How I Built This with Guy Raz - How I Built Resilience: Live with Tobias Lütke and Jon Stein

Episode Date: May 16, 2020

When Tobias Lütke started Shopify, he wanted to empower merchants to start small and build resilience. Tobi spoke with Guy about the relevance of those principles in 2020, as he explains the rise of Shopify sign-ups during the pandemic. Jon Stein spoke with Guy about starting Betterment in the wake of the 2008 recession, and why this economic downturn could be the perfect time to start a company. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating these turbulent times.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb. It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna,

walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hey everyone, welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition. I'm Guy Raz. So today we've got excerpts from two recent live conversations from our new video series. You can catch them every Wednesday and Friday at 12 Eastern on our Facebook page. Later in the show, we'll hear from John Stein, the founder of betterment and investment startup about what to not do with your money right now.

But first, to my conversation with Toby Ludke, the founder of Shopify, the e-commerce platform that powers more than a million online stores. Toby was a guest on how I built this back in August of 2019. And if you want to hear his backstory and how he lived with his in-laws for 10 years while building Shopify, you can find that in our podcast queue. Anyway, since the pandemic began, Shopify has actually seen a spike in new customers setting up e-commerce sites. Same thing, by the way, happened to Shopify after the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Toby joined me from his home in Ottawa, Canada, where he's helping merchants stay afloat while managing thousands of employees. So I'm Toby right now in terms of Shopify. You've got, I think, 5,000 employees in offices in Canada and abroad.

How are people working right now? presumably remotely. Yeah, exactly. I imagine, like, everyone else, at least in the technology industry is doing it, like we have Slack, which is taking over the role of the hallways of office. I'm jumping from Google Meet to Google Meet right now, basically, all day long. There's so much new that has to be figured out. Like, I used to just sort of walk around and meet people,

and it's much easier to say yes to meeting after meeting. But one thing that really is special is Shopify sort of found its role during a recession. We felt there was something specific. for us to do that would actually help other people. People were losing their jobs and almost like a fallback to plan B for their lives. We always wanted to do this thing and tried it. And like we were eight people back then. Now we have 5,000 people. Like it's amazing to see exactly the same spirit coming at the team, which is that our job is to get more small businesses to survive. That's the only thing that matters right now. You've got, I think, a million e-commerce sites all around the world. Tell me a little bit about

what trends you've been seeing. I mean, because you thought in 2008, 2009, when Shopify was just eight people, that you were finished, that that financial crisis was going to wipe you out. The exact opposite happened. People started to sign up for Shopify, people who were losing their jobs,

said, all right, well, I might as well pursue this idea that I had. And are you seeing a similar kind of trend now? Or is this different? Yeah. No, we are seeing a similar trend. It's a lot of more traditional businesses, especially, have now come to us to do exactly

bad. We have had Heinz ketchup go online, which is a 151 year old company that I don't think ever expected to go direct to consumer, but everyone's facing the same problems. And, you know, in seven days, they stood up a site and now you can buy ketchup online. And it's, it's, it's, we're seeing a lot of adaptability where maybe previously it might just not have existed in the same way. And I, I think that's hopeful. Toby, you said something in our interview on the podcast. I'm going to kind of mess up your quote here, but it's something like, as an entrepreneur, you always live in two states of mind. One state of mind is if we do this, we'll be unbeatable and we're doing great.

It's all working out. And then the other state of mind is complete dread. We're dead. Are you, do you still experience those two thoughts right now? Totally. I think the thing that changes as the company gets bigger is that the oscillation between those two things just keeps getting faster. And it's like I have a pretty incredible.

job now and I see in some cases it's these incredible people who are setting up from completely new journeys and kind of excited about this on the other side it's I mean this is a real challenge there's some serious hardship out there and it's challenged in a way that I don't think anyone like no one would sign up for it's just like hey everything I knew is now invalidated I have to re-derive every single idea I have about my business every single idea I have about being able to meet payroll or who I'm working with or or in which way I'm showing up or what my brand actually stands for. It's a crazy situation.

