The Game with Alex Hormozi - I Interviewed the President of Shopify | Ep 651

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Get an inside look at Shopify's exponential growth and its impact on the e-commerce industry! Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) is joined by Shopify’s President, Harley Finkelstein, as he dives deep into the philosophy and operation of the company, learning how the platform has become a cornerstone for modern entrepreneurs. He reveals the key factors behind Shopify's user-friendly design, robust support system, and its vision for the future of commerce. The conversation also highlights the role of innovation and customer focus in driving business growth.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(0:00) - Introduction and the excitement of entrepreneurship(3:01) - Journey from zero to hero(5:56) - Entrepreneurship and the t-shirt business(8:47) - Starting my own DJ business(11:47) - Starting a snowboard shop(14:47) - Starting a business by solving your own problem(17:27) - Increasing your luck surface area(20:19) - The lowest cost of failure in starting a business(23:28) - Shifting towards business owners(26:36) - Focusing on SMBs and e-commerce(29:41) - Key business principles(32:55) - Building a long-term business with patience and generosity(36:03) - The Build the Business competition and its impact on growth(38:55) - Scaling and growth strategies on Shopify(41:44) - Finding the perfect fit for your product(44:31) - Authentic sponsorships and growth strategies(47:30) - Building partnerships for business growth(50:21) - Creating your own affiliate program(53:02) - Making partners rich(56:10) - Building generational wealth through sharing(59:02) - The power of vulnerability(1:02:11) - Shopify's founders mentality(1:05:26) - The importance of employee tracks and transparency in communication(1:08:19) - The importance of specialization and teamwork(1:11:07) - Importance of micromanagement as a leader(1:13:49) - Alignment and disagreement in Shopify(1:16:53) - The changing landscape of retail(1:20:03) - Authenticity and being yourself(1:22:51) - Authenticity and connecting with others in entrepreneurship(1:25:38) - Find your passion and solve a problem(1:28:35) - A fun and valuable conversation with AlexFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

A hundred billion dollar company. This is a pretty exciting time for entrepreneurship. You're at that point in your stage. Like, this is important. The cost of failure of starting a business today is by far the lowest has ever been. Business advice to Harley 10 years ago, you've got one thing you can tell. Welcome everybody to The Game. I got a special episode for you guys today.

As you know, I do not have many guests on my podcast. I don't like sharing the spotlight. So if somebody's going to be on, they've got to be really, really special and have true expertise. to give. And I think the person I have with me today or that will be joining us today definitely meets that in spades. And so Harley is a god amongst men, a legend in the making, and runs a small company. You may not have heard of it. Shopify, which right now is a publicly traded company. It's worth right now. I think it was 80 billion. If I'm not mistaken, probably correct me there. I think it's closer to 100 billion, but yeah, I was 20 billion.

You just round it down by $20 billion, which for someone like me, like, I don't come from this world. This is, you know, I'm a tourist here. That's a lot of money. So a hundred billion dollar company. So that's a, so 10, 10 figures is a billion, 11, 12, a 12 figure company. There you go. And just the only thing that rivals the business success that he has is just the humility that he brings to it. He was willing to hop on a call with me before this and we hit it off.

And I was like, I know my audience would love to talk to you and just kind of hear your perspective of entrepreneurship. And you have such an interesting story that I think will relate to so many people in my audience from the people who are just trying to figure out what they want to do to make money all the way to, you know, right now, 20% of my audience is, you know, winning entrepreneurs with, you know, large companies and so forth. So we definitely have the gamut from an entrepreneurship perspective. of kind of beginning, middle, and end.

And yeah, so thank you so much for taking time to join us today. It's a great honor to be here, Alex. Thank you so much. I'm a big fan of the pod. And I think what you're doing is making business and entrepreneurship. I mean, very similar to the mission chava. You're making it more accessible. And I think that is the coolest thing in the world, this idea that business was out

of touch for most people, both financially from a capital perspective or because of knowledge and inside and experience. I think those days are long over. And I think we were going through an entrepreneurial renaissance. now and I think people like you and your community is leading the way in that front. Well, I appreciate it. And I mean, everything that we do is just for everybody on the pod is, I know Harley and I agree on this, is to just try and break down as many barriers between where people are and where they

want to be, right? A lot of people have this vision for their lives they want and there are things that get in their way. Some of them are between your ears. Some of it are between your hands and keyboard. And so Shopify is taking a lot of that between hands and keyboard out of the way to decrease the friction of actually getting a product launch, get it online, actually get customers, and you can do it from anywhere in the world, which is, again, something that 30 years ago just

wasn't really a thing. And now everyone can have access to this stuff. So I'm going to go, I'm going to kind of break this pot into three kind of sections loosely. So first kind of, chunk, I want to talk about looking back. And I think that'll that'll relate to a lot of people who are listening or watching right now. Kind of like zero to hero. Like what got you to hear and all the things that that come with that uh second chunk we'll go over what's hero to to superhero right like what is what's the forward look like what's the future look what do you see um and i'll dive into some more specific details around that stuff and then at the very end we'll go kind of like final nuggets and wrapping it up of of like forward and backwards what are kind of like the principles and truths

that um that you would try and pass on to the people who are listening cool let's do it all right that's our roadmap so i know a little bit about the story but my audience doesn't um so So you have this really unique thing of being employee one and customer one. Can you walk us through like just the beginning of shop, like even the decision to jump into Shopify? What, what the risks that were associated with that? What was like prior to that? And then like, what were the factors that got you into that? Step one, because I think that's where a lot of people are right now.

Yeah. So I was born in Montreal, like born in Canada. I moved to South Florida with my parents and my sisters when I was very young. I was always entrepreneurial. My parents did not have a lot of money. But my father, to his credit, my dad's an immigrant. He came to Canada from Hungary in the revolution. My grandparents are Holocaust survivors.

I mean, we were poor immigrants. And although my dad never had much money to give me, because I always had these little silly business ideas when I was a kid, what my dad did for me, which was very valuable was even like when I was like 10 years old, every silly business idea that I had, he would validate it by actually making me these business. cards that would say the name of the business and my name on it. And I'm now a dad. I have two daughters, Bailey and Zoe, who are five and seven. And now that I think about parenting and stuff, I'm like, I think a lot more about that story and those stories of my father making those business cards,

because at the time, it didn't seem that profound. And in hindsight now, as, you know, a father myself, I realize these small things that we do for our kids have this massive impact. And so even though these businesses were all very silly, you know, trading, like trading cards. And, and, you know, and lemonade stands and eventually a DJ business when I was 13 years old, I was always an entrepreneurial kid. And partially it was because I thought entrepreneurship was this fun activity.

Like I wasn't really into sports, playing them or watching them. I wasn't really into video games. I was kind of into like this idea of like, you know, selling something. And that was always fun for me. Moved to South Florida, went, finished high school there

and moved back to Canada when I was 17, 2001, to go to McGill University. McGill is in Montreal, where I live now. I went to McGill because it was cheap. My parents didn't have much money. And so because I was born in Canada, I kind of got this in-state tuition thing. Unfortunately, very quickly, once I moved to Montreal, I started McGill, my dad got some

trouble and our family lost everything. And once again, I sort of pulled out this tool that I'd been tinkering with throughout my life called entrepreneurship to make some money. I started a teacher business when I was at McGill made teachers for a bunch of universities across Canada, like the promotional T-shirts you got the first day of school, Frosh or orientation stuff. And I loved it. It was great. I wasn't necessarily passionate about T-shirts, but I love this sort of idea of being able to support myself and help my family. I was really...

Can I hit on this real quick? Yeah, please go ahead. Sure. Absolutely. Jump in any way you on. The point that Harley just made, I just want to underline, which is that the first business he had, one, I don't think that you thought this is going to be the business. will have for the rest of my life. This is my dream. This is my vision. You were trying to make money. It's always. And I think a lot of people who are aspiring are trying to find this like perfect puzzle piece that's going to fit all of these things. It's going to be my passion. It's going to be fulfilling. It can be the next Amazon. When a lot of times, I think it's a big fallacy because

the first business just gives you a little bit of light to show you the next step to take is because you learn a bunch of stuff from that first business. And so I just want to just take the pause for the audience that everyone's like, I got to find the perfect thing when promo shirts for freshmen and sophomores, it's, it's, it's not glamorous. And in fact, the only unfair advantage that I had was that I was selling T-shirts to a customer who was who I also was part of that demographic meeting. I was selling T-shirts to the student council treasurer or procurement office so they can give them out to students. And I myself was a student. And so the pitch that I made was that one, I have very low overhead because it's just me.

I was the CEO and the janitor. I was printing T-shirts myself. So one, I'm going to be cheaper. Two, I'm going to care a lot because I really need this to work. And three, I'm going to make T-shirts for people like me. And so I kind of know what your students want because I am myself and one of your students. Just to go step back, because I think you said it was super interesting. So I sort of skipped over this.

But when I was 13 years old, the business that really got started, like, started me in entrepreneurship, a real business was, again, I was 13. So, you know, I wouldn't put too much, you know, credence on the fact that it was a real business. But it was a real thing was I wanted to be a DJ. I was, I'm Jewish. I went to a lot of bar mitzvahs when I was 13 years old. And I thought the DJs were the coolest people in the world. They were sort of magicians in my mind. They would take a group of people that were sitting down eating some rubber chicken dinner in some hotel ballroom.

And like three minutes later, using their voice and using lighting and music, there'd be a conga line. I just thought they were just, they were like magicians. I called around a bunch of DJ companies to ask them if they would hire me. And of course, they said no, because I was 13, had no experience and didn't know how to DJ. But because I had this sort of, you know, like silly confidence that these business cards had provided for me, I had this idea to start my own DJ company and hire myself. So that was sort of when this idea of entrepreneurship as a tool to solve problems was sort of cemented in my, in my very, you know, immature young brain.

