step to running a marathon, but it turns out both are true.

I think it's honestly, it's not a complex idea and it's extremely valuable for 15 other reasons other than it powering the reviews. But yeah, it's not terribly complex and it will be very much. No, we took inspiration from GST, your system as we built out, R's similarly, and having a centralized internal source of truth for projects that are going on is surprisingly helpful. And it feels like it shouldn't be, but it is. Yeah. You know, it's funny because, so again, it's an internal system. Shopify has a culture of building internal software.

It's, I mean, I tend to point out Shopify itself started out as internal software to, um, to, um, power my snowboard store. So it'd be funny to not do this. And so I think fundamentally companies are all pretty bad. Like all the companies of today are pretty bad compared to the companies we will have in the future. And I don't know how to how I would possibly run Shopify without having GSD. And I think there's going to be some productizations of GSD that will be available to everyone. that's probably going to be renamed 15 times or whatever, become a category of software that's going to exist. And then everyone's going to be wondering,

how the hell did we build software before we had it? Yes. And I try to have Shopify live in that particular state a little bit earlier. Has your proclivity for developing internal software ever led in just like a really hilariously overbuilding internal software direction? Oh, yeah, absolutely all the time.

Like what's the most ridiculous internally developed piece of software? You have like a static sort of our internal geosities, like static site hosting, which is like, like, it's the most incredible. Oh, Jersey, yeah. Like, it's like a 90s web with all the pros and cons. Yeah, like it's, I mean, it sends us down wrong paths. Like it's very often, I say internal tools culture.

This is actually a little bit of a dangerous statement. I shouldn't make it like as such. We have a very strong appreciation of good software. and good in the context of we have to use it. Some software is really good. Like, Shopify is really, really, really good software if you're running like a D2C business or with products. Some people try to stretch it to subscription-based groceries, stores, something.

Maybe that even works, but I clearly didn't build a reverse in mind. And I actually, although I appreciate all my customers, I'd rather not anyone use the software if it's bad for them. Because that's like I build Shopify's to avoid people having to use shitty software, not to add to the pilot. So sometimes this means, given our scale and our minimum quality bar, that we have to build it to assess. And in those cases, we do that.

Sometimes we build it where we have no business doing it, and that's where things go sometimes wrong. Well, what I think is interesting is you think it's important to build your own HR software, and you would recommend people at least think so seriously about that. Maybe you can show the worldview there. Not sure, I'd exactly recommend it. But we have ideas about how to do HR in terms of compensation and so on, that they're just different from what's normally implemented.

This is most true in project management software, like, again, GSD. If you use software by others, you have to buy into their vision. Like, some vendors tell you the software can do absolutely everything. Software has a worldview. So you're adopting Workday's worldview when it comes to your HR, which may or may not be what you're doing. That's right. And I think that's important to realize and it's important to use the advantage. And I think this is why it's really, really important to buy software.

Like the people who buy the software, other people should use the software in the end because they have a better view of what needs to be had. So in our case, in HR, we had some things that were not doable with workday and all these systems. And so we build it ourselves. I mean, this led to a journey that might have gone a little bit too far on how should this be done. This is one of our areas where probably should find the weirdest bit of software ever made. But it's something like the internal systems you use will subtly affect the decisions that you make. Everyone's probably been in meetings where it's like, oh, well, we can't do that because the system doesn't support it.

And so again, do you want to have a workday designed compensation system? probably not, you wouldn't frame it that way, which is why, again, it's important that people think about, yeah, what is the vision they want and does the software? I'm toolmaker, through and through. I have the sub-tits in the land parties of the 90s that set up their internet sharing for everyone, right? Like that was still difficult. I'm in tools, toolmaker infrastructure in my entire life. And I deeply believe in environments that cause people to accomplish bigger and better. things than what they even imagine they could have done. Marshall McLuhan says, first we make the tools and then they shape us or something along most lines. I have a terrible memory for exact quotes.

But the sentiment is right. And so I think this is powerful and is something I want to channel at every level. Again, I want the people who have a utilitarian problem of, hey, I need an online store to accidentally catch Shopify because it's the go-to software. then Shopify to inspire them to build much bigger and better companies than they thought they did and elevate their own ambition in what they are building, just like my ambition increased from building snowboard stores to helping millions of businesses be built. And so it's the environment that I think we have a lot more power over.

And it's the sort of missing agreement people talk about, you know, people talk about incentives shaping companies and then policies. shipping companies, so those are they tend to be the two tools. And I think then sort of generally, like if people are really insightful, they talk about culture as well. But it's the environment that's even more powerful than all those things. And it tends to be as a software company, especially if you feel like you have agency over the tools, that you actually have more power over the tools and therefore the environment

than you have over policies. Because those can be moving forward by the speed of a deploy. A new change to the GSD software is immediately part of the environment where a rollout of a new policy is going to be a conservative town hall and, you know, a lot of convincing. So in funny ways, it actually acts as a fast and the most effective way of evolving a company forward. Having opinionated software that you use to tweak the environment. That's right. So the obvious question is if software shapes us and kind of shapes the actions of organizing, organizations, and you should think about what the vision embedded in software is.

What is the vision of Shopify for your merchants? I mean, you said one part, which is that they should be more ambitious for their business success and they can probably be more successful than they might realize. What else? What I tend to visualize is like, what are the things, you know, if you're sitting with a friend over drinks in an Irish pub? I'm watching so far. And the question is, like, hey, you've done an online store, you've done an e-commerce business, you've done a retail business for Shopify, would you do this again?

But the answer to the question is, like, hopefully, hell yes, because, and then there comes a list of things that we would like to do. Like, amongst those, like, it just makes it easy. Like, it allows me to build the business not feeling like I have, like, you know, when you try to paint a painting and you have, like, mittens or. I guess it's just like, there's a sort of, you know, there's perfect vision in your mind, but you can't get it out because of the tools or you...

We've all used software like that. Exactly. So, like another thing is that it just kept, it keeps me cutting edge, right? Like it's, we're going through an enormous platform shift. Like Shopify predates smartphones, right, like a software. So we have seen multiple platform shifts. And usually what happens when you study any kind of industry, upheaval or like a recession or anything,

It's hardest on, like the small businesses, the really big businesses get bailed out anyway, and everyone in between has usually the line of credits or whatever capital to make it through. You're talking about an economic recession. Economic recession. So like something happens in the world. The small businesses are the ones who are wiped out. The failure rates during recessions is enormous. And that's a huge track on economies.

Because like 60 to 80% of all people will work for small businesses. I think people felt this very vivid. in COVID with restaurants, which were obviously particularly hard-hit by COVID, but I think people could see how little, how kind of shallow the balance sheets were, because entire streets turned over with new storefronts. Like it was a very visual representation for people of how fragile a lot of small businesses are. Yeah, and like, I mean, many, many places never recovered. It's like, it's a very organic process by which an area becomes, like, sort of have the critical

mass of interesting stores that like then have people come. there and they're just like this builds up over very long periods of time. The entire city's centers can shift in these times. And so it's a very precarious balance. And they have very tight margins. They often, like there's so much that makes them fragile by like systematically, that at least all their sales disappearing because suddenly most people purchase from their mobile phones that

just their website doesn't work on. It's not their job to stay current with these kind of things. So just like inoculating from all these kind of shifts is a really important part of her business. So you're talking about some of the disadvantages that small businesses have. I was realizing recently it actually really hit me when I went to buy something from a very large, famous brand, name redacted to protect the guilty, but very big, very storied. And I was going through the e-commerce experience. And it was horrendous.

It was so bad. And I realized that thanks to Shopify, we are now, I don't think it's hyperbole to say, we're living in an inverted world where the very large retailers are worse off in their e-commerce experience. They have worse systems and lower converting websites

than small businesses, which have these, like, amazing, super snappy. And they're just like more technically performant if you measure the latency, if you measure the full funnel conversion and everything like that. On any metric by which, you know,

if you were, which are stopwatch, and you went from Bethlehem Steel to the internet, and we're kind of measuring things which are a stopwatch, the small business are better off. So one, I thought there's just interesting that in this case, we have this inversion where on a very tangible technical level, the Rebel Alliance is doing better than the large established companies. But then it made me wonder, there's kind of a question for Shopify

where you have succeeded on the small business side. And I know that's probably anathlet to you. It's like, oh, no, we're just getting started, blah, blah, blah. But you have a very significant fraction of the small business. e-commerce market with a very successful product there. And so how do you think about Shopify expansion from here, where you can go international, you can go up market to large companies, you can go into new modalities like agenetic commerce, and there's many vectors of expansion, but it does feel like there's a take-stop moment,

because step one is deliver a great experience for small businesses. Yeah, thank you. By way, I meet too. I also have purchased from Nike. It wasn't Nike, but yeah, those kinds of people. Yes, you know, that I love this inversion because the inversion is super, this is one of a very few spaces where this is true. Yes, exactly. And that is exactly what we set out to do. It's actually an access to the capital market.

