The Startup Ideas Podcast - Forget Zero-Sum, Be Positive-Sum with Harley Finkelstein

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

Shopify has changed e-commerce forever. And, if you're willing to listen closely enough, you can borrow part of their DNA to accelerate your own entrepreneurial success. On this episode of Where It Happens, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein shares how he created his own luck to become involved with Shopify, how NFTs are changing the future of entrepreneurship, and how media will never be the same.Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comSPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORSThis episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the fastest way for investors and M&A teams to learn everything they want to know about a company, all from an on-demand digital platform. Tegus is the most extensive source of instantly-available 1:1 conversations between investors and experts, covering companies from the seed stage to the public markets. Just log in for instant access to 25,000+ transcripts. They are offering you a free 2-week trial at tegus.co/room.This episode is also brought to you by OpenPhone. OpenPhone is an all-in-one business phone system that can help your startup look more credible—and it works right from your existing smartphone or computer. Each phone number comes with its own inbox for managing calls, texts, and voicemails together—making it easy to keep track of every conversation. Sign up and start using your new business number in minutes. Visit OpenPhone.co/room to save 20% on your first six months.

What's going on, man? Not much. Good to see you. Good to see you. I've got big news today that I feel like is proper to open with. And it's related to my Dunkin' Donuts, large, cold brew that I have every day. See this straw? Yep. You know how they say the little things in life are like really important? Well, this straw is my little thing today because Dunkin' Donuts, they've had a straw shortage.

And they've had these really crappy straws for the last probably six months. honestly it was like part of the whole supply chain shortage i read about it and finally they have brought back these orange classic duncan donut straws which are just better straws they're much more robust and they like hold up better and they give you better like flow through them to get a better drinking experience and i went in today to go get my coffee before we did this episode and they had them and it brought this huge smile to my face stupid thing but creates a big impact i don't do straws i don't know if i've ever told you that why um i have i haven't have a thirst for life and I don't like to be constrained.

You know, I feel like I like to open the lid and just sort of go go all in and let as much liquid as my mouth could, you know. All right. Before this gets into weird territory, let's jump into what we're talking about today. Yeah. I don't know how much more I can take on that. So we have an awesome guest and someone that I've been really wanted to talk to for a while from Shopify, Harley.

And it's going to be a blast. jamming of him. We've got so much to cover with him. And what I wanted to talk about in the lead into him joining is this story that I did a bunch of research for for something I was writing about a year ago. And it's very relevant and it kind of has this like arrow of progress in technology that connects through to what Shopify is doing today and building. And so I feel like it's a really good lead in. So if you'll humor me, I'd love to kind of start with this story and and start there to kind of jam for the episode. Okay, cool. Yeah, I'm all yours. Are you in your team still using your personal phone numbers for work? Do you call customers, partners, or candidates with your

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Hey everyone, Sahil here. If you know me, you know that I love going down rabbit holes. Well, I have my secret weapon for you today, Teegis. In today's market, we don't have time to spend weeks to get up to speed on a new company, industry, or idea. Teegis is the fastest way for investors and M&A teams to learn everything they want to know about a company, all from an on-demand digital platform. Teegis is the most extensive source of instantly available one-on-one conversations between investors and experts, covering companies from seed stage to public markets. Just log in for instant access to 25,000 plus transcripts that are instantly searchable. To try it out today, sign up for a free trial at tegis.co slash room. Again, you can try Teegis for

free today at tegis.com slash room. You won't regret it. So the person I want to talk about in the story I want to talk about is Morris Chang. And you probably never heard of Morris Chang because you're probably like most people. And he's a relatively unknown figure, although arguably, if not the most impactful figure, one of the most impactful figures in the history of technology, which is a crazy thing to say, I know. But let me explain.

So Morris Chang is the founder of a business called Taiwan Semiconductor manufacturing company, TSM. It is based in Taiwan, as you'd imagine. And it is probably the most geopolitically and potentially economically important company in the world today. Morris Chang is a fascinating human being. And his life and story is extremely inspiring as well as being really impactful. So he was born in China, fled the country during the civil war that occurred, I think like 1948, fled the country, went to Hong Kong, ended up getting accepted to Harvard. came over to the U.S. to go to Harvard, left Harvard to go to MIT, did his degree there, and basically was off to the races on this, like, amazing career, extremely intelligent,

did really well, ended up joining Texas Instruments, which you might know is like a large American semiconductor company and one of the first big semiconductor companies back in the day. Semiconductors, if you're not aware what they are, they're like computer chips, right? It's the things that power all of our technology. over time, they've gotten more and more powerful at this accelerating rate. Moore's Law is the thing people talk about there, basically that semiconductors double in terms of their capacity on regular intervals. So Morris Chang is rising through the ranks at this company.

He's become a senior executive doing extremely well. And then suddenly he's like 50 years old, 52 years old, I think, to be precise. And he basically gets put out to pasture in his own words. I think he says that in his biography. You know, 52 years old, he's running one of the biggest divisions and kind of gets transferred. And it's very clear to him that they're putting him out to pasture. He's no longer in charge of the most important stuff. And in hindsight, I think a lot of people have pointed to potential racism.

You know, we're talking about something in, I don't know what years this is. Like in 1970s maybe, or sorry, 1983. So maybe there was a, you know, some racism involved, Chinese man, rising. through the ranks at this American company. So he leaves. Taiwan comes along and basically offers to have him come back and lead their semiconductor manufacturing industry. They want to promote it. It's clear that it's going to be a huge part of the future as technology develops. So he gets this invite and he has this realization, which I think is going to be the thing that connects to all of this future technology in Shopify, which is semiconductors had always been

an industry where you had to both design and manufacture in the same place. And the manufacturing part of that was extraordinarily expensive, like billions and billions of dollars to build these facilities. And what he realized was a lot of innovative design thinkers were not actually being unlocked or able to do their best work because it costs so much money to start up a manufacturing facility. So you had all these great people that were basically languishing. And the whole industry wasn't progressing in the way.

could because they couldn't actually go and start a manufacturing plant. It was too expensive. So his idea and what he did was he started TSMC, which was the first ever pure manufacturing. They call it Fabless facility where it was entirely about manufacturing. And basically they would rent out their manufacturing capacity to amazing designers. And so now if you were an incredible semiconductor designer, chip designer, you could go create all of these innovative designs and go and contract with this company, TSM, to build them. And what this has done is created this unbelievable industry and this incredible amount of innovation over the 20, 30 years since he's, I guess it's 40 years now since he started it,

that has allowed basically technology to continue to flourish and progress at this insane pace. So what are my thoughts? Is that the... Yeah, well, let's start there because there's so many connections to broader technology that I want to talk about, but it's a really interesting case study. So let's start there. So when I hear that story and the connection to Shopify, what I love about it is, okay, what I like about Shopify is that it's a business in a box.

And, you know, if you're a creative and you're passionate about something, to your point, like, you probably just want to focus on, if it's making T-shirts, just focus on, like, designing cool T-shirts and then have everything else, you know, managed. and outsourced. So I think that's what I love about Shopify. They have like an app store. There's like fulfillment you can do. There's just like everything you can do.

You're seeing this also with no code. Like now of a sudden, and we've talked about no code before, but like now of a sudden like you can just, you know, outsource so much via no code and just sort of put these building blocks together. So what's exciting if you're a creator and you have startup ideas is it's pretty, easy to get started and at least build an MVP. Yeah. So you're hitting on something that's a really interesting framework, which is these companies,

like Shopify, like TSM, like Amazon Web Services, who have basically done all of the really heavy lifting, the really expensive, the heavy lifting, the capacity buildout servers in the case of AWS that now enable creatives and idea people to go build on the back and just rent that capacity out rather than having to build it. It used to be that if you had one of these ideas, like if you, with Shopify as an example, if you wanted to start an e-commerce store, that was really hard to do. There was nothing, there was no software. There was nothing you could go and just get it started up.

