This Week in Startups - Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke on navigating a downturn, innovating in compensation & more | E1568

Episode Date: September 24, 2022

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke joins Jason for the third time to break down Shopify's wild ride over the past 2+ years (1:40), $SHOP's new compensation system (14:19), competing with Amazon (45:38), Shop Pay (56:25), and more! Then, Producer Rachel welcomes Jules Terpak back for another segment of OK Boomer! (1:15:58) (0:00) Jason intros today's segments! (1:40) Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke joins to break down Shopify's wild ride over the past 2+ years and the state of the e-commerce market post-COVID peaks (13:00) Spokn - Get 3 months free at https://getspokn.com/twist  (14:19) Dealing with stock price distractions during periods of volatility, innovating Shopify's compensation system (27:56) Masterworks - Skip the waitlist to invest in fine art using at https://Masterworks.io/twist (29:23) Tobi breaks down the ideation of Shopify's new "Flex Comp" system (38:53) Helpware - Go to https://helpware.com/TWIST to get $1000 off your first invoice (40:09) Laying off 10% of staff over the summer (45:38) Competing with Amazon, innovating in fulfillment (56:25) Shop Pay, BNPL, and remote work quirks (1:15:58) Producer Rachel welcomes Jules Terpak back for another OK Boomer segment covering Gen Z online life, the entertainment economy, social media backlash, "Sharenting" and more FOLLOW Tobi: https://twitter.com/tobi FOLLOW Jules: https://twitter.com/julesterpak FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

All right, everybody, it's a huge show today. It's Friday. We're bringing back our heavy hitters for interviews. And today, you're not going to believe it. Shopify, CEO and founder, Toby Lukka is back. He's amazing. This is a third or fourth time on the show. We've got a great rapport.

He's super honest. He's super candid. We go deep on running companies, scaling companies. My God, what a massive pull forward the pandemic was for Shopify, the stock price, dealing with employees with our employees. use underwater. What an amazing interview. He's so thoughtful. This is a must listen. Slow it down. Keep it on 1X speed. And you're probably going to want to listen to it twice. Stick with us. This is an amazing episode. This week in startups is brought to you by Spoken. Finally,

there is a way to build culture and connection that is designed for remote. Spoken Stories. It's fast. It's acing, yet it's human. Check out getspoken.com slash twist to get three months free. That's G-E-S-P-O-K-N without the e.com slash twist. MasterWorks is the first company allowing investors exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class. Twist listeners can skip the wait list by going to masterworks.com.I.O. slash twist. And Helpware helps you outsource the tasks that slow your team down. From data entry to world-class customer support, Helpware can help make you bionic.

Go to helpware.com slash twist to get $1,000 off your first invoice. All right, everybody, really excited to have a friend of the show, Toby Lutka, on the program again. How are you doing, Toby? I'm doing very well. How are you, Jason? I'm good.

You know, it was a crazy summer. Oh, and for people who don't know, Toby found it Shopify, and he did that in 2004. I met him. I don't know. Chamoth and I went up to Canada and I interviewed you, I don't know, 10 years ago maybe, you were first on the show. Actually, it was 2013. So it's almost 10 years. It's true. And you were on in 2021 as well. And so we've watched the company grow. And it was extraordinary during the pandemic. My Lord did the company grow. And then you had a quick pullback. It's been a crazy three years for the company, huh? Yeah. And running it.

It's been a crazy right. not for a feigned of heart. I mean, it's a funny thing. It's like, you know, Shopify is a celebration of entrepreneurship. And so I see no reason for me not going through some kind of dramatized version of it. It's like the roller coaster is, as you know,

is what it is. It's like there's high highs and very low lows. And one thing, an observation about building a company as it gets bigger and bigger is that the time between the highs and the lows starts. getting shorter and shorter, and sometimes you have multiple ones in the same day. And yeah, so there's certainly been one of those high oscillation years if I've ever seen one. It is interesting how, as entrepreneurs, we perceive every year that goes by, this business