Yes, I fundamental belief is like people should use amazing software that really, really, like, is like perfectly fit to the problem there. You don't blow so. Exactly. But we can go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into this space. right. So it's just really, really quick. It's really easy to underestimate the size of, right? Everyone underestimates the size of the internet and everyone underestimates the size of retail. We sit in the intersection of both those things, right? I guess my favorite stat is that the companies, the industry supplying wooden pallets to warehouses is a $60 billion a year industry.

That gives you sort of an idea for how large retail actually is. at least directionally. And so what we have done from a company perspective is we're very, very clear that our mission is to make entrepreneurship simpler. And that's their, you know, like our heart is. And many of our customers have gotten quite big. Like we ended up raising one of our customers

to a billion dollars of revenue. And so there's some of our customers, in the top 10 of largest customers, many of them have started on Shopify. The reason why they're still around because we actually, again, we take this so seriously that we're actually building with them while they grow. And, you know, it turns out, again, like all these stories of software is for a certain segment of a market are skills issues. And that's exactly what they sounded like when I first heard about it.

It's convenience to the company making the software to say, we are focused on one segment. And by way, they're all the segment, like, focused on the richest segment, funny enough. And we just said, no, we are like starting with SMB and then you can, you can't. some of them grow and hopefully build good software and then we invite the others over. The most common thing that people said with Shopify in the early days was always that this will never work in a real life because like in a real world retailers are messy and you know just like have all these business rules that we didn't implement and our opinion there was always like well the real world sounds

like a terrible place. We like always better and we just invite everyone over and well isn't there also something where like the real world is messy but we find with Stripe billing, where people say, oh, everyone's billing system is different and, like, the dimensions of their billing that they want to encode and things like that. Therefore, you know, there's a certain size beyond which, you know, strike billing will cap out and people need a custom system. And our view is, absolutely, billing is really messy. And it's also hard to test because it involves time travel, right? It's like, you know, what happens if people do a mid-period adjustment, then it needs to be proreration or whatever? Therefore, do you want to be

using your homegrown version of this that was developed by some guy who'd never built an e-commerce or billing system before and has since left the company and now it's kind of poorly maintained or do you want to buy it from people who have been thinking about this problem space and building a generally abstracted frame

and you know our strike billing now has a time travel engine where you can just move time around to test all these kind of different cases because obviously you need that and then Shopify's case similarly yeah we've been thinking about inventory management for a very long time and you know how you model infantry and all these kind of things.

And so I feel like it's funny that people sometimes say, oh, this will never work at the large end because our needs are super complex. Therefore, we should be using a piece of software that only has one user and is poorly maintained by, you know, one tiny corner of the company. Yeah, that's right. I think, look, when I first started programming in my apprenticeship, my master told me that in the software world, you have, um, about two years time, anytime you start an important piece of software,

to try to nail it, try to nail the problem in, because afterwards it just magically, like, someone puts cement in the code-based and never going to change a thing. Yes. And that's just like, that's the state of the software in the 90s. And frankly, just the way the software works, like everything that got to scale was like finished in the 90s with cement in it. Yes.

And then sold it in the 2000s. And in a lot of decision makers alive, that was the time when software adoption really started. and their priors are loaded up with software that corresponds to roughly what my, what Juergen back then was telling me. Now, we've gotten a lot smarter about building software. We have, you know, CI and automated testing in general and like, we just like, we know how to build software in a way.

Yes. We're by no means perfect at it. Yes, we don't even know how to measure it as we talked about earlier. But like state of art has increased significantly and we make better software and that's a completely different thing than what people are comparing it again. But it's hard to tell them, right? Like, it's, you know, the first 80% of every e-commerce business are the same. It's like you need a checkout, you need a carry-cards, or three-carls, and you're taking credit cards for us.

And, you know, like, you need the hosting and the checkout and office got fixed and an admin interface. So it's the last 20% that are actually quite unique. And they exist in a particular, very predictable problem remain. Like, what does the website look like? It's like what my brand looks like. And also business rules. Like we have over time, just like you're time traveling. back test system, figured out where do we allow programming or programming-enabled extensibility

in the system so that these last 20% can uniquely be created for everyone who wants them. And I think that's what it means. I think that's a place you can only get to. If people work on the problem, really care. Because you kind of have to fall in love with a problem, to want to look at it from so many sides. that at some point you understand it well enough to not solve the problems that people state, but build infrastructure in a form of primitives that can be composed to solve all the problems. And that's a completely different level, but it's what I deeply appreciate.

I massively admire it every single time any category gets to this quality of decision-making and infrastructure. Another thing I enjoy on the software quality side that both Shopify and Stripe Sell on, that's just a funny domain to pursue, is peak load, where Stripe sells on just, you can put a lot of transactions through the system at once, and obviously Shopify, similarly, it feels to me that how you displace other e-commerce systems is if you are getting very spiky sales, you can put a thousand requests per second through the system, and that's totally. totally fine, and most systems at a technical level can't do that. I guess I find it funny because I think we kind of grew up together,

kind of expanding the request per second thresholds, and you guys push that's pretty well there. But where did this come from an e-commerce culture? Because the marketer is saying, everyone will come to the website and click, you know, buy at the same time. The engineers are like, no, please do that. Stop encouraging that. But it's become like a real part of e-commerce culture,

like the drops and things like that. Maybe you can fill me in on the drop history. So it's funny. You seem to have started this. Yeah, like, it's really funny. I'm just as amused by this as you are because it's like completely- No engineer would ever suggest this. Because it's a very, way strange thing.

But it works with a fantastic business built around it. The one that did it for us first is like somewhere in 2010 was a, this is called the Chive, which was like some, I mean. It's a website. It was like some community. I had like some t-shirt with Bill Murray on it. And that thing, every single time I went on sale that took Shopify on. It was just like unbelievable. We actually couldn't, we didn't know the demand level because we just couldn't observe it.

It was like upstream the routers could not send enough traffic. And it's like, first of all, who's to try? If you had to like catch up very quickly. So it was one of those things there, um, there, um, uh, It was a very specific decision moment where we realized, I mean, this is, obviously, we shop by down is the worst possible thing. Like, this is like, the entire company exists to never make it so that anyone's down, no less the entire thing.

So we were like, well, the traditional business thing is like, this is super expensive from a reputation, from money, and we can't even, in our business model, ever make money back from the child, given the amount of resources they consume. So we clearly need to fire the customer. No, absolutely not. We're using this as a gym, and we're going to use them, like, we're going to build the system in such a way they can deal with this, because this is exactly what good engineering looks like. And that was for tutors, because I think this sort of pattern ended up, like, really sticking. It was like Supreme, which really drove this further. It was streetware world. I remember Supreme, and I remember Kylie Jenner, there was like lip kits.

I don't really. Lipstick. That's embedded in my memory from kind of 2013, 2014 stripe-ish. That was definitely, like, that was a board-level topic. Yes, and we had board-level discussions and all the side too. It actually would be funny to know the diff. We probably sweated exactly the same amounts of on both sides, because obviously we have an incredibly long-standing and I think at this point story partnership.

It's tremendously difficult to synthetically test all the pieces that go into commerce because it's just like so complex of so many things there's so many APIs so much we have to like the chipping to of course payments and payments is like depending on mix of bins it's like a different profile of on lot right um kiley jenner like the store had office a lot more debit cards and that just kind of exercise in different parts of infrastructure and so anyway these kind of these kind of things you find out and um in um in And on our side, we just like, yeah, like, no sin was forgiven. Like, every single sin, like, was revealed and found us to be wanting very publicly.

Is there anything particularly technically hard to scale? Well, I mean, so if you open a book on databases, like sort of page, probably chapter one, is like an example of how transaction works is like, I mean, taking either moving money on a ledger or moving an item out of inventory into an order, right? It's a textbook definition of technology. There's two textbook definitions in a row. So you are fundamentally have to serialize at those points. This is like the lock contention moment.

There's architectures which we employ that you can get around this. There's like pools of products. Like we take out of an integer into like a striped thing. and like there's all sorts of things that do and then try to refill this as fast as possible. But the point is that you really deal with lock contention and lock contention is difficult. It's very, very hard to scale if everyone at the same time

wants to decrement an integer in the database actually, then also the transaction involves having to go to interchange and move money. I was reading some histories of Oracle recently, but I think it's kind of interesting because, you know, proprietary databases, were the leading databases. The lamp stack only really took over in the 2000s,

but in the 1990s, if you were, like, building a thing, you actually needed to go buy your database, and there was these proprietary database wars in the 70s. And I was wondering how other lessons for us for the current AI wars and model wars from the database history. But it was striking talking about kind of the early feature wars of Oracle versus its competitors.

And locking was such a big differentiator in those early versions. and like row-level locking. Ro-level locking. But it came in like Oracle 6 or something. You would think it's like an Oracle 2 feature, but no, it took them a few revs to get there, and row-level locking was like the bees' knees.

