Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Tobias Lütke

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Tobias Lütke is the founder and CEO of Shopify, an e-commerce platform that enables businesses to sell products online and in person. Channeling his background as a self-taught programmer, he built Shopify out of a need for e-commerce solutions while running an online snowboard shop. Under Lütke’s leadership, the company, founded in 2006, opened its platform to third-party developers in 2009, went public in 2015, and has grown to support millions of merchants worldwide. Beyond tech, Lütke is also a racing enthusiast, currently competing in the 2025 IMSA SportsCar Championship as a full-season driver for Era Motorsport.  ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Tetragrammaton. I'm the kid in school that I love technology, I love computers, so exactly as nerdy as you would imagine. But I was also a kid that always ended up figuring out what everyone else was into, so I would buy a lot of, I don't know, Magic Eye books or something and then sell them to my classmates. So I like technology and to be able to do more of the technology, I need money and to make money, I sell something for profit.

And so this was a full line to my childhood. Business was to support your technology habit. Exactly. Jensen Wong was a founder of like Nvidia, was like now one of the biggest companies. I got to meet him at some point a few years ago and then I told him that to buy his first product when I was you know my teens I actually literally went to the hospital in Germany they pay you to donate blood and I have O positive which apparently they were very excited about and so that was my first product market fit was I have I bled for his product, is what I told him.

And he looks at me and says, you'd be surprised how often I hear stories like this. I'm like, wow, you know you have a great product. So anyway, I needed money. So many years later, beginning of Shopify. So this is the end. Like in 2004, I moved to Canada with my now wonderful wife. How did you decide to move to Canada?

So she's, my wife is Canadian. So as soon as I caught I left school, I finished 10th grade and then I was 16, I started a apprenticeship at a company called Siemens. Germany has this wonderful vocational education system, which they can apprentice as a computer programmer. So I actually left school, four days of a week we would be working in a company and one day of a week we would go to trade school.

And like I had a meister who I worked for who took me on his wing. It's like wonderful, 200 pound long gray hair and a ponytail like coming into work on his BMW motorcycle every day, and everyone else wearing suits and he was like, he was so competent that no one could impose any kind of dress coat on him. So a huge inspiration for me. And so I was studying under him and learned the ropes and learned programming like essentially a blue collar craftsmanship. I actually think this is a beautiful way to learn about technology and worked wonderfully for me. So now I meet my wife, we lived in Germany for a year and then she went to Canada to finish her studies and I decided to move with her because at this point I heard about Silicon Valley and

California. I knew where it was on a map at least, I had never been there, but in Canada was closer to Silicon Valley than Germany. So I'm like, that seems like the right direction. Let's go. And I sort of imagined I would end up in San Francisco, but then chopper happened and that got me busy. Did you have any ideas yet about starting a business or anything? Or you just know that you're a programmer? Yeah, I love the craft of programming things.

And I was looking for a programming job and I got people to offer me jobs but then I found out that I was there on a visitor's visa. Turns out they don't allow you to work when you're on a visitor's visa. I tried to figure out how to get a work permit and then that seemed really hard. The lawyer, when I talked with a lawyer friend and what he sort of taught me on the way out because I was dismayed, I guess I can't do any work. And he said, well, you could start your own company. Just as a throwaway. So had it not been for the visa, you might not have started a company. You would have

gotten a job. I think so. I'd like to think I might have seized another opportunity at some point, but not this one. And this ended up being a really good idea. And I kind of love that. My wife, Fiona, was like this wonderful person, the rock of my life, she was working 14 hours a day studying, right? She was doing her degrees. And I just told her, you know what, I think I'm going to just start something.

And she said like, hey, this is the perfect time for us to do this, let's jump. And so it was fairly modest. I started a business selling snowboards, like, hey, this is the perfect time for us to do this. Let's jump. And so it was fairly modest. I started a business selling snowboards, like an online store. And I understand the internet. Seems like that's where things are going. I did not know that in 2001, there was a big dot com crash. Like, pets.com.

Like, all the companies that died were like that there. Like, ordering pets.com, ordering pet food over internet. All these things were like, went up, became worth a huge amount and then crashed because they crashed. So it was nuclear winter in technology. Everyone was like, clearly the internet didn't work or e-commerce, all these things that crashed in dot com, the e-commerce stores. I didn't know this.

Anyway, I built this little snowboard business called Snowdevil. Until then, all the other stores I saw were just sort of a grid of products and there was no context. And I wanted to tell a story. We got snowboards, you could buy them, there was a buy button, this kind of thing, and a checkout and all these things you associate with the internet now. But the description of a product was basically me and my co-founders, like friends, telling a story of like, here's what happened the day we took this one out. It was just new snow,

in Canada it's like snows for half a year or something like this. So new snow, we took this snowboard for these reasons, and then we went out on a mountain and Bob got hurt, and we spent most of the day in the hospital. Like literally just like we just chronicled. It's like it almost ended up not being about a product but what people liked is just that these are real stories. And it was like a diary. Exactly because it's just like a lot of times people end up purchasing products because they actually they fell in love with the thing

it stands for, what's behind it, you know, like the people it supports and so on. It's like almost a vote for something that they find valuable, even beyond the product that they end up getting. So that was fun. You also become a trusted source when you're telling these stories. People trust you. You're telling them personal stories about yourself. It's just not all good stories.

Exactly. It's like the day didn't work. We didn't get to use the snow, but we really wanted to. It's like actually also really interesting. It's authentic. It's a real story. Like a friend. Exactly. Like talking to a friend. And so again, we're talking in internet years, 2004 is another world. It's like it might as well be a hundred years ago. Right? The most fun thing that was going on from the perspective of us techies

was we were exploring this new medium. We now connected all the computers. Every day more people would be using this, but we haven't found out how to communicate. What are the patterns? What is the language? What's the aesthetic of this medium? So just contributing something different ended up being just like fun. And so people noticed and I didn't use an Office Chef software, I just built the software

I wanted. And at some point, some gentleman from Pennsylvania ordered a snowboard. And it's like, this is going to sound silly, but like what my software did is send an email that someone placed an order. Now, at some point in the months before, I wrote that email. I wrote the software. I had to write the email that it would send. So I knew exactly what the email would say if it would arrive at some point.

But then it would arrive in my inbox, and I just like, I remember everything about that day. Right, it's just like, I felt like the day where I went from being a builder to an entrepreneur, like someone else saw value in the thing I built. One person. One person engaged. Yes. How long had you been doing it at this point?

Like I started four months earlier. So for four months, there's no feedback. No feedback. And then you get one customer. One customer. And it's proof of concept. It's proof of concept. And it's just like someone, like people do not want to share money.

They do use their money for something. It is a huge, like it's a vote for everything behind this thing they are doing. They want the product, yes, but they also deem the story valuable. In a very real way, people do vote for more of that in the future. I think you're deeming the entire enterprise as something that you would like to see more of in the future, although we don't think about it like this. And so it is a profound experience. When did you start thinking about it that way?

It was a couple of years later, I think maybe 10 years in or so, I was like, okay, I built this. What do I want to do next? I sat down and was like, why am I doing this? And I just realized that moment I've had about becoming an entrepreneur, the thing I built afterwards, and then Shopify now has millions of businesses, I can help other people have that same experience. I just think I want to vote for the world where more people are entrepreneurs. I think- So you realized the business wasn't selling the snowboards.

It was providing the system so that anyone could do what you just did. Exactly. I wanted to share this. I had such a good experience with this. And I realized, you know what? Yes, there was other software for e-commerce, but no one has sat down and built software for new entrepreneurs, and that's a very different thing.

Up until this point, all the retailers who were on the internet, they're already rich companies that were established and they worked with some service provider and they got a version of whatever they were doing online and paid many millions of dollars. I want to make it so that for a couple bucks, everyone can just go and give it a try. I want people to reach for their own independence during the lunch breaks. It's for the do-it-yourself community, really? Exactly.

The mission of Shopify is cause more entrepreneurship. And you do this by lowering the friction. Like if it's required that you happen to have spent your entirety of your teenage years in dark rooms cultivating the craftsmanship involved in computer programming, then that is a completely ridiculous barrier that you put in front of people who actually have something to contribute some product to share with the world, right? That's an unreasonable ask. And so lowering the barrier for entry actually causes more consumption, causes more people to do it.

So in a way, you're like a collaborator with the people who make things. That's right. You're their technical collaborator, and you provide them the service if they don't have the skill set to do it and make it really easy. Exactly. And importantly, we are not the thing. We are actually just pushed from behind. Shopify is invisible.

Exactly. It's invisible. In fact, I'd like to think it has significant positive impact on the story, but it's not written in the story. It's your superpower. You don't go to Shopify to use Shopify. If you've bought anything on the Internet and it wasn't on Amazon, it was probably a Shopify store. Like Shopify is all the other small boutiques.

And some of, I mean, to be fair, some of the customers got really, really large and they started on Shopify and are now massive businesses. But like we would like people to be more successful. I mean, we're reasonably big now and the best thing we can do to grow our own business is to make our customers more successful. So we are just on the same side of the table with them and that makes the mission so much

simpler. It was the first non-snowboard business that got to work through this system. So I mean, to be fair, after launching, it was a wonderful, this is 2006, it's been Shopify launched. I'll say for the first year or so, it was an amazing good platform for other people who wanted to also build Snowboard stores and nothing else. Like I hoped it was generic enough for other people to use it and it really, really took a lot more work

to make it work for other industries. How did people know about it? It really was very word of mouth, in a sense that because of Snowdevil and because it was so different, people kept sending me emails about, can I license the software? I want to do something similar. And this is actually how the idea really was born.

And so what I then was doing was actually continuing telling the story of why I was building it and the decisions I was making about how I wanted to work work and I just tried to teach what I have learned. That sort of created an initial group of people who were all ready to go, like they tried something. Some of those businesses are still active. This was now, oh man, that is like, that's a long time ago, like 2006, so we are almost 20 years ago, you know.