And then when I needed to make money again at 17 as an undergrad in college, I once again, I didn't even think about, you know, I should go get a job somewhere. Immediately my thought was, all right, I got to start another business to make some money here. So it began, I began to form this what is now effectively my, I think it's Shopify's mission. It's also my personal mission, which is an entrepreneurship, is this incredibly powerful tool because it's democratic and it allows anyone and anybody around to start something with very little. It doesn't matter who you are, what your last name is, and who your parents are, my parents were nobody's.

It matters how much value you add. And so I ran this teacher business all throughout college and developed a really good set of mentors along the way, people that I sort of met and some people were lawyers and others were these random entrepreneurs and, you know, Dove Charnie from American Apparel. Now he's sort of, I guess, disgraced. But at the time, he was a very big deal starting American Apparel. He was another Jewish entrepreneur from Montreal. And I met these people along the way.

And one of those mentors convinced me when I finished college to go to law school, not to become a lawyer, but rather to become a better entrepreneur, almost like finishing school for entrepreneurship. And I was incredibly impressionable. I was 21 when I was finishing college. Again, I had a little bit of money from the T-shirts, but not much. And he said, look, I'm going to teach law next year at the University of Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada. Why don't you come to Ottawa? Go to law school here. I'll be in town. I can sort of help you navigate the city.

And you'll go to law school, not with the mandate to get called to the bar or ever litigate or practice law, but rather as a way to accumulate more skills that will be very valuable as you think about scaling a business longer term. And so 2005, moved to Ottawa, no friends, no family there. And by this point, entrepreneurship was a part of my identity. And so like I always did when I moved to a new place, I asked where the entrepreneurs hung out. And very, very fortunately, very luckily, I was directed to a coffee shop and I was told that there's a group of entrepreneurs that hung out to this coffee shop every Friday evening. And they called themselves the Young Entrepreneurs Club, the YEC. And I started showing up there every Friday and meeting these young entrepreneurs.

And one of those entrepreneurs was this brilliant programmer named Toby who had just moved to Canada, I think a couple, about a year earlier, from Germany. and he moved to Canada because he made a girl and he wanted to go be close to that girl. Her name is Phil. As all people move for that reason, right? Very good, very good reason. Love is always a good reason to move somewhere. And Toby had moved to Canada from Germany, didn't have papers to work. And so he was told that even as a new immigrant,

he could start a business. And being in Canada where it's very cold, a lot of snow, he loves snowboarding. He decided he wanted to build a snowboard shop on the internet. In 2005, there were two ways to sell a product on the internet. The first way was to sell through a marketplace. At the time, like, eBay was really the most prominent one. Amazon, I don't think at the time alive for third-party sellers.

It was still a first-party marketplace. So you'd eBay, and you had a bunch of these sort of very nichey marketplaces, but eBay being the big one. So you could sell on a marketplace, or you would pay a company like IBM. They had WebSphere or Oracle or AT or SAP. All these big enterprise companies had some sort of e-commerce functionality for very large enterprises for like Walmart. And that would be like a couple million bucks.

And Toby did not like the idea of renting customers from a marketplace. And he did not like the idea of what didn't have a million dollars to spend on enterprise software. So that was impossible. So we wrote this piece of software using Ruby on Rails, where he was a sort of core developer of Ruby on Rails in the early days with DHH and a bunch of really interesting people. And he wrote this piece of software to sell his snowboards.

And that's around the time where I met him. He was like just selling these snowboards. And it was a really neat little business. He was making real money. And around that, and again, I was, I'm in law school now. And so I'd ask him if I can use, um, the software, uh, to sell my own, my own products, which in my case would be T-shirts. And by that point, he'd already sort of figured out that the snowboard business was a good idea. But the software that he'd written, uh, to sell these snowboards was a great idea. And, uh, and, and shortly thereafter, I ended up, building a store on Shopify. This is 2006 at the time. And I became one of the first people to use what

would become, at the time it was called jaded pixel, it wasn't actually called Shopify originally, and I would be one of the first people to use the software. And I built this, I ran this t-shirt businesses, direct-to-consumer, licensed t-shirt business all throughout law school. And that was sort of my first entry into Shopify meeting Toby. And then when I finished grad school, I called Toby and said, look, like, I love entrepreneurship. It's everything. I think it's the greatest thing for me. It's my passion, my hobby. I want to increase the surface area for more people. And honestly, what I experienced building a beautiful, scalable store sitting in my tax law class on Shopify, I think more people should experience that. And I joined him about a year

later in 2009 or so. And I was like the first non-engineer to join the company. And it was amazing. It was one of the greatest. I mean, I've really fond memories of those very early days. But that's a long answer, short question of how I got to Shopify. No, this is perfect because this is a great pause point. Because I was writing down some notes just for the audience. And then I want to definitely, we're going to go from like, okay, you're now in Shopify and what are trials and tribulations?

Because, of course, I'm sure going from that to 100 billion was probably just straight line, very smooth sailing, you haven't any issues. And I'm sure everyone will be glad to hear that very short story. but we'll get to that one. But just everyone who's listening, number one, the first business that Harley started was just for money. And it wasn't just some magical thing that was going to be perfect. He did what he had to do.

And he learned a ton of skills that really valuable along the way. Second thing is that, and I want to emphasize this, is people a lot of times are like, man, I don't know what to sell or what business should I start. And I think the easiest one to use is just solve your own problem, scratch your own inch. Totally. But like almost every business I've had, well, every really good business I've had has come from that, which is like, like, I mean, even the furthest one we have now, because there's not

a family office and I wish I had had this available to me when I was scaling up our companies, like somebody who'd already been there sold multiple times and like had a vested interest, et cetera. But scratching your own inch. Also, I want to highlight some people kind of get segmented in one thing or the other. Like you did a physical products business, but earlier you'd done a DJ thing, even though it was not, you know, you made money. So you made a profit. And so like in my mind, like self-employed whatever, like it was a service-based business. So you had a service business and you also had a physical product was super. you were flexible in terms of how you were willing to make money.

And I was agnostic to what I was selling. I mean, to your point, you know, I think one of the easiest ways to figure out what to sell, you know, you said scratch your own niche. Another way to do it is simply just to like tell a bunch of people that you're thinking of starting a business and just leave it out in the ether. The reason that I started selling T-shirts universities was as I told people that my dad wasn't around anymore, mom had no money. I needed to make some money.

I need sort of business. The more people I spoke to about that, a lot of the idea, that I got were dumb. But more and more people started telling me, hey, what about this? Hey, what about that? Most of the things that they mentioned were not great ideas. But then someone randomly, his name is Jamie once told me, remember this like, they perfectly clear it. He said, hey, just so you know, McGill spends $25,000 a semester on t-shirts, on printed promotional t-shirts. It turned that he was wrong. These universities spent a quarter million dollars Yeah, it has to be way hard than that, right?

But because I was putting it out there, this thing that I was looking sort of business, a bunch of people sort of became almost like my idea generation machine. And so this whole idea that, like, I know there's a lot out there about like, don't tell people your goals and keep things to yourself. I call bullshit. I think do things and tell people is super important, even at the early stages of starting these things. Well, I'm a big, I mean, my second book, 100 million-dollar leads, advertising is the process of making known.

And so if no one knows about your stuff, no one can buy it. They must first know about it in order to buy it. And so if you just think about it from a first principal's perspective, ain't no customers if they don't know. So first way to do that. So two things that I also want to highlight. So you talked about two different types of people that you surround yourself with. One was mentors.

So just for everyone in my audience, we're talking people ahead. Right. And the other thing was the community of peers, right? He had the coffee shop where he met Toby who ultimately got you into this thing again by chance. But both of those things increase your luck surface area. The amount of potential opportunities for exposing opportunity. Well, yeah. And so I just want to highlight that because a lot of people feel like entrepreneurship is lonely and it can be, but to a degree it is a choice.

Right. And if you can't physically move environments, you can do it online now. And that wasn't available back then. But now we've got online communities, you've got school. We've got all these things where people can connect. And when I say school, SKOL.com, school, people can actually connect and meet one another. All right. Now, the last one is resourcefulness. And this kind of ties well into kind of the next chapter of this journey, which is that,

like, you did all this stuff. Like, you, Toby wrote code so that he could, so you could sell his snowboards, right? Like, it's, there's this, there's a, there's this whole, like everything, of course, our whole mission is to make things easier, make things more accessible to people. But on some level, like, it's, the fact that it becomes. is what makes the goal worthwhile, right? And if everyone could do it, then everyone would do it, and then it would no longer be worthy, right?

Everyone can tie their shoes. Everyone can get dressed. And so no one's like, congratulations. There's this whole, I think Chris Rock's kit where he's like, what do you want a cookie? He's like, man, I ain't never been prison. He's like, you ain't supposed to go to jail, right? And he goes to this whole thing.