And they released it. Yeah. I mean, and I'm very glad they did. So I mean, yeah, this is. Dotcom predates Shopify a little bit. But like, yeah, dot com tech company creation was like day one, you send a million dollars to Larry to get your Oracle database.

And I think, you know, day, like, 180, you go public or something. It's a very different time from today. Yes. I mean, I guess we're kind of getting back to that a little bit. AI where, you know, step one, send $300 billion to Oracle for a data center. You're a couple days past 180 on your journey to becoming a public company, I have to say. Yes, yes. Anyway, moving on.

I'm talking about agenta commerce. I had a really nice shopping experience recently where I wanted to buy a integrated travel adapter and power brick. And so I did some product research in chat GPT and it was really nice. There was no ads getting in the way or anything like that. I actually found a product that I hadn't come across from MoMAX.

It was really good. I think I was telling you. I was excited. Okay, yeah, and what's the verdict? It's very good. It's very good. Okay. Yeah, we'll put a link.

And it kind of linked me out, and I purchased, obviously, super easy one-click with Shoppe and everything like that. And it felt very futuristic to me, both in the product discovery and the completion side of things. But it feels like filling out web forms is not a value-out activity for people. Like, when you travel, you probably don't directly book the hotel yourself on the website. You know, you have an assistant to do it or something like that. Because choosing the hotel. it might be desirable for you, but actually filling out the web form is not a value-out activity for you.

And so what is your vision for how agentic commerce happens specifically? Because it seems relevant to your interests. It's relevant to my interest. I mean, it will be extremely valuable, and it will be something that will be done a lot and might even be like a majority of commerce on the internet. I don't know. But like I think my role in this is going to be largely infestern. providing.

Right? Like I, um, uh, this is the, our job is to keep our, like, all the millions of business of Shopify extremely current. And so, um, what, um, we want to do is make sure that, like, everyone's plugged into the various chat systems and there's an MCP connected to every Shopify store and, you know, a global catalog that's really nicely presented. So it's like, um, we're building software specifically for, um, the open AIs and the cloud and the complexities to make it really, really easy for these products to show up and reason

about them and so on, because we think it's really important that they can show up. So like, there's an infrastructure angle in it. But like, how is being used? So I think the best way to predict the future in most cases is just like, frankly, look at what rich people buy for himself, right? Like, you know, Uber is a wonderful company. It's also extremely predictable because rich people had car servers and, you know, so it's figuring out a way.

to scale that in such a way from cross-bases so that everyone can use it. It's just like, yes, that works. So personal shoppers, right? These are the places where, you know, memory and understanding people and personalization are just, like, pay so many dividends and are so clearly all-so-good. Like, it's like people have to make so much out of, like, data and advertising. You know, a personalized ad is a wonderful thing. Right?

Like, if a personal ad that tells, like, you know, I am scrolling. passing past something that's monetizing the free application that I appreciate using. You should tell the EU this. Yes, well, I do, actually. And the fact that it's highly personalized to me means, like, at this moment where this platform monetizes because they're giving me a gift that I get to use. It's win-win. It's win-win.

Using this moment also that it's now, not just like a fucking like Ford 150 truck or I don't even know if that's how you say that. But it's like, I'm not in market for trucks, right? So I, instead, I see a travel adapter. Like, what you should send me? You know, like, it was just like... I am your personal shopper, yeah, in this case. But the funny thing is, you send me the link,

and if I would put that link in chat GPT, which has my, sort of, you know, lots of my history, and ask, is that the kind of product that I would appreciate? It would just return, yes, right? Because it's like, it solves a problem in its entirety. It's like a travel adapter, which, like, for any country to any plug, to any other, all sorts of stuff, good product, right?

I wanted. Okay, so we're getting down the road here. I mean, it feels like step one that's going to happen with Agentic Commerce is, I feel like existing aggregators. If just aggregation is their raison d'ette, then they're going to have a lot of questions that they need to answer because chatybt and the AI apps end up as a new aggregation point. And so it seems to very much benefit the tail. It benefits all the Shopify merchants,

just like we had a new set of content creators emerge on YouTube that effectively compete with kind of TV. They're both just entertainment. And the tail becomes much more powerful when you've over-the-top distribution through YouTube. Similarly, it feels like once you've over-the-top distribution through AI apps, it becomes... You have a much more powerful position as a tail merchant

because, you know, MoMAX is a tiny brand, but they can just get recommended as the best product. So that's step one that I think happens. I think a slight modification about presentation. I don't think the tail part matters. I think merit matters. It's just like, it's kind of an important point because like, you know, often,

when you talk a lot about commerce and products, at some point just because of prior discussions, people are like, yeah, but aren't you just feeding consumerism? Right. And so this is sort of like the negative take, right? And again, consumerism is like a thing that is being thrown around, but where does it come from? It comes from people throwing away a lot of things that they probably shouldn't. But they throw away things because they hate the things they have.

These things don't work. They fall apart. They don't do the thing. They're like cheap, plastic-y, this kind of thing. The thing that solves consumerism is quality products, which you want to keep using. You want to be excited about this. and like you want this travel out to last forever and solve the thing. You never have to think of, you literally never have to Google what plug is being used in Singapore.

Right? Like, you just know that the thing that you have if you can deal with everything to everything. So, problem solved. And so, um, so that's, I think, I think that's an important modification on, on a point. Yeah, I guess implicit in my view is that there's good stuff in the tail, whereas the head has distributional advantages. and so it is more meritocratic to bubble more stuff up from the tail. That is, I think, the reconciliation of those two worldviews. Okay, so that's kind of step one that happens. I think you are getting to step two, which is, it feels like there's a lot of changes potentially that can happen

around personalization about agents actually acting for you. And maybe one thing, I'm curious if you've thoughts on it, it seems like a lot of search in e-commerce is really bad, where it's keyword-based search still. And you can't do things like, let me know if this becomes available in gray. Or what other products do you have like this? And you want some kind of embedding space

that thinks about similarity between the products and no one can do this. So when are we getting better personalizing and search? I just want a really good search of the products that are out there. I remember obsessing about this now. And like, we should have been... Tell the secret chopfire roadmap.

We should have solved this earlier and hasn't. And I'm pretty mopey about this. I, like, we, we, we, we will, yeah, we will, I think we will solve this now. So, like, the thing is that, so just, it's really, really fascinating. I really deeply appreciate it as a field. It's, like, so different. It has its own, it has its own law. It's, like, everything is interesting, is my fundamental opinion.

And search has been a wonderful area to, like, actually learn a lot more about the history now. And, like, the fundamental thing is, like, they're a generic. bias in search and a text is king and like frankly the people the people who worked in search are like much more interested, fundamentally more interested in searching through papers than for products. And so there's very few of the best people in search in the world where people who know most have actually ended up working specifically on product search which is really a should be seen as its own completely different domain that just sort of looks like it but it's really clearly with lots and lots of complex features and so on.

So we, like, I got to like build up like over last year, like, you know, sort of really, really, really, really, really great search team and exactly look at the, you know, embeddings and these kind of things. And it's just, it's so, the amount of improvements that's just like, unexplored is just staggering. Shouldn't you do search across that? I mean, I find it interesting when Shopify does things broader than the Shopify universe, because like shop for, the shop app can,

track packages not bought from Shopify merchants, right? Yeah. And so shouldn't you do the search thing across the whole web and not just Shopify? No, should we? I think so, because, again, the thing that feels like the big opportunity to me is clustering was always so hard to do because all the features were developed manually. And so you had to, like, go say that the dress is read and everything like that. And it feels like, have you ever using LLM as just a recommender engine where, like, I like,

feeding in? These are all the books that I've read recently. give me a narrative nonfiction book that someone who's read all these books might like and it does extremely well but you're kind of using the LLM to access its world model and it feels like now

you can have an interesting kind of product world model and access it but people like for the people using it whether a merchant is on shopfire or not is probably an incidental detail they don't care about it. Yeah I totally agree and you're talking about or how but like the what is the really important thing I just want the LLM to be proactive

and just tell me, hey, this outfit would look good on you, and here's a preview. And just like, here's a full cost and you want it. Right? It's the personal shopper outreach kind of component, which I think is just like really valuable. And this is not going to be like some kind of, like you'll get this from everyone because it's really easy to put together.

It's hard to get the data and embeddings and the sort of understanding about, you know, like we have to figure, it's funny. The most important thing again in the in the airings, AI space is also by unquantifiable. It's the vibes people call it there. It seems like mid-journey specifically, so one company that managed to actually scale taste. They're very distinct aesthetic in the images they produce. Yeah, and maybe this is because they drove towards a particular aesthetic that they just sort of kind of felt they had ownership over, but it's one that's clearly appreciated.