But this keeps going. And even when a company is at the point that Shopify is at, like I often go through these mental states back and forth in the same day. You sort of get used to it, but not really. Which is what I love about you, because you are the head of the CEO of a 5,000-person company. It's doing very well. And I love that you still have self-doubt and that you talk about it.

I think that's super important and healthy. I mean, if you had an idea or you kind of wanted to launch something for a while, I mean, is now a good time to do it? I guess it's hard question to answer, but are there opportunities now, given what's going on around the world? A surprising number of the best companies in the world have been launched at the depths of recessions. Well, look, so the way we are talking about this internally is from what we're seeing, 2030 basically got pulled to 2020.

forward on all trends that relate to digitalization. Again, all these businesses that only were retail just disappeared. There's a vacuum that they left behind, which they are scrambling to fill in. The businesses that were more digitally native, a business that had retail, but also were online and on the different channels like Instagram or Pinterest, they have replaced over 90% of their lost sales. And so it's not really that people have stopped spending money. The mix of how people spend their money has changed.

It's a lot more online. It's a lot more on the kinds of products that you need around the house. So that is a backdrop against which amazing entrepreneurial stories can be written. Because there is just opportunity, especially on the recovery side, where people can just have new options on the market. And I think that's a lot of people now have a new understanding of what the world's probably going to be like. I don't think we're going to go back to the world we had. We're going to forward into something different.

Yeah, I mean, Toby, this is the thing. Like, I've been looking at companies that have started at difficult times. I mean, Slack, Venmo. I mean, all these brands that we used. There's actually an amazing supermarket chain in the United States called Publix. It was started in 1930, you know, at the beginning of the Great Depression and struggled for like 10 years. And today, it employs 200,000 people and is an enormous company. And anyway, I just, I think that's an important point to make.

As an entrepreneur, it's a scary time, right? But to your point, I mean, there are still reasons to get in there, right, and put your hat in the ring. And you need to be extremely comfortable as an entrepreneur charging into the unknown because that's literally what you're committing yourself to. During a recession, there is an advantage that it's not just you doing it. It's everyone has to do it. So in a way, it's more equal environment. I also think that the formative years of companies end up mattering a lot more than I think anyone's willing to admit. Like I can absolutely see a supermarket chain founded right at the dawn of the Great Depression,

having a more sustainable attitude towards expenses, and you will pick up skills based on your experiences during your formative years. And I think I can see how that's helpful. Toby, what kind, I mean, what are some kind of like types of stores you've seen people launch in recent weeks? Any examples that stick out? One of the most amazing things, like right at the earliest time, like when shelter in place happened and we saw new businesses and some existing businesses pivot towards mask making, which is, of course, becoming much more important. We all know that there's a significant shortage in PPE. And some people retooled their sneaker factories to create masks.

And a lot of people drove efforts from home. That's one of the things we saw. The other thing is there's just been an enormous community effort of bringing sort of a favorite local businesses online so that they can do curbside pickup or even do deliveries in the neighborhood. And what's been remarkable is that we've seen some of these businesses actually do better than they've ever done before. It's not the rule, but like we hear this in our calls of our customers and like just sort of local, even local newspaper stories, which is really, really awesome. What if you were planning on launching a product or service, right, before the pandemic happened?

And here you are out in the world. You've got a shopping. storefront and you're trying to generate interest, but you can't be out in the world. What are ways that people are able to market and to spread the word about what it is that they're offering? I think it's a better time than ever to do this through specifically social media. There's a lot more attention there. I mean, it depends a lot on your product, of course, but we found the most sort of random subcategories of products ending up doing extremely well.