And so right now, like the fact that it's difficult is just another barrier that somebody might have to compete with will have to go over. And so it gives yourself a little stripe that you can show yourself about who you really are. Also, remember, remember this, you kind of think about like, if you kind of go back to, I don't know, go back 200 years, when you think about starting a business, the one thing that besides capital to get started and knowledge and understanding and technology to help you do it, forget all that stuff for a second. One of the big risks of starting a business historically was that the cost of failure could affect your life in a very adverse way, meaning when my

grandfather came to North America from Eastern Europe, he started an egg. business. He had a little egg stall at a local farmer's market, which actually still stands today. My uncle currently runs it. But he had to take a loan out on his home in order to afford the fee and the cost of actually renting this particular stall. If this did not work, the result of that would be no food on the table, no roof over their head. And that is effectively how businesses were built so that people with more capital were able to take more risks. People that had more capital were able to invest more. People had more capital were able to have, you know, be able to mitigate the cost of failure. Well, one thing that has changed dramatically, and I would say

today, like literally right now, Alex, you and I are talking about this, the cost of failure of starting a business today is by far the lowest it's ever been, whether you use a product like Shopify or use whatever you decide to do. The cost of failure is effectively $39. If it works, you scale it literally like three feet from me. I have a gift from Ben Francis, who's the founder of Jim Shark. And it's a Christmas gift he gave me, a holiday gift he gave me. It's the original screen print from the original Jim Shark, the first t-shirt he made. It was, Ben's been a big part of my life, and I've been, I think, a big part of his life.

And so his gift was the original screen that created the first t-shirt for Jim Shark. When Ben started, it was 2012 out of his dorm room. If it would have gone, if it would have failed, he would have gone back to class. I mean, he was literally also delivering pizzas, I think for Pizza Hut at the time, if I get that right, or some pizza company. But if it worked, he would go on to build a multi-billion dollar company called Jim Shark. So think about that. The upside, and that was 2012. That was like, you know, 12 years ago.

The upside today of starting a business is effectively infinite growth if you do it well and you're smart and you're having great value. The downside is a couple less cups of coffee or a couple less Starbucks for that week. that is remarkable. And I think that, I mean, if there's anything that, like if there's one underlying point here, it's the, it's risk-adjusted return, right? Is that everyone here now can get endless shots on goal. Right now, because of how accessible entrepreneurship is, you basically just keep taking lottery tickets. And if you lose, then you just buy another scratch-off, right?

And you try it again. And so you still have the upside, except the thing is, is it's not rigged for you to lose. Like, there actually is a lot of people who want you to win, and there's an entire economy around you. Well, not just that. Right now, what that's created is nearly a quarter, 25% of US consumers in 2024 are considering starting a business. That's the highest, I believe, it's ever been. Number two is, since 2021, there's been 15.5 million new business applications in the U.S. in 85% increase from 2004 to 2021. The White House put out a bunch of stats on this recently. I mean, that is, the reason that is happening is not just because technology is getting

better and not just because of great podcasts and content like you're putting out there. It's because people are realized that entrepreneurship may be the vehicle for them to actually find their life's work, make their life better, create independence, like do the thing that they love most. This is a pretty exciting time for entrepreneurship. And I think the cost of failure thing is a big part of it. So now you're employee number one, non-developer employee number one. You've used the product.

You fell in love with it. And this is now aligned with your calling. So walk me through kind of the stages of growth. And if you can give kind of like internal external, so this is what was happening externally, maybe revenue levels, customer levels, things like that.

And then mirrored, what does that look like internally? So I'm shifting a little bit towards my business owners right now. All right. So now we're talking like, okay, we've got the business. We're generating revenue.

Or is it cash flow positive? Do they have investor? Like how, let's, yeah, just give me the scoop. So we were bootstrapped. We had a very,

very small angel investor. in early on, which his name is John. He's now a multi-billionaire, I believe. And so was his wife separately because she also put some money in. But it was a very small amount of money. We were bootstrapped. We were profitable. And when I joined, we didn't have a CFO.

We didn't have a CMO. I mean, part of what I viewed my role as, and anyone who's listening, who is joining a very early stage company as a non-engineer, like the person not working. like the person not running, you know, writing code or building product. The role that I wanted, that I felt I should play and that I think I did play was this Swiss Army knife. Let me figure out everything and anything that is going to be valuable to the people that are writing code. And whether that's commercialization or sales or support or, I mean, literally figuring out like where we're going to like work at it, like like negotiating the lease for it. Or figuring out, you know, what are we paying for?

I think we were paying rack space at the time, like negotiating a rack space contract. I think at the time we only had one payment integration, which was PayPal, negotiating the PayPal rev share. But those very early days, this sort of Swiss Army knife type model, I think was really, really important because, I mean, you can be the greatest salesperson or marketer in the world. If you have a great product matched with a great ability to sell and commercialize, that's where this thing gets really interesting.

And I deeply believe that Shopify, even back, in 2010 had this incredible product, leaps and bounds better than all the competition. The competition at the time was like Yahoo stores or a couple other like that, but very, very few competitors. And so this idea of being a Swiss Army knife was important. And that's what I did. If there was an opportunity for me to tell the story publicly to a local newspaper in Ottawa, Canada, I would take that opportunity.

If there was an opportunity for me to help someone get a job done internally, I would take that opportunity. But that Swiss Army knife was that sort of model of that was very, very helpful. And as part of that, I think I earned the trust of Toby in particular, but also, you know, the other engineers because I was just there to add value. That's it. In fact, I'd actually been called to the bar. And so I think my, like, I was also the company's lawyer. And again, I've been out of law school for all of 10 months, I think, at that point.

But whatever I could do, I was going to do that. And it was only a couple years later. We raised our Series A, but a year later, I think it was a $7 million investment from Bessemer who led it, on a $25 million, I think, post. And that's really when we began to realize that, okay, there is a real there there, that this company could be something remarkable, large, scalable,

and we can really make a dent on. At the time, it was really, but we were focused on SMBs and e-commerce only, very different than today where we do business, of all sizes and retail everywhere, but it was SMBs and it was e-commerce only. And it was only until, you know, after our series B and C that we began really figuring out like, okay, what are each other superpowers? And this idea of rather than all of us become these sort of well-rounded objects, these sort of riverstones, what if we all were very precise on the thing that we think we could

be the best in the world at and spend our time? And you start doing that. So if we're walking through this, because right now probably around, probably like around series B or Series C, we hired a CFO, we hired a CMO, we hired a head of sales. It was around that time where we felt we were well capitalized. I think our series B was about $100 million valuation. This is like 2013 or so. And around that time, so like $10,000. Don't, I have no, I mean, it was.

Okay. Yeah, I'm not sure. A lot less than $100 million. Do you need employees were around then? I'm just trying to give a game. Probably, probably 50 to 100 at that point. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, got it.

So like low, small mid-sized. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Cool. And a lot of what we were trying to do then is like find, you know, find, at least a lot of how I spend my time is find new channels. So this idea that, okay, we can only sell so many people on Shopify, but there's this

massive ecosystem of web agencies and freelancers and developers who are in Oklahoma and are in, you know, places like South America and they're in Singapore and they're in Vancouver and they're in, you know, New Mexico. And what if we actually created something whereby if someone walked in to their agency, to their business and said, I need an online store, what could we do to actually make it so that they would say by default, great, we'll build it on Shopify. That's sort of on the referral side. On the product side, another thing that was really, that we created around that time was

the Shopify App Store, which I believe today is one of the largest ecosystems of third-party developers on the planet. I mean, if you are building an app for commerce today, the best, most effective go-to-market strategy is to put it in the Shopify App Store because you have millions of customers for your applications. That now seems polished and a really healthy kind of flywheel of an ecosystem. But originally, the reason that the app stores really set up was all these different merchants were coming to us, and they all had a very unique and a very particular business.

And so we really focused on let's make Shopify's core offering what most of the market. people need most of the time, checkout, payments, inventory, marketing, analytics. Let's make that like world class. But everything that is very specific to a particular merchant's business, let's invite third parties from all over the world to build apps on top of it, which meant that no matter what the particular needs your business might be, you would find 100% product market fit using Shopify because of this app ecosystem. And we didn't have to build everything ourselves, which would have been impossible. And so some of these things now in hindsight seem like, while shopping ecosystem is really cool and the app store is is is is is is is humming but originally

it was done because we couldn't build every feature ourselves nor nor should we so what were some of the like absolute key decisions or like business principles that you learned kind of scaling through this focus was really important not being everything to everyone I mean today you know um last week was was the national retail federation's big show literally like the most important conference in enterprise retail um and I sit on the board now of NRF with like the likes of the CEO of, you know, Brian from Target and John from Walmart and like, you know, these amazing people like that run effectively all of retail all over the world. And so now we're really obviously, you know, getting some of the biggest

retailers who Shopify. But there was absolutely no way we were even considering that in those days because fundamentally we wanted to win our particular market, which was SMB's in English-speaking countries that wanted to sell. on the internet. And so one thing that was really valuable was like focus, don't sort of, and a lot of our competitors, by the way, ended up going out of business because they kind of ran up market way too soon, and they left the entire base of SMBs available. They didn't like the idea that SMBs, you know, some churn and not every business succeeds. And we thought, well, what if we just slightly increase the chance of success and mitigated the risk? If every single person thinking about

starting a business, like in a shower in the morning, then did so with Shopify, even though not all will succeed, as long as the ones that do stay with us indefinitely, they will offset the cost of ones that leave. And so one was really making sure we were very, very focused. The second thing that was really important to us, I think, was that the product was super simple. And, you know, now companies like, I don't know, Mars or Mattel or Staples or, you know, glossier, aloe yoga viewer, all these amazing brands all you Shopify skims. And what's neat even today, but Shopify is that the complexity of the product almost reveals itself over time. Rather than simply being in a data with every single feature and functionality, Shopify can be used by someone just setting up a store at their mom's kitchen table.