Yeah. I mean, there's really big business like Fashion Nova, it's a great customer, Allo Yoga, and Allbirds is a company that's out on Shopify, and then Public is a company fix here in LA, it's just wonderful. Have any companies that already had their own sales technology, shut theirs down to use Shopify? Not for a very long time. So this is when we're talking chronologically,

like 2006 was launch and then it wasn't a good business. Partly because, well, it turns out there's a reason why no one's built software for new entrepreneurs. Because new entrepreneurs, well, they don't yet know really what they're doing. They might not have their products. They probably have no money. They really require a lot of customer support.

So Shopify would have lost every single business plan and competition that was ever created. It's actually kind of a bad idea from this sort of traditional business perspective. And the big business, they're just not trusting some two, three guys up in Canada. We ask people to trust us with their livelihoods We're like it's like we are now like if shop first down the business is not Operating right? That's a huge responsibility Which we were asking for a lot you feel that responsibility right from the beginning like right from beginning every day sense It's it's a huge responsibility. It's super motivating too. I mean beginning was tough like cost was super low we were living with my parents-in-law in my wife's childhood room, which could use rent

free and so that was very helpful. And the thing that changed was my wonderful father-in-law. He's a bureaucrat, he worked for government on a government salary. We were running out of money, of course, and I couldn't meet payroll and it was getting very close. And then our evening conversation, he just wrote me a check to pay payroll and he kept doing this for almost a year because I was just married with Fiona, we were living in their house.

So it was like, I just like, they'll never forget these incredible, I found out he took a remorse mortgage on the house and so forth for doing this. In the end, it's like- Without telling you. I was aware how much of my family was like invested in this company already. And I still didn't know,

I only found out years later how real that really was. So I had incredibly generous people helping along the way. I was in Silicon Valley, which I then finally made it to just for a visit. And the way this was set up in 2008 was all these fantastical storied investments, how it was benchmarking Excel and Sequoia, they were all on one street, right? Like this central road, which is like, again, for a European, like that's surprising. I would have imagined that all happening downtown.

So I was staying at a hostel somewhere close by and I bought a bicycle of Craigslist. Like I had a meeting. For the first meeting, I couldn't answer a single question because I had no idea. I built software. I was like cosplaying and being a business person basically. So he had lots of patience with me, the venture capitalist, he asked me all his questions.

I had no idea how to answer them but I did write down all the terms he was asking me and then later on I used the neighbor's wi-fi to look up on Wikipedia what this actually is and then I figured out I looked into the data and could answer one more question in the next meeting. So it went like this one step at a time. Then I was there and then right when I was sort of actually getting some interest, one firm gave me a term sheet, but it was conditional on moving to Second Valley, which I don't like when people tell me what to do. It's like, it's very, very natural. I would rather do the opposite kind of. It's funny because you moved to Canada because it was closer to Silicon Valley.

Yes. And it sounded like your dream was to some day get to live in Silicon Valley. Right. So. But when they said you have to, you said no. I think my wife is very wise at using this against me. Like if she really doesn't want me to do something, then she understands the reverse psychology perspective and someone sort of accidentally tripped over it. But it also was an interesting experience because I was meeting with her partners at

this firm. This is sort of a thing you practice for, I suppose. That was a day when Lehman Brothers was collapsing, Bear Stearns. It's like all this, another financial crisis, almost like this dot com period. Again, this is sort of odd business history events kind of thing. And they were basically saying, yeah, so that sounds nice, but like, yeah, no one is going to have money. We're going to go in a bad time, recession, everyone's probably going to go out of business.

So I flew back and I thought we were dead. And something really funny happened. I'd like suddenly just more people started signing up. Why do you think that is? What changed? I think because it turns out that more people dream or want to be entrepreneurs than we think. It's kind of in the back of everyone's mind, their plan B for their career. And then when times went tough and people lost their jobs in finance, plan B becomes plan A.

And like people said, okay, well, I lost my job. I'm going to go try building this business I always wanted to build. And so at this point, we were ready for this and this is what we trained for and like help people build the business or take the business that's now struggling locally, your parents' artisanal leather belt business and just like maybe see if there's an audience

or people who want this kind of thing online, right? And so- So in some ways the crash may have helped you. maybe see if there's an audience of people who want this kind of thing online, right? And so... So in some ways, the crash may have helped you. It absolutely did. It made the company. That's really interesting. It's just like it was there at the right moment and suddenly I think we made a profit for

the first time and this I'm talking, I didn't take a salary ever. And so it's a very virtual profit. But making a profit ever means that it's via the business and that changes everything. So that's the sort of early days about it. And so it's just been, it's kind of a blur. Let's keep going from there. What would be the next breakthrough moment after 2008? So at this point, we were like,

we were at the end of a financial crisis. Let's put this to 2010, just to pick a round number. Okay. And we were, I'd say 20, 25 people. And it's a very modest. What would those 25 people do? Mostly programmers. Actually, my co-founder Daniel,

he was our chief designer officer, and he's a brilliant designer. He really had a role figuring out how to make internet software work. It was a key thing about Shopify to make everything as approachable as possible because we find... When you say designer, I think of designer as a graphic designer. You don't mean that. Yes.

Yeah, I do. We used to call it user experience is maybe a good term for it. Like it's like not just what it looks like. It's a technical job. It's a technical job. Well, a lot you live in Photoshop in these times as well. You create the user interfaces that are approachable. If you put yourself into a mind of our users, again, you are reaching for independence, which is by the way, an enormous act of courage. Like putting yourself out there, you will know more about this than like probably anyone I ever talked to, is frightening because you are creating something that is there for the world to judge, right?

And at least in our world, it's like entrepreneurs usually told their family or their friends that they're to judge, right? And at least in our world, it's like, entrepreneurs usually told their family or their friends that they're doing it, right? So there's a sort of sense of public failure that people act under. So they're already frightened doing this thing, but hopeful. That's the mindset that most people use our software in during the early days.

Are you able to figure out how to do this? Because if it's convoluted or complex, if a software is in a way of that, well, it will make you feel dumb. That is never your fault. That is never your fault. People should never feel dumb because they can't figure out something.

The software is always the software's fault, at least our belief. So we try to figure out how to make things just more approachable for the uninitiated. Because every single time we did, more people ended up using it. The venture capitalists in Silicon Valley that passed on Shopify in 2007, 2008,

the reason why they passed on Shopify is because they said they did market analysis and there were only 40,000 online stores in the world during that time. And they said, well, even if you get half of them, I mean, that's first of all, really hard to do. And then second, it's still, that's a good business, but maybe not a great business. But what they missed is the reason why there was 40,000 online stores is just because it was too hard. How hard it was to do. Exactly. Yeah. The point because it was too hard. How hard it was to do. Exactly.

Yeah, the point of entry was too much. And would you provide only the online experience or would you help with shipping or any of the other things? Yeah, so we give you an online store to begin with. I mean, today Shopify does so much more with point of sale and like all these kinds of things. You can buy products for chat GPT right now. It's like as of last week.

But we also have the shipping, buying the shipping labels, figuring out how to do this, helping you. Most of what Shopify really does is integrate you into whatever you want to use. You work with a warehouse, it integrates into Shopify, the products will just leave the warehouse for you when they're being ordered. So how to professionalize quote unquote for businesses,

all these things. I have a question. If I have a business and if I'm selling my things on Amazon, person would buy it from Amazon and then it would ship from the Amazon warehouse to them. With Shopify, it would be on my own store instead of Amazon. But the back end would work in a similar way. Is that correct? Yeah. Most people start by either self shipping the product. I had my snowboards in the garage.

I had a garage full of snowboards and I sold through them. That's not that common anymore because the infrastructure has gotten good. There's like this warehouse you can go to and you give them the parts and then they ship them and that all integrates. So for most people, it would be very similar. So it's more do you want to have something in someone else's brand or whether you want to have your own storefront brand? Yeah, exactly.

That'd be the main difference. That's the main decision you're making. Exactly. And then the difference is how much money do you make when you sell? Because when you sell for a marketplace, then like fees are like a tax and it's often like 15% or something, which is razor thin. Many categories of products can't operate even at those numbers. Some are much higher.

But your store is your own thing. It's 70. There's only two things you can own on the internet. It's like your own domain and your mailing list. Everything else is leased. And so Shopify is a thing you put on your own domain. It's your design. You make the full margin and you can place advertising or you can just can be your company's homepage and all these kinds of things are possible. So it plays a role. I'm going to complicate things a little bit because they often then they buy something from Amazon. That order flows into a Shopify store and

then Shopify says Amazon to sell it out. So this is all, there's like a lot of these components. If you buy something off Instagram, there's a lot of crossover. It's, software is complicated in the, like it's never quite like this one thing it does. The thing you get when you use Shopify is that you can then plan to expand your business however you like, but you always keep sovereignty over decisions, right? Like we don't impose on you limitations. In fact, we have 3,000 engineers that basically integrate every single bit of the global world of commerce into the software

and then hide that feature until you need it. If you need it, make it so that it's easy to make the decision of if that's something you should be doing. And it's global, it's not just North America. Yeah, 175 countries, so we have customers in, yeah. When did it expand to the world? So it would be around these times. So here's what happened in 2010.

Until this day, I was programming all day long. It's been pure 16-hour days, and I loved it. It was just like incredible time. I need to start doing a little bit more like just figuring out business and setting all these kinds of things up. I had hopes that I would find a CEO for a company because I really wanted to look after technology. But eventually someone told me just like, you will never find someone who gives as much a shit about this as you do. And you have to run this.