Now, because of what Shopify is built, you can go and just rent their box in order to go start your website. You and I could start an e-commerce brand by tonight if we wanted to start that today. And we could contract out manufacturing or product. we could use the Shopify system to find the drop shippers to do all of that. It's really amazing and it all exists there. It's the same thing as what TSMC did for semiconductor industry and for the broader technology industry because suddenly this massive ecosystem of designers was able to innovate and was able

to sit around and just think about designing the most innovative chips because they knew they could rent capacity from TSMC. Amazon Web Services, another example of that. Any new builder doesn't have to think about going and buying and building. building servers to go sit at their technology company. You can just rent that capacity from AWS, who has put in the dirty work and gone and built all of that capacity out, the crazy high upfront fixed costs that are associated with that, they can take and spread across all of these customers that now come to them. Yeah, one of the things that is pretty cool if you're a

builder now in this whole new world is also the velocity of experiments that you can do. So, you know, you could theoretically be launching a startup every single week, put it out there, see if it resonates, if it strikes a chord with people, and just kill things really quickly. I think that's why you're seeing the rise of so many product studios and holding companies. We were just texting before this about Cody Sanchez. She is like a holding company and she's like spitting up stuff and buying stuff. They check out my company is a holding company and we're constantly. We're constantly doing experiments to see what strikes a chord. My prediction is there's going to be a ton more product studios, a ton more holding companies, because, you know, it's just, it's easier to get

these experiments out the door. And as creators, we just have so much less to worry about, which is, which is pretty cool. The cost of failure has never been lower. Yeah. And that's how I think of it. Because of all of these things because of no code, because of these capacity providers like an AWS, a TSMC, a Shopify, you can go rent capacity so cheap, so quickly. Because of no code, low code, you can go build things out without hiring a bunch of developer talent. You can test ideas. The cost of testing, a minimum viable product, minimum viable community to connect to the point that we brought up with Alexis O'Hanian a few weeks ago, you can connect those to and get something off the ground so quickly that the cost of trying something is very, very low now. And so, to you know,

your point on product studios, I think when I come to these things, I think about what is scarce. And it used to be that capital was scarce to go start these things because it was so expensive. Now capital's abundant. The capacity is abundant. You can go and try all these things. All of the technology to try them is abundant. What's scarce then in my mind is execution. You know, it's action bias. It's like people that are actually willing to go and test their ideas and go try new things and dive in on it. That's what's scarce is the actual bias for execution, bias. for action. I'm sure you have friends who text you and like, hey, I have this startup idea of what you think, right? And I get those texts all the time. And I, like, now I'm kind of like, well,

cool idea, but like, why don't you just go build it? Like, go build something to test this hypothesis. You know, I'm getting tired of like, what do you think this idea? What do you think this idea? because like if it's going to take you seven days, 14 days, 24 hours, 48 hours to go and actually test this core hypothesis, like I'd much rather you send me, hey, here's this landing page. You know, I posted it on Twitter. I got 150 email signups. Here's what I learned. What do you think of that versus like, here's an idea? I totally agree. And we all have friends that are like that too that are, you know, you have kind of a split of friends or people in your network.

the people that are like ideas and nothing ever really comes of it and you like talking about ideas, which is also fine actually. People that like talking about ideas, I think that's great. But then there's these people that we all have in our lives who are just bias for action types. And those people are amazing to be around. I mean, we have a friend that we're in a group chat with Nick Huber, who is a controversial guy, you know, people say what they want about him with different things he does and says. But the guy has a real bias for action. And when he says he's going to do something or when he has some idea, he somehow just finds a way to roll it out very quickly and test it and see if there's a market for it.

And it's something to look up to and aspire to, I think, because those people end up being winners. I have a close friend, this guy Barrett O'Neill, who you will surely hear more from. And I have a small holding company with him that we're working on a handful of different SaaS things that we've rolled out on the side, don't really publicize it. We're starting to do more build in public around it. And he's one of those guys that the reason I wanted to partner with him on it is literally because he would come an idea we would jam on it and a week later he'd be like oh i had my developer team uh pulled together this like quick mock up of it what do you think how does this work like what's the click flow and it was literally seven days after we had come up with the idea and he had this prototype of it wanted to like

test it with 10 customers um and when you're like that and you have that kind of bias for action and you leverage all of the things that we have at our you know at our disposal today relative to 20 years ago people would have killed for that stuff um you realize that today is literally the best time in history to be an entrepreneur and to be someone that has a bias for action. I will say on the bias for action piece, I do know a lot of people who are biased for action. So they put out a ton of experiments every week, month, whatever, but then they give up too easily on some of these experiments. So that's, I think we're going to encounter that a lot in like 22 and 23, which is like,

there's just going to, there's going to be graveyards of these experiments. And I think it's really important to like, if you're a builder and you're, you're putting experiments out, you're not, you're also like gaining the key insights, you're writing down the key insights, um, and you're iterating, you know, around a problem. Um, and you're not just, you know, jumping around kind of aimlessly just to put out experiments for the sake of putting out experiments. Yeah. Well, it's a good, it's a good point because I think what you're getting at is that there's more scarcity of bias for action is real, but there's also a scarcity of things like kind of grit, tenacity, like the ability to follow through on things. Um,

And then like intellectual curiosity, I still think is going to be kind of the razor's edge between success and failure. Because in a world where, you know, kind of compute capacity is limitless eventually, intellectual curiosity and the willingness to go down those rabbit holes and figure out what it is that needs to be built in the first place is always going to be in short supply. So, I mean, I totally agree with you. I think it'll be really interesting to see, I mean, with things like microacquire, And our friend Gazdecki that's building that, it's pretty cool because there's a real pathway for people to build something small, scale it up, stick with it a little bit. And now there's liquidity on those type of businesses.

And there's a real marketplace being built around it. So I think you're going to see this whole new generation of entrepreneurs, like micro entrepreneurs that are going and doing these things to your point on product studios. And it's super fun. Like the number one, you know, people ask me all the time, like why do I love doing a holding company and a studio and an agency and a fund and all these things and all these things. and all these experiments. The number one reason selfishly is that it's a lot of fun.

It's really fun to be a creative person and to work on multiple ideas, multiple experiments, iterate it, iterate versus like, you know, you're working on a small feature of like a large thing and you're just, it's just, you know, it's really fun to do zero to one concept building and experiments right now. Yeah, and you can be your own boss doing that. You don't have to go work for someone. and you can go build things, find liquidity, find cash flows, et cetera. Pretty cool.

And ties so well to our conversation with our guest, Harley, who is an amazing figure. Also has one of the best Zoom setups I've ever seen in my life. So I'm personally excited to get shown up here. And jam on all of this stuff. I mean, what they are doing to foster the entrepreneurial ecosystem and increase the GDP of the Internet. I know that's Stripes thing. But Shopify, I would argue, actually has just as much of a, a claim to it. They call it arming the rebels, I suppose, which I absolutely love, and I'm going to

ask Harley about it. But let's bring him in and let's go deeper on this stuff. I really want to hear more about his predictions for the future, what's working for them, what's not, and just go deeper on it. Sounds good, man. I should probably look it up, like history of SM7B. Welcome in, man. 1973. Okay, good. 1970. Yeah, the SM7 was introduced in 1973. And there were some revisions, but effectively, the revision was introduced in 1999, where there was an additional larger windscreen built in. But yeah, the mic, if you look at the one from 1973, it's almost exactly the one we're using right now. So you're telling me that our mics are more retro than Greg's? Greg looks like he's from the future, which I think is probably true.