One of my favorite examples of this is decorative, tape. tapestries, which I never would have imagined being some, but once you realize, hey, that's sort of a real world zoom background kind of accessory, then when you realize why people are now buying decorative tapestries and wall art. And like, I think what you have to ask yourself is like, this product I'm creating, how does this fit into the story of the times? I mean, this is always a question you should ask yourself. But I think now especially if you can tell your product fits better in a future that's emergent or fits in well in the times and sorts of real problem. You will find an incredibly receptive audience. You know, we, we had Stuart Butterfield on from Slack a couple days ago, and Stewart acknowledged there is sort of this kind of weird position that he's in, which is Slack is obviously doing very well. Because of the crisis, so many people are relying on Slack to communicate. You're in a similar position. I mean, most businesses are not doing well now. But Shopify, of course, has benefited from so many people signing up. I mean, obviously it's good for your company. You're a publicly traded company, you've got a responsibility to, you know, a series of constituents.

But I don't know, is there something a little weird about it too? Yeah. No, it certainly is. I don't exactly know how I feel about this either. I mean, one thing I can do is try to share any good fortune coming our way. Like, the most wonderful thing about Shopify is that we can actually make a difference, right? We will work at Shopify or Slack. We all made life choices that meant we didn't wind up being doctors.

or nurses or frontline workers. So it's very hard for us to join the real heroes of this crisis and make a difference in the most important realm. But at least via Shopify, we can make a significant impact on the second wave economic crisis that comes from the humanitarian crisis. Like, we really, really believe that merchants and the small business and the entrepreneurs are such an important part of the economy.

Like more than 50% of people in the world work for small businesses. So what we try as much as we, can is launch everything, even if we're uncomfortable about the quality. If we have something in the pipeline in the roadmap that makes a difference right now, we are currently getting this out of the door. So we are trying, like, we're bringing everything forward, like local delivery, curbside pickup, all these things are things that we are trying to build better software for, because here's what happens. Like, we brought 20, 30, 10 years forward. So that also means we all are in 2030 right now with a circa 2020 quality software. If you go back and try to use

quasi-2010 quality software. You remember it to be really good, but if you try it, it's not. It's 10 years out of date. So we found ourselves not facing problems without software of the quality that we would like to take into the, to solve the problems. And we're trying to catch up. We're in a 2030 situation with 2020 software, essentially. That's, yeah, that's interesting.

Here's a question that, a version of a question that I'm getting to. Chavon Lee asked his question on Facebook and others. how is what's happening now going to change the way Shopify works, the way you operate? Yeah, I think a good culture is not defined by keeping it a certain way. In fact, I think the way a lot of companies end up destroying their own culture is by seeing it as a static thing that has to be kept rather than wanting to evolve it with the situation that they are in. It's impossible to have the same culture in a five-people company as you have in a 500-people company. but what you can have is a great culture in both, and one of them can evolve into the other, like over time.

So this is really what it's about. So we have to be adaptable. We will all change. Like again, I think the office centricity is going to change. We will have a lot more norms about the way we work together and work together maybe digitally by default. But we're also seeing things which are good, right? Like I think one thing that I've learned personally is that a meeting with people

who are remotely is significant. better if everyone is in their own tile instead of if some people are in the same room. Totally. How often have you been in a video meeting where you're looking at a conference table with like nine people around the conference table? And it's just not, you're so right. I never thought about that. Everyone getting their own tile makes it a better meeting. It absolutely does. And I think then we have a lot of meeting rooms. Like I can't tell you the last time I was in a meeting with just local people. Like Shopify is like distributed because we have more offices as a younger company than I think most companies, especially in Silicon Valley do.

So we were always in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Waterloo and Berlin, and Vancouver and San Francisco and so on. And so I have not been to a meeting with just local people in a long time. I think I know something about what's like to be the one person on a Zoom call and not wanting to interrupt and others. So we're learning about a good way to work together. Is it as good as the previous one? And probably not. But it has a different set of tradeoffs. And I think this is a new break in the foundation of the modern company, and on top of which we can build great cultures if you want to. Toby, how has this changed you as a leader? I mean, you started this company when you're so young. You oversee 5,000 people. And I mean, how do you think it's changed