And so I'm like, okay, I take this more seriously and learn some of the skills. I love actually being bad at stuff. I find learning the entire point of it. So I started focusing a little bit more on this. We had some money saved and said, okay, let's do some marketing programs. We just actually didn't really do marketing until this point, we didn't have money for it. I separated out in like five different programs, we did five different tests to see if any of them

would help us grow the business. And then it turns out all five worked. And I'm like, okay, clearly we need more money. And so when I started talking about venture capitalists, we started doing, going this route. We were actually a six-year-old profitable company going for venture capital, which is like totally the wrong way around. But it became clear to me

that this was not a I thought of Shopify a bit as a lifestyle business, like as in like, they'll make profit and then we just tinker on it and it's going to be reasonably small affair. But like it became so important to so many people so quickly that it was very clear that I had to support it differently. Okay, all of a sudden, it's like I went again back to venture capitalists, we raised money, and then things just went very, very, very quickly. And five years later- What did you do different when you got the influx of venture capital money?

I think maybe money in general, but definitely venture capital money. It's an amplification of everything that's already there. Basically, I think what VCs do is they accelerate the process of revealing everything that actually would have happened otherwise. And I think in a way, I'm super thankful that we went this very winding and non-standard way because we were just a very good business at this point. Really we made every dollar count. Just like we really were very, very good at being effective. Once we had the money, we were like, wow, that's a lot of money. I mean,

a couple million dollars is an incredible amount of money. And let's invest that just as wisely, even though those are bigger sums, into these marketing programs we were setting up. And it just turned out there was just this incredible... this was just a time where the internet was clearly there, everyone at broadband, e-commerce, I mean, there's no one confused about this, the iPhone, you know, like there was just a lot of happening at the same time. Yeah, the growth just went totally into a different gear. And so we learned how to put an executive team together, although lots of our wonderful people like that, because we just sort of prioritized learning as a thriving on change, learn things quickly.

I mean, funnily enough, no one of us ever worked in a public company. We didn't even really, like I kind of had to figure out what that even really is. But like we figured that was a good thing for us to do. So in like 2015, we went public. How was that experience? Profound, actually. I'm not super sentimental, but writing the first line of code for something and then about 10 years later, just bring the Bellat New York Stock Exchange, this is

like, man, that is a surreal experience. This is a significant percentage of what's possible to do in the world of capitalism. It's just like... And not what you set out to do. No, no. It happened. I call it, this is not a fortune cookie. It doesn't sound very good, but it feels like a collaborative inquiry into a question. And the question is, what would the world look like if entrepreneurship would just be

significantly simpler? Would people do it more? The beautiful thing is that question is like a resounding yes as an answer. And the degree of a yes was not absolutely unclear to me. So much of today's life happens on the web. to me. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus, so your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with Fluid Engine, a highly intuitive drag-and-drop editor. No coding or technical experiences required.

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similar from company to company? The thing that makes it different is the story you're telling within that technology. Is that right? You're spot on. It's exactly that. It's the first 80% of the same for everyone, which you can give them right of a bet and just set them up well. The next 20% are different for absolutely everyone. It's the creativity, it's the storytelling, it's the narrative, it's the explaining the reason why you exist. Even if you go to Shopify.com today, because this is what we tell our customers. On the top, there's a video that's linked, which says, why do we exist? Which is actually just what was not there that needed to be there,

and why this product had to be created. And the best entrepreneurs tell that story. It's like, we live in Toronto, we go to vacation with my three boys, and we go to a Caribbean. So it's like, it has this sort of pirate quality to it, right? And we like playing poker. So I, for whatever reason, I found a shop that sells pirate themed poker sets. I'm like, I don't know how many people there are that really, really want this to exist, but I am so excited to play with like Golden Duplo and poker in the Caribbean with my boy. It's just like, it's like, my life is not 100 times better

because of it, but it's like, that vacation is 10% better. And that's so worth it, right? And it's because it's the thing that you want that probably no one else wants. Exactly. All of the niches that are interesting to somebody now have a place to live. Exactly. Someone's aesthetic said

this is a thing that should exist. And there's like a thousand true fans in the world for this maybe. Maybe that's all there is, but like you can make a living with it. And it turns out winter is so big that if you have a thousand true friends, you have a lot more. Because the difference between someone who appreciates something

and someone who is utterly excited about something is like me right now telling you about this. Like it's like there's a virality to just good ideas. And in the traditional world of retail, that wasn't allowed because a lot of retail before the internet was dictated by merchandising executives. If you made a product, you had meetings with the merchandising executives at Walmart and Target and other places, and they had limited share space, and they were making cost-benefit analysis like how much profit margin does your product have? How much space do I have?

Where can I put it? So the channel by which products could be sold was one which optimized away everything that was interesting for some, but made it appealing to the most. And I think a lot of the consumerism that people sort of vilify is not because people love stuff too much. It's because people hate the stuff they get. The quality is not there. And so what's actually much, it's because people hate the stuff they get, right? The quality is not there. And so what's actually intact, again, because of the oneness of a distributed internet and this sort of global brainstorm

about what are the things that ought to be existing and the voting for dollars, is that fully intact great products can be created and can be marketed and can be found. And then there's these incredible systems like, I mean, Facebook's advertising engine that says, hey, you can actually probably find people who like pirate theme and poker.

It's like, this is like possible now. You can connect to people who are utterly delighted. And so this is the engine which is driving it all. So the idea that if a thousand people in the world are interested, that could be a good business. Whereas in the old model, if there were a thousand people in the world, there would that could be a good business. Whereas in the old model, if there were a thousand people in the world,

there would be no way to ever, nobody would ever know. Exactly. And it wouldn't make sense to do it where you are, because where you are, you might be the only person interested. Yes. And there was no avenue to get to the others. That's exactly right.

If that would have remained the case, I think the world would feel very muted compared to what it is. There's just like a vibrancy that doesn't exist. Because again, products matter. People love the things they buy. Like people buy wonderful objects for all sorts of reasons. Because they want to feel connected to the people who created it, because they love the story. One of our incredible success stories very early was Kylie Jenner with her lipstick brand.

And it just like it went incredibly big. Because when I grew up in Germany, sort of a star, first I was like Michael Schumer, her Formula One driver. And so you would see him on television all the time, and he was doing advertising for toothpaste. And it's just like, even to a nine-year-old that felt dissonant, it's like feels very much by doing this, he's sort of using his sort of reputation. And it's just like, even to a nine-year-old that felt dissonant, it feels like very much by doing this, he's sort of using his sort of reputation.

Like he's drawing against the bank account of the reputation he built, right? Like he's sort of using it to benefit the Kolkata or whoever. Now like with Kylie's lipstick, like that's so her. That's like every transaction is actually additive. Like people have a stronger connection to her. And I think it's just very pure. It's a, this is why I'm so excited. Like I hope to do this my entire life, right?

So, because I just like, I love this space. How difficult was it to scale along with the interest? We were a public company for a few years, learned how to be a public company, grow for like very, very good. And then COVID stopped, right? And so we were under shelter in place orders basically for a year and a half in Canada. So it was extremely tweaked towards the overbalance of caution.

So that was difficult for a company. Of course, when you work with a lot of small business, and again we have lot of small businesses, and again, we have millions of small businesses on Shopify. I mean, they are the lifeblood of our economies, right? Like 80% of people, 60 to 80% of people in every country work for small businesses, but they're fragmented. If you're, I don't know, any of the large companies,

you can sort of represent the interests of the entire company really well to politicians or so, we need to know about your needs or whatnot. The small businesses have very little representation in this way. One thing that always happens during every time of crisis, and certainly during dot-com and financial downturn that I've encountered, is that the small businesses really, really suffer. A lot of them go out of business very quickly. They have no credit, they don't have inventory,

they can't absorb a downturn of spend. So like I went in front of company and said, look, all of us made life decisions. We made decisions to not become doctors. We made the decision to not become nurses. Like we can't help the health crisis here. But the thing that we can do as our mission is just make more

small businesses get to the other side of this than otherwise would. Let's try everything we could. So we figured out overnight how to extend credit to people and from our balance sheets and like all these kinds of things. And this wasn't clear to us initially, but maybe should have given the patterns. Well, if no one can leave their house, e-commerce starts playing a completely different role in the world. So we just checked out all the plans and roadmap, all the work that we did ended up being pointed at like a thing that just gets businesses to the other side without having to lay off everyone. And it worked really, really well.

We doubled in a year. We actually had the craziest insane things inside of a company. We had to be on call with all internet providers who were running auctions on server capacity because the world couldn't produce more chips anymore. So all the ones, the computers that made up the internet with all the computers we've had for a while. And it's like, you all had to kind of ration basically. There's so many stories there. But like, from a corporate way, Shopify exploded and ended up being very much talked about.

And I'm super proud of what we did. Internally, basically almost fell apart. It was just such a stressful time and so difficult to manage. And so many people decided to just like, they've had enough, this is too hard. And I had to do like live two different lives externally and internally and try to sort of, I felt like I kept a bomb from exploding

by just like trying to wrap it from all directions and get my arms around it. So it was a really, really trying time, but also just kind of, I think that really, really tested us. How much customization can a store get through Shopify? You should not be able to tell that you're interacting with a Shopify store. Like, they look completely different. Again, sovereignty is a word I use a lot.

It's like, if you don't have ability to make, you know, the design or the look of it feel anything like your vision, then I would feel as a failure as Shopify, even if you continue using us, because our job is never to constrain you. Not to limit the seller. The thing that's under our control is that we want to go and make it so that you can be as creative as you can. Do you have competitors? I mean, for a while people made a lot of Shopify and Amazon being competitors. And do you think of Amazon as a competitor? No, I never did.

I once ran my mouth because I was starting to get annoyed with the question. I said that Amazon is trying to build an empire and Shopify is arming rebels. And apparently, turns out Jeff Bezos is a very, very big Star Wars fan and never saw himself as Darth Vader. So like this turns out to be a really, really unbecoming analogy. So, so, and then like, it got quoted a lot. And so anyway, no, I think Amazon as a extremely worthy rival. I think competition always feels like someone's dying in the end, but a rivalry is a wonderful thing because you get to inspire each other to be better. These days, we actually work super closely together on many things,

so it's hard to even make the rivalry station. If one of your stores, let's say one of your biggest accounts, had great success selling a product, would you then ever manufacture the same product to try to compete with the person? We would never ever manufacture a product. That would be an incredible application. So that's the difference between you and Amazon, for example.