Every time we get on these with Greg, I crack up seeing him. I think he looks like he's getting into some like ready player one mode or something like that to go into the metaverse. I mean, it's nerdy. It's a gaming headset. It's perfect. Yeah, yeah. I think you know, you kind of have the all in podcast, you know, kind of set up there. I think they all use that on that podcast. Yeah, it's not below your line, Greg. That's good. Not going there. Too soon. Not going there. Greg and I have known each other. If you know this for a long, long time. And I know we'll talk a bit about Montreal and sort of why I think Montreal is such a ridiculous. inspiring place to grow up and become an entrepreneur. But Greg and I have been interested for a very long time. And it's, uh, I, you know, him and I are peers. So it's kind of weird to say this, but I am, uh, incredibly blown away. And, and frankly, um, I just very impressed and very proud of his incredible success. Could you see me blushing right now? No, sorry. I don't want to do the whole like

patronizing, right? I think you and I are almost the same age, but I am, I'm, you know, Greg has always been someone that's had great talent. So it's super cool to see it. I, I, I, I, I, I'm not good with compliments. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I was hoping we can talk about Montreal a little bit because Sahel has actually asked me about Montreal and he's like, what is in the water up there? I call it the Montreal Mafia. Did I say it appropriately? It's fascinating. Yeah, Montreal. Montreal, which I'll speak a little strange because Montreal, is it's the only, I mean, you know, inside of the Canadian main cities, it's the only bilingual city. So what you have is you have a bunch of people like Greg and I who grew up there who,

I think Greg, you'd probably be the same thing. We only started learning French in school around the fourth or fifth grade. That's right. Right. So most of us did not grow up. I mean, we were Anglophones. We speak English at home. But in school in Quebec, you did not learn English until, again, you're probably, you know, eight or nine years old. And so, you know, Montrealers say things, instead of saying like the water is cold, they'll say things like, it's cold the water, which is a weird thing and makes no sense, but it sort of takes its cues from the French language. But I actually think at a, you know, just at a Montreal citywide level, Montreal is an immigrant city.

And you will find very few people that go back three or four generations in Montreal. Greg, I suspect your grandparents probably were the first gen in Montreal. They were born actually in Montreal. They were. So it's fairly not common. My, you know, most of, my father was, was born in Hungary. He immigrated to Montreal when he was, you know, five years old. And I think one of the things that Montreal has done is, it's embraced as sort of this immigrant culture, which effectively is entrepreneurship, because you have no capital, you have no experience, you have no money. So the thing to do is go and find a way to hustle and make, you know, put food on the table. And that takes the form of what is, you know, famously known as the Schmata business in Montreal, which is the clothing business, uh, which is, you know, where dove charnied American apparel got started and, you know, Buffalo jeans and Parasuka got started there and a whole pager and a whole bunch of, you know, global fashion brands all got started in Montreal because the barred entry into that, into that industry was

a low. But, you know, my, my, my grandfather sold eggs at a farmer's market for his entire life. And so I think more than most cities, uh, that I've been to, Montreal in Brumannibal, in graces this idea of being an entrepreneur and owning your own small business. It's so interesting what you just hit on in a number of ways. But when I think about like Montreal and then New York City, right, both are kind of cities of immigrants. But New York very quickly became the center of the financial world. And in the early days, like it was a center of capitalism and there was so much capital.

And so I think there's probably a grittiness of the entrepreneurship in Montreal that it developed from not being that where it was, you know, like now they call it bootstrapping. But basically, you had to, you know, hustle and figure out how to make the working capital model work and figure out how to how to kind of grind your way to that success because you didn't have those ties to the global financial center like you might have in New York. And you didn't necessarily have this, the people that I looked up to. I remember my first, I had a couple of businesses when I I was a kid like 13 years old. But my first real business was a t-shirt business that I launched when I was at McGill.

So I was born in Montreal. I lived there. I was about 12 years old. Then I moved to South Florida with my family. I went to high school in South Florida and then moved back to Montreal when I was 17 to go to McGill. And that was a tough year for my family. My dad was no longer around.

Family goes bankrupt. So I started a t-shirt business. And I remember that when I told people that I was starting a t-shirt business, it wasn't that uncommon. It wasn't like, well, aren't you a student? Aren't you, don't you have to go to school? It was sort of, it felt culturally appropriate or at least geographically relevant and appropriate that someone in Montreal would be starting a T-shirt business.

And I don't know if this for a fact, because Greg and I did not rehearse this, but Greg, I suspect you know a lot of people that started T-shirt businesses. I know a ton. And you're completely right in the sense that like it's almost unusual if you go work at, you know, if you go work on Wall Street. And I remember I dropped out of McGill, and I remember I was really scared to have that discussion with my parents and my grandparents and stuff like that. And I went to my grandfather, who was an entrepreneur, kind of like old school.

And I went to him and I was really nervous about, like, telling him. And I just remember being like, hey, I'm going to drop out of school. I'm going to start this company. And he wasn't saying anything. And I was just like, I was just speaking really quickly and I was like, oh, my, is he, is he going to prove? He's not going to prove. And he was like, yeah, that makes sense. You know, it was supportive. And that's kind of the vibe in Montreal. It's so interesting that you kind of bring up the cultural side of it. It's something I think about a lot. And I think about it in the context of both broader cultural, like within a city, but then also on a micro level within a family and how entrepreneurship and that grittiness is sort of something that's built in you from a young age and that you learn and you see it around. you. And like I come from my mom is India and my dad is white Jewish from the Bronx. Actually, my great grandfather was a vegetable peddler in the Bronx. Perfect.

And allegedly, allegedly he sold vegetables to Babe Ruth. That was like something I was always told as a kid growing up. Of course, you can't prove that. That's one of those things. You can't disprove it. But like I was a baseball kid growing up. I played baseball in college. And so that was always something I told my friends when I was a kid. Like my great grandfather, new Babe Ruth. But my family, like my dad's a academic, he's a professor at high Harvard, my grandfather and my mom side, similarly an academic, we didn't really have, I didn't have people around me constantly that were starting things or that were kind of, you know, building new ideas. And so when I went to go start my own life and go to college or

go get my first job, there was always just the path. It was like the clean path was basically, you go to college, you get a degree, you go take a stable job and you kind of work in that and make money and put your head down. And that was what life was. And only when I met Greg and a handful of other friends after when COVID started, did I start to see this other side of life? And I started having this like decentralized friend group that showed me the other side and the other way of doing things. So I'm fascinated by this like cultural entrepreneurship movement, as it were. I think it also depends on, you know, who are the role models in any particular community? Obviously in the valley, you have a certain set of role models that would be very different than,

you know, say on Wall Street. And I think in Montreal, or you can sort of replace Montreal with entrepreneurial cities. You know, for example, like I've been told that Chicago is incredibly entrepreneurial relative to New York, for example. And I don't know, I don't know all the American cities, but Toronto, for example, is, I think, less entrepreneurial. It's the biggest city. And in Canada, it's far more, you know, there's like, there's the Wall Street of Canada called Bay Street in Toronto. And I think it depends on who are the, who do people try to emulate? And in a place like Montreal, you tried to emulate, at least I did growing up, the entrepreneurs, the people that started something from nothing.

And I remember in those first couple of months of starting this T-shirt business, there was this coffee shop in Shubanel, which is the Montreal Garment District called Gentile. Greg, I'm not sure if you ever went there. Of course. But it was this sort of, you know, kind of grimy coffee shop. But the cool part is you can kind of just sit there at the coffee bar and you can listen to. mostly these like, you know, old men, these old Jewish men, you know, talk about, uh, business and talk about what it was like to start and, and they would, you know, they would complain and they would lament, but they also would sort of talk strategy and they would talk about dealmaking.