the way you operate as a leader and the way you think about what it means to be a leader? I'm learning a lot. I mean, before this, I used to do an AMA, ask me anything about once a quarter with the entire company, and it was sort of an in-person event again. Now it's something I'm doing weekly. Like I've been hosting every town hall since because I think just the entire company has incredibly clarity of mission right now, again, about what we set out to do. But exactly how we do this really left to all these parts of a company. We love to be loosely coupled, but loosely coupled only really works when we come together

and base our decisions on the same fundamentals. So just the amount of communication and the ways to communicate have evolved so much. I gave you one example, like for instance, I loved spending time with my product teams. I love getting into deep, detailed, like, engineering conversations. This used to be, like, I just walked into the part of a team that worked on this, and we did a little workshop, and I can't do this anymore. But one thing I do have, I have a really good video setup now, and I think this is something everyone's involved.

Like, hitting that record button is really cheap, going through a flow or mock up and just talking about this and then putting this into the video. the right Slack channel. It's not as good because it's not as fun because it's the interactivity is missing. But then I get a video back with response and suddenly I'm like, hey, this is diminished but also a lot more efficient. And by way, I can do this with more groups. So I think just keeping an open mind about how to reproduce the situations that you

appreciated before in new ways is just such an important ingredient in this whole thing. Toby, thank you so much. and hope to see you again soon. Toby, thank you so much. Absolutely. Thank you so much for doing it. I love the show, and it's bringing us all closer together

and these conversations are invaluable. So thank you so much. That's an excerpt for my conversation with Toby Ludke, the founder of Shopify. To see our full interview, you can go to Facebook.com slash how I built this and look up videos. When we come back,

we'll hear from John Stein, the founder of Betterment, and the trends he's seeing might surprise you. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Resilience Edition. So around the time Shopify started to take off, John Stein was in New York trying to start Betterment.

This was in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. We profiled Betterment back in October 2018 on the podcast. Anyway, I spoke to John just a few days ago. He's sheltering in upstate New York, and he talked about how to invest wisely during an economic crisis and what the road to recovery might look like for his company and the whole financial services industry. I'm wondering, John, I mean, when the market starts to dive, people's natural reaction is to pull money out because they're freaking out. You know, they don't know how low it's going to go. Have you seen significant numbers of your customers, you know, withdraw their money or some of their money?

You bet. And I have so many anecdotes about this. And it changes every day, right? starting off, my own parents called me up and said, John, we're thinking about withdrawing some money. It would just make us more comfortable to do so. This was the day the S&P 500 reached its absolute bottom. And I said, I think we've talked about this. The idea is to stay the course for going to manage your money smarter over the long term.

You don't need to react in the moment. And they said, well, it would just make us more comfortable to have a little more cash on the site. And I said, your plan is we've already got enough of a safety net for you. you're fine for the next few years you don't need it. But people react emotionally to the market. And I guess I'm just telling that anecdote to say it happens to me, my own family too. Fortunately, they kept most of their money invested,

but I couldn't stop them from withdrawing a little bit. I think it's interesting that among all of our customers, only 2% more customers withdrew in March than did in a normal month for us. And by far more customers were depositing the withdrawing. So 26% more of our total customers customer base was depositing ad hoc, not just auto deposit, but actually actively putting more money in than pulling money out. And for millennials, the most interesting thing is that for

millennials, it was 37 percent more were putting ad hoc money in than withdrawing. And there's something there about how these younger customers are reacting differently to this crisis than say the boomers or Gen X is reacting to it. So, John, I'm curious. I mean, there are some people who are withdrawing money because they are worried about their financial situation. If they have a small business, the revenue is not coming in. If some people are being furloughed, I mean, your business depends on accounts, on more and more accounts, right? Because your margins are so thin. I mean, you're only charging a quarter of a basis point to manage people's money, which is just tiny, it's a tiny amount of money. So what explains the fact that your overall business isn't affected by it,