It also can be used by Trina, who runs figs, which is a publicly traded company. they make uniform scrubs, uniform scrubs, hospital scrubs. And the fact that the same code base can make those things was something that was always important, keep it really, really simple. And credit to Toby and his sort of vision around product, because that's really what he drilled in all of us was that the product has to be incredibly simple. So first is focus, second is simplicity. And the third one was we really tried to run a really tight business, meaning we knew what

our sort of cact to LTV ratio is. So cost of customer acquisition on one side versus lifetime value. And as long, I don't know if you're, I want to make sure I define all the acronyms. Oh yeah. Well, my audience says that. Okay. Okay. So we knew what our cact to LTV ratio was. And once we got it above one effectively, it meant that, okay, now it's time to go raise money because the more dollars you put on the left side, the more $180s or whatever the ratio was, we got on on the right side. And so by being meticulous and thoughtful about that, um, I think is really helpful. Maybe the last thing I'll say, which seems a little bit soft, but it's important to say is we were really, really patient, meaning we want, like, even today, we want to build

a hundred year business. We're now about 20 years into it. We got 80 years left to go. But even then when we were, you know, five, eight, ten years in, we still thought about this like really long-term business focused, which meant that we were not willing to pull forward future profits at a discount. Like pretty much most of our competitors, I think we're doing at that point. So what were some of the key growth kind of levers that you were able to pool throughout this process that like really accelerated. Like if you had to name the three biggest things in the first 10 years of Shopify that like, man, if we hadn't done this, we wouldn't have been able to get to the next level. I mean, I think the app store, the ecosystem was really important, both on making sure the product had a product, had a hundred percent product market fit and also in the referral. So I think that was really important because it meant that we had, we had effectively a distributed sales force that wasn't on our.

our payroll. And just something small on that that really matters. I remember at the time, the Apple iOS store had an 80-20 rev-share split. So if you built something on Apple, excuse me, it had a 70-30-Ref-share split. So you built something on Apple, you as a developer keep 70%, 30% goes to Apple. And I remember when we were talking about our rev-share for our app store, we actually said 80-20. Not that we were competing with the Apple, the iOS store. I mean, we were a small little nothing company in Canada. But this idea that we would be more generous than the incumbents might be was very important. And the truth is, the additional 10 points didn't really change it for us.

But it just meant that when you built on Shopify, you deeply understood that you were going to get a very fair and a generous rev share split. And that was one. I think the second one we really hammered hard was this thing called the Build of Business Competition. It was like our big aha moment. And it was, you know, we had an article in New York Times about it. But it started in a very kind of simple way. We had met Tim Ferriss, I think in 2009 or so. And he became an advisor.

And Tim is now a very good friend to both me and Toby. And we've done his pod. He's a great guy. But Tim looked at Shopify and said, great product. You guys are missing something. Most people, even though your product is great, easy to use, and you're making entrepreneurship more accessible,

most people have a risk-adversion to something entrepreneurship for one of two reasons, either too expensive or they don't know how to use it. And he had this idea that we should create a competition whereby someone would start a brand-new business on Shopify, like Jan 1, and six months later, the store with the highest sales would win. I think we said $10,000,

and then Tim said, it's got to be $100,000. We did not have $100,000 to give out that way, but our hope was that by the time the competition ended, we would actually have the type of money. And we launched the first build of business competition in 2010. And it got us, you know, I think the article in New York Times, I have to go check, but I'm sure your listeners will keep me honest here. But I think it's like a startup starts their own startup competition, like launch their own startup company. It was like, because it was kind of a silly thing that we ourselves were starting competition. The winner that year was a company called Dodo

case that made these beautiful, beautiful leather iPad case. It was the year the iPad was coming out. And so that was one of those ways where if you sort of read the sort of the Jeffrey Moore, I think it's Jeffrey Moore crossing the chasm book where he talks about, you know, technology adoption cycles go from early adopters to mainstream. It felt like the build the business competition helped us cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream. And over, I think we did the build the business competition for like five years after that. And ultimately the stores were getting like Jim Shark won one year and like some Knicksware won one year. like these big companies ended up winning.

But so we couldn't give out $100,000 anymore. So we had to come up with these new ideas. Like how do we incentivize the creation of new businesses? And we did things like the winner would spend a week with Richard Branson on Necker Island. And the winner would go and spend, like go have lunch with Seth Godin. And so we created this really cool stuff. But I would say that's probably the second sort of vector in terms of growth. We found a way for us to cross the chasm.

I just want, I'll pause right there. I'm a huge fan of the build of business competition. Oh, you know about it. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, super, super well acquainted with it. Oh, that's so, that was, I mean, that, like, that was something that was really, really important.

Maybe the third thing that I think was probably really valuable was we began to look at what are the other things, like, what is the relationship that our product has in the lives of people that use it? And the relationship started to look like when someone said they were going to work in the morning, what they meant was they were opening up their Shopify admin on their laptop or on their, on their desktop. So if we were becoming the center of like their day-to-day work where they added products and fulfilled orders and added new skews and ran marketing campaigns, what else can we do to be valuable to be helpful there? One thing that most people don't realize today, which is the case, I'll bring it back in a second, is that if you were to pretend today that Shopify was a single retailer, like if you were to aggregate all our stores, just in the U.S. alone, we would be the second largest online retailer in America

after Amazon. Okay, why is it important? Because if you are the second largest online retail in America and you go to negotiate rates with payment gateways and shipping companies and banks and all these different types of ancillary services, the economy of scale that you have is so massive. Well, even in the early days, back going back to, I don't say 2013, 2014 or so, as we were thinking about adding new features, new functionality we call merchant solutions, we began to think about in that way, whereby could we go and negotiate the best rates from the payment gateways as if we were the second largest retailer? We were the second.

We were the 20th at that point or the 30th at that point. But we were able to get economies of scale because of the aggregated size of our merchant base. And instead of keeping those economies of scale for ourselves, we gave them directly to the merchants. We took a little bit of margin because we wanted to make money. But we gave, so using Shopify, you know, to buy a domain, using Shopify to figure out who's going to process your credit card payments in your merchant gateway, it became much better to do it through us than do it on your own. And over time, that has turned into things like

Shopify payments and Shopify capital and Shopify shipping, all these big parts of our business today were built on this philosophy that we have an unfair advantage because these economies of scale. And if we give it to merchants, it means that Shopify plays an even larger role in their lives. So the three big growth strategies, the first one is you had referral partners. So you made it easy for other people to basically work on the platform and promote your platform because if you're a web agency and people want to store, then if you make it easy for them and maybe they get some sort of financial incentive to do it. They got a rev share for it. Yeah. We get in the revs share, I think at the time in perpetuity, like 20% of whatever we took they got. Which is awesome.

Which for an agency is as you probably know, like recurring cash flow is king. Yeah. And it's on. And what's interesting about it is it's on a business. Right. So it's not like, so basically as long as the as the, as long as the customer. continues to sell stuff, you get a rev share basically forever on the business, which is a great long term. I mean, it's an incentivizing offer. And also these agencies are not going to build their own e-commerce stack, right? So they needed someone. Might as well use Shopify. And I bring this up because a lot of the business owners that I have, you know, they're like, how do I grow? Right. And that's why I wanted to really zero in on some of these growth strategies.

So one is you had referral partners you brought in. You were generous with them to the app developers and to the web stores. They got 20% of the of your cut. Awesome. The second one, was you had a really sexy competition. And so I talk about this in terms of like making offers to an audience. It's like, how can we make it so good people feel stupid saying now? Right. And so for, I would say that obviously it worked. I mean, I've heard about it.

We've modeled it at school.com. I just made the largest investment I've made into a platform. So we saw that and so we had the school games. And so we really looked at a lot of the stuff that you guys did there, try to make it fun. And but the key point is that you made it fun, you made it competitive, you got You got customers to compete against one another, but they're all winning. And this was one point I still wanted to ask. So was it, was the New York Times the only promotion that you did for that?

Or was there other things that you did? Or like, was it all word of met? Like, how? Well, at this point, like, when we started this, like, Tim was just sort of coming out. The four work week, I think, was in its second edition. But he had this massive audience. Part of the cool part, part of the beauty and the value of working with Tim was not just to give us a great idea. But we're like, great, Tim. Now you've got to help us tell the world about it also.

So if we would have gone to Tim with this idea, I don't know if he would have said yes. But the fact that it was like Tim's that we got Tim to generate an idea for us. It was his idea. He felt personally invested in. In fact, he's, I've heard him say this on his on his own show where he'll say like, you know, he's one of the co-founders of the build of business competition. I love that because we created a real vested interest in him to actually make this a success. And it wasn't just New York Times. I mean, there was a lot of articles written about it. But it also gave us a narrative, a thing that we were able to go around and talk about. It was difficult for me to go around and talk about, I'm, like, you know, I'm shot by chief storyteller.

It was difficult for me to go around and talk about like software, Ruby on Rails or the simplicity of e-commerce. But it wasn't as difficult for me to go around and say, hey, we created this thing. We think everyone has, you know, Nike convinced the world that if you have a body, you're an athlete. like mind my blood so so brilliant we were trying to go around convince the world if you have ambition you could be an entrepreneur and so i had now this new beautiful asset piece of ammunition that i was able to go around to media and to anyone that would listen to me to blogs to celebrities and say there's a thing here we'd love you to talk about and like oh that's kind of cool that was really helpful and so for the business owners at home um one big one obviously was tim got involved and so

if you're like how do i promote my business finding a brand champion or finding somebody who, I mean, there's, if you've seen, I think is it air, that movie that's, it tells a story of Jordan's like. Yeah. So like sometimes you need to find, like if you're, like if you have an audience, awesome, then you already know what you're doing. But if you don't have an audience, you're more of a product person and you're like, shoot, how do I get this to the world? Sometimes finding your Michael Jordan. And in this instance, like Tim was probably the Michael Jordan for that era for that entrepreneurship. Definitely. Right. For entrepreneurship at that time. And so being willing to, and I'm sure that Tim had a good deal with Shopify for, you know,

I'm sure that there was a deal with Tim that worked out. Yeah, there was for sure. That he's profited a lot from. And so sometimes you just got to be really generous. Like the Michael Jordan deals, first of its kind, it was, it was kind of crazy. The founder, you know, the felt was like, I don't know, this like, should I really go all in on this person? And sometimes you got to make bets, right? And obviously this bet paid off, the Michael Jordan bet paid off.