And I think because of that, um, those were sort of the leaders of the city. And I think because those are the leaders of the city, those are people wanted to emulate. It encouraged people to try their hand in entrepreneurship in a way that felt almost safe if you failed because at least, And this is sort of, you know, Greg, your grandfather and this conversation with your grandfather is, well, you know, go and try. He didn't necessarily talk you out of it where, where I suspect a lot of people that didn't grow up in a place like that with the family like that would say, are you crazy? Like, go to school, get a degree. That is, that is the safest way to make money or to be successful. I also think.

So cannot agree more on on a few things. Okay, a few reactions to that. Number one, like, I think it's so important that everyone finds their own gentiles, whatever that is. You know, just a safe spot where they could share stories, share experiences. How are they? I'm curious, like, how important do you think that is to some of the entrepreneurs that you see in terms of, you know, having a safe spot? Is that key to success? So we're going to jump around timelines a little bit here, but just to connect some dots.

So I finished undergrad, finished university. I actually didn't finish at McGill. I finished a Concordia, which is sort of, you know, McGill's kind of younger brother across the street in Montreal. My T-shirt business had, you know, had some success. And McGill did not encourage you to be a full-time working student. You either went to school or you worked, but doing it together concurrently was sort of frowned upon. And they would encourage you to do a reduced course load.

And, you know, I was all of 18 years old or 19 years old. And I didn't want to do that. So there was another university in Montreal, which is not necessarily as prestigious or well-known as McGill, but they were totally fine with me being an entrepreneur student. So I transferred and I graduated. And a mentor of mine who had been a mentor of mine since I was a kid convinced me to go to law school, not to become a lawyer, but to become a better entrepreneur. And this particular mentor, his name is Philip Reimer.

He was teaching law that year in 2005 at the University of Ottawa. He was effectively taken off some time from his legal. practice to teach, which is something that was very meaningful to him. And so he said, why don't you, apply to school at University of Ottawa and go to law school there? And I got to Ottawa in 2005. I'd never been here, even though it was so close to Montreal, Ottawa, was not on my, wasn't on my radar. It's the capital of Canada, but it just never been here. And the first thing I did was I asked where the entrepreneurs hung out, because the entrepreneurial community had effectively became my tribe. When I moved to South Florida, as a 13-year-old Jewish kid,

I didn't know anyone. I also, you know, immediately there was a club at my, you know, at the high school I went to, it was called Spanish River High School, a very large public high school. There were something called business, young business leaders of America or something like that. And I joined that club and I met more entrepreneurs and those became my friends. And so when I got to Ottawa, I asked where the entrepreneurs were. And I was directed to a coffee shop in Ottawa. And that's where I met Toby.

I was doing the T-shirt thing. He was doing the snowboard thing. And so not only do I think having a space where you can go, a safe space where you can go and learn and talk and and find, you know, and hear about these great war stories from people that are more accomplished than you are. But I think it's also important if you're an entrepreneur, find your tribe. You know, I spend my entire life trying to encourage more people to be, to try their hand in entrepreneurship. But the one thing that most people don't talk about is that it's really, really lonely. I mean, I don't know if I can curse in this

podcast, but like, it's fucking lonely. It's really lonely. It's, it's probably the most lonely profession out there. Even if you are, you know, in a service-based business, at least you have colleagues around. But like when you're an entrepreneur, there's nobody around. And for the most part, if your parents don't believe in you and your, you know, and your friends think you're crazy, like it's just, you're always by yourself. And so not only do I think a place like Gentilia, a physical location is important to go and spend time, but also the people that you will meet there presumably and hopefully will become potentially your next, you know, your business partners, as was the case for me.

This is one of my favorite things to talk about because you're hitting on like two concepts that are incredible independently and also collectively because they tie together. One is like this whole idea of, you know, locations where smart people can come together and gather and like those rooms. I mean, we call this show the, you know, the room where it happens because it's like these rooms have always existed. And they've never been democratized because you didn't know. You might not have access to that room.

You might not have Gentilia. You might not be able to access that group, you know, the people that are in the coffee shop, whatever it is. A lot of that is now in the cloud. And Greg and I were talking about it before you joined that like the cost of failure is so low today. Because you can start things up. You can try things. You can rent scale your business in a box like Shopify, which we can talk about.

All of these things exist. And you can go access. these people through the internet. You can go find these friend groups, find these rooms where these conversations are happening in the cloud. You don't have to be in a physical location anymore. A kid on the streets in India that has access to his phone because of what Reliance Geo has done has a lot of the same opportunities today and hopefully will continue to have even more as the kid who grew up in Greenwich and went to Ivy League. And that is such an amazing, empowering thing of technology. The other thing you hit on, which I love, I was talking about

with someone recently is this whole idea of like decentralized friend groups, which to me is an interesting concept. You historically had centralized friend groups. You had your like one pocket of friends that you all, you went to school with or you had a job with and those were your friends. And centralized friend groups are great, but they also create kind of an environment of group thing. You're like the same type of people that grew up in the same neighborhood and have the same set of experiences, backgrounds, etc. Decentralized friend groups are something that I think has been accelerated by COVID because you have these pockets of friends that you've met in Discord servers, you've met in group chats, you've met all over the world that you're interacting with.

And the result of that is you have these creative new ideas. You go pursue new things. It completely changed my life meeting Greg and some of the people that were in a group chat. Because with any group, because fundamentally with any group, what you have is you have a centerpiece. So the centerpiece is the thing that sits in the middle of the group. And I think historically the centerpiece has been location. So I go to a particular high school, that's my centerpiece. We all go to high school together. Or I grew up in a particular neighborhood, you know, that's my centerpiece. And I think now the major shift that you're describing is from centralized friend groups or community to decentralizes that now the

centerpiece is interest. And so it doesn't matter where you're located. It doesn't matter, frankly, what your socioeconomic status of your parents might be because who the hell cares about that. What matters now is what is the centerpiece of actual interest. And I'm in a WhatsApp group right now. a yakatori what's app group i kid you not i'm really into like this this sort of my covid hobby was making yakotori for my wife and daughters um which is japanese barbecue i was just looking it up while you it's it's really cool it's if you like cooking and hosting it's like this amazing thing because you get to pick the charcoal and each charcoal smells different there's all these techniques and it's cool like very similar to any great you know hobby um you can't get there's no

perfection perfection is is impossible so you're always working at it but i you know i have a yakotory group of people on, that we share stories on, on WhatsApp, which most of the people all never meet in person, but they're my friends. We communicate. We spend time together digitally. And I think actually, tying that back to entrepreneurship, that is what I think is so interesting right now of being an entrepreneur is that for the first time, I think maybe ever, you mentioned that the cost of failure is as close to zero. Well, that's true. But also, it is less lonely now because it seems at least to me that we now know more people that are entrepreneur entrepreneurs are entrepreneurial than ever before. And part of that, you know, I like to, I think Shopify and companies like Shopify has made it

more accessible from a tooling perspective, from a functionality perspective. But I also think, like from a society perspective, you know, you get a high five if you go to some Ivy League school, but you also get a high five if you launch as really cool new direct to consumer brand, you know, making tea or something like that. And I think that is so fast. fascinating. So it tied directly into like my favorite thing about Shopify, which is this whole framework of arming the rebels. And I know it's something you guys talk about in the past. And I love it as a general concept. And I think it's fascinating. But I would love to hear what it means to you and how you think about that tying into what you guys are building. So the, um, that way that came