I think even, I don't know how much this is actually cultural for Amazon even, but it's just a consequence of being a marketplace. Because again, the internet of the 90s, sorry to go back there, but like there's a bunch of idealism encoded here in the way Shopify works. Because in the 90s, again, I grew up in a very small city, nothing terribly interesting happened ever. I think Julius Caesar founded it. That was probably the most interesting thing

that ever happened there, so 2000 years ago. At some point, the internet came to town, and then you sort of explored it. This was this new thing, it was fantastic. For the first time, you could interact with people without having to call into a radio show or something, with people who were like everywhere in the world. And that was like incredibly liberating. You could serve a website to everyone. And like,

it's up to you. Like, there's no license. Like, I needed no license to start Shopify. I just had a machine started to respond to requests. And it's an incredibly liberating affair. So it was promising and an incredible decentralization of power and of opportunity. And so unfortunately a lot of aspects of the modern internet are actually quite centralized. So we wound up with one search engine and maybe two or three social media networks, all sort of kind of different, there's one in every category, and the everything store, literally, right? And so they're obviously super convenient

because when there's a search box, you can type in exactly the widget you want, you'll get it and you purchase it. And like, that makes perfect sense. And maybe even is ideal. But I come at it from another perspective. I'm like, well, what if we take the ideals of the nineties, everyone has their own side

and everyone is their own sovereign individual, and really explore that, would it work? And it turns out in e-commerce it's actually really, really valuable. It works as well. And so it's almost a bit of a clash of visions for how the internet works. And now people would argue Shopify itself

is one big piece of software that hosts all of them. Maybe that's also not exactly the spirit of early internet, but fair enough. I think it's an implementation of the same ideas. Tell me about your relationship to coding. I love coding. I mean, I sit down on a Saturday night, but I have time, and I just put headphones on. And I always have a couple of things that I want to get done. It's like my craft.

What are the type of things you like to get done? Sometimes I make games. There's these things called game jams or jams in general. They're like just people decide from this time to this time we are making a game and everyone should share. It's almost, it's not even, there's no prizes. It's just like a convenient excuse for creating constraints. Creativity must have constraints. So I love the artistry of it. The only way to be a good programmer is to be a very, very good learner. Because you have to understand the problem domain that you're trying to solve so well

that you can actually write software against it. There's so much wonderful things about it. It fits my brain in a way that like, I almost can't access this sort of creativity in any other way. So anyway, I think it's deeply creative, it's deeply interesting, and it's a wonderful craft by itself.

I personally use Japanese programming language, which I found in 2004, then I could make all choices. Like, you know, my own company, I can now use really, really weird things that I could never use. And then this programming language out of Japan called Ruby, that's what I built Shopify in. And again, because it felt like when I was using other programming language, it always felt like I wanted to paint,

like let's say an oil painting, but someone giving me crayons, it just, there was a mismatch. And then I found Ruby and it's just like, I found that my brain ran on Ruby even before I knew of it. So I'm using this language because it really feels like it connects with me at that level. How has AI impacted Shopify? I consider myself so incredibly lucky here

because like again, I saw technology kind of grow up and I've been part of this industry long enough that I've seen when a new platform came out, we connected all computers through internet and then the phones came out, which just was another platform and it made things so interesting. I didn't expect to have another one of those. I think this is the best. I always thought Shopify was a company that sort of is a bridge between the real world and the sort of world of the internet and technology because really the software I make is so that other people can help themselves

to everything that technology has to offer for their own pursuits. But like software was always pretty autistic. It doesn't understand the meaning behind anything or so. It blindly follows. And I think AI is increasingly allowing people to have collaboration around intent, actually conversations that lead to more creativity. And so with chatbots or conversationists or so, we see this. It's deeply integrated in our software. We are super excited about it. So I think it's an incredible privilege to actually have to reinvent all software again.

It's certainly... It's not daunting to you? No, I love it. It's an opportunity. Yeah, I don't like stasis. I don't know this for sure, but I would have probably retired now if it wouldn't have happened for AI. But AI gives me, like, I, again, I love the task I've gotten myself in life, which is I really deeply care about wellness on Shopify and this kind of idea. So I found my gifts early, like with programming,

I cultivated them to be hopefully very good at them. And then through Shopify, I managed to give them away, which is I think really the meaning in life is to share the gifts that you've cultivated. And so the technology capabilities coming, there's so much more we can do for people. We used to do a survey, and I wish we would have done it more.

And in the survey, we had lots of questions. And one of them sort of added on a whim was, do you know someone who within 24 hours would respond to an email or a text message about an entrepreneurial question? And the amount of people who said yes was something about something like 70 something percent. Then initially I was super impressed by this

because I would have imagined this would have been much, much lower, right? So then we had the idea of let's try this in general population. And it turns out it was like 9%. And we're like, okay, well, what's happening here? Very simple. What's happening here is that only the people who know someone who's done entrepreneurship actually try to build businesses.

Because otherwise it just seems like impossible. So the model, having the model. Having someone having demonstrated that it's possible. Having someone when you run out of options, answer the question. It's so hard, how do you incorporate something? Who knows? It's different depending on where you,

like you can't even read a book about it. So now you sign up for Shopify, you have like the thing called Sidekick, you can have a conversation with it, like infinitely patient, super intelligent, knows everything about entrepreneurship, can tell you how your business is really doing, and do all sorts of tasks for you. And you start out with a co-founder, right, like which is beautiful, and it costs like

no equity. It's like it's just like there to push you. And so I love all that. Is there any advantage or disadvantage to being based in Canada? Canada had the perfect culture for doing something like this when I started. And if I would have been in Germany, it would probably have been too much. It would be too friction for you. You would have to like, you have to like, you need to start with $50,000,

which I didn't have before you can incorporate anything. So I call Canada basically America for Europeans. Like, because it's just like, it's such a fun mix of the two. So it made it very easy. Then we started and built there and always found good people. I think there was advantages of not being in Silicon Valley. In fact, for commerce specifically. In many ways, it made it harder.

But Silicon Valley really committed itself to make money for advertising. And it's such a good business model to make money for advertising that if you do anything else you're running out of time too quickly. You can't make money fast enough. It's so much slower to build something that you charge money for like monthly, like Shopify. So I think there were some advantages there. And you know, they did this funny thing.

I don't know how real it is, but I only realized this years later. I'm curious what you think about this. I would travel to Silicon Valley and then I would have meetings with people and I would ask them millions of questions about how to build companies because I was trying to figure it out. And then I would write everything down

and try to figure out which of this makes sense. And then I would localize it if it's a good idea to Shopify and then we'll implement it. And it took me a long time to figure out that in this conversation, I didn't actually hear the real answers to what other people are doing. I usually got the highlight reel, or actually the ambitions. Often I got the ideas they have that they wish would be true and they're currently working on.

And I compared that to my average. So I compared the highlight reel that I got from Silicon Valley to what actually was going on in a company. Then I implemented some of those things. I ended up with something a better version much earlier than anyone else on these kind of matters. And in a way, it actually almost head faked Shopify into being a better company than it could otherwise been. Because if you would actually been closer to everyone, we would have a much better model for what the companies around us actually like. It would have made it more ordinary. Exactly.

It allowed us to just be in a way extraordinary and different. There's value in difference. Of the sameness is conversed. Absolutely. Yeah, if it's the same, why do it? Yes, exactly. It is an axiom that if you want to be better, you must be different. Because if you're the same, you end up being the same. This is the way the sentence continues. And

just finding different constraints that mean that you end up different means that you have a chance at being better, because otherwise you don't. So distance actually is more valuable than people think. How do you think growing up in Germany impacted you? I think Germany initializes your acceptable minimum quality higher. And I think that's a good thing and a bad thing in a lot of ways. Like I remember going to the MoMA at some point, I think one in San Francisco, and there was like a Dieter Rams exhibit. He's a designer of this wonderful products for Brown. And I loved it, but it looked like my house growing up. It was just like, all these beautiful objects

were like, that's literally the LP player and the coffee machine and the razor, my dad used to make. I think it's harder to create a product in Germany and get market acceptance because the minimum quality bar that people accept is higher. Like you cultivate tastes, I think, in a way that I think is also important. And then coming to North America and working in Canada where people are much more, hey, let's put an MVP out. The confluence of those two things is like, yes, but is it good?

Yes, it can be minimum viable. I push people to call it minimum lovable product. Like what's something that actually someone might actually love if it turns out to be good? And I think that ended up making a difference. How do you think about that? That sounds good. I think we can know what the bar is for us, but it's very hard to know what the bar is for someone else. Yeah. But you cultivated an incredibly well-refined taste.

Something passing your quality bar is an asset test that is high enough in the market. If it is high enough for you, it's probably high enough for everyone. That doesn't mean it's going to be successful. No, and also, the opposite is like, often I would miss things that ended up being very successful just because that looked similar to something I saw when I was younger and didn't seem so revolutionary now. And, but to the people at that time, it was revolutionary. Yes. Yeah.

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How many employees do you have now? Shopify is 8,000 people, about half, half in Canada and United States. Yeah, public company, $120 billion, smart cap kind of thing. How did the business change when it went public? I think it just got better. Like we weren't public so early. This is another one of us, like everyone at Silicon Valley was always telling me go public

as late as possible and I just couldn't find it. Like, I tried to get people to argue from first principles for this idea and it seemed very derivative. It's like, oh, other people are going public later, is what I heard. What does that have to do with you? That is the worst reason. Exactly.

So I was like, again, I felt a certain just deference, like the institution of being public. Again, I want to share. I develop your gifts, and then I cultivate them, and then share it widely. I had wonderful investors, and? Like, I like develop your gifts and then I cultivated them and then shared widely. Like I had wonderful investors and they all fully trusted me, right? Like 100% trust.