And so you come up with something really sexy. and then you find somebody who's the perfect fit for it, and then you put it together, right? And so just as like... And there's always a perfect fit, right? There's always someone out there. There's someone who, if you have a product, physical product or a piece of software, digital product,

there is someone out there that is purchased from you, even if you're a small business, who probably has some sort of leverage, meaning they have an audience, they have a community, they have a big newsletter, they have a big following, they know a bunch of people.

If they have bought your product organically, and they have a connection to you organically, you asking them point blank hey i had this crazy idea you seem to like my my my tea um and i would love to feature you in a promotion would you be interested that is very different than cold calling them and saying hi i'm harley from this tea company uh from firebelly tea and i'd love you to be a spokesperson like i think the days by the way especially go back like to come to present day for a second the days of brad pitt hawking coldgate or or toothpaste are over nobody wants these artificial connections or sponsorships.

When you look at what Jimmy and Mr. Bees has done with Feastables or Emma Chamberlain with coffee or you see what Kim Kardashian is doing with skims, because these are all on Shopify, I have a very deep understanding of these businesses. These are authentic, real products that were built, curated, organized by these credible celebrities who care so deeply about the product.

So the days of artificial sponsorship pay-to-play thing I think are over. And I think what we did with build the business was almost like showcase that, hey, Tim's for some reason interested in our business. Hey, Tim, how do you think we can grow our business? Oh, that's a good idea. We'll do the competition. But by the way, we need your help for this competition. And it was really meta. And I just really want to hit on this because this is what a lot of, a lot of businesses need growth, right? They've got a product. They're like, how do I let people know about it? And obviously, you can run ads or if you already have an audience, then you already know that stuff. If you're like, well, shoot, how do I do it scrappy?

Right? And so, like, making an incentive that gives people a big reason to say yes, right? Finding a brand champion that already has distribution can be the unlock because all of that acquisition is really just based on the negotiation you have with that one person. And if they can bring a lot, like everyone, you have the opportunity to make a true win-win and obviously Shopify one and Tim want and the main one. All of the people who built stores were the real winners here. And I'll bet you some of the winners on the stores.

also did the exact same strategy that shop I was also doing. And so you've got a tea company and they find Mrs. T on, I don't know, on Instagram who just loves tries teas teas all day. It's like if she really did like the product, then she would be a spokesperson. And so just finding that out. Okay, cool. And then the third one, you said, and I want to zero in on this was it was the economy. So you said growth strategies and you talked more about the economies of scale. Was that just that because that seems a little bit more product focused. And I'm game for that. I just want to make sure that I, Yeah, I think on that one, I mean, it's product focused, but it's also just simply like business focus. My ability to go and negotiate with a large payment gateway every year got easier and easier.

Why? Because I was coming to them as a much larger merchant. Now, if you just take a very simple, you know, a very simple example, 10 individual merchants go to negotiate with the payment gateway on their own. They're all to get some rates. But if I do it in aggregate with all 10, my rates are going to be much, much better. and I can literally give those 10 merchants the exact same rates, you know, less maybe, you know, a couple basis points that I want to keep for myself from a profitability perspective. That kept getting bigger.

It doesn't mean, by the way, when we can talk about, you know, shop by, you know, like our whole shipping thing, because we divested shopper by shipping, what's called SFN, Shopping Filming Network a couple months ago, but a year ago at this point,

because there are sometimes we have gone into areas that were not main quest, we sort of call them side quests, that maybe we shouldn't have done on our own. In fact, in the case of shipping, we found another company called Flexport, whose main quest is an end-to-end logistics platform, which is what we were trying to build ourselves. And rather than build it ourselves, we're like, you just do it. And that, I mean, what we can talk a bit about the value of what some companies are very,

very good at partnership. I think Shopping is one of those companies. If you look at what we've done with a firm for Buy Now Pay Later or Globally around cross-border payments, we've really, we pride ourselves in being a company that is a really good company to partner with, which is very unique in tech. which is sort of all kind of frenemy-esque. Yeah. And I want to, I'm going to bring this to the brick and mortar chiropractor.

Like so just down to home base. Those relationships don't need to be these massive billion dollar deals. Obviously, they work at scale. But, you know, I think about my, I think, okay, so if I'm my chiropractor, what are all the things that anybody who's my customer also gets? They might go to the gym. They might like smoothies. They might like yoga, right?

They make other things that are ancillary. And I think, okay, well, what if I go to each of those businesses and say, hey, with every smoothie, just put a coupon, you can slap it on there for a free adjustment. So they're going to get a free adjustment and a smith. Like, you're going to enhance the value proposition that you have to your customers at no cost to you. But then I get free leads. And so they get a win.

And then I get free customers or at least a free shot at a customer. And so these partnerships and, you know, this has been a huge core to every business that I've built is, I mean, I think I've built almost the same amount of revenue from partnerships and affiliate relationships as I have just from, you know, direct sales and generating them ourselves. Because you are known as, like, I mean, you know, you and I know each other sort of from our own communities, like you were known as being a good partner, meaning you leave enough on the table so your partners can make money from it.

You know, doctors actually, there's really, really well on their own referral side, meaning if you go to see a doctor and that doctor can help you, great, they'll work on you. If they can't, they'll recommend someone. else. If you, what I've noticed is that a lot of them recommend, like, it's almost like a closed loop circuit where Dr. A, if they can help you, always recommends Dr. B, who always recommends Dr. C. And, and Dr. C always recommends Dr. A. And it's sort of this, I think if you're a chiropractor, for example, you, if you sort of Venn diagram out, meaning you look at your customer base and you ask them, you know, where do you go, where do you work out? What clothing do you like to wear?

What, where do you go to get your smoothies, for example? You probably have your own version of that. but also the people hanging out in the smoothie bar are also asking the smoothie person, hey, do you want any good chiropractors? And the yoga instructor is also saying, hey, I think you need a chiropractor as well. And so creating your own version of an affiliate program, even if it's not called an affiliate program, it's sort of your own creation of it actually is incredibly effective. And if you over deliver, meaning every time the chiropractor recommends a yoga instructor, the, you know, the yoga instructor's client comes back and says, man, that yoga instructor

you recommended is amazing. You can send more clients to that yoga instructor. And so there is an opportunity to sort of over-deliver to create even more leverage in this sort of closed ecosystem of reciprocity. And I'm going to give everyone three quick tips on this. Number one, if you're going to create one of these relationships, give them customers first. If you give them customers first, they're way more like, send them five people and then make the call. Be like, hey, by the way, I thought maybe it makes sense if we did some. Now, they're going to want more of what you just gave them, and they're going to be happy to talk. Second one is in terms of generosity, like if you know, what your cost to acquire our customer is, you should be willing to give at least that to a referral

to a referral partner because you either pay Zuck, right, or you just pay another small business owner. And I can almost promise you that a referral from a partner is going to be worth more in LTV. So you still get a better LTV to Kack ratio by going to a stronger channel with like a referral partner. And one little thing that Layla's really good at this and she has just drilled it into me over time, which has been helpful for partnerships. She says, never count the other guy's money. And so just because you're making. someone else a ton of money, like it has nothing, like if you take out how much that person makes

and you just look at your side of the table, make the deal and make sense for you. If they make a killing, awesome. They're going to be an amazing partner, right? And so I just want to underline that for, because some of the mistakes I made early on is I wanted, I saw how much I would make, but I've lost deals because I got too greedy trying to say, well, he's going to make even more than me. And I would encourage you not to think that way because if everyone grows. It's such an amazing reminder. So I don't watch sports. I don't really play sports. So my Sunday project, This is a little bit weird and nerdy, but I have this project. It's called Big Shot.

It's an archive that I'm creating of the greatest stories of the greatest Jewish entrepreneurs of the last half century. And so I'm meeting these people. Most of them are in their 80s and 90s. And I sit down with them and I record it. I put it on YouTube. It's not a big podcast. It's mostly a personal project, but it's fascinating.

And I've sat down with people like Izzy Sharp, who's the founder of the Four Seasons's hotel, or a guy named Larry Silverstein, who's the owner of the World Trade Center. These were poor kids. I mean, these people grew up with nothing. Zero. Or Fran Wiesler, who's the queen of Broadway. These are very poor people that grew up and eventually have created, you know, they're billionaires and they've created empires.

When you ask them at 90 years old, I think Izzy Sharp in the Four Seasons Hotel is 95 years old. When you ask these people, tell me one or two things that I don't know. I'm, I turned 40s here. So Izzy, tell me something I don't know that I should at my age. Almost to the, I've done about 12 of these interviews so far with these like older icons and legends on Titans, almost all of them to a T say, make your partners really, really rich. Now, the reason I bring this up now is because these are people in their 90s who, they got nothing, you know, they're not trying to have swagger. They're not trying to like flex.

They're so, and the reason I love interview them is because they're so transparent. But to a T, every single one of them, from these Titans of Industry and Real Estate to the Queen of Broadway has always made their partners incredibly rich. And that is not something that is intuitive, but it's something that I think is legitimate. I love this entire line of thinking because, I mean, it goes down to just more of abundance mindset. Most of the people that I know they were wealthiest in the world just don't see businesses a zero-sum game. Right. It's just like everyone actually can win, whereas in a lot of games, it isn't structured that way. Whereas like even just the build a business competition you mentioned earlier, like, sure, there was one winner,

but do you think that number two to number 100 on the list was like, oh, man, I'm so bummed that I only got to a hundred. That's the craziest part. Number two, number 100 have built million-dollar brands also, right? And that's, this idea of like positive something I think is so important. I know there's like, you know, like I'm an optimist. I know you are also Alex. But one thing that I think people miss is often when you go to raise money, for those of you

that are looking to raise money, one criticism you often get from investors, is this concept of TAM, total address market, how big is your market? And effectively, what they're trying to say is that if you look at your market, it's a pie. And your TAM is effectively the pie, and your market share is a slice of the pie. I think that's very flawed thinking.