that your revenue stream seems to be more or less the same? So we are are affected. We feel it too. But I feel lucky in many ways that we're not, say, dependent upon people to come in to a branch or into a physical retail location in order to hand us money for our services, right? We are a digital business. And right now, actually, digital financial services are doing, I'd say, as one of my board members said to me this week at our meeting, you're in the top quadrant. Things might be tough, but you're lucky that you're not, say, a restaurant. You know, there's so many businesses that are being hit hard. We're still seeing record sign up numbers. We're seeing people coming to us. And, you know, it's interesting because especially younger people

are losing jobs. In our survey of millennials, I think it was 33% of Gen Z lost to. jobs in our survey due to COVID versus only about 8% of the baby boomers had lost jobs. And so you can, of that 15 total unemployment, you can see who it's impacting. It's impacting everyone, but particularly younger people. And yet they're the ones who are more likely right now than ever before to be signing up. We're just seeing a surge in especially young people signing up. And this survey you're referring to, you guys surveyed about 5,000 investors. And it's public.

It's on your blog. and I looked through it, you would think that investors, like experienced investors who wrote out the 2008 financial crisis would be more resilient today and would be kind of watching this and saying, you know, let's roll with this. But actually what you found is that they are not any less stressed out than new investors. Like in some ways, they are more stressed out. Exactly. And I think part of that is if your time horizon is short to need that money, you're going to be more panic than if you have, you know, another 20 plus years to save and invest. And, you know, you know, you know, for the long term, you don't have to worry about it.

But I don't think that fully explains it. Because for investors who are closer to retirement, we're recommending more conservative portfolios. We're putting them into more cash. We're putting them into more bonds that are less volatile in times like these. And nevertheless, they're more likely to withdraw than the younger customers. Listen, I don't know. I'm hypothesizing, but I think there's just something about those of us,

or people even younger than me, I shouldn't include myself in the millennials. But young folks may be having grown up in the tech bubble, followed by 2008, just a little bit of a sense that like things come and go and just like this is a buying opportunity. We are farther from, say, the Great Depression. We're farther from like the significant downturns that lasted for decades. And we're closer and more familiar with these more V-shaped downturns that we've seen in the past. We're getting a lot of questions in from Facebook and from YouTube and from Twitter. Let me go to a question from Gerald Kesswater. He says this $1,200 stimulus check is extra money.

How best would I invest this? He says he has it now in a savings account through a local credit union. What do you recommend people do with a $1,200 stimulus check if they got it? I've been amazed at how many people are getting that stimulus money and saving it. We would expect in this time that when the government is pumping money into the economy through this stimulus, that people go out and immediately spend it. But I saw numbers, I read numbers last week, that the national savings rate has jumped from 9%.

It jumped to 15% at the end of March. It might be even higher in April. People are saving so much more. And even this stimulus that's meant to help them pay the bills or get through the month, people are saving that. And it's in part because there's nowhere to spend it. And I wonder, too, if younger people, like, especially living through this, are going to be more focused on savings and think more about, you know, putting the,

that money away. In our own customer base, we saw about 55% of customers put it into a short-term savings vehicle like that community bank or our cash reserve funds that we have at Betterment. We're seeing another 40% put it into long-term retirement savings, things like an IRA or a 401k. And actually, the smallest minority, maybe it's 15%, is putting that money toward, say, an immediate spending need. So pretty striking. John, I want to ask you to put your entrepreneur hat on for a sec. I mean, you started this business. You were a young trader at Lehman Brothers when it collapsed or like right around the time of the collapse. And this is 2008. I mean,

you were out of work. You started this business at a time when it was hard for you to get investors on board. There was, the money was tied. I mean, if you are thinking about starting a business or you were thinking about starting a business and then this crisis happened, what What advice would you give to somebody who's, you know, in that situation? Everyone was saying, this is an awful time to start a financial services company. Don't even think about it. And I said, this is when we're needed most. People are losing their shirts and they need a financial advisor and banks are closing and