out of is, you know, if, if Amazon is, is building an empire, the, metaphor is that Shopify is arming the rebels. And part of it is that for a very, very long time, it was very difficult for someone with a product to reach an audience to get the product into the hands of anyone around the world. If you go back like 300 years, everyone's talking about direct to consumer now as if it's like this crazy fad. And I, by the way, I don't think it's a fad. I think it actually will be steady state. But if you go back 300 years, when you as a consumer wanted to buy bread, you bought bread from the baker and you bought shoes from the cobbler. And that's just how it went. And then in this date, I know for sure, I know we're talking about dates earlier, but in this day, around 1876, there was a department store. The first department store was created in Philadelphia. It was called Wanamaker's department story. It was created by John Wanamaker, who was this entrepreneur, politician. He actually, he was the guy who coined the phrase, 50% of my marketing works. The problem is I don't know which 50%. And so, you, you had this, so that was the introduction of intermediation in commerce and retail. And effectively,

that's kind of how retail operated for the last, I don't know, call it 130 years or so, where you have a product, you went to go meet a buyer at some big department store or some grocery chain or some, you know, local boutique. And you tried to convince them to put the product on the shelf. And you shared the profit margin with them. And the reason that that physical store was entitled to a percentage of your profit margin was because they were giving you distribution. They were renting you their customers for a cost. And the internet happens. And now the internet all of a sudden makes distribution effectively commoditized. It's universal now. It's democratized. Anyone can distribute it. But it was still very, very difficult if you wanted to get your product in the

hands of consumers, even with e-commerce. And I think if you look at the early days of e-commerce in the United States, which, by the way, looks very similar to what e-commerce looks like right now in China, even though China is at a much bigger scale. Most commerce, most e-commerce in China right now is happening through a marketplace, whether it's JD or Taubo or Timal or Alibaba. But in the last 15 years or so, what has happened is through companies like Shopify, but also others as well, there's sort of been this trend now where makers, entrepreneurs, creators, you know, business owners have said, I actually want to have a direct relationship with the person buying my products. And using Shopify or using a product like Shopify, they are able to alleviate and remove the

intermediary, the middle person, and go direct to the consumer. So part of what I think has happened as you sort of zoom out now, you see a vast majority of of commerce, it still happens on marketplaces. I don't know the exact number, but, you know, if you look at Amazon, something in the neighborhood of 35 to 45% of all e-commerce in the United States is done on Amazon. And a lot of that is done, is third-party marketplace commerce. So it's not Amazon selling. It's them inviting third parties to sell their products on that marketplace. And that works great. And from a consumer, if I want to buy something fast and cheap and easy, it's a great way to do that. But you as the merchants, those are not.

not your customers. You are renting customers from Amazon. If you decide you want to leave Amazon for ever reason, you don't take your customers with you. Our version is we think that actually you should be able to have a direct relationship with the end consumer. You should be able to own the entire stack of the customer relationship because it's your business. And, you know, we now have about two million stores on Shopify, which is amazing. But if any of those merchants want to leave shop, I hope they don't, those are their customers. They don't belong to Shopify. And one of the other things that's happens, that's sort of on the supply side.

On the demand side, you also see consumers more than ever before today voting with their wallets to buy direct from those independent direct-to-consumer brand. That's the reason why you hear so much about, you know, Jim Shark or why allbirds and figs and bombists and fashion nova and Tommy John underwear, all these amazing brands are able to do so well. it's because it's entirely their business and they own it. They don't have to rent customers anymore. And so to us and certainly to me on a personal level, that is the way that we are allowing and enabling these sort of rebels to be successful and fight off sort of the evil

empire, I suppose. And I think direct to consumer is not just a fad, but rather it's a much better way to do commerce. And I suspect that's where it's going. I think there will be a place for marketplace-based commerce, particularly when you're buying something that is somewhat commoditized, something you need. But, you know, I'm wearing a blue salt hoodie and I'm wearing James Purse pants and I'm wearing Bombas socks. I'm never going to a marketplace to buy this. I'm going to go directly to Jamesperse.com or Blue Salt or Bombas.com

to buy it because it's my way as a consumer of voting with my wallet to say, I want more of those brands to exist. Yeah. And you have, you have a really unique thing in that, number one, you measure the success of Shopify in the success of your customers. And so when I see Toby or you celebrating the latest IPO of a Shopify based brand, that is such a cool thing because it's so directly tied to you to see your customers succeed. You're not competing with them in any way. Like it is very, very real. And it's so real in terms of the authenticity that comes across from you, Toby, the whole team, how excited you are when those kind of things happen. and when you're able to scale with these companies so that they can go do that,

the other piece is similar to what Greg, what I was talking to you about with Morris Chang and TSM, in that you have this story that has enabled so many people to become entrepreneurs. And so you've armed the rebels and there were rebels that existed that just needed to be armed. You've also created a bunch of rebels in a way, which I love because there's so many people who they had an idea, they had something really cool. they wanted to start it, but man, it was really hard before. And it was so hard. I don't know how to code. I don't know how to set up a website or create a store or get manufacturers and do drop

shipping. There's just so much shit, right? But all of a sudden now, because of something like a Shopify or like a TSM in the semiconductor space, you can go rent that. You can have this kind of business in a box. And so my great idea now, I can actually bring to life quite easily. And more importantly, you can focus on your great idea as opposed to focusing on, you know, servers or merchandising or inventory management or fulfillment. If you look at the shop at fulfillment network, for example, all these things that we think are pain points that we can help with. That's, we can, and we can make it so that you as the entrepreneur can just focus on doing what you do best, which is making your actual product. And one thing that I don't think people, you know,

people talk about GMV of Shopify and how much our merchants are selling. And, you know, if you to pretend Shopify was a retailer. I think you probably have seen me say this a number of times. If you pretend we were retailer, we would be the second largest online retailer in America after Amazon. The reason that that's important is because what we now can do that we haven't able to do even five years ago is we now can go and act like we're the second largest retailer on things like capital and payments and fulfillment and shipping. And we can give any entrepreneur that's getting started on Shopify right now, every 28 seconds an entrepreneur gets their for sale. Anyone starting right now can get access to all these tools as if they're the second

largest retailer in America. That is a real leveling of the playing field. That is what it means to arm the rebels. But that's only half of it. The other half of it is that when we went public May 24th, I think, I have the sort of badge up there. May 24, 2015, we went public. It was a dual listing, New York Stock Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange.

And I remember on the road show, which is a fascinating experience for any entrepreneur and frankly, one of the most fun a couple weeks of my life, they ask you about Tam, what is your total addressable market? Because of course, the analysts need to create their model. They need to figure out, you know, what is this company worth and what is the growth rate and what is the potential for this business. And the best number we would give was something like, well, there are like 46 million retail SMB. in the world. And so, you know, at the time, I don't know, we had 100,000 merchants. I'm sure exactly the number was, but we have a long runway. And the reason we gave that number is because we had to give a number. They wanted to know what our town was. But that actually was not even close to being accurate because at the time, because that definition was someone that was an existing entrepreneur who maybe wanted to expand their business or move from offline to online. I think a more honest and truthful definition of our total just market is anyone that wants to make something and then ensure someone else gets access to it.