I could not build more if I tried. It's like, battery doesn't charge past 100%. I can get a new set of private investors, but like, I think what's much better is become a public company, have some people hopefully early in their career make bets on you. And then we grow the company together, that's going to work well, they are going to be successful,

and there's going to be a kinship or like a relationship that's being developed and it worked perfectly this way. For some reason, some people have the experience of going public and feeling shackled by the experience, but you didn't have that experience. I mean, I also, like, I mean, to be fair, I should say that I just retained control in a way that helped. I started a company, I think Shopify, at least while I'm there, would do very poorly if my job would have to become to be like sort of consensus builder, right? Just because to me, consensus always finds the least objectionable option, right? What I want to do with building, I want to build full class things. To me, that comes from a really big piece of software,

like Shopify, feeling like it's written by a single author in the end, right? Like it's not, it isn't. It's thousands of people working on it. But like, there gotta be one consistent narrative style. You can't switch perspective out of a sudden, no writing styles, from one screen to the next. And so in the same thing with a company, again, even investing in a company is a vote.

If you're voting with your investment money for a company and you want to participate in the value, and that is a company run by their founder. I think what you want is that founder to be in control of a company because that's what you don't want. You will need to find someone very different. Like let's call them founder run companies and managerial run companies.

Managerial run companies, the job of CEO is totally different. The job is to create a plan. Like the CEO doesn't actually have a legitimacy to decide exactly what the company does. People think so, but it's not actually like that. The legitimacy is a thing that's built. And what the CEO does, it creates the stakeholders a plan and then creates legitimacy in the plan.

And the plan is then followed by everyone. Like it's the plan that has authority. The CEO just has ability to influence the plan heavily. That also makes these companies very, very hard to adjust. Right, like so if you want to pivot or something, you need to make a new plan and explain why you didn't screw up with the last plan. So this is why large companies very often have a hard time incorporating AI quickly or something like this,

or doing COVID. Founder-run companies are different. The fact that the slot is filled, that the person is there who has all, in my case, the 20 or 21 years of being there for every decision. Every step. Every step. I can talk with great authority to what the Shopify way is about something, what, like how to make this, and, when COVID happens, the day that happened, or when AI comes out, I'm actually not beholden to the roadmap. Because the roadmap exists because it comes from

figuring out what the exact best things are to work on right now. But if reality's changed, that is clearly no something different, because otherwise, reality didn't actually change. I think they have underappreciated how different they are, founder-run companies that is clearly know something different because otherwise reality didn't actually change. I think they are underappreciated how different they are, founder-run companies and managerial-run companies, and neither is better than the other.

In fact, in most business sectors, I think founder-run companies are a mess, like they are a hot mess of chaos and hard to predict and they're harder to work for. Things change on a dime. For the right people, this is the best. They love this energy. They love the ability to creatively impact the entire thing. Like just ideas matter in the best cases. Like the best idea wins. Doesn't matter who said it. But if everyone disagrees, there's someone who can just say, we are going to go with the best idea and this is it based on this kind of thing rather than highest paid person said

so. Would you say you trust your instincts? Yes, I think instincts are your entire life's experiences, rolled up and ready for instant decision making. I think people should trust them more. It's just you have to cultivate your instincts. You also have to learn a lot. And like, sometimes people end up trusting all the instincts

and that can go poorly. But like, I think for for engineering and for business and strategy and entrepreneurship, I say, yes, I trust my instincts. Do you question yourself? If you have an idea, do you question, is this going to work? How will it work? All the time. I never am as hard on anyone else's ideas as on my own.

I actually discount my ideas significantly, because I just like the conversation. I work with absolutely incredible people. And the worst thing that you can ever do as a leader is like just like constrain the upside, right? Like I want to raise the floor by just navigating us around just bad things that have been tried, don't work or won't work in this case because I can spot those, but I don't want to cap the upside. How difficult is it to recruit people?

I mean, the moment you have like a bunch of, like 20 people in the company, you're really in the people business, right? Like it's like you're drafting the team, you're finding great people. I've hired people who I've worked on for 15 years before, and is it hard? It's super hard.

The thing I've found that makes it really, really easy is just be very, very clear about who you want and who you don't want. I think people are not ready enough to... I almost talk people out of coming to Shopify. Sometimes I just explain, look, this is again founder and company, therefore if you come from Siemens

and you're very, very used to everything being just like operationally fantastic, then none of that stuff happens here. We are just like, be a company, we try our very best, but every once in a while, people have to put on their cape and be heroes, and that's the way it works. What are your reading habits?

My wife is in a completely different circadian cycle to me. Like I would be a night owl if the world would let me. And she's a light sleeper, so we're both in bed at 10, and I read to one. So it gives me wonderful time. I'm a kindle that doesn't cause too much light, so she doesn't wake up. I mean, I read sometimes fantasy. I make it so that every third book has to be a book that I think I will disagree with, is one of my things that has been a fun habit. I tend to read books that are older at this point. Actually, Marc Antresen has gotten me on this.

Just like, I was like, I read too many current issue books, which were all the same book in the end. And I was complaining to him and he said, just like, just read books that people recommend that are more than 40 years old. And then you only read the books that stood the test of time. So that's been actually a wonderful habit for past recent years. What are the kind of things you'd like to learn about?

I think everything's interesting. I've never found anything that's not interesting. I teach this to my kids. No one of my kids is allowed to say that anything is uninteresting. They can only say this isn't interesting to me yet. So which is actually a wonderful way to do it. I mean, obviously I study excellence, like I just love reading about excellence in every

other field. I love biographies. I also try on different hobbies. Like if someone I really admire has a hobby which sounds surprising to me, I try it on. I really, really, really got into motorsports, which has just been so incredible. I call it Zen Buddhism at 200 miles per hour. It just focuses me in a way nothing else seems to be able to do. I do endurance racing.

Endurance racing driving. Driving, yes. What's an endurance race driving? How long is that? The most famous race is the 24 hours of Le Mans. And you do that with a team of three people. I'm training for doing it next year. This year I've done a 24 hour race at Daytona.

With the team is the hardest thing I've ever done. I was delirious driving at like 2 a.m. after already having driven for like four hours with 61 other cars. It's one of the most beautiful things about motorsport is that you do it like amateurs and pros together. There's no tournaments where you can play with the best tennis players, right, like as well, because it's too much of a weak link. But in motorsport, you, one of the free drivers is an amateur. So if you're a fast amateur, you can go find fantastic pros who you can then learn from. And there's always so much to learn.

And yeah, I just love doing difficult things with interesting people. I served with the through line in my life. So it's a wonderful thing. Does the fact that the consequences are dire play a big role? I think so. I didn't even have a driving license in Canada.

So I just had one during my living, six-by-ears. I never drove. It's just like. I don't even know if I truly love cars. But I got invited to a track day and friends just pulled me with them. And then they put us in these cars and gave us instructions and let us go on a track. And then they immediately pulled me in on like two laps later. And I thought I did something wrong. But then they told me my tank of gas was empty.

It was 40 minutes later. And like, how is that possible? You thought you just started. You lost time. I lost. Like, this has never happened. It was just incredible in this way. You were so concentrated in what you were doing, time stopped essentially.

Because what I realized is racing is there's a perfect lap time out there. It's physically possible to calculate this, I imagine. And the actual lap time you get is for some total of all your inadequacies as a driver. So it's like you're competing against yourself, you're competing against a truck. The other cars are actually obstacles to this. But you get this immediate feedback after every turn, you know, like you just feel it, you're connected for your ass to the car, to the ground, to feeling all the movements in the car.

You get the lap time at the end and you just know if you did well and you know that you're getting better. And you're connected to the ground at the bottom and you just know if you did well and you know that you're getting better and you're connected to the ground at the bottom of the tires. Like it's basically four playing cards of contact patches, that's all. And from them you ask, you can ask up to 100%. If you ask anymore, it's bad, you don't want to.

You're trying to get as close to 99.999% of what the grip can do and then you invest it either in going straight or into turns. And so it's immediate feedback, visceral, high adrenaline skill building. So that's wonderful. So I love it. Do you feel like every lap you're aiming to get the perfect lap over and over again? You're chasing something, right?

So you're chasing this thing that's like just elusive. And again, you have to accept that you cannot drive perfectly. I find that very motivating. I have never been externally motivated, oddly. I've always been internally motivated. I just believe we meet the person we could have been at the end of our lives. And the point is to try to minimize the difference. So this is kind of what else is there.

You cultivate your sets of skills, and then along the way you share them again. Would you say you spend most of your time in your head or in your body? In my head. To me, self is sort of camera at abstractor, like analyzing the day, the situation, like again, how can I show a better tomorrow? It's the types of books I am drawn to, other ones that talk about these kinds of things. It's growth is good.

How does being an engineer impact you as a CEO? I think engineering is a great preparation for it. Good companies are complex adaptive systems. There's a good deal of game theory in incentive system design. Engineering is like how to get a large system to end up doing the thing that it is supposed to do. Like it's like, that's basically

what you get computers to do. Especially for kind of engineers, like I did a lot of like sort of internet and network engineering. They're like, this might be too much in your weeds, but like the moment there's a network cable, you don't know if a thing that you send on a wire will arrive on the other side. So you actually have to build the system with like, in such a way that self healing, right? Like you have to build a system that like if something is out of order, if a packet

doesn't arrive, but it can recover from that. I think that's sort of really odd, esoteric way of talking about it. But I think knowing how to build complex systems that orchestrate together and to run like a global e-commerce platform that heal themselves in the unforeseen, hard to predict problems, actually's kind of pretty amazing preparation for building companies because they happen to also be very non-deterministic. So it's pretty good.