no one trusts the banks anymore. This is the time to launch it. It was a hard time to raise money. It was a hard time to get started. But in retrospect, our success is as much timing as it is anything else, right? it was the right time to launch this business. And we did enjoy a long bull market for many years thereafter. Now, in this moment, I've heard this question too,

is this a good time to start a business? Like, I've lost my job. I've been thinking about starting something. Maybe this is that moment when I should do it. And my answer is yes. I would say a downturn is actually a great time to think about starting a business, especially because you might have more free time on your hands and you can finally focus on doing that thing that you're passionate about

or solving that problem. and there are so many problems right now to solve and so many novel ways of solving them. What I think, you know, everyone has their own interests and should focus on what makes them, you know, most excited in helping, making the world a better place. But I always say, I think there are three areas that are particularly right for disruption. Financial services, health care, and education. Technology is going to change these three areas more in our lifetimes than any other things. Financial services, you get it.

health care, wow, like right now, there's so much telemedicine happening. Just we're able to use technology and we should be using technology in a much better way than we are to track patients. There's so many opportunities that light is being shown upon them because of this crisis. In education, my daughters are in the other room doing their morning meeting with their like kindergarten, you know, where you never thought technology would be used in this way in the kindergarten classroom. And it's not all great, but there are parts of it that are really interesting and good.

and I think we'll build on those in the decade to come. What about with your team? I mean, how is this going to change the way you guys operate? I mean, presumably, you know, people are going to start asking questions like, hey, John, do I really need to live in New York City? It's really expensive. Can I live in Southern New Jersey and do this job? Or can I live in, you know, western Pennsylvania or wherever?

We've been talking a lot about this and hearing a lot about it from our team. A lot of it depends upon where people are in life, I find. You know, we've got young folks who have, whether they're, out in Manhattan the entire time and they just cannot wait to get back to the office and like get things back to the way they are. We've got parents who are hold up with children who say, I've got to get out of here. I've got to get out of here. I need, I need that office. I can't function at home. I can think of dozens of team members who are now thinking about moving to the suburbs or I've already, you know, made, made some steps in that direction or even to the Midwest or

to the southeast, people are definitely thinking that this is working for me. And like, there's, there's things about this arrangement that I like better. And it will change the way we work, I think, because people are having forced into this. I used to think I couldn't possibly work from home. As the CEO, I had to be there every day, you know, like it's all essential. And this has shown me that I was wrong. And so it's interesting. John, before I let you go, what is one thing that you want to take away from this crisis, like that might change your mission or might just influence how you think about the culture of your organization or what your purpose is. In five years' time, if you could say, you know, this is how that crisis made us a better and more resilient company.

What would you want that to be? I think being remote is a big part of it, but where my mind goes immediately is something that my wife said yesterday, which was that it's so nice that in this time you've been home for dinner with us every night. And in our 10, 12-year relationship, like, that's never been the case. You've never done that. And, I mean, I'd realize that we were doing it, and it's been really nice,

but it didn't occur to me that I'd never done that before so consistently. And I hope I keep that. You know, if there's one thing I keep, and it's going to be hard. You know, we're all going to go back, you know, someday, and things will be, in some ways, back to the way they were. But just having dinner with the families, been pretty special. I love that. John Stein of Betterment, thank you so much. Stay safe and I hope to see

you soon once this is over. Thanks, Guy. Hope to see you on the other side in person again and be well. Glad your family is well and safe. That's next for my conversation with John Stein, the founder of Betterment. To see our full interview, you can go to Facebook.com slash how I built this. And if you want to see all of our past live interviews, you can find them there or at YouTube.com slash NPR. Next week, we're going every single day with five founders in the fashion and beauty world. We'll be catching up with Marcia Kilgore, Jen Hyman, Sarah LaFleur, Ali Webb, and James Reinhardt. So bring your questions to join us live from May 18th to the 22nd at noon eastern, 9 Pacific on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

And if you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by Candice Lim, with help from John. John Isabella, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Thanks for listening. Stay safe. And we'll see you on Monday with a brand new episode of How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR. LifeKit is like your friend with really good advice.

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