And I think whether it's a vertical, which is huge right now, like NFTs, and you see Jimmy Butler and Martha Stewart using Shopify to sell NFTs, or it's drop shipping a couple years ago, which frankly I thought was just was totally misunderstood. And I think drop shipping was just this great process improvement for readdies. where instead of spending money in inventory, you were able to spend your money on marketing. All these things are able to emerge now because more people have decided that entrepreneurship may be for them. And that was not the case even 10 years ago. It was, you know, Greg, growing up, I know you were sort of in your group of friends, you were the entrepreneur. And that was kind of a,

you were unique in that. You weren't the athlete. You weren't the, you know, debate champion. You were the entrepreneur in your group of friends like I was. That was a unique thing. my hope and my suspicion is that is far less unique today. And Shopify is doing such a good job at supporting all these people. And I want to read you an email. I just pulled it up that my dad sent me about, okay, my dad has been a retailer, comes from a retail family, you know,

I don't know, 100 years or something. We'll have to send him this clip. and he recently told me that he, you know, he had this Yahoo stores for like many, many years. And he recently told me that he was going to move to Shopify. And he sends me an email and my brother on it. And he says, built, he says, my new website, built it all by myself with three hours of customer service help from Shopify. It was a blast to do. And I called him.

And he was so stoked. He built this thing by himself. Sales are coming in. And the support, just having the support of Shopify is sometimes what people need to actually, you know, we talked about this actually before you came on, like taking an idea and actually executing it. Yeah. And how much do you think about that in terms of supporting the, you know, the ecosystem in terms of like, product, road mapping and stuff like that.

A ton. I mean, you know, a couple of things that I think shopplay has a couple of competitive advantages. One of those advantages, we'll talk a bit about the ecosystem, the partners, because they play a huge role in Shopify. In the last 12 months or so, I think I said this in the last earnings call, like 46,000 partners, agencies, freelancers have referred shops, merchants to Shopify. So they're sort of distributed, you know, force out there, distributed like Salesforce out there. encouraging people to try their hand in entrepreneurship and use Shopify.

Part of that also is there are, right now as we sit here, thousands of app developers all over the world thinking about how to make Shopify's product better so that no matter who you are, no matter what your business is, no matter what your dad is selling, whatever that use case may be, there is a way, there's functionality he can add to a Shopify store to give him 100% product market fit. On the support thing, it's a fascinating thing because in product organizations and product companies, you can kind of look at support two ways. You can say, well, support is

effectively subsidizing a deficiency in the product, that the product is not good enough so you need support. We never really looked at it that way. Even from a very early stage, we always focused on having someone that you can talk to 24-7, even if it's not a technical support call. One of the things we often do at Shopify just using Slack is we'll post a lot of recordings, phone calls with permission for merchants of a particular call. And a support person may say, support advisor may say, hey, there's a really cool call and posted to the whole company. We'll listen to it together.

Or at a town hall, we do that every Thursday. We'll listen to support calls. And what you notice is that often what people need is not necessarily technical support where they're trying to use an API or they're trying to integrate some sort of third-party ERP system. most of it is just like business coaching. It's someone who's on the other line that says, yeah, you know, I see you've had a couple sales.

Hey, it looks like, you know, you're getting great traffic from Instagram or from Pinterest or from, you know, some other, some other site. Have you thought about activating the Pinterest channel, the Instagram channel or the TikTok channel? So support is is often, I think, looked at technology companies and software companies as this technology support. But rather, when you're talking to entrepreneurs, in many cases, first, time entrepreneurs, often what they need is they just need a voice in the other end to give them,

you know, to tell them to keep going, to give them some tips about maybe something they haven't thought about yet. And that's a huge part of our business. And even today, you know, there are brands that started on Shoplight around their mom's kitchen table that are now multi-billion dollar companies, who I still speak to every week or two. Ben Francis, who's CEO and founder of Jim Shark, is someone that I've known pretty much from day one when he was a pizza delivery boy in London and starting to do Jim Shark on the side to now where I think Jim Shark is probably one of the biggest rivals of Nike, if you can believe that. And I still speak to him fairly regularly. Now the questions are, you know, more about scale and more about building an

executive team and coaching. But that matters a great deal to us. And, you know, this is going to sound a little bit like Mother Goose, but Shopify in many ways, if you sort of reflect, go back a little bit when we talked about growing up in Montreal, there is no better company for me, for me to work at, for Harley to work at in the world than Shopify, because fundamentally, and I think you guys do this so well too, both of you do this. Your professional life's work, your professional mission and the mission of this podcast and frankly the mission of your businesses is pretty much the same. Think of how unique that is. I mean, Greg, I don't know what your dad sells and I assume it's a physical product, but I suspect that he may be interested in his business. I'm not necessarily sure that he

would say that he's obsessed with that thing. Or go back 50 years and look at someone who's running a tire company. Was that leader, was that founder? Was that executive? Were they obsessed with tires? Or was it more just like widgets to them? And they could be selling tires or they could be selling cars. They'd be selling anything or light bulbs. It doesn't really matter to them. And I think the opportunity that a lot of us have, and you two, are sort of poster children for this. And I think I am, too, is that the overlap of my personal mission, my personal interests and my professional mission interests are completely overlapped. That is so unique.

That's an incredible way. I've never actually contextualized it for myself that way. And it is a really powerful thing to think about. It also makes me think, you know, what is the atomic unit of passion for that tire sales, you know, for the tire entrepreneur because for them, yeah, it might be a widget, the tire, but maybe what they love is the feeling of selling or helping customers. Or building something. Yeah, building a company.

So it could be a tire. It could be a different widget, but they still feel like it's their life's work to kind of help people, I don't know, get through their life in a more efficient way. Have you guys thought just on your prior note about kind of the loneliness of entrepreneurs and this network you've created and needing to just talk to somebody? Have you guys ever thought about like creating some sort of Shopify sellers like mentor pods or like network where people can, you know, find someone to talk to that isn't necessarily, you know, a person they see on a daily basis? Yeah. So we have two experiments running right now. One is in downtown L.A. in the road DTLA, which is it's called the Shopify space. And anyone can walk in. And there are support people on the ground there. You can be a Shopify merchant or not. if you want to have, you know, just sit around and work you can. There's like classes and courses

there in workshops. There's a photography studio. There's a podcast studio. How cool. And then we just open up one in, excuse me, in November in New York City in Soho. Yeah, on Green Street, I believe. And again, anyone can walk in. And it's just, again, like, it's not about Shopify. It's about, you know, just walk in. And if you're an entrepreneur, you're welcome here. And what's so interesting is when you walk into these places and I've had a chance to spend time in both. I mean, it's cool to have these workshops. And we had, you know, Adam Baum Squad and the hundreds there giving a talk a couple weeks ago. And there's some really cool things happening. Great coffee bar there. But more importantly, what you end up seeing is that someone is just sitting working on a laptop and someone else is next to them. And they've never met before. And very quickly, you almost, you watch this interaction sort of happen in like, in like hyper real time. And they'll say, what are you working on? I'm working on this. I'm currently facing. Or you'll, you'll go to the photography studio, which is kind of downstating. in the Soho space. And you'll see someone go up to someone be like, hey, try taking the photo like this as

opposed to like this. And it's kind of an amazing thing to watch. And in some ways, where this, you know, what this gets to a little bit is this idea of like zero some thinking or the opposite of some thinking that I think so many entrepreneurs of past generations, sort of our parents and grandparents generations, entrepreneurship was this kind of highly guarded secret. Like don't tell anyone it's mine. And I don't want anyone to.

share in in in in in this and know my strategy that's another thing that's been completely flipped i think because distribution because now everyone's addressable market is the world is that the zero-sum thinking is is really going away and so people are happy to share you know how to do great adwords and using particular tags or how to create great content on youtube i mean if someone asked you how you guys have created this amazing podcast i suspect you would say well here's what we did i don't think you would, I don't think you would, I don't think you would limit that information because you were there to compete with you, because that's not really how you think about the world. You think about the world in a, in, in, in, in, that there is unlimited amounts of, of, of energy and

an unlimited amounts of audiences for this great podcast. And I think that is really cool. And I call it positive sum magnetism. I like that. That's cool. It is, I think of it as when you, when you start genuinely celebrating the winds of others, you find that you start winning a whole lot more too. Totally. And there's something so beautiful about that when you can just genuinely cheer for other people to succeed and feel so happy for your friends. And honestly, feel even happier when you see your friends succeed than when you succeed.