But David is also like deep founder mode type how he operates. Yeah, exactly. And so like, I mean, it's when something outperforms, it's, it's something. usually the product of a place that doesn't make decisions by consensus, right? Yes, yes, we know. So, you know, how do we, like, we need to figure out taste in this product sense. Yes. And we'll figure this out.

Someone's going to figure it out. Maybe everyone's going to figure it out. Maybe it's already figured out in the neurons, and we just don't give enough information for it to reason around taste. And so putting, like, yeah. I think it will be very, very vague with personal shopper. The thing that I think the aggregators still, to just like get back to your point on the aggregation side, there's many reasons why people buy things. I just, like, lots of things

are inputs purchases. It's like the things at the next to the checkout counter at the supermarket. I don't think people are going to use shared GPT to buy mask bars or something, like a candy or so. Like that's just like... Well, you just don't do so online. Right. Exactly. But like, is there an online impulse purchase that is not suited to have in an AI app? Interesting question. Nothing comes to mind immediately. I mean, I guess online impulse purchases are like things where you're scrolling through

Instagram and it's like, you know, all the COVID stuff. It's the sharpest knife ever developed. I wonder if it's a really... The umbrella that changes color in the rain. I wonder if it was a truly inputs, I mean, they sort of feel like input purchase, but they tend to be, like, they few people part with money unless they are like, holy shit with something I always wanted. Like this is actually usually the longest.

It's just tapping into demand that's been there for a long time. It's sometimes a little bit. But the opinion, when you look at log files, you're going to get a very incorrect view of the world. It's very often the longest consideration phases. Like, for years, I wanted a travel adapter that can deal with everything to everything. And the fact that it goes in a chat from you or in an Instagram ad, it doesn't matter. I'll Insta purchase it at this point. Okay, you were just ready to do that.

My other purchase I made recently that I really liked is I was going on a long day hike. And if you read the accident reports, there's often people day hiking who get into trouble because people who are going out on a multi-day hike they have their tent with them and they're prepared, do you know what I mean?

And then people go... It's all the problem with bicycle helmets too, like same issue. It's a short journey, exactly, just to the store that gets people in trouble. Yeah, so day hikers, they get in trouble. And so they think they don't need any preparedness and then they end up out after dark

and, you know, a rescue party and everything like that. And so it was like a, it's called Bivie, you know, like a little sleeping bag for emergency purposes. And it's made out of the reflective of foil. And so again, it's if you end up stuck an emergency foil sleeping bag just so you don't die of exposure. But it falls up to that size. And so you can just stick it in a daypack.

And now you are somewhat more prepared for the elements than you were before. I don't know, do you have a favorite recent purchase? I like the, I just really like these. I mean, someone going just like to ridiculously further and to just like almost like product. that just celebrate craftsmanship in a way, even in places where it's just like no one else does. It's like I, this is a weird example, but like I, you know, take all these vitamins in the morning. And like I've bought these like CVS vitamin pillcases at some point, which is for travel, like for travel. And then I found on Shopify like this like Japanese, perfectly CNC, like unbelievably beautiful pillcases. Like it's just like it's like the entire website.

It's just like a love letter to. The most beautiful pill cases. You know, precision engineered, like tolerances of sub-millil meters. What's it made of? Like metal, which is like absolutely, like, it feels so, whatever. I'm really excited about it. I, I cheat, let's put something. Put a link it.

I forgot the name, sadly. And now I, like, gift those things because they're just beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool. How's shop here doing? we referenced it there. Shoppe? Shoppe is awesome. It's, um, you know, that started all this life as a feature called Remember Me, which, like, is literally the name what was on the checkbox. We also had a thing that was called Remember Me. That's like the original name for Link.

No way. Yeah. That's, that's trippy. That's very funny. So the, um, which you know, it's like, I mean, it's kind of the same thing. I mean, chopper is much broader, but they're the similar things. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, it's up, it's on, it's on, it's on, it's on, it's on, specifically. Well, you guys do all the shipping tracking. Yeah, that's right. And so, yeah, so, yeah, shop started. Like, shop then, I mean, shop is Shopify's brand for buyers, right?

So it's, you know, Shopify is what you use to be on shop. And at least as well, we think about it. So, you know, there's a shop app and, you know, Shop Pay. So, I mean, again, it started because it just is a ridiculous, thing that we asked anyone asked anyone to fill out their address with their thumbs when you purchase something that is insane. This was meant to never be a thing because you know like in the I don't know when they came up with HTTP but there's the 402 error code payments payment required right like it's like built into the HTTP

standard and no one ever implemented it and so moving money around was supposed to be built into the platform and wasn't and then Credit card forms were like hilariously insecure over the normal web and when we came up with H-GPS and made it reasonable, I suppose, and then it became good enough. There's always efforts, Apple Pay. I think actually PayPal was around, but then sort of didn't do anything.

You know, so there's so many people like doing this. They just like, okay, well, clearly this is going to be solved soon, but like might as well just put a remember-me thing in there so we can solve this now as almost a poorly fill for the future of the internet. And then no one did. I mean, very few people did, and it just sort of didn't happen. And now shop pay is like incredible. Super glad to have it.

It's like the most converting thing we've ever done. Yeah, what seems interesting to me about it is, I think it's a significant part. It's not the only part, but it's a significant part of the inversion, where again, now the small stores are significantly better off than the large stores online. And that's just a striking. It's striking. And it's like it's 16% conversion increase by it being robbed. Right, like it's, so it's a remarkable product in now party, because, again, it's power of branding.

It's purple always, and people learn to trust it and associated with a store that's actually reasoned and cared for and doesn't, you know, even now they don't have to, before they get to check out, they know they will not have to type in the address with their thumbs, like some kind of heathen from the 90s. Yes. You mentioned personalized advertising of being a big fan of it. It seems to me that there is a real symbiotic relationship between Instagram where people are kind of scrolling in an aesthetic mood looking at nice things and then Shopify stores where they need customers. And so especially during the pandemic, there was this huge growth of direct-to-consumer brands who really cracked the Instagram cact-LTV math and they were able to grow in a big way there. Then, of course, the Apple ATT changes happened where for a brief period, it got harder. It seems like meta has mostly solved that.

But anyway, I'm just curious what's the current state of, like, is this worldview I have true that there's a lot of Shopify merchants that have been able to really scale up thanks to personalized direct advertising? Yeah, 100%. It's a main growth channel is advertising on the platform. The meta platform specifically is just so incredible for it. I think the Mera Shopify LAUB has created more businesses than like any government policy in history. So it's like, I mean, if you just compare to television and consumer packaged goods before, the television channel required broadcast. And so the only things you could really advertise were like mass market high margin products.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Washing powder and those kind of stuff. So it's like, you know, long-deterchin and toothpaste. Yeah. And so the Instagram, Shopify, is the precise inversion of this. It's like highly, like, highly meritful products. It's the first time you can advertise niche products. Exactly.

And the niche product's actually doing better. That's the crazy thing. Like, advertising directly snowboards is, like, impossible there. Because just like a billboard for snowboards. The brand halo of Burton means you can't compete with that. There's intersections for like snowboards only for powder snow on the you know like US West Coast and like in certain environments with like just like you know like this is not the best example usually there's like three different intersections of something and it goes back to you know

Kevin Kelly wrote about this in the early 2000s he's like it's like he wrote an essay of a thousand true fans and the internet is about finding your thousand true fans and everything else will will happen and and um Restoring that idea, or bringing this idea into retail, has done a lot of good things, right? Like it just created better products, it created this world. Biosis and like meta allowing you to discover one of those people who has a potential to be one of those thousand true fans. It's an incredibly powerful thing that just like, again, led to enormous good employment and all these kind of things. So it's a very, very powerful combination.

There's also other ways how people grow, but this is a very, very large part of everyone's strategy. You're seeing this enables 4K for commerce. There's this like higher resolution, more specialization, as opposed to the blurry generic products. Yeah, exactly. Find the people who are really interested in who appreciate the products. I like that. How is the stablecoin rollout going on Shopify? So we're obviously doing lots of stablecoin stuff with lots of people, including you guys.

But I feel like you guys are one of the biggest bets on Stablecoin pay-ins. Everyone should just be able to use stable coins as a payment method that we've seen. And so how's that going? I'm obviously just like you're a huge fan of the concept of stable coins. I love the work you're doing there and congrats on the launch of Turbo and then just needs its own currencies. I think it's important at least it needs its own infrastructure to move things by internet speeds. And I'm excited for it because, I mean, sort of, I think a valid criticism of crypto in the past, as exciting as it is, has been that the utilitarian difference between a real US dollar and a US dollar crypto coin, it's like that the US dollar crypto coin is mostly like, it's sort

of like gift certificates to scams. It's like there's not very many things you can actually purchase. with it that are of high utility value. It's like, obviously, this is, I think, why... The economy was too circular. Exactly. It's like most of it was like you purchase other coins.