And I think if we would have done that at Shopify, we would not be a $100 billion company. Our version was not, let's take a piece of the pie. Rather, let's grow the pie itself. And so we'll get to the IPO in a second, but we took our company public in 2015, May 2015, on the New York Stock Exchange. It was a billion-dollar company at that point.

So, but, you know, 1% of the market cap that it is today. At the time, every, when you, before you go public, you went this roadshow. We did 93 meetings all over the U.S. And you're meeting these investors and you're meeting these funds. And you want them investing in these big funds that have trillions of dollars under management. And this idea of TAM would come up over and over again. And I needed to have an answer for what the TAM was. And I remember it off by heart.

It was, there were 46 million retail SMBs on the planet. I think at the time we had 100 or 300,000 of them. So big, big growth opportunity. Ironically, if you sort of, you know, we're now nine years past the IPO. If you look at Shopify today, a lot of our customers are not just SMBs. We have very large companies. We're also well beyond e-commerce. We have tons of merchants users for point-to-sell physical retail.

We have a capital business, a payments business. there was no way for them to actually, for me to give an answer about Tam in terms of like foreshadowing what we would become. And so I love this idea that you're talking about, which is like positive some thinking and optimism where share the wealth of other people around you, because rather than sort of thinking of the pie as sort of this finite space, think about the pie as infinite and encourage more people to participate. That's how you build these like generational 100 year multi-billion dollar companies. I talked to a fund manager. the other day and he was a public a public fund and he was he was saying you know one of the things

that I really like is that I've got 10,000 people praying that I win every night. Isn't that great? Yeah. And I think Ziglar said something to the degree of like you can have whatever you want in life as long as you help other people get what they want first. And I just really, really believe that because I've, so I actually feel like I've actually put some numbers to this. But I think that from an entrepreneurship perspective, it's about one-tenth. And what I mean by that is like, you get to keep about one-tenth of the wealth that you generate for other people. And so I've just seen that from like the number of entrepreneurs that I look at like how much the market cap, like, the like total revenue that's run through their platforms versus how much

their equity stake is and what it's valued at. Like the amount of times that I've seen that equation done were like it's 10x. Like you have to make 10 times the amount of money for other people as you'll be able to make. It's just been really cool. And I think framing it that way is like, how do I make everyone else a ton of money? Like, everyone loves doing business with someone who makes them money. And then they will, like, and then they will want you to keep doing business with them. So in 2022, our 2022 numbers are not out yet.

Q4 earnings are coming at soon. So can't talk about that. But I'll tell you last year. In 2022, Shopify's revenue was but $5.6 billion, under $6 billion. Our merchants, the people that used Shopify made almost $200 billion in GMV in revenue and sales. That is, I mean, that is amazing. I'm very proud of that. I love the fact that our merchants made 200 and we made five point something. That is the reciprocity that I think is important. I also love the fact that our ecosystem

partners made more than $6 billion last year. That matters because it means for 2023 they're going to come back and work with us again. And so I want to, this is a really good line of thinking for, I think, a lot of people in the audience. So one is we've got this big theme of reciprocity. And what are what are some of the other because I'm skipping one ahead but I think I think I think it's worth it. So what are some of the, you put this question, which is what are some of the things I don't know what should, which is actually a question that I ask people too. So I like that you asked that question. What are some of the other things that came up from those conversations are just things that you would share as kind of some of the big breakthroughs and like really ones that you were like, I really thought this and I was dead wrong. And I see this now and it changed everything. All right. Let me go a little personal for a second because I think these conversations don't really add as much value unless you can sort of take off the facade. Yeah. I have, I turned 40 two months ago. My wife turned 40 a month ago. So we've been doing a lot of like reflection on our life and, and, you know, we're grateful and we love what we do. We're doing our life's work and all that. But one of the things that I really believe on a personal level

is more true to me now than ever is this idea that vulnerability is actually this incredible superpower. And my life has gotten dramatically better when I became a lot more vulnerable. And I'll give you a quick example. I was the chief operating officer of Shopify between pretty much 2015 or so in 2020. So post-IPO until sort of the pandemic. And I love being shopplice COO. It was a big role. I had thousands of thousands of reports and most like pretty much all the non-engineering organizations, you know, rolled up to me. And I thought that was cool. I thought that was really fun. And I felt good about that. But I wasn't. wasn't happy. I didn't feel necessarily that I was the best CEO in the world. But there was no way in

hell I was ever going to raise man and say, this is not the right role for me. This is not what's going to keep me at Shopify for a long time. And it was only until I had a really good chat with Toby. And I was like, look, I was like, there is someone who's better at this role than I am. I'm certain of it. And it turns out it's Kaz, who's our current CEO. He was initially he was running product for payments for us, our money product, but he's now, he loves being the CEO and running operations, the way that I love storytelling. And I never would have had this new sort of, this next gear of my career at Shopify, had I not had a little bit of like just gotten over my own shit, my own crap to say, this is really not for me. And I think this idea of vulnerability

showing weakness as being this like weird bravado insecurity thing, I think the more you show vulnerability, the more you ask for help, the better things become. And I recognize that it's easier for someone like me to show vulnerability of my stage than it would have been for me to show 10 years ago. But I actually, as I get older, I believe that less and less that I actually believe at any stage being really honest with yourself and being honest with the people around you about what you want to do, what you love doing, what you're really good at. Like this idea of, I've mentioned the term, life's work a couple times. There's a great Japanese term, which is icky guy, which is effectively like, what do you love? What does the world need?

What can you get paid for? That idea of finding your thing, at a stage in life where you're not 95, like Izzy Sharp in four seasons, but you're 40 like I am, or you're 50 or 60 or 30, I think is a great gift. And I think you're able to find your thing a lot easier when you simply are a lot more

vulnerable about that. And more than ever, I really look at that today as a real strength. That's the first. The second thing I would say is, even shop by is, you know, we have eight or nine thousand people at the company. Shopify is very much a founder-led company,

but also the people that work at Shopify have this incredible founder's mentality. They act like an owner with every expense that they spend, the speed and agility they use, they reject best practices, quote-unquote. They reject processes that don't make sense, don't make it faster. And not just that, we encourage that.

If you look at some of the biggest areas of Shopify, They're ran by founders of companies that we've acquired. And they've stayed at Shopify long past the earnout dates because we've created this sort of crafters and founders paradise at this company. In many ways, it is like this incredible like collective of founders and entrepreneurs. And I think that you can do that at any stage of company. But if you're not careful, it goes away really quickly. And there are very few companies in our size today that feels like a founder-led entrepreneurial. Everyone calls themselves the largest startup.

Like it's almost, you know, it's such a common thing to say. But it's bullshit. Most of them are not like that. And I think one thing that you can do as the founder of your company is instill this founder's, this founder's mindset or founder mentality. And you can keep it there if you work at it. And I think the results are almost always unequivocally better. What do you do tactically in order to keep that?

So a couple of things are very simple. in most companies of our size, the way to get a promotion is to go into management. There's one track. It always leads to a manager-type role. We don't do that. There are other tracks at Shopify.

There is a manager track. There's also an individual contributor track, or we call the crafter track. There are these other tracks that allow you to stay at our company for a long time. And if your craft is engineering or its product or its sales

or it's storytelling and it's sort of brand building, we are absolutely, in fact, not even okay with it, we are going to be super happy if your mandate for your career is to get really, really good at being the world's best marketer or the world's best sales rep or the world's best whatever. So one is we've created these different tracks at Shopify. Really interesting. And we've created, which is sort of, you know, like the way I like to word is like,

Shopify is really a crafter of paradise. That's one. The second thing that is really important is we also encourage, like, real disagreements. We invite people to actively disagree when something just doesn't feel right. Now, if, like, if we've made the decision, we've beat it up, you know, disagree and commit sometimes has to happen also. But instilling a place where, like, you encourage open debate is really, I think, super important. I think most companies talk about transparency and they talk, but it's total bullshit. You do any tactics to encourage that?

I always get into the weeds, but like, yeah, the tracks makes a ton of sense. Like that was like for me, you know, with our companies, like, I will, I will, that'll probably my number one takeaway from just my tactical takeaway is like interesting, having individual contributor tracks because one of the big issues that a lot, like when you have a star media buyer right in a company, that guy usually doesn't want to then manage media buyer. Like he's used like that person. And why do you want that person to, like you want that star media buyer? to be a media buyer.

And what if our media buyer is a seven and actually wants to become a nine or a ten at some point? Now all of a sudden you have like the world's greatest media buyer. So one thing is I think you do have to have a conversation with people, no matter what size your company is like what track are you on? Are you going to manage? Like there are some people who are just so great at management. You want them to manage teams. They just, they're really good at that stuff.

But I think having a conversation to say, what track are you on really, really matters? The second thing I think that's also, that's also really important is. I know every company likes to talk about things like, you know, transparency and open communication. We write a letter to our board every quarter. We share that letter with the board the whole company. And it's not redacted. It's exactly the letter that even at our size that we share with the board, we share with the entire company. Now, not every letter is going to be this holy shit, mind-blowing, you know, piece of content.