Totally. And you just find that good things start happening when you adopt that mentality in life. I totally agree with you. Harley, I got to ask, because you mentioned Adam Bomb Squad. And actually, both Sehiel and I have Adam Bombs. And I noticed you've been getting into it. Can you tell us about your, you know, the rabbit hole of Web3 and just like how you're feeling about it all? Yeah.

I mean, frankly, I read a lot of what you guys write on the topic. And I listen to your podcast. And, you know, I subscribe to your substack, Greg. So a lot of what I'm learning is I'm sort of learning as I go here. here. I think a couple of things. I think that, you know, we talked a little bit about more people are trying their hand in entrepreneurship and more people are trying to participate in this, in this sort of modern economy. And I think Web3 does that. I think anything that allows, you know, right behind me, I have this, this is called a Harold Town

as the painting behind me. It's one of my favorite artists. It's a Canadian artist. I bought it from, from his, he's long gone, but he was sort of like one of the rebels of the Canadian art scene in the 50s. His art series. His art series. super cool. And I bought it from a gallery owned by his family. I love it. I'm going to keep it. But at some point, maybe I get sick of it. And I resell it. The fact that his family doesn't get anything from that resale, even if I resell it for double or triple what I bought it for, which I might be able to because the price of his art has gone up dramatically. That seems weird. And what a thing I like about Web3 generally is that it feels far more, to use this term,

democratic. It feels far more fair. The fact that I can, you know, if I were able to embed some smart contract in that 10% of every, of the resale price goes back to the family who I've gotten to know pretty well. And frankly, that family can use this money. I mean, this isn't a very wealthy family. This is a family who, you know, is relying on the income from, from Harold Towns art. That I think is incredibly interesting. The other part that I think is interesting is that whether they're NFTs or anyone participating in Web3, it feels very entrepreneurial. I know you both sort of look at it from the lens of community, which I think is absolutely accurate, but it also feels more entrepreneurial. It feels that more people are now

commercializing their art, their thing, their their widget, their product. And that I think is really cool. I think it's also, you know, just to give some concrete examples here, during the first round of COVID in 2020, you'll remember that there was that the NBA played in that bubble in Disney. I forget what the bubble was called, but anyways, apparently the coffee in the bubble was not very good. And a great ballplayer named Jimmy Butler, who's, of course, very famous,

started making coffee for his colleagues and friends and teammates, and frankly, people in other teams, and he would charge 20 bucks for this coffee. And it became kind of a thing, a kind of an interesting thing that was happening in the bubble that Jimmy Butler was creating. It was basically making coffee out of his like, quote, quote, dorm room and selling it. And then, you know, things go back to normal.

And then Jimmy Butler decides to create Big Face coffee brand launch on Shopify. And I remember going and I love this idea. I thought this was so, so cool. And I remember going to Big Face coffee and everything is sold out. And I was like, oh, that's, that's Jeannie. Like I want to support him. I love this idea of an athlete also becoming an entrepreneur. And I got tons of examples.

I can talk to about Beast Mode Apparel and the story with Marchand Lynch, which is a really cool one too. But I want to support. I wanted to vote with my wallet. And so instead of buying the coffee, which was sold out, I actually bought one of his Big Face NFTs. And it's my rainbow wallet. And I don't display it anywhere. But I like the fact that I have this thing that I can do, this tool that I have at my disposal as a consumer to vote for something to exist. And more recently, you know, learning about, I got a chance to spend some time with Bobby Hundreds and understand how the hundreds had sort of formed.

I think they're an amazing, amazing brand, of course, but they're also very, very talented designers that I now can vote with my wallet to support them by not only buying an Adam Bomb NFT, but also I can display as my profile picture on Twitter, which is right now. This idea of encouraging more people to commercialize something deeply personal to them is really cool. And I think Web3 does a lot of that. Now, like any new trend, I think there's probably a dark side to this. I don't, you two would know more about that than I would. And so, you know, I think there should be some form of skepticism. I don't think people should take their rent money and go buy a bunch of NFTs if they can't afford to, if the price drops. But I do think that this idea of them, there being way more opportunity is only going to be a good thing.

And then from a commerce perspective where I think that's get super cool is that, you know, one of the recent, hundreds drops was basically gated. And the key to access the drop was having one of the having one of their NFTs, particular collection of NFTs. This is getting really interesting. And so you can think about an artist, for example, you know, I talked a little bit about athletes becoming entrepreneurs, but artists also becoming entrepreneurs. And you can sort of see it. And there's some cool stuff happening. I mean, you know, this is kind of an old school example. But when I used to go to concerts when I was a kid and I wanted to support the band, I would go to the merch table and buy some shitty guilty gilton t-shirt with a screen print and the tour dates on the back. I think that's what we all did.

Whereas now, if I go to, you know, a Drake show, I can go to buy an OVO collaboration with Canada Goose jacket, which actually is the winter jacket that I wear all the time. So it's just, it's this fascinating thing. Now you can imagine if I'm a really big Drake fan that I can buy a particular NFT and now I get access to different merch that only is for his best fans or his most important, you know, the people that he values their commitment to it to him the most. That's where the stuff gets really, really cool. And so, and that's, I think more entrepreneurs is a good thing. And I think Web3 is actually producing more entrepreneurs than ever before. Funny story about Adam Bombsk squad, which Greg will laugh at me about when they released,

it was like, you know, mystery NFTs when they first dropped. And Greg and I were talking about it. I was like, oh, that's a cool project. I should go buy a couple. And I fat-fingered a buy and bought a mystery release, Bobby, Adam Bomb Squad NFT for 2.5 ETH when they were all at 0.25. And then I, like, you know, I was looking around like an idiot. It was like one of my first NFT purchases and Greg was making fun of me.

And then a few days later, the release happened. It turned out the thing was a rare. one and I sold it for five Eath like a few days later. So it turned out to be like rather be lucky than good. But no, completely agree with you. I personally think of all these things in like Gartner hype cycle terms or you know, clearly there is a ton of hype that has been built around this. But there is also a ton of really interesting underlying innovation and progress. And the reality with a lot of it is it's sort of a natural evolutionary feature, this hype because it draws a ton of capital, but also a ton of talent into the space that will build the next layer of innovation.

So even if we go through kind of a cycle where it's a bear market and people aren't talking about it every day, those people and the capital really did come in to build something. Like we just saw Ryan, the head of gaming at YouTube, just took a job to, you know, go be CEO Polygon Labs. Crazy. Like, big, big Web 2 role and he leaves to go take this job in Web 3. There's a lot of that happening. And it does feel there's something that's very real.

I actually heard this on one of your podcast. I think with Alexis, where you guys are talking about, you know, watch where the smart people are going and work and you can sort of see trends that way. I think that's certainly the case. What I like about it is this, like this term starving artist has been, it's been a real thing for decades or hundreds and hundreds of years where someone who's so creative who makes beautiful art can afford to put food on their table. I'm not suggesting that Web3 changes that. I am suggesting, however, that Web3 makes. it a little bit easier to make a living. And if that is where this is going, I'm going to support it. So we have to ask you before we, before we lose you here, we always try to wrap the episode with asking for predictions. So give us your, you know, it doesn't have to be several. Give us your predictions for, you know, five, 10 years from now in technology and the world of entrepreneurship. But what do you, what do you think the world looks like? What are your, what are your predictions. That's a loaded question.