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to artists pursuing their vision, athletic nicotine offers the lift you've been looking for. Learn more at athleticnicotine.com slash tetra and experience next level performance with athletic nicotine. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Tell me about efficiency. When do we benefit from efficiency and when is efficiency not a good thing? I used to talk a lot about efficiency and I think it's still the right way to get at

it because people are more familiar, but I'm actually more very against waste. And it's actually a different thing. Like to me, like wasting things, it's just like, it's a crutch for your craft. Like I think great craftsmen like make the most out of what they got. Yes, those things can also be described as being inefficient, but it's actually not the inefficiency that's offensive to me. It's just like actually the waste that's produced because that ends up being like, especially it usually accumulates and then has very high interest. I mean, I think the ideal thing to do to build is something that's beautiful all the way through, including

the processes and therefore which aren't wasteful and efficiency is almost a secondary property of that. And then there's times where you just need to be, just a step out of this because you're doing something that's only needed once, and then it just like, kind of doesn't matter, right? Like sometimes you just need to do really unscalable things to do it. Action causes information, and instead of going

and building an entire like piece of software, just pretending that it exists is like a really good thing. Like startups learn this, right? Like they're just like put something in the market, which might just be a landing page. And they only build it and people are actually interested in it. I got so lucky. I built all of Shopify before I told anyone about it. Like I imagined it would be wrong.

I mean, it kind of was. I sort of like added up like doggedly pursuing it and eventually making it good. But yeah. So what's your relationship of efficiency? Well, I too don't like waste, but I understand that in the process to get where you're going to get to the best, sometimes the time aspect of it's not in your control. That's right. And sometimes the number of iterations it takes to get it right is not really in your control.

Totally. So it's not inefficient to do a hundred versions if you're hunting for this thing. That's world class. It is very, it gets tricky even talking about efficiency, right? So I can tell you the way I loved to write code with my colleagues early. Myself philosophy on code is like for every problem, as probably a 100 lines of code that solve it extremely elegantly, and no one in the world is smart enough to find those. So we end up needing 5,000 lines of code to actually like given skills issues and maybe to make it readable enough to

other humans who will end up having to make changes to our future. Sometimes people do hundreds, thousands, or millions of lines of code for something like this, and that's inefficient. In order to find those, what we've done is we set ourselves constraints. We just love these constraints where we said, okay, we are gonna build this feature,

and we start in the morning and we pair program. Two people in front of computer, we sort of keyboard back and forth. And at the end of the day, we would throw away our code. And we would ship the feature the day that we could implement all of it in the day. And it would fully work all the way to the end. And that just meant we ended up really learning about the problem domain. So this is similar to what you say.

To me, that's incredibly efficient because I want the efficiency in the product. I think the efficiency in the product. I think the process, people should not talk about efficiency to find the serendipity that leads to the best possible insight. You can't know. Sometimes you're just a vessel for the right idea coming. You can help serendipity by just really deeply understanding the problem, which you explore through code. Sometimes or not understanding it at all. Yeah, that's true. Is the other way.

Because sometimes coming at it from not knowing what's possible allows you to do things. Yeah. I did not know that the world hated e-commerce. Everyone lost a lot of money doing dot com. No one was going to invest into e-commerce software. I just didn't know. I also didn't know that it's usually a couple of hundred people working on it. I just tried it and I used a better programming language than everyone else, at least one that fit me, and then it worked.

It happened. Tell me the difference between hiring someone who's very experienced versus smart beginners. Okay, so there are two kinds of intelligences, I think. There's like fluid intelligence and then there's this crystallized intelligence. Describe the two. There's like fluid intelligence and then there's crystallized intelligence, right? So it's... Describe the two. Fluid intelligence is essentially the sort of curiosity-driven, like, I want to figure this out.

It's just like, how quickly can you pick something up? How are you... Do you like playing with ideas? In my interviews with people, I try to find a thing that they're very passionate about and then ask them about, I make changes to what they're passionate about in such a way that they have to like re-imagine something. Like if someone is like really into soccer for instance, I'm like, okay, we all wake up, this crazy thing happened,

Earth's core stopped rotating quite as quickly and gravity is now 0.7. 0.7 of a G, so 30% less. Which positions in the game of soccer end up being more important? And I have no idea what the right answer is, but I want to play with ideas. That's fluid intelligence in this moment. I love that. Then there's crystallized exchange, which really is wisdom. If you've been programming for a long time, you've picked up a lot of patterns, you know what not to do. In so many situations, you can say the words, oh, this is another one of those, and already have an idea for how to solve it because you've encountered the problem before.

I'm making this distinction because this distinction is actually invisible in a very, very, very profound way day to day. When you work with your colleagues, it's like your colleagues are incredibly helpful to have on a very, very, very profound way day to day. When you work with your colleagues, your colleagues are incredibly helpful to have in a project, but you don't know what side it's coming from. What happens, though, is that, again, in the world of AI, just AI comes and suddenly everything is new. Suddenly the patterns end up not actually mattering so much. I had these incredibly interesting experiences where some of our best engineers, we put on

the project that really, really, really need to succeed, and we put them on really, really, really need to succeed AI projects, and they kind of didn't contribute. And we're like, well, hold on, why is that happening? And then we put an intern on it, and everything just goes incredibly well. And so I think what's the magic is for people who end up just doing both. Because unfortunately what I've observed in these 20 years of building Shopify is that

some people are okay with the overall amount of intelligence they bring to Bayer to be the same and slowly it's all converting from fluid to crystallized. They are day to day just as helpful, but they've stopped cultivating their skills, right? They've stopped reading the books, they stopped tinkering with new technologies and you just don't know and then everything changes

and suddenly you find out very quickly. But some people keep it and then they compound and that's like just, when that happens, it's just magic, right? Like people who are like deeply curious, but also know a lot are just like, there's no better thing than it's intoxicating working with people on new problems like this. And so those are the people I'm incredibly drawn to. What is chaos engineering? Well, that's a solve for things being too derivative, too static.

I think stasis is death. When things are static, that means you're not advancing. And if you're not advancing, that means you're sliding soon, right? Like backwards, usually. And so, okay, what's chaos engineering? Well, chaos engineering has a fun history. Like they are, again, this incredible thing that so many millions of people trust us with their livelihood is very real. And then there's downtime because some piece of hardware failed and everyone is going,

well, look, a piece of hardware failed, it's an act of God, so to speak, it just happens. I'm like, well, if it happens, then that means we have to engineer around it, right? Like, so we have to build the redundancies to make that not affect the system. And what I hear back is like that it's just hard to test because it happens rarely. I'm like, cool. So you can make up potential failures. Yeah. So I log into our server farm and turn off my service.

And I just started doing that. And it was better than doing it when something fails, it usually is at night. And then pages sometimes are slept through and then suddenly you have real problem. So let's make this actually happen more frequently because if failure is more common, it's actually easier to reason about. It's actually bad that failure is rare.

If it's a real part of a system, you want it to be frequent. So initially this was, I did this manually. And you get good at solving the problem. Exactly. You just know what this thing... You build that muscle. Years later, actually, Simtaleb wrote a fantastic book on this exact thing called antifragile.

He coined a name for this kind of thing. He said, hey, after you break a bone, after it heals, that part of the bone is the strongest part of the bone. And no language on planet Earth actually has a word for that kind of thing. No culture has discovered that certain things get better by breaking them or disrupting them, even though the concept is clearly all around us. So peer's engineering, so very quickly the operations people figured out, they can just set alerts on me logging into servers.

So they had plenty of warning and then that so, but we encoded into the system. We ended up like building a random thing that something fails more frequently. It became a thing. And then eventually I kind of loved it so much as a thing, but I wanted it in company because I also don't want things to be too static. Yeah. Right. So you don't want every day to be the same, because that's like...

Boring. Boring. Like, so we just come up with annoying stuff to do. Like, use your mouse if you're non-dominant hand days. It's such a bullshit move. It's like challenges. Yeah, yeah, just like today you have to put your mouse on the other side of a keyboard and now to fix. It's like challenges. Yeah, it's like today you have to put your mouse on the other side of a keyboard and

just like you just have to make do. By the end of the day, everyone's quite good at it. What are some other ones besides left hand and mouse day? Best thing we did, and this is like I feel extremely lucky that this happened. We were in a negotiation, we had some possible landlord. Eventually he threatened us to just kick us out, out of like our office, right? And we were already starting to, you know, we were going to build another office because we were outgoing this one and we were kind of getting pretty tired of finding him passed out every night on some couch somewhere. This is like this entire thing.

So this kind of situation with Orlando did not work for either side. Then we were like, what would we actually do if we would be kicked out? And Dan, my co-founder said, well, we should really have a plan B for this. Like, we should know what to do. Let's think about this. And we sort of said, OK, let's have a session. Let's think about what we actually do. And by the end of the session, we're like, you know,

let's make that plan A. Like so, we sent everyone email the next weekend that Forbes wouldn't work in the office for the next month, and we all work remotely now. Like to build some empathy with a few people who work remotely to us. We just shut down the office. This was in 2016.

I mean, day one was no one got anything done. Turns out some people didn't even actually have reasonable internet, so they went to each other. Our interns, we used to serve lunch, so some of our interns were completely dependent on this and almost starved. So we had one cook in the company, he asked if he can buy a taco truck, an old one, and just like drive sandwiches to people. So everyone kind of, and then some people met in coffee shops. Everyone kind of made it work. Like by day three, we were cracking. So that was really cool and a cool experience.

And then a couple of years later, COVID happened and we were like, fuck, we trained for this. We knew how to do this. We knew, we had our systems were so well set up for this eventually, because we figured out how to have a culture that actually understands etiquettes about video calls. And we had this all kind of figured out. And so some of these things ended up being really, really, really not bearing for our culture.

Another good thing is we randomly delete meetings. We're currently in meetings, we often delete all of them every year and a half or so. Just like we figured the good ones come back and the bad ones, no one wants to tell the person who started it that it's a bad meeting. So it's like a garbage collection thing. It's like- No meetings.