will become more stable and easier to operate. We'll just be flying at a nice height, and there'll be no turbulence, and everything is going be stable. And I think that's happened to like three businesses in the history of tech and it happened in the third decade. Like you look at Apple, you look at Microsoft and Google, like, sure, they're on cruise control now. Like three of them, great money printing machines of all time. But then you look at like Airbnb or Facebook or Intel, like chaos, right? It's, it never gets, it very rarely gets easy, I think is the truth. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what you think about why this is. because like, I mean, I mean, once of, you know,

notable thing about this set of places that seem to get more stable and more predictable ends up being that they find like some quasi, I mean, a very, very good business model that's kind of self-sustaining or being a government or something, they're very slow down too. So I imagine that there's a lot of a books and articles written out there is by people who have encountered this. And so people are like, their pattern recognition or like they think it's more common. but that's just an aspect of only people who have time to write books,

other people who find these business models. So there's like an overexposure of this kind of experience. In reality, I mean, this is one cool thing about shop. It's like millions of entrepreneurs we get to speak to. And like everyone's in the same boat, right? Like it's just it's a crazy thing to do this. And it's hard, but it's also exhilarating. I would be getting pretty bored if things got very stable and predictable.

I think you would be too, right? Of course, of course. I mean, the fact that it's so dynamic. And maybe it has to do with, there are some businesses if they can capture, you know, close to a monopoly or, you know, they've basically got a lock on it, a duopoly. You know, you look at the duopoly of, you know, iOS and Android and the loyalty and their focus. I mean, it's probably some combination of that Google search. Just, you know, and everything else Google does, you know, outside of search, like, it's kind of variable.

What's been the thing that hasn't changed? during this crazy period because you have the pandemic, you got the stock market correction, you have a very big competitor who is extremely good at what they do. Yep. And they changed who's running the company. And I think, you know, that means you got somebody who's super focused in there running the company. Maybe as somebody who wasn't as focused.

I'm talking, of course, about Amazon. So through this last three years, what has been the thing that hasn't changed and what has been the thing that's been most challenged? Yeah, I don't know if it sounds lame, but like, um, I mean, there's a huge difference between things outside and inside of a company, right? Like, it's like inside the company, we've been, like, there's a mission that we're following, right? Like, and it's like, you know, we build the best software. We know how to build.

We are getting information from the rest of the world about, like, you know, what should we build, what's needed, what's useful. There were some significant changes around the beginning of a pandemic about, like, I mean, click to, like, curbside delivery and these kind of things. But like largely like if it was actually with all the craziness and this sort of churn and talking but the talking was all induced and like it's like mom sending a message saying hey is this as bad as it sounds? Like it's just like if it's bad or is this like what do you guys actually like you know I remember a lot of people at Shopify said hey for the first time doing this pandemic my parents actually started being interested in this business I'm part of you know like so suddenly everyone paid attention. which, you know, again, variable outcomes from that. But like, we've just sort of, you know, same thing. Like, we celebrate the people who are reaching for independence and we make the software hopefully vastly better over time.

And so the company just keeps getting better, I think. It's best version of that shop ever existed by a mile. But externally, people seem to think differently about the company. And, like, if you sort of overlay stock price on this sort of gradually, every day getting a little bit more excellent kind of thing that I perceive internally. And you're superimposed on stock prices. Like people are of different minds about how this is going, which is kind of a, it's an interesting experience by itself.

Like it's just, I mean, I have this fantastically privileged experience of having, you know, Ron started writing first lines of code on something, which when became a company, which when, eventually became a public company and have a ticker symbol. And now I sort of have seen multiple parts of a business cycle. And I'm pretty, people are always like, how do you deal with the, you know, of a distraction or the noise, with depression and these kind of things. And I'm like, I just, that has never really affected me. So I'm almost like a bit of an observer to the war thing.

And it's just like, it's just like, you kind of get the sense for like, man, how group ends up forming opinions. and like, you know, how is all this reflexive and, you know, anyway, I don't know if that's the answer. You bargain for it. But like, it's like, it's just always, it's an endless fascination to me about like observing these things. And every once in a while then I'm someone has to remind me saying, hey, you're not just an observer. You're like in this arena. And then I'm like, okay, yeah, right.