Yeah, yeah. But then you might have... I mean, hopefully you diamond handed into some kind of upswing, but it's like, that's not usually what happened. And I think that's valid criticism. I think the most important thing to happen there is we need to expand

what can be purchased, the stable coins, to the things people want to play. like outside of like just sort of insular crypto fintech. But yeah, like we had working hard on getting all shop-frey stores to just take... What does the merchant response mean? Very positive. Again, because like through like the work for purchase doing, we can settle into US dollars directly. So the merchants can, they've just gained a new ability without having to make a strategic choice to go into new industry.

There's demand for being able to spend stable coins and they can now sell to everyone who wants to particularly do that. So it's totally transparent and that's a beautiful thing, amortizing R&D over millions of businesses with us centrally because we can just build up the system. And everyone gets the benefit of it. And so obviously it's in testing. The conversion rates have to not be negatively affected, obviously, by its presence. So there's some, like, we have to make up.

absolutely sure this is the case and lots overbonds of caution on every world record from the checkout because it's like the probably I mean it's in the busiest checkout in the internet basically so we might not want to yes reduce conversion rates ever yeah I think it'll also be interested to watch the consumer training aspect of it where like QR code is always my example of this where like the tech has existed since what the 90s but it was really only during the pandemic when like we install the software in people's brains to understand how how QR codes work. But there was a moment and now they're kind of everywhere for everything.

And obviously they're in Asia before they're in the US and everything like that. I think there'll be something similar with stable coins where they'll be offered at the point of checkout way before people become super familiar with them. But we're probably only a small number of years away from some mass market. I think it's going to be very, very natural for people. But also in a way that they just not think about it. It's like it's an enormous thing. It's like, It doesn't matter. It's going to be so well-tooled up to bridge between these things that it's using crypto rails while using the internet. And until you need it out of the internet, it's not,

like, you don't have to bridge anything. Yes, yes. You've referenced a few times the kind of stuff Stripe and Shopfire are doing together. And, you know, we've caught up at various points on, and you even talked at the meta level about the Stripe Shopify relationship where there's some, I don't know, is it like Apple TSM or something there where it's like deep intertwined building in a stable way, but also kind of expanding over time. And no confusion as to who's ultimately the one building the end product versus who's kind of providing some of the underlying infrastructure. But I'm curious what you think has worked well because, yeah, a lot of corporate relationships do not last. I mean, I guess if you dated 2012, which I think is accurate, maybe 2011. between 12, like 13 years, it's certainly more tenure than some.

Yeah, and I think it's almost more impressive when you think about it as market cap expansion. I mean, we have both a small company. Also, I mean, we have had a highly functioning, excellent symbiotic partnership, and probably there's like, I mean, how many more digits on the market cap of both companies? Like we've expanded many, many, many times here, many out of magnitude. And that's pretty rare because like, again, partnerships, especially in tech, tech is extraordinarily bad at partnerships. It's, and I mean, it's always treated as a prisoner's dilemma that at some point someone in the company realizes defecting gives you five points on the mouth. And that sounds really, really good with the short-time focus.

So everyone mistrust each other. And it's fairly rare. And I think it's cool that we pulled it off. I appreciate the partnership. It's been really, really fantastic being able to just focus on my space instead of having to duplicate things that Stripe would always have done better. I think a lot about main quests and side quests. And I have such good, I guess, founder market fit with commerce.

I just like I really care about this. And I really have, I can spend my entire, like it's one, Carl Popper calls it finding, like, the best gift in life is finding a beautiful problem that you can never solve. And even if you accidentally solve it, if you're so unfortunate to solve it, hopefully it has like plenty of enlightened problem children that you can then tackle, right? Like so. And so finding one of those is good and not having to like meander into some complete adjacency to support it. It's actually wonderful.

Yeah. Yeah, I think there's also something about, um, When you talk about this idea of focus, I think second acts are kind of a bit over valorized in Silicon Valley somehow, where everyone talks about, oh, we want to do like a new AWS is kind of the coolest thing ever where you do a second thing that is completely unrelated to the first thing versus Nvidia is the largest company in the world. And they just started making GPUs in the 90s. And turns out a lot of people want GPUs. And I mean, they did obviously lots of incremental expansion from their, like calling them GPUs is doing a different. the service, but it's in a very hill-climy expansion way. I think it's in vertical. I think it said horizontal.

Business folks tell you to go horizontal, because again, the chief competency of most businesses ended up being having a stopwatch. Like that's, it was sort of a management system world, but we are actually in a different world now. It's like this is commoditized. It's easy to access and probably GPT5 is better at it than most managers.

And it's now actually like, well, what problem do you understand better and what's in the training tokens for GPT5, and what do care more, which is a human capacity specifically. And so, like, Jensen just cared more about GPUs and, you know, saw more potential in that. Isn't there a bit of MBAism here too, where if one was trying to, you know, when Shopify was a thousand times smaller,

raise money for Shopify, it would just sound ludicrous to say, we're just gonna do e-commerce software, and it turns out that's a really big market, and here's our current projection, and here's when it's a thousand times larger. Like, get out of here, come on. Whereas if you say, oh, we'll expand to do this and we'll expand to do that, we'll build a CRM or whatever, it's easier to justify, you know, expanding into other

tabs. Like, I got rejected from plenty of VCs in 2008, and I went around. And some of them said they would invest. And Ben, it was usually terrible terms of, like, wretches or multiple. And I had to move a company to Silicon Valley, which, again, I would have, if I wouldn't have told me to do it. Yes. Like, once you tell me to do something I don't want it anymore.

So, but anyway, so like, like, and I caught up with many of the partners later. In one case, we had a really interesting conversation. It's just like, he asked me what did we miss back then? And I just like, well, the reason why you didn't invest is like, like you said, like 40,000 online stores in the world right now in 2008. And, well, you can get half of them, but that's not actually that big of a business. And what they missed is like, well, show before. itself was a solution to bad problem.

Like, the reason why no one was building online stores is because it was, the friction was so high. It's like, and so it's a little bit of that, right? Like, it's, you gotta, like, yes, it's not an interesting business plan. It doesn't, it's, it doesn't, it's in very good. And specifically coming from me. Yeah, yeah, coming from me is probably especially bad. But like, it's also kind of, man, the best products in the world

come from people just like really, really, really, really being deep on something. In a programming world, we are using cursor, which is basically V.S. Code. Vs code is Eric Gamma's fourth editor. It's like he spent his entire life making these things. Like craftsmanship. Yeah, it's like he wrote the design patterns book that many of us read at some point, littlely about programming text editors. Right, so it's like, yeah, sometimes you just need to dedicate a career to a field

and get deeper into it than anyone else and celebrate craftsmanship along the way. and kind of try to build the best thing. Yeah. But again, it's hard for people to give credit to that idea in a model. Like, people are not capable of being sufficiently optimistic about a business that really works. It just blows through all their projections. Yeah. The question is also, like, we've seen the story so many times that, like, some step function changes.

Like, at some point, like, maybe the shop pay and, like, all these kind of things with Shopify, it somehow became something very different than what it otherwise sort of, what you would have visualized. And I mean, this is in no area more true than in the NBedia case. They're like, I mean, these Kuda cores, the tensor cores were around. They were on these cards which you put, which everyone put, they're part of the bomb. And very little used by any of engine. Like Karmak's new engine probably used them for something useful.

But they were just there. And Kuda was not even like, like that was around for 10 years before Alex Nett got trained. Yeah. Like, it's an incredible vision to just like doggedly pursue this because, you know, in the future there will be value if you do this. And it's, it makes you wonder, I think that's probably true for almost every space. I think every space driven to that level could become so big. Isn't there something here where more founders should be willing to follow their nose of what's just a good product? because, again, I think that what can happen as company scale is founders get successful by building good product.

And then they hire a bunch of people and finance people and run the planning process and everything like that. And it's like, okay, well, what's the revenue projection for this and, you know, things like that? Whereas actually, like, when we built Stripe Atlas for incorporation, there was no amazing projections behind that. That one day this would be a giant business. It's not a giant business for us by any kind of revenue metric, but we think it's very valuable, because people start their business on Stripe, and we help them with something foundational of incorporating the company and get it off the ground.

And it all kind of ties together in this very immeasurable, nebulous way. And kind of like you're saying with Kuda, I think that it's hard to justify at that moment in time, but it seemed like the right technical decision. And there's something maybe where founders should be a bit more willing to follow their noses on what is right for the product and right for the user, and it'll all come up in the wash and years down the line.

Yeah, I'm a great believer that if you if you build things that are of value, then people figure that out. It's very, very hard to keep people away from things that make their lives significantly easier, better, or more joyful. And, I mean, I get the front row seat to this on my platform, right? Like, it's crazy how fast some success stories. One of my favorite things we do is we started making these really sort of nice awards,

people than they do hit certain sales milestones and um uh you know some of those like when i go travel i check out who's just got them and just like sometimes deliver them and hardly does this much more than me and like it's it's such a cool thing to like to talk with them and man like some of these businesses that hit like 100,000 or million sales are like 18 months old it's just like just cracked the code or something of, and with the most, you know, talk about a thousand, true fans. It's like millions. It's like, this has an army created because people just were staffed for this, like, authentic, like, unabashed, like something needed to be done.