Just like delete them all. And I mean, if it's a meeting with an external person, it stays, of course. But like all internal meetings get deleted and people hated it. Now it's like people cheer, like they are so happy. It's like completely unstructured time for actually doing their craft, right?

What are some of the requests you've made of your team that would likely not have come from other CEOs? I mean, like I really tried basically everything at some point, like when we started a company, again, I didn't take a salary for a long time, but everyone who got salary earned the same amount of money. Like we started basically straight up communism. So it's funny to think about this now.

But like I think deriving some of the capitalism values from first principles is also a good thing, a good exercise. And then I read a book, actually a paper at some point, called The Tyranny of Structuralistness. It was fascinating. I think it was like about the 1960s feminism movement. But basically, the thing they analyzed wasn't important. What it basically said is, a hierarchy always exists, is what it said. The only choice you have is are you documenting it or not documenting it. And then it made the case that documenting it was way better for everyone. It just really, really changed

my mind on some of these things. And so I don't even know if it was that interesting, but what I really loved was this idea of some things are simply true, and the choice that you make is are you documenting it or not? And I found I document. Sometimes that means I have to tell people inconvenient things,

but it's just more honest, right? Like so recently, like I, this is a memo which a bunch of people have read online. They just said, look, using AI reflexively to solve problems is a baseline expectation now. Two and a half, three years in, AI tools around, just play with them and try them. And if you find they can help you with something that's valuable to you, then that's good. And there's always early adopters like me

who are just like, try it. But then some people- Some people are really resistant. Some people are like, well, I'll wait and see. And I think that's actually, that's pretty optimal. I actually don't think it's terribly efficient to try absolutely everything. That's a lot of work. In the same way, I'm now reading books that are 30 years old. I actually don't think it's terribly efficient to try absolutely everything.

That's a lot of work. In the same way, I'm now reading books that are 30 years old. Let's do the things that stand the test of time. But I think in performance, if we have someone who uses AI a lot and well, and someone was just as good at their craft but doesn't, the person who's using AI, for instance, in engineering, is just significantly more productive. How do we think about this in terms of performance management? And the only correct answer here is, well, that affects things. So that person who isn't, we need to tell them that that's what they compete with now, right? Because if no one says, hey, this expectation is set now, then suddenly their career goes away

or isn't going as well as it should based on their skill. And that's unfair. So anyway, send a memo about this and just like explain this. And apparently that captured the imagination. So interesting. How was it received? I mean, yeah, like internally, everyone's like, oh, that's cool. And I mean, it has some language about before you ask for the grow headcount, try it with

AI first. And, you know, so the media did an entire construction out of this about this being a layoff notice, which it really wasn't. I just want people to have instances of playing with AI. We create a lot of internal tools, just sort of activism. We teach, we have channels, we have get-togethers, there's an evening AI tinkering fest now that people have put together. It's actually our non-engineers who have taken the call the most.

There are just incredible things coming out of sales team. So it's like it was an unmitigated success inside of a company because it did share the excitement with AI because, well, if it's expected, I should probably get on this. And turns out, you know, the funny thing about AI, or at least the large language models is fundamentally you communicate with them, right? You write to them, we call it a prompt, but really it's like it's a document, a conversation. You tell them to do something and you provide context. You know who isn't very good at communicating? It's usually document, a conversation. You tell them to do something and you provide context. You know who isn't very good at communicating?

It's usually the engineers. So in a lot of ways, it's actually a wonderfully democratizing. It's a life skill. Yeah, there's a lot of fantastic communicators in every group of a company. And they are really having a moment to shine because they can just describe

how to be helpful for this thing. And then it is. Have you experimented with vibe coding? Yes. I love the name, actually. I am now aspiring to cause vibe entrepreneurship or vibe business growing or whatever. It's not as catchy. You know, you've become like a spirit animal to the vibe coding movement. It's so ridiculous.

Yeah, the picture is so perfect with like the headphones. It's fantastic. Yeah, vibe coding is really it's funny, right? Like programming is very much early in this, right? Like, and I love programming. I also love programming with AI. It's like feels exactly like back in the day when I was working with friends, two people in front of a monitor,

now I have someone who has all this time and we can do it together. And I have a second person looking, quote unquote, person looking over my shoulder. Some programming is also just told some, it's like, it's just a lot of like reading a lot of documents and learning an API. I just like, it just knows it. It's wonderful. So you gave an example of writing that note to the staff and then the media misrepresenting it.

Yeah. And have you been misrepresented in any other way? Oh yeah. I mean, like there's lots of history there. Like Shopify is a platform. We like white tent. We had like, you know, 2016, we had the, it was Elizabeth Warren. It was Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump campaigned stores on Shopify.

And a lot of internal consternation with that. People wanted us to commit to being a tutor side and I thought it was quite ridiculous. I didn't think there should be a liberal Shopify and a conservative Shopify. That seems ridiculous. Other than by law, are there any censorship rules that you have of what you won't put on Shopify? Yeah, there are. There's an acceptable use policy,

which is I think sort of the conclusion that a lot of industry has gotten to. These are living documents. They have to change because divisiveness or edginess maybe, edginess on a spectrum. Like my pirate poker set is probably like, it's probably not zero because poker might be seen as gambling. So like, let's put it like 0.1% on edginess, right? So this has always been something, it has to be a living document. You have to kind of create

acceptable use policy, but you do also have to have a big tent in some international fortitude to deal with this because these are usually valuable societal conversation as long as there's no harm implied at which point it's like, like the laws are very clear and we act super fast. This is another area where AI is so fantastic. We can hold various sort of complex cases up to policies and decide super quickly. So the internet is just kind of really getting much better because AI, it was insanely difficult to institutionalize these things because these platforms are so big. You're a service provider, but you're not a content creator. That's right.

We don't provide amplification, right? So we don't make an editorial decision. So we don't make an editorial decision. So we host. Now, if people purchase, then there's economic value accruing to it. And a lot of people, some people anyway, make the case that that's an act of direct support. That is a hard case to make in my mind. Well, you don't support any of the things

that are on the platform. Right, exactly. We are a hosting provider. We are like a street. We are not terribly unlike the streets that are used by the FedEx truck or FedEx truck itself. It's infrastructure. So anyway, at least this is the way we see it. Smart people can disagree about these things. There's no perfect answer to this. So we do our best. Yeah. But it seems like if it's against the law, that's a fair lot.

Oh yeah, yeah, that's easy. That's a clear line. But anything beyond that seems difficult. This is what we, like, I think society should make this choice. I think that's the right process because, yeah, like it should be well debated. And what you look for is to find the best set of trade-offs. What are some accepted assumptions you've questioned

when building something new? What are some accepted assumptions you've questioned when building something new? I love just invalidating assumptions. You know, just again, we started off with one single salary and that became pretty untenable very quickly. So there's a long history about it. I used to think that I can convince people to just like, when something went wrong,

my first reaction initially was that I would talk to people about why this went wrong and like, we just sort of like, try to get them to like, do things differently. And like, I mean, there's some of that, but like, I actually think, like, there's almost two different visions for Yume Kapala. Like, it's like, that we are like, perfectable and that we are like, not. And if you like that we are like perfectable and that we are like not. And if you accept that we are not, what it does is that you get inspired to just find for a best set of trade-offs when building a company. And it's just like, I really had to change my mind on this, but now I really, really love it.

I'm like, look, I think everyone's allowed to be an intelligent actor in a local incentive system. If my comp plan is stupid and there's an activity that overpays, even though it doesn't... I'm good for you. You hack the system. Let's go. It's my job to make a system. That's good. And that's an interesting game. That's much more interesting. I used to think that people had figured out how to build good companies. I definitely no longer think so. I think all companies are terrible, including mine. I think we will figure out in the next 20 years how to build good companies, but we are all going to be terribly embarrassed by the companies we used to run in the 2020s.

And I now see it as my goal in life to be slightly less embarrassed by my company than everyone else who's retiring with me at the same time. So I just think companies are understudied and underappreciated. What else exists that allows just a ton of fascinating, deeply carrying, inspiring people to just get to spend their day together working on worthwhile things that then, in our case, we make tools, so those tools help others. And it's just like, it's great. Companies are technology themselves.

And we should all be glad that they... I know they have a bad rap at times and because sometimes they do dumb stuff, but I just like, I love companies. I think they're so cool. So I think universities are only other thing that's socially acceptable for you to just like go all in on like researching something, right? And if it wasn't for university and for companies, how do you actually channel your craft into something over a very long period of time,

aligning incentives so well? Tell me some of the things you've changed your mind about over the course of your life. Oh man, like that would be fun to prepare for. That's what I would love to think more about that. Things I changed my mind on. Like, I mean, I used to think business is bullshit. Now I have to, like, maybe it is,

but like, now I'm invested enough that, like, I can no longer claim that. I have lots of strong opinions that I attempt to hold weekly. I actually really, really love when people change my mind. For instance, like, we were perfectly office-centric culture. We built amazing offices.

My co-founder designed floor space. We open-sourced them. They ended up being template for many tech companies building their places. And we designed everything for serendipity and people just drawing people through the building and just making them up, all these kind of things. So I was totally against remote remote work and then COVID happened and I committed a company to just only remote work, right? Like so

we're probably the largest remote company in the world and people got real rib lash from this but like I mean it's still remote now it's still remote. So since COVID you've gone remote. We have gone remote. Tell me advantages and disadvantages. OK, right off the bat, it's worse. Which is like, I think, I mean, it's probably surprising to hear from someone who's committed for it. It's worse because it's like the office does so much for us. The community. It's like you ship something, you do something.

You walk to a water cooler. Someone gives you a fist bump. The afterglow of that lasts weeks. Someone sends you a fist bump emoji on Slack, you forgot about it in a second, it just doesn't hit you. So it feels muted to do remote work in this way, or at least the bland version of it. So it's harder. It's a little bit like training for Marathon at altitude, I suppose. I hadn't done that, but that's what people say.