They're always really interesting. But sometimes, you know, it's more like making sure the trains are, are. on time and stuff like that. But what it does do over time is it really brings everyone into the same page of like, hey, the things we're telling the board, we're also telling you that there isn't these like two different versions of the narrative of the company. And I think that's something that is, it seems simple, but it's really, really impactful, especially if you do it really consistently. I'll give a, I'll give, I'll give the listeners a tactic that we have done for this, which is we actually run open book financials in all of our companies. And so,

When we do quarterlies, it's like, here's where we made money. Here's where this, like we spend money and it didn't work out well. And so that's helped for everyone feeling like they're on the same page that we're not hiding anything. And if things are going really well, they can see it. And if something doesn't go as well, some of the decisions that happened downline, we're like, well, that was suffering. And I guess this does make sense that we decided to divest in this kind of endeavor that

we were doing. And I know I love Susie, but I get it. You know, like, even if people aren't like stoked about it, like, they get it. So I was just, I love, this is great, by the way. And so acting like an owner, you operationalize that by creating individual contributor tracks and by having managed tracks really so people can be honest about what they're really good at. And the one tidbit I'll give for people who actually aren't owners are just like entrepreneurs, I'm sorry, employees and businesses is no one can fault you once you own your flaws.

Like if you're like, hey, I really suck at project management. And if you say that up front, then people are like, they don't talk behind your back about it. They'll just talk to your face about it because it's not a secret. You're like, I know I suck a project management. And so the more it's like Eminem's whole thing is like if he claimed every single deficiency and flaw that he had, no one could say anything back to him in rap battles. And even though, you know, hopefully corporate America is a little bit nicer than a rap battle. Maybe it isn't.

Yeah, it may not always be. But I think you're right about that. I think also the thing that what happens is when you say to someone, look, I don't want to be a riverstone. I don't want to be well-rounded. I want to be really, really pointy at this thing. And that means that there's other things around me, I'm going to hire or I'm going to find teams who are really good at those other things.

Now you're beginning to actually put yourself in a position where if you're not like the world's greatest, I don't know, writer, for example, but you're really good at coming up with like, you know, great slogans. Or you're not the world's great ad, you know, you're not great at writing ad copy, but you're a great media buyer. Now if you say, look, I'm not good at ad copy, but I'm so good at fun. opportunities for for great exposure. If you say you're not good at that,

that means it invites someone who may be really good at copy to come and be your, like your, your, your, your, your buddy, your best friend at work. That stuff really, really matters. And I think, I think that stuff is really great. The only other thing I will say is this. I know a lot of coming to talk about Mission and North Star.

One thing that we are very clear on, even from day one till now, is we are a merchant obsessed. And what does that mean? when given any decision whereby we have to pick one of two things, we always ask ourselves, what is better for merchants? Now, by the way, that is different than, let's say, Amazon, for example, who is very famously consumer obsessed. They don't, like, that's what they care about.

They're very clear about that. When you work at Amazon, if there's like 100,000 people who work there, they are consumer obsessed. By creating this very simple heuristic of which allows you to say, given two opportunities both seem pretty good, How do you actually evaluate it? Well, what's the one that's best for the merchant? That means that thousands of people work at Shopify in a daily basis are making independent

decisions that all roll up to that centralized mission, which is we are merchant obsessed. We care first and foremost about the millions of business owners that you Shopify. And again, it sounds obvious, but most companies totally mess us up. And where the vision and mission stuff gets really important just for everyone who's listening is like once you get to about 100 employees, that's where you're usually two to three three levels away, like if you're the founder, you're two to three levels away from people who are getting hired. You're starting to hire people. You don't even know their names. Like this is where this really becomes important because decentralized decision making is the

only way you can continue to scale. And you need people to make decisions that would be in alignment with you. Like you can't be in every room to make every decision. And so that's where mission and values create decision making frameworks that people can use as litmus tests of, okay, what would Toby do right now? Well, I know that Toby says, merchants are North Star. And merchants would not like this, that we don't do it, right? Even though we'd make a little bit more, they don't like it. And that's what... Correct. I just want to highlight that because a lot of the people, I mean, obviously, we take businesses on smaller than Shopify that we invested. But like, we'll go through this exercise with leadership because usually when they're at, you know, between

$10 to $30 million a year, this is when this gets really important to get to $100 million a year in revenue and so forth. And so, like, if you're at that point in your stage, like, this shit gets important. I also think something you're sort of skating or flirting with a little. little bit, which has to be said is, I think that there is a strange thing that as you grow, so you mentioned 100 people, there's actually a real thing. It's called Dunbar's number. It's 150 people, right? And Dunbar's number basically goes back to like the days of like when we're all living in tribes, that basically a tribe size should never go beyond 150. There's some sort of science around humans can only really remember 150 people at any one particular time.

I went through the 150 mark a long time ago at Shopify. It does change. And there's no question about it. But the one thing that often happens when you cross that 100 mark or 150 person mark is you begin to do this whole like, you know, macro management. You sort of get out of the weeds. And actually, I think this whole narrative that micromanagement is bad is total horseshit. I actually think that the best leaders I know whether they're running like trillion-dollar companies, because I know some of those, or $100 billion companies or million-dollar companies, is the best leaders I know are in the weeds on the things that matter most. And even, you know, I'm preparing me now for my earnings call, which in two weeks.

Like, I'm in the weeds on this. Like, we have an IR team who could prepare all this. No, I want to actually go through every single word in the script, in the press release, in the narrative. I want to go, like, word for word, on my own before anyone even takes a look at it, because it matters so much. And if that's my craft, that's what I'm supposed to be responsible for, that I'm going to be in the weeds on that.

I think there's like this, this corporate American. you know, bashing of micromanagement. And I think I think some micromanagement is actually really positive and needed. We agree. And we have a little saying for this internally, which is win in the weeds. Yeah. Like that's what I love that. Like that's you're going to go toe to toe to toe. Somebody is like, you're going to win in the weeds. Like that's how you do it. And I like like, like, I feel the same way. If some, you know, some, some president of some other company of our size is not in the weeds on, on, on earnings, on on press, on partnerships, I'm going to run circles around them because I am in the weeds.

Because you have the visceral knowledge of like the stuff that really makes it. And one of the things that also helps with this is that if you're in the weeds when something goes wrong, you know why it went wrong and you can make a pivot where if you're two levels removed, you don't know why it didn't work. And then your decision making of what to do next, then relies on secondhand and it gets really, really messy after that. You make really dumb moves. Okay.

So we have reciprocity is one of the big driving things. We have vulnerability and then the downstream impacts of how you kind of implement that within Shopify with the individual tracks and encouraging open disagreement among people and giving everyone kind of a North Star. So everyone's aligned with how we're like what frameworks are we going to disagree around? Like it's not whether we're doing customer or we're doing merchant. The disagreement is going to be which of these best serves the merchant if we're going to disagree. Correct.

So I want to zoom out. And so I said we're going to look back. And I think we took a little bit of final nugget of stuff and moved it forward, which I loved anyways. So if we're looking forward, right? you sit in this really unique perch that, I mean, maybe 10 people on earth sit on, that you sit on top of this mountain of data and you kind of see around the corner. And so what's coming, what are you, what are you thinking about for Shopify and just kind of the marketplace overall for retail entrepreneurs or even just entrepreneurs in general? Look, we talked to a little bit about the sort of idea that the cost of failure is trending towards zero. It's never going to be zero because ultimately like it's sort of asymptopes because ultimately like, you have an opportunity cost, like you could be doing something else.

So it's never going to be zero, but it's getting close to it. I think a couple things around the entrepreneurship thing. One is, I think entrepreneurship now more than ever before is default global. I think this idea that we've imported physical geographies

and borders of countries from the physical world into the digital world is really silly. I don't think, I mean, you'll see a lot of great brands behind me that I'm very close with. I put up

you know, from Kith to Supreme, to Mom Spaghetti, which is Eminem's company, to Firebelly, which is my little T side hustle, master dynamic headphones. These are some of the companies that I love that I'm connected to. None of them have geographic limitations. That's just not how they operate. I get it. It's more complicated sometimes to sell, although, frankly, we have a product called Shopify Markets and Markets Pro, which makes everything really easy there.

But I don't want to, this isn't a Shopify pitch. just, I think one, like your total or justable market when you're getting started is anyone on the planet who wants to buy your particular product first. Second of all is, I think the idea, if you listen to any of the earnings calls from these big big retailers, one of the terms you often hear is this concept of channel conflict, which is a very simple thing. It's online is doing well, but it's hurting offline. Instagram commerce is doing well, but it's hurting my online store.

I, when I think about the brands and I admire the most across millions of stores on Shopify, none of them, none of them use the term channel conflict. Why? Because they are channel agnostic. What they care about is serving their customer in the way that the customer loves to be served or wants to be served, which is very different than pretty much, you know, the history of retail where if you wanted to buy bread, you went to the baker in the town square, you want to buy shoes, you went to the cobbler down the street, you want to buy, you went to the

down the streets in the 80s. I'm an 80s kid. When I went to go buy a video game, I'd have to line up at the store at this hour, doors open, wait in line, use this credit card. Nope, not that credit card. Use this one. That whole thing was the concept of the retailer dictating the process of purchase to the consumer is over. And the reason that you're seeing, you know, things like shop pay, for example, becomes so popular is because seamless, simple, easy, convenient checkout is what every consumer wants. And so modern retailers today, one, are geographically agnostic. Two, are channel agnostic. They sell across every channel. And the reason why you see us do things like, there's a, there's a Spotify channel for Shopify. So if you're an artist,

most, most merchants on Shopify are not artists, but if you're an artist and you have your Eminem, for example, and you have a great popular artist profile and fan base on Spotify, now you can sell your merch directly from your artist profile page on Spotify. Won't be important to most people, but if we want to qualify and requalify to be the retail operating system for these millions of stores, our responsibility is every surface area on the planet, digital, physical, anywhere in between, that a transaction could happen. We have to make that easy. So that's probably the second thing I think that's happening retail.