Something was wrong in world. It involved a product not existing. And that product not existing was such a bother to someone. They made it their mission to create it. And then they went through trials and tribunal. usually they often documenting the journey, taking, like allowing other people to write shotgun to sort of over time try on their vision of the world,

which again is not to change the world, but it's to add the thing that was missing. It's just like, it makes things 1% better, not like sort of everything is new. And they just agree with that, and they love authenticity of it. They love that someone that they now have a little bit of a relationship with, with like kind of pursuit this thing that they think it was worth doing. And then the product comes out and they tell everyone and then more people buy it.

And it's just like there's so much good that comes out of this. And there was all value which was there for everyone to take. Like every product that sells well was a discovery. It's like it was sort of invented but also kind of discovered. And so but it's that person that did it and they deserve the chronolic value that comes to them. It's such everything about this. It's like it's a best part. of capitalism all rolled up for everyone to inspect and review and we get to have a front

row seat from data and front row seat sometimes with giving these sort of celebration artifacts. And anyway, so this is always the greatest thing. It's just like the people who are using the platforms are actually really inspiring people. Well, you know, I feel like it must be particularly satisfying for you because there's all these edge case failure modes of capitalism of, you know, rent extraction or oligopoly or regulatory capture or everything like that. And you just have a front-rocyte to the pure competitive differentiation, people succeeding on the merits.

And it's kind of a very pure form. I feel like you have that, too. And it's like we should write postcards to the rest of the world. It's like there's something really to this. Like, you know, just don't. This real world thing, right? Like it's like the one everyone says your product doesn't. wouldn't work in, like that sounds so dystopian, it does really sound quite dystopian.

Like, so I don't want to have anything to do with it. I'd just much rather like, hey, just build this whatever world, whatever that is, and invite everyone over. And if it's good and works, then people are joined. Like, it's actually that simple. And I think it's better to live in a world with like not, like, people going direct, people communicating, right? People being real people.

There's very, very rarely it's very, PR department or like even, there's probably a marketing strategy, but the marketing strategy works like based on, you know, just like new ideas and organically. And there's very few people being highly enabled building products that they care about. We had McKenzie from Ambrook on here,

which is SaaS for financial infrastructure for farms. But she was saying one of the big trends in agriculture right now is direct consumer stuff where, you know, you're actually transacting direct. with your farmer and I'm sure a lot of them are running on Shopify as well. What have you learned on the Coinbaseboard? I never had another job really. My apprenticeship and mostly learned what not to do as a company and then sort of had

the opportunity to start Shopify just try and literally the opposite and that's basically the operators I've been running on. It's been amazingly successful. So thank you cement. But like it's it's it's so hard especially building it in Canada like in Ottawa and Toronto. It's funny. I always had this effect of it came to a value a lot when I had time and money. You know, I had both meetings and then talk with people and they described to me how real companies do these things and then I went home and tried to implement it. And only years later, they realized very few of a company is describing what they're doing

actually did the things that they told me. Everyone gave me sort of idealized highlight reel and I compared that to my average. And then I implemented how I think you could do a better job on the stuff that described. and sometimes ended up with good things, and I was very happy with this. And then, now, obviously, I'm describing when this goes really right, and then just as often this went really wrong.

So they are just like, Shopify ended up being this sort of lopsided thing that is like probably ludicrously over-engineered but advanced at certain things, and then incredibly primitive at things that no one fails, usually. Because in a more liquid labor market where more people build companies, the information is just more readily available.

What was awesome was like joining Coinbase as a board because like it's like, here's another founder-run company by an incredible entrepreneur that's like put together, like again, not by committee, but by, you know, like a clear desire to build an important company, an important institution. And just like holding it up and seeing like what they were incredibly strong at compared to, like, it gave me, I learned so much about my own company, and I could, like, you know, have a reference point.

Right. So it's quite a gift. I don't know when it's the right time for an successful entrepreneur to join another company. I wouldn't do it too early, but, like, it eventually becomes quite valuable. And so Coinbase is such a remarkable company. You had Brian on. He's such an incredible entrepreneur. Very first principles.

And that was a company under brutal attack by the regulators in a way that, like, a very few companies of all the time have ever faced. That's like, the government wanted them dead and pretty much settled. Right. So I learned so much about the posture that Brian took to it. He will never get enough credit for the courage and, like, the intestinal fortitude he is shown there. because many of the details are internal to the company and the board, but, like, God damn it, he's, like, good. Like, I do not think I could have navigated my company

through a similar barrage. Yeah, Brian strikes me as someone who is very hard to manage up to. You know, that's always the risk for CEOs that people are trying to, you know, construct some Potemkin village. And, you know, he was describing the policy work that they were doing. And he was saying, you know, well, you know, you know, the company's meant to be the good cop and the trade group will be the bad cop. And then he's being the trade group and it's like, wait, these are also the good cops.

And so he was saying, okay, here's our new bank cop plan. But again, he was just kind of refusing to go along with the things that everyone was serving up to him as the plan. I think great entrepreneurs are ungovernable. And it's the problems often arise when people somehow manage to figure out. I think studying failed companies is actually often more useful than you agree. You agree. What you find invariably is that the company knew exactly the stuff. That was the problem.

It's just like somehow CEOs got disconnected from that. Yeah, it's not so much that I want to study failures. It's that I really want to avoid making the same mistakes that other people have well intentionally made and found, oh yeah, no, that's a blind canyon up there. We should at least be able to make new exciting mistakes. Rob, the guy here who runs corp dev, he's very experienced in it and he's done hundreds of acquisitions

previously, but it makes him way better as a corp dev lever because it turns out that there's lots of ways for deals to go sideways and if you just have seen a lot of them before, you can keep tabs in them and be finding ways to steer away from things like that. And I think just

avoiding the well-trodden mistakes and if you're going to make mistakes, at least make new mistakes that haven't been discovered yet was kind of underrated as a strategy. It's totally underrated but completely vital because like you died to a thousand paper cards as a company. So like you kind of have to like first avoid like it becoming a thousand and then second. You will make mistakes, make them original so there's alpha in it so that you accrues some additional knowledge with now is unique to you. How do you like to be ungovernable?

How do you like to avoid being managed up to? Probably can't share all your secrets because part of them are part of the special stuff. I just like think going direct a lot inside of a company too. It's like just like, I mean, this... The attorney of the org chart and information flowing up, being polished at each step. Yeah, I'm just like, I don't think up, like, up and down is sort of not the right mental model.

It's in now, it's good. It's like certain decisions are best made at the outskirts of a company, closest to the customers. But I do, I'm a big believer in many decisions have to be brought inwards as well. Like, this is why product reviews are like very centralized. It's like a way of efficiently moving information completely in the bend of orchids. charts. I'm a fan of functionally organized companies. It's the trade-offs, it's like it's significantly harder for executives. It's it's very unpopular of executives because obviously

they just don't own like entire shebang that they can, you know, make all decisions in and that requires a lot more collaboration which feels wrong and feels slow. But like you make vastly better products in functional organizations, at least for Shopify. And, you know, that helps. I just, like, know a lot about the company. Like, being so many details. Like, I try to be, like, in AI stuff first so that I can, you know, I always see it as a gift when something new happens.

Yeah. Because especially, like, I'm very good at quickly figuring out stuff. And then I sit there with knowledge, and I can now, like, look at, okay, who else gets there fast? And those are my future leaders. That's a very implicit test. Oh, that's interesting. You're kind of testing some adaptability or something like that.

Yeah. Like the biggest difference between people inside of any company or just like in general in industry is like some people fall in love of solutions. Some people fall in love with problems. And I just like fundamentally, I'm a person who appreciates with people who fall in love of problems. They're hard to distinguish during fairly stable times. Like it's very hard to know who is who because, well, if you don't change anything, they look exactly the same. I like inducing change in general to assess this out. this out, I like, I don't know.

How do you induce change? That sounds euphemistic. I don't know, just like literally like that, like do stuff. It's, I think reorgs are sort of a standard way. All reorgs work because reorging is valuable. It doesn't matter what your organization structure is afterwards. The benefit, well, I mean, does, but like, there's some benefits to any organization structure. You just shake things out of the stasis?

Well, and the advantages of any organization structure occur immediately. They have the disadvantages only appear over time. So if you change a lot, you do multiple things. You're also like, I think heightening your misalignment with the people you don't want in a company is an enormously important thing. So like if you re-org a lot, yeah. So if you re-org a lot, you end up the people that self-select out who don't like that, which is a perfect, like, it's probably the sane position to take even. If a company thrives under a lot of change and is exposing itself to a lot of change, then it's important that you are clear about that. I think you try to make your company as different from every other company as possible,

which is actually the opposite of what most companies, most CEOs optimized for. And probably most professional management. Right. I think a lot people want to make their company as similar as possible to all other companies. But I think that, I mean, to me that's a lack of diversity, right? Like there should be diversity in companies because there is diversity in people and people need to find a product. In what ways is Shopify most different to other companies? I mean, this sort of, you know, the internal tool culture is maybe an example of this.