A couple things. First of all, I think we started by talking, the start of the episode by talking about hometowns and cities and where we, where Greg and I grew up. I actually think the concept of hometown is changing. I think from where humans, like what, what a human says is their hometown will change fairly dramatically over the next 10 years. I think, I think it'll kind of be like this where there's a, like you'll have an HQ where you or your family, you know, my, for me, it's my wife and my two daughters.

Like, we're based sort of our HQ. But I think we'll have a lot of satellite locations. And it's not to say we're going to have like homes everywhere and like that. It's just where we spend our time. I think that that is going to, uh, will not go away post COVID. Uh, I think that that, that idea of hometown will change. And I think actually that that's, that's really interesting. Um, that creates a bunch of ripple effects into so many areas. I mean, you think of the story of your daughters, how education is going to fundamentally change around that. That's right, because the school is going to have to, and also what I believe education is. I mean, you know, my wife and I, I went to law school. My wife's, you know, as a psychotherapist, we went to graduate school. I don't think my kids are

going to do that. If they want to, they can, but I'm not sure they will, but that's right. That will change. But also in terms of my connection to the hometown, the way that I want to contribute to my hometown. I mean, when I moved to Auto 105, part of, and I've been here now for, you know, for for 17 years now, if I felt a commitment to the city, I still do. And if I spend less time here, does that commitment change? And how does that all work out? And so that I think is going to be, or even where does my mail get? Where do I get mail? Right. It's like home phones are gone, so it's not really an issue anymore. But, but where does mail arrive when someone wants to reach me? That's going to change as well. So there'll be a ton of ripple effects, I think, around the idea.

of like, what is someone's hometown? I think I do a lot of, you know, broadcast and TV. And so I think a lot of, but broadcasts and television, for example. And one thing I thought that is super fascinating is, if you look at the Nielsen ratings for Q4s on out, yeah, but Q3 is out for 2021, the number one, sorry, the show with the highest average views on television, sort of eye roll, but it's Tucker Carlson, whether you hate him or like him, that that is, you know, that, that's factual. There's about, I think there's about 3.5 million average views per episode for Tucker Carlson. And below that, you have kind of, you know,

CNN and all the others. But if you look at average views on Joe Rogan, it's 11 million. It's, you know, it's, it's almost four times as big. That is unbelievable. And I don't think, I think that's going to change the media landscape. This is a weird comment to make, but a couple of months ago, Kim Kardashian was on SNL. And if you watch her, I don't step that late, but I did watch her monologue. And she said this thing that was fascinating. I think it went over everybody's head for the most part because it was sort of a joke. But she said it is, this is Kim talking.

She said it is really nice to be on SNL in front of an intimate audience. I think on that show SNL did something like seven or eight million viewers. And again, she was poking. She was kind of making a joke. But what she meant was that that is probably the smallest, audience that she has had on anything she's said in the past year or two because she can get hundreds of millions of people watching her pretty much do anything. That is a dramatic shift. Or you think about, so I think just on the media side, I think we all kind of know that the future

of media is probably not, you know, exclusively linear television. But I think from an entrepreneur perspective, if you think you're about how to get your story out there and you're using a PR firm, they're trying to get you on, you know, Good Morning American. It's not working. It doesn't matter. There are so many other ways that are easier to leverage and easier to get attention that actually may have even higher viewer numbers, which I think is also quite fascinating. Attention is decentralized now. That's right.

And actually, it could be even more impactful in the way that we can all do it without having connections or relationships into the big broadcasters. Probably in the last one, just because I sort of spent most of my time thinking about commerce and retail. I think talking about Omni Channel selling on online or offline or, you know, Instagram or we just announced a partnership with JD. So now Merchants at the Shop, they can push products right to JD. We have an integration with Spotify. So Spotify artists can easily sell merchandise to their fans. I think talking about a couple, talking about Omni Channel in the future will be like talking about a color TV today.

You never would say color TV. I think every business will be by, very nature on each channel even restaurants um you know the french laundry this famous restaurant in uh in napa uh in yon phil like now has a shopify store where they're selling meal kits and they're selling cookbooks and are selling kitchenware and it's just yeah right some go there during the uh during i mean that's totally tone deaf but uh but so i i think this this idea omni channel even though you hear it at every single retail and commerce event and every white paper and uh i think that is just going to be steady stated. That's just what it's going to be. What else? Those are great. Those are some of the ones. Yeah, those are some of the ones. I think people are people will start,

you know, yeah, those are some of the ones that are on top of my mind right now. I've got a loaded last question. Where do you think the, the tea space is going? Because I know you are involved in a tea company. And next time, well, you're, you can come back on the show anytime you want, but the next time we need to be drinking tea. I totally, I totally agree. I am drinking my fireball. Valley tea right now. I mean, part of the firebelly thing is, this is not me trying to, you know, promote firebelly, but I've been drinking coffee for most of my life. I've had anxiety most of my life as well. I didn't necessarily recognize that there was a direct relationship between my afternoon coffee consumption and my anxiety levels.

And it was only the last couple of years, actually through COVID that I discovered it. One of my closest friends is David Siegel, who famously built, I think probably one of the only billion dollar tea companies ever, David's tea. They had like 400 locations. he took in public in 2013, I think. And so during COVID, I told him that I need to stop drinking coffee because I was just, my anxiety levels were not being helped by it. And he turned me on to green tea. And he curated this amazing green tea for me, like the best green tea on the planet.

And so that happens. And then at the same time, the last time I built a store on Shopify was in like 2006. It was a T-shirt shop. I was one of the first merchants on Shopify. That's how I met, you know, that's why I got introduced to the company. And I wanted to know what was like to build a brand new, business and brand in 2022. And so we launched Firebelly tea together. And so we had this great tea company, which every accessory is made by David. It's like all the accessories he always wanted

but couldn't find. He designed it all from scratch and has like the world's best tea. And so I think I think more people should drink tea. I think most people assume that tea is like, you know, they don't really understand it. They got it in like a gift box or some sort of like, you know, gift package. And like they'll have. And actually tea is, for me at least, it gives me this incredible calm alertness. And anxiety levels have been better. And I can sleep at night far better than I did when I was drinking coffee. So it's been super helpful.

Well, I'm going to do a one-click checkout using shop pay on firebellyt.com right now to try this out. Isn't shop pay amazing? Isn't shopper the best? Amazing. To try to kick my large Dunkin' Donuts, cold brew habit in the afternoon. Can you sleep okay nights when you have that? Yeah, I blew out. This is a longer story for you at some point, but I blew out.

my caffeine receptors playing baseball in college because I was hurt. And so I was ending up drinking, I don't know, 800 milligrams to just not feel pain when I was throwing. So I can still do it, but it's not good for me. And I know that. So I'm going to, I'm going to buy using my one-click checkout shop pay. Oh, thank you. Some of this matcha probably. Harley won't promote it, but I will promote it. Check out Firebelly tea. The slogan's amazing. I think it's feel the difference because you will feel a difference. So check it out. Thank you guys. That's very kind.

Awesome. Harley, you've been so generous with your time. Thank you so much. This has been so fun. People could find you on Twitter. Where else? Yeah, Harley F on Twitter, at Harley on Instagram. And if you're an entrepreneur, you want to try your hand in entrepreneurship, check

out Shopify. I think it'll make it a lot easier for you. And if you're like the three of us on this podcast right now, I think entrepreneurship may be the best way to find your life's work. So I'm grateful you guys invited me on. Thank you so much for coming. This was one of those, holy shit, I can't believe I get to do this for a living moment. Isn't it great?

Right. I mean, I'm seriously, I feel the same way. I feel the same way. I feel the same way. And so excited too of major acquaintance. Hey, everyone. Sahil here. If you know me, you know that I love going down rabbit holes.

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