And then the third thing that I think is kind of like an interesting thing is that, I think business is becoming at all sizes personal. And you do this very well, Alex, maybe better than anyone. But, you know, your own personal brand and your business's brand, they're not separate anymore. A couple, a little while ago, I saw a very, very high-end brand. Their online store was down. I'll say it.

It was Versace. Versace went down, I think eight months ago when I tweeted. I said, Versace, like, let me help you out. And it ended up leading to some of the Versacee brands coming on to Shopify. At that point, was I the president of Shopify? Was I hardly the entrepreneur? Was I hardly the human? I think this idea that, that, you know, work-life balance or work-life harmony, the separate,

I think it's over. I think people, I think we as entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs in 2024, we have to sort of incorporate all these things into our backpack. Our businesses, our personal life. Like, you know, you talk about, you talk about your wife, Lela, right? All the time about being part of, like, you sort of mix in between total addressable market. and talking about your wife. I do the same thing. Like, Lindsay, my wife is a huge part of my life. And when I go home, I talk about work and I was talking about our kids. And I think there's sort of

this wonderful, harmonious situation now where we don't, like, we're not separating these things. We're not waiting to retire to live our life. I think more and more you're able to kind of like have a personal brand, but it's also your business's brand. And you're also an extension of the company, but you're also your own person. I actually think that's a wonderful new thing, that new phenomenon that is very different than our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had. And they don't really get it as a site. Right. I mean, Mr. Beast, is he a YouTuber or is he a confectionary genius with his chalk?

Who cares? He's this amazing guy. He's a great entrepreneur and he makes content and he makes chocolate and he makes burgers and he makes cool videos and he's a cool dude. And like, who cares how you sort of categorize these people? And that's the reason why, actually back to what we said at the beginning, authenticity is going to rule here. And if you are, if you are full of shit,

people are going to figure that out very quickly, and they're not going to buy it from you, and they're not going to want to participate in your journey. But if you're not full of shit, and you invite people along into your journey, and you talk about your kids and your spouse and your business, people cheer for you. And it goes back to what I think you said, you know,

earlier is that quote about, you know, you want as many people cheering for you as possible in your journey. I've read the exact quote, but if something like that. And, because I like defining terms a lot, it's like one of my hobbies, but defining it from a behavioral perspective. So a lot of people are like, well, what is being authentic or like, I want to be authentic? Like, how do you do that? The best definition that I have that's working is

behaving as if you could not be punished. And so oftentimes, like we censor ourselves for fear of punishment. We like the many things that we don't say or don't do because we're afraid someone's going to say something or someone's going to do something in reaction. And so basically, if you're in an empty room, you have almost no potential for punishment, right? And so it's how you act as if you could not be punished is how you are authentically. And so we talk about the concept of like, you are the niche. So it's like, what is Logan? He likes, he likes aliens. He likes, you know, weird government stuff. He likes fighting. He likes comedy. He likes biohacking. He likes taking crazy drugs. Like he likes all sorts of stuff. And so if you're to say, hey, I want to start this podcast where I talk about aliens, fighting,

comedy like all like people be like you're crazy but it's Joe Rogan and so it also creates a one of one category that only you can really occupy and so I I genuinely do believe this that everyone is kind of unique in terms of their distinct interests and kind of like if they were a chart like how how the point of their rock is in one directions versus a hundred other ones and so I do think there is a thumbprint there that that is unique to the individual where people do become rounded stones is because they pull back on their pointy bits. And so then they do look more uniform. And so people look uniform but aren't in reality.

And so looking at these three big things in terms of what's coming around the corner in commerce and kind of like where the best brands are indexing, number one is that they see everyone as a potential customer around the world, not just their local area, or just even people who speak their language. Second was that they don't really care where the customer comes from. Like if more people know about your stuff and you put it in more places, more people will buy it. And as long as you treat them well, you'll make more sales and you're more

repeat customers. And then the third one is basically allowing yourself to be you publicly and being more okay with the association that's going to happen inevitably with you starting a company because if you really believe in the product, it's going to be enmeshed in your identity. Like it's going to be part of who you are. And rather than caging these things out or boxing them, just leaning into the fact that like you're you and you own this thing. And I think that we were saying earlier with kind of Tim Ferriss and these brand champions, like those other people can contribute their thumbprints to your product as well. Well, if you're authentic, then other people that are kind of like you, like, you know,

I like to, I like to be exothermic. Like, I like to take, I'm very high energy. Always have been. I like to add energy to other people and other, other situations and rooms and conversations. And so I'm just going to, like, I want to be exothermic. And so everything that I do, I want to, like, I want to be the exothermic person. What that means is people see me being exothermic. I mean, you and I sort of connected, like, you and I are kind of social media friends.

Like, I was being exothermic, and you were being exothermic. We're like, hey, let's be extrothermal together. That's how you and I, that's why we're talking right now, because I try to be authentically me on the internet, and you try to be authentically you on the internet. And so we connected and like immediately, we're like, yeah, we kind of like each other. You get tons of people coming at you asking to do stuff together. And immediately, you're like, ah, something is off here. And I feel the same way sometimes when people come to me and they say, like, I want to connect,

I want to do a deal with you. when you are exothermic, and when you are authentic, you actually invite other people that are similarly authentic in your way into your lives. And you create these amazing communities and friendships and relationships. And it's really fun. But, you know, I mean, it's a great sort of place to wrap up, I think, which is like there is a deep optimism, I think, around the entrepreneurial community. And for those you that are listening, whether you're an entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur,

one of the best parts of entrepreneurship is that all of us, not all, actually not all, Most of us didn't sort of start with like some sort of like we didn't start on third base. Most of us started at the beginning and we've been building ourselves. And so we see other people building on their own, whether they're chiropractors or their tech entrepreneurs or their lawyers or accountants or they're someone who's creating, you know, I love my ember mug. I love the guys at Ember. They make these great coffee mugs that stay hot.

Whatever they are, I'm rooting for them. And they're rooting for me. And that actually, that's sort of wonderful like ecosystem reciprocity. you go back to that, that makes entrepreneurship a little bit less lonely and also the greatest tool for humans to find their own version of success, whatever your version is successes, make a lot of money, put food in your table, be creative, whatever that version is. Entrepreneurship is this amazing vehicle, and today it's more accessible than it's ever been. And it's tough not to be optimistic about that.

Last question. Business advice to Harley 10 years ago, you've got one thing you can tell them. I think a lot of, you know, a lot of people don't know where to start. We kind of talk to this a little bit earlier when we talked about T-shirts, but just find a problem that you feel yourself and just solve it. Like, it's hard to imagine how to scale and how big it could become. Don't even worry about that. But, like, if there's a hobby, like, you know, one of my best friends is really, his name is David Siegel. He's founder of David's Tea, this big T empire. He sold the company 2016, and he was trying to figure out what to do.

And all along the way, David was like, coming over to my house and you're hanging out a lot and he's obsessed with tea um i was like dude like you have a thing it's tea why aren't you build another tea company and so that's where firebelly came from and i love this idea that like you know the thing that you're searching for is probably right in front of you and i know some people say that you know you shouldn't commercialize your hobbies but i'm actually i'm not really sure i believe that like if you have this amazing hobby this amazing interest this amazing pain point you feel a lot that's exactly what you should be working on that's the first thing The second thing I think is like, you know, this is my 15th year at Shopify.

I'm 40 years old, so more than a third of my life has been spent at this incredible company. And if Toby and the board will have me, I'll stay there as long as I possibly can. But finding someone who, like from a partnership perspective, someone you work with closely, I think a lot of people start companies in businesses with people that are just like them, people that they would have been friends with in high school. I think it's fun, and I get it. And, you know, Firebelly, for example, Dave and I are both kind of similar with our little T thing.

But actually, I think some of the most impressive things I've ever seen built were built by people that probably would not have been friends in high school. Again, going back to this idea of pointy objects, they're pointy in their own way, but their points are not the same. And by combining their points, they kind of create this like Avengers thing, which on their own, they'd be doing cool stuff, but like, you know, doing it all together means they can build a hundred billion dollar company. So those would be some of the things, I would say.

Maybe the only other thing is like, you know, one, just going back to like life, life and work altogether, and one of the most important decisions all of us can make is finding an incredible, incredible partner, spouse, wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. I think people underestimate how important that is. And I think I often refer to Lindsay at our 40th birthday. I said, you know, Lindsay is my superpower that I have this incredible part. And I think we all, not all, but I know a lot of people that take for granted how important

that particular decision is. I think finding a wonderful life partner for you, whoever you are, is just probably the most important decision you're ever going to make. And I think we all, some people think about it very thoughtfully, others sort of do it half-hazardly. And I think that's a mistake. Yeah. 0.71 correlation with your subjective well-being.

Hell yeah. Is that true? Are you making that out? No, no, that's point seven. Wow. The relationship with subjective love being. The strength of the relationship with your significant other. With that, I feel like it's a great stopping point.

Thank you so much for giving your time. Like, just, just thank you. This is so fun. I'm, I hope it's valuable to your community and your listeners. I'm a huge fan. I'm part of your community. And I tried to bring as much insight and thoughtfulness as I possibly could. It's an honor, Alex, for me to be talking to you for, I don't know, the last 90 minutes.

It's beyond mutual. And on just behalf of, you know, Moza Nation, thank you so much. Appreciate you.