It's quite clearly R&D run in a way that quite a few companies are, but they don't acknowledge. We actually say it and celebrate it and say, we actually are on our opinion at this point that everyone should be able to code, at least sort of since five coding is around, this has gone from a, you know, have to spend all of you teenage years in a dark room, cultivating a rare skill to spending a couple of weekends with YouTube. Like, let's go. This is not a problem anymore. Speaking of teenage years, I'm always very interested in the on-ramp to entrepreneurship and the un-ramps to programming.

And I'm curious, some people decry that programming has gotten harder to un-ramp into, where the first stuff I built was like janky PHP web pages. But obviously, PHP is actually very nice because, you know, you're just writing code directly in the web page and you refresh it, that's the execution environment. And now... It's a high watermark of our industry. And so have we made programming too hard to get into? Totally.

Okay. To tell my wonderful board member, David Heinemar Hansen, like the high watermark of the world of programming, at least web programming, was clearly when the FTP file up and it was instantaneously deployed. How long does it take code to deploy these days? This is like all choices now, right?

I mean, we've made some choices which are worth making, maybe we would do it at them again. Yes. But, like, there was an immediacy and a visceralness to programming, and that clearly has been lost. So lots of things have gotten incredibly amazing, and I always said, like, we used to say that after two years, it's like someone pushed them into code base,

no one changed anything. We figured out how to avoid those horrors. I think we have a very mature discipline. We have always, as programmers, I'm an engineer too, We've always had like a identity crisis. We always wanted to be someone else. We have significant science envy. We even attempt to call it computer science.

There are some people who do computer science in the machine learning world. So it's a real thing, but clearly that's not, it's a vocational art. It's not most computer science degree. Yeah. And this is also how we eliminated things like aesthetics and beauty and stuff from our codebases. So I like from talking about it, there are beautiful code bases. beautiful quote. It's like his code that like tells a story and clearly communicates what it's therefore to everyone who reads it ideally in his is an artwork of sorts. And so yes, I think

we have progressed. I think we have also advanced, but I think we don't have a clear vision to drive simplicity. And I think I personally really deeply appreciate and have hired, that's always prioritized hiring electrical engineers into programming roles, just because they just have a better idea for the costs of inefficiency. Waste, really. You know, like you put too many chips on a thing, it's too expensive to manufacture, you will just never sell it. It's not a good product.

Where the zero marginal cost of copying software just means all sins are forgiven, and in fact, of course, still runs and does a thing, right? You really have to fit the whole system in your head as an electric engineer. That's right. So anyway, so I think they're immature. You don't know what grade is. We leave a lot of this up to people and therefore the outcomes are so different, depending on who is on the project. I mean, again, we are all getting more conscientious about it.

And I think they are in a counter swing to the sort of horrors of architecture, astronauts that have caused a lot of damage to, I think, our industry over the last, like, especially in the 2010s. So we're getting in a better spot, and then I don't know what AI it was. But the interesting thing is I don't even think it's going to end up mattering because AI is going to solve all a technical depth. So it's like maybe all the same thing. The front engineer you're right to exactly. Same question about unramps to entrepreneurship.

You know, as a kid, you were selling things to your classmates. And what I observe is a lot of entrepreneurs have the same origin stories where they were entrepreneurial early, either something like that where they had some business in school. A super common one is Patrick did web development and you know when you're a kid getting paid thousands of euros to build a website. It was like infinite money. I didn't know such large amounts of money exist.

And obviously to a small business, so like, wow, I'm totally taking advantage of this kid for a mere, you know, a few thousand euros. And then another common one seems to be drop shipping arbitrage. You know, this whole thing of like buying on Ali Express and selling on eBay or something like that. But you maybe have a window into this with Chappfire or something. Do you have a sense of what the right?

Like if a 13, 14-year-old is listening to this and interested in making money, what are the areas where you think are kind of good to pursue to that? Yeah, I think it's just these reps are the important thing. I've made the mechanism to change and there's like entrepreneurship clubs are really like using Shopify a lot. And like it's, I love that. And I, this is one of those areas I would love to go much deeper on like just because it's like such a, it's, it's, it would be so fun to really, really, you know, build directly for them. The super important thing is just go through life, like understanding that like everything around you is built. You wrote one of my favorite tweets of all time. Probably like actually maybe a high water mark on X on this topic.

The world's museum of passion projects. That's right. And I love that because it's like if you can teach that to students, it's worth more than most of the entire curriculums of subjects. And so I think the commonality behind entrepreneurs is that they early in life, they somehow something happened that told them that the world is dynamic and it changes. Some of us, I had the enormous advantage of living exactly sort of at the time when events of computers to know computers like in homes and like I had one early and lots of my neighbors didn't so I had the counterfactual there of and I'm being just absolutely fascinated with

them and then networks came in my teens internet. So I had a front row seat to a world. Like the world around me in this small sleepy town in Germany was irreconcilable with what was becoming possible. Like it was so clear that so much would change. And so I think that dissuade me of sleepwalking through the world. It just made me like this like, okay, that's fun. Like I'm sitting on a piece of information that everyone around me doesn't believe yet,

but it's clearly true and I'm going to bet on. And so I'm going to take reps looking at things around me and figuring out how they could be done better. And like that process is, I think, the most valuable process to cultivate as a young adult or teenager. And... So the meta process is more important than the actual domain you choose. I agree.

Yeah. Absolutely. I think if you spot opportunities, see what you can do with it. It's a really important thing. I think we overemphasize those stories and deemphasize the process. that causes this. It's building the habit of looking at things and thinking about,

A, do I know how to make a better version of this, which you should do anyway? And then we definitely underestimate and under celebrate and under-Lyrony's. The Beatles' Hamburg days. And acting on this impulse would mean I'm going to spend the next five years of my life doing this,

and I'm willing to pay what that costs. And for you, is that just doing a lot of programming of the teenager? Programming is how I just like made things different. And, you know, like I went to these classical language schools. I was bad at Latin. We started with Latin. I only got English in like an age of grade, hence my accent.

But your Latin accent is accent. Yeah, I imagine. Well, no, because no one knows how that actually sounds, and it's definitely not German. So everyone just like, because of, yeah. Anyway, I just hated doing the vocabulary tests. I was bad at it. at some point I wrote software for teaching myself, basically similar to, I suppose,

what's called space repetition now, but like, it's like, little basic shell script, right? Like, and it's stupid, but like, something about making this and then using it, made it interesting enough that I did it. And so, like, it's a very clear moment where, like, went from, I think I got a D on a test, which was like, it's starting to be problematic.

It's just like, A, for the rest of my life, right? Like, it's just like, that is a crazy experience, right? Like, this is a thing that didn't exist, that like fits me personally. Maybe my first internal tool. So, yeah, it changes you. Exactly. It made you passionate about building your own software.

Yes. You mentioned space repetition. The other interesting, you know, educational topic, du jour is mastery learning in the bloom 2-Sigma effect. How do you put that into practice do you with your own kids? Yeah, so my kids. I have three boys, 15, 13, 11. And they go to a school, a boys' school,

which we are quite fond of. And I mean, when my kids, they're quite nerdy. So, like, it's just like that. I met them, yeah. Yeah, so I love them to bits. I can't wait to go home. It's such a fun time. Everyone should have kids.

And the particular mechanisms by, I don't know, it's like the most important principle of, like, parity principle I have is everything's interesting. This is a sentence you will hear a lot in our household. that's the kids say it. No one is allowed to say they're bad at something. They're only ever allowed to say they are not good at something yet. So that's basically the entire set of principles.

We're not good at gross margins yet. Exactly. Yes. We choose not. Yes. You know, and making a joke is funny too, right? Like, it's just like it's, I want them to have those things in their priors because, like, it's really easy to say something is annoying, but like it's much, much harder to figure out

what you would have to do to make it interesting for yourself. And I think that just isn't anything that is not actually interesting. You spent a long time in banking. It doesn't sound terribly interesting to me initially, but like I've learned enough about it, but I've read books about double-entry accounting and the history of. And it's just like absolutely fascinating.

Did we recommend the Kalamiris book to you, Fragile by Design, which is a history of various countries' banking system? I'm literally just reading it. Oh, you are? The Canada chapter is particularly good. It's like a history of the Canadian banking system. Like, very fond of Canada right now. It's just like,

it's a new origin, I think. Yeah, yeah. Well, I found it interesting how it kind of explains the path dependence of how each country gets to where it is. Speaking of Canada, what's your advice for Mark Carney? Yeah, I mean, it's like, funny. Our partnership is very very storied and layered, and somehow your board members know my parents.