That's really hard. I believe them. So why do you do it? Well, there are significant advantages as well. And it's a set of trade-offs that is worth doing for some companies in some cases. In our case, the problem was we've started in Ottawa, Canada.

That was our biggest office. We relocated lots and lots of people there. But it's a small city, it's a million people. Ended up having a lot of great technology people, but never as deep as like another city would be. We had offices in Toronto and Montreal, New York. So we had this situation where like everyone in the offices ended up like going to rooms

and usually talking to other offices on the screen, no one there, like so often. So it was like this really weird form of hybrid that just like felt first than all other options. And so what we ended up saying, okay, we are going to be remote by default now. And we get really, really good at this. And this required just like complete, like, and we get really, really good at this. And this required just like complete, like, I said, don't port the office online, port the internet to the company, right? Because on the internet, there's like

communities of excellence that are all remote. Like, a lot of the big open source software for our world has been written by people who actually never met, to make an even more geeky analogy like, do you know what World of Warcraft is? It's a video game that... I've heard of it, but I don't play games. Like lots of people playing together doing very complicated things or like 40 people going doing something very difficult requires a lot of coordination. There's real excellence.

There's people doing something for the first time in the world and there's like cultures of excellence that form online with people who have never met each other. Funny enough, my wife is actually ran and wrote a book called guilt. Like, so she ended up having more experience how to run a remote culture than I did. So I learned from her. And so they were like, okay, well, it's been done.

Therefore it's something we can figure out. And I think we did. And so now the people who work for a company can engage in like a really amazing lifestyle design. Like some people just choose to move downtown, some people choose to move out to the cottage. And it's just like talent is incredibly well distributed. And so it's actually worked really, really well for us.

And I still wouldn't recommend it for everyone. And I would never recommend it to a new company, especially these sort of early days. Finding itself. Finding itself. Yeah. Like we have lots of rituals, such as, I mean, once a year, like next month,

we get everyone for a week to Toronto, including from Japan and everywhere in the world. Just like for a week, we just work on a big industrial hall, and we have a big creativity and like just events and because building relationships is very hard remotely, but if you're doing it deliberately you can also make up for a lot of time by just, I mean this is my conferences are great. How is your company structured different than other companies?

It's very functional. I believe in craft. You can be the best paid person in a company as a craft person. When I use craft person, that means not manager. So we think most companies have too many managers, too many layers. All our managers were hired as programmers, designers first and then, because we think it works best to work for people that have a full appreciation of the crafts that you are yourself trying to cultivate. This is just like not usually done in industry and I just find it's... I don't understand how this works. What size teams do you have? We love the team of four. This is our favorite. We start almost everything as a team of four. And what would the four team members be? Ideally, we talk about T-shaped people.

It's basically people with a very wide set of skills and one significant specialization in the middle. It's like programmers who also have hopefully good taste but also know enough about design and how the intent works. Sometimes people have a law degree because they went later to the world of engineering. So we put teams together. Hopefully everyone has functioning understanding

of everyone else's job, but also therefore have deference to their specialization. Like we love teams that fall in love with the problems. We just like, I want them to go and if you're building a point of sale software, I want them to ideally build it in someone's store. So we will send messages to our customers and say, this is weird, but like, can we rent space in one of your stores? Like, can you just put like, like an office in there and where people can just talk to you about what you need and work with you on these kinds of things. So action causes information.

We love to just go and just start building. And ideally, throw away what you build as you understand the problem better, just like we discussed earlier. And then if a team has to become bigger, after about eight or so, we split it into a subtask. And then we have a system that also makes the remote thing work, but it's called GSD,

which literally stands for get shit done. And where every team has a page of project and they do updates and they can do that so they don't have to have meetings with other people about informing them how it's going. Just like everyone knows they can go on GSD and read and you can follow projects. You have IIS now making briefs about all the projects in one area. So, you know, just like avoiding all this kind of things that distract people who build things.

So it's easy to find out what's going on. Yes, like it's an active process. You're not like, you can't sit there and expect like operations team to book a meeting and then brief you on everything that's going on. It's at your fingertips, right? So, yeah, it's all available. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I try to not do this sort of corporate baby proofing that exists in a lot of companies, right? I've always found that especially the companies that call themselves to be the professional companies, when you look inside, they look like when you go to visit people who just had their first baby, right? Like, it's like every electrical outlet has these things in them and all the corners around it and there's baby gates everywhere. It's like they're not moving for 10 months, by the way. It's just like they can't even get to these. But it's funny because I know why it happened.

But then if you go to a professional company, they have a dress code. You know, it's like, what is that? You can't even trust your people to dress. It's like, it's amazing. Right? It's wild. We try to have not too much guidance, but a huge amount of tools.

How would you describe the company culture? I mean, like, island of misfit toys. It's a random assortment of people that are all united in that they're giving a shit. I think when you make a product, people will feel it at some level other than the conscious if the people will create it and give a shit. And there's nothing that allows you to fake that. And so that's the thing that I think unites us. The beautiful thing about Shopify is, again, you're making a product that helps really inspiring people.

Right, like our customers are incredible. And it's like, I worked with a banker at some point and just like, I was so dismayed because I got the sense that they treat their customers not as their customers, but rather as their crop. There was like fees to be harvested. And that's like an adversarial relationship with your customers. It's like, to hell, that's terrible.

So best thing we can do for becoming a bigger company growing tomorrow is to make our customers today more successful. Right? Like, which is like, we're on the same side of the table. And I don't need to go around and tell everyone, hey, you need to talk with our customers. They want to do that anyway. It's like, it is really fun to have a meeting about e-commerce with Kardashians.

It's just like really, like it's also by way, they're incredibly good entrepreneurs. Like immediately, like five minutes into a meeting, you will learn, of course you've been incredibly successful because you're insanely smart and you just understand this stuff at an intuitive level. And the way you do anything is how you do everything. Therefore your e-commerce strategy is absolutely mint.

And that's a wonderful thing you find out. How has the scale of your business positively impacted the business? Like again, I love the small teams. I preach for small teams, we form small teams. I would have imagined that I'm gonna grow shop with a great size and then I'm gonna stop doing this and then go work with a small team afterwards because it seems consistent. I no longer think so, partly because we figured out how to scale.

I think Shopify is often described as the largest small company imaginable, and I think that works quite well. The awesome thing about scale is it is such a gift to be able to be focused on more than one thing. Because focus is super important and usually up to a certain size, it's either focused or unfocused. After a certain size, you can actually be focused on multiple things. And that's just such an amazing accelerant for everything. And you don't burn out. Because the burnout comes from too much focus on one thing. Great.

And like our sort of eternal theory of how to have the best internal career, with Shopify again you can be an innovative contributor for life. We call them mastery levels. You can just climb the mastery levels and it gives you more compensation and career advancement. What we really celebrate is when people, we call it do the jungle gym. Just go from one area,

follow down some zip line to a completely different area. I have an intern, Anna, and she's like, at some point she ran HR, and now when she did mergers and acquisitions, and then she joined product teams to work on point of sale and out and eventually like currently she runs real estate for us. She's like, Toby, why do you do this to me? Like why? It's like, well, you're competent. You're just like you like I have problems. You like solving problems. Let's go. Like for 15 minutes after Anna takes over real estate, it sounds boring, but you know, we have some cool real estate. We have suddenly everything is going well because she has this perspective of all these parts of a company. And it's like that's also contrary to how people think about their career.

Right. So the beautiful thing is when you get to build a company and you're as lucky to like have it be a success, is you can try to counterfactualize. Like there's multiple forms of failure. And failure is, of course, the whole thing is financially a failure. And let's clear that bar. But there's actually almost a more profound failure of, at 10 years or so, you wake up and you're like, you build a company you wouldn't want to work for.

That feels pretty dystopian in a way, because there's so many companies I would not want to work for. Why did I add one? Why is my life work to add one more to the stack? It's actually build a company that's worth working for. Like let's focus on craft and giving a shit. It's fine that this stuff isn't quantifiable. It's fine that that sounds dumb when you say it,

but it's true and like may eventually sound smart when people figure out that it's actually working. Would you say you have a basic philosophy or is everything up for grabs? No, I think I have a basic philosophy about quality. Like I fundamentally believe no one sort of operates on their full potential. Like I think we all underperform our sort of hardware. But I think helping people get more out of whatever they got is like, that's what tools do, right?

The difference between modernity and 30,000 years ago is not genetics. It's like the tools we have, we can build houses, airplanes, get to space. We have internet. We're tool builders as a species, right? So I think the best tools in the world make people end up having been more ambitious

than they actually thought they were. Because you see a possibility that you didn't know was possible. Exactly. You take it one step at a time. I think we make too much about this sort of... People need courage. People should emphasize courage more than ambition, I think.

And they have very different things. Ambition is an outcome. Like it's measured based on actually a goal. People should emphasize the courage and the habit to support getting to the goal. And to try fast. Swing. Yes. Like a bias towards action.

Right? Like it's like just do something and have the courage to put something out there, make something. If you don't make something in life, you can only end up being defined by the things you consume. And I think that's a different existence. That's very interesting. So we want more makers.

That is my philosophy. So causing that is a thing. Shopify really is a mission-based company. Some of our customers become many multi-billion dollar businesses and sales a year. One of our customers got to a billion dollars of revenue before us did. Like we raised them and they won, which is like the coolest thing ever. And so, and they started on Shopify. So the heart is like all in causing entrepreneurship and that just overrides all other priorities.

And it turns out over time that actually arcs to the right business outcomes too. And if it wouldn't, that would be okay. Right? Like it's like, because that's the prime director. But it does. But it happens to do it. Yeah, which is like, I mean, that's the, like, this is why I feel so lucky, right? Like, because again, I would have insisted on it anyway. Tetragrammaton is a podcast. Tetragrammaton is a website. Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge.

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