So that's fun. Look, I love Canada. I live now more Canada than Germany for longer. I think it's a beautiful project. It's a beautiful implementation of different implementation from the United States or from Europe of classical liberalism. It's very much weird into socialism under Trudeau. He pushed that very, very hard. I am very much hoping that Mark is helping all of Canada to figure out that that's a successful discovery of something that doesn't work,

because obviously that kind of push socialism always leads to poverty. The problem that socializing is eventually run out of other people's money. Exactly. And so it's just like, and it doesn't need it because it's such an incredibly, like, I mean, I built Canada's largest company now at this point from by MarketCab as an immigrant. I think that one did you had as an immigrant is I wasn't sort of aware that we are supposed to, you know, make small plans, so I made big plans, you know, just like and held everyone unaccountable to that. And it turns out you can build world class companies if you do that. And there doesn't need to be any kind of inferiority like there. And also, you know, So, list like on from first principles, it's like, it's just like, I mean, first of all, it is attached to like next door to the best consumer market on planet Earth until 50 minutes ago. It was, we were good friends. And it's, you know, it has in the ground basically as much, like, it's number one,

two or three on every single resource that is of value in the, in the next manufacturing buildup age. So like, like, we should probably get on extracting some of those resources. resources and do something. I think it can be richest country in the world if it chose so and it just needs to make a decision that it wants that. And I'm very optimistic I'm very optimistic what Mark, you know, pushing into that direction and I hope he's going to push very far because I think that's there's no there's no advantage of waiting. So taking economic growth and GDP growth seriously, which is obviously plateaued somehow in Canada in recent years

and then being willing to make the potentially controversial policy decisions and kind of changes that are required to actually enable that? Well, I mean, the things that are controversial policy decisions are not just like controversial for path depends, not for not real. Like Canada has something crazy to tell people, but it has like this incredible heartburn over pipelines, which are like things that go underground next to highways. And it's just like no one knows that there's a pipe. Like the only thing of pipeline doors is you don't need diesel trucks. That's the only thing. And you can save a lot of diesel.

It also changes the cost basis. And Canada has all these resources and they need to somehow get to ports. And so it just feels like these tiny little implementation details. It's like as if computer manufacturers would somehow get down on copper cables. It's a weird thing. So deep politicizing just like implementation details that professionals can do. It's odd because Canada, for instance, doesn't have this on nuclear power. Like, where I live in Ontario, it's like the grid is entirely clean.

It's like the Bruce Nuclear Power Plant, which we constantly build more reactors for, which is like every time under budget and before schedule, like six, seven gigawatts now, and just humming and then the rest is... It's the cleanest grid in the world. And so like, the funny thing is it doesn't even need it, because it has all the other stuff too that it could just use, but we could at this too. So like, I think there's like, the blueprint is obvious. Well, actually, so my main advice to him,

like, is always like, I want him to, in fact, ideally talk to you about the Shannon Economic Zone because I feel like it's like a blueprint for success in Canada because I think we can build data centers or space ports and stuff like it's much faster. And my hope is that Canada can build up an economy and a meritful market and so on, which makes it like can get back to doing what Canada,

does best, which is like succeed by helping America succeed and, you know, just like broke together and let's go. Yeah. And as you say, energy could be a big part of that. As you mentioned nuclear, I was thinking about hydro, where obviously Canada has a ton of hydro already. Yeah. Like you were saying the seven gigawatt nuclear power station, but I think LaGron Revere is a seven

gigawatt project and could be a lot more. I think there's other phases that were not done. Absolutely massive. On every single angle you look, it is every single time I learn about a new resource that we will probably need a lot of. If I look, it's just like there. Yeah. Like, it's just unexploidy.

Yeah. Maybe last question. We have your Daytona car here. What is the draw of motor racing to you? Yeah. I mean, I just love it, and it's, I'm surprising to me. Honestly, this is one of a weirder, weird. Sorry, is or it isn't surprising?

It is surprising to me. So it's like, you know, so, so I, I, I, I, love like kind of figuring out my own limitations or propensities. Like it's just like I think it's like some it's a game everyone is playing I think to some degree maybe less conscientiously. I uh try on every hobby that anyone I admire gets into because it's like maybe I'm interested in too. I wouldn't know like again everything's interesting. Motorsports was like not really something I high likelihood or betting average on unliking because I didn't even have a driver license after coming to Canada after my German one expired.

And so a couple friends took me to, like, I went to a track, and I went out, and I just made in love with it. There's something just incredible. And I love competing against myself, I guess. I think that's the thing. I just like, I race in races, and I don't even try to win. I'm like, I'm still competing against myself, and I see all the other cars as obstacles. And so there's just like this.

beautiful thing about it's technical and you're connected with this like four basically playing card size patches of rubber to the ground and there's only so much grip to get out of them and like trying to get to like 99.9% of like lateral acceleration or turning understanding the weight transistors of the cars and all these kind of things and and and trying to get to the best lap time you can and And the difference between that lap time and the theoretical possible lap time is just the exact report card of all your inadequacies as a driver. And like next lap, you try to do it slightly better and better and better and just honed this craft. It's like just like the immediacy and the adrenaline.

It's just a brilliant thing which I discovered for myself. So started taking it more seriously over a couple of years and now the Daytona this year and hopefully do it. a big 24-hour relay race, right? Like you saw up with other drivers? Yeah, yeah, that's right. So one car, 24. It's actually, if you watch the Formula One cinema movie that starts at that race,

which was also really fun to see. It's like I've done the getting up in the middle of the night, walk exactly down that first scene, the Brad Pitt walks, like down to the pits, and all the pit stall was even exactly the one event in the movie and then get in a car and you're very, very tired in the middle of the night. So I have to say, I found out recently they sold sponsorships for the fake F1 teams in that movie and made a lot of money on that.

Incredible bit of product placement. I mean, like, if you think about it from the one itself, it's like such a made-up thing. Right? Like, it's like it's so synthetic. It's like we just decided to create a document, which is a set of rules. And somehow because that document existed, like 20 teams move cars around Planet Earth, which is like also one of a bull cases. I don't even believe in AI unemployment to begin with. It's not how things work.

But if you were worried about it, but if you were worried about it, F1 is a good... F1 is kind of proving that we can just make up completely incredible pursuits, especially with AI and robotics, we can make it cheaper, and then let's go. Yeah, there's a great... I mean, the history of F1 is super interesting. There was a great colossus podcast on the history of F1 describing basically the Bernie Ecclestone era, which came with, you know, the emergence of TV, obviously.

And there's even things like the different race schedules were not standardized, and there was like multiple, like, not every team would show up to every race or whatever. And so he really kind of harangued everyone into kind of a standardized thing. But then it feels like the modern era, especially with Netflix, I think they're very successfully internalized that they're selling an entertainment product. And some people will watch every race every weekend, but like, I'm not going to watch every F1 race. But I will watch Drive to Survive. Like that is an appropriate short-form amount of F-1 for me. And so I think they've actually very savourly internalized that their F1 is an entertainment product and it needs to be kind of consumable in all the appropriate form factories.

And they just gave access to the sort of intrigue in politics and just characters behind it. Formula One drives are crazy people, right? It's a nutty thing to basically drive a billboard around at 350 kilmills now. So like the characters are larger than life and like absolutely like driven their most zero-sum competitors. you can imagine. No one's there to just computing against themselves. And part of how it works, I remember hearing Zach Brown, the McLaren team principal, talk about how

Netflix is everywhere in, you know, the paddocks and around and things like that. And he was saying, yes, you're aware that you've, like, signed a thing that, like, you know, Netflix microphones will be everywhere, but they're really savvy where they'll have the, like in a spy movie, they'll have the directional microphones trained on you from like a super far away distance. And you

just end up forgetting that, like, you're on a hot mic, your entire day, while trying to actually manage a race. And so I think they get authentic content because, yeah, in theory, people know that they're on camera and on a microphone all the time. But you actually just can't live your life that way. You know, you just forget.

And so they actually get kind of interesting content. Completely agree. And it's like, the seasons long, they do many races. It's actually amazing what they do. You know, like a very fantastic athletes, they lose like five, 10 pounds. Yeah, yeah. Singapore Night Race for it. So it's pretty amazing.

And like, it's a fantastic sport. I actually love what Netflix did. because, like, I mean, Liberty Media is one of those companies. You kind of have to start. Like, I mean, Cable Cowboys already one of the best. It's a great book. It's such a great book. And then, like, you know he wrote a book?

He's like, it's coming out soon imminently? I did not know. Yeah, he has an autobiography. So. That'll be, that'll be fireworks. Yeah, it'll be really good. I agree. Well, look, thank you, Debbie.

This is fun. This is super fun. So it's really, really fortuit. It's sort of a nice pub just popped up in your office. Exactly. Yeah, yes.