Well, I mean, if you think about it, you have complete information on the business. You know where the business is going. So you're in the room where it happens. You're making the decisions with your team. You know the roadmap. You're watching, you know, your customers use the product and you are studying, you know, their behavior. And then you have outside commenters who have partial information. And so their view of it and they have other things going on in their lives, whether it's journalists or analysts or competitors or just, you know, the people on social media.

And so they're just commenting with incomplete information. And you, of course, are just watching month over month. The product got better. Consumer customers visiting. stores and closing transactions. So, yeah, it is very strange to be a public company, I think, for a lot of folks, especially when you have too much attention, right? I mean, arguably, you know, the press wanted to know who was going to win inside of commerce, inside of the pandemic. This became an obsession with CMEC and everybody else.

Who's going to win? Who's going to win? And they basically picked two categories, telemedicine and e-commerce. But you did a really great blog post. where you show this incredible bump, and then I guess reversion to the meme, maybe you could talk a little bit about the bump you saw during the pandemic and how that smoothed out

and just became more of a straight line eventually. Yeah, so this is sort of e-commerce adoption rate. E-commerce is a percentage of overall retail and how it evolved. I mean, this is very easy to understand. I'm sure, like, the moment no one could move around anymore. People could not reach retail stores. Also, people could not.

spend their money on experiences or like go to bars and so on. So what happened at the beginning of a pandemic is like people very much switched spending to like party saving in fact and the other part to goods. And the goods were predominantly acquired for e-commerce and that created a massive, massive leap forward in terms of GMV for our emergence and business for a platform. There was actually points in time. they're like doing this period where the cloud providers almost ran out of servers. It was actually, I don't know,

CPU, like, yeah, yeah. Storage. Well, so you're, I mean, I'm sure you're familiar, and your listeners are familiar with the concept of a bank run that can happen. So there was basically a bank run going on CPU instances. And just because everyone, like, was growing and, you know, companies have projections about utilization rates. they're building ahead of those, but like, there's not a lot of in it for you to like build

massively ahead that's just carrying more costs on the books, right? So like, so suddenly everyone realized we are going for these leaps forwards in utilization and probably haven't done all the optimizations we wanted to get done right at this moment. And then people are sequestering resources that they are not utilized. It's kind of interesting, like, so just lots of interesting stories from this time. we really saw this, like everything just, you know, became very, very, very busy quickly. And so I, so I was wrong about this. I actually expected this to be a very, very long-term, a stepping stone event for e-commerce

adoption. Because my theory was that people, there's just, like, there's just a lot of people who have never experienced it. Like, it's just like not in the habits. Like, people, then people say, hey, I need this thing. It's just, you know, for you and me, the first thing we think of is just probably get out of a phone and buy it or order it or something.

And I sometimes actually have to mind if I could go to stores because I sort of fallen out of a habit, especially for COVID. And I imagine this would be more of an effect. I think that is, and then like as the lockdown orders came down, it actually like, then basically to where e-commerce penetration that would have been, if things would have just.

On a slope and 10% of people were buying online, it shoots up to 16%. It goes up 60% in six months maybe. Yes, yeah, massive. Out of necessity. And then it just comes slowly back down. And if it had gone on the regular pace, it maybe we would have been at 14 or something. So, you know, net net, it's probably a 20% speed up or something, an acceleration. Yeah.

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get s p o kn dot com slash twist get s p o kn dot com slash twist get spoken dot com slash twist for three months free take out the e for excellent which is fascinating when i go to a store now i don't know if you have this experience but like for me going to the movies or the store it's like going to a museum or like going to an amusement park where i'm like whoa this is special i'm in a place where there's things on a shelf and i sort through them and there's a person who helps me navigate through all this stuff. I just, the whole concept is so foreign to me. And of course, the stock went up crazy. That's a distraction inside the company, I would take it. Yeah. So how do you manage that? Because it's kind of hard to keep people, this is what I've heard from a lot of CEOs who go through this. You know, you as the founder,

very easily could just be like, whatever, my net worth's X or Y or Z. It doesn't really affect me. I'm past that escape velocity, but for somebody who maybe is, you know, a rank and follow person, this can get very distracting. Do I have a million dollars in RSUs or five or two or 500? Like this is the majority of their wealth is in there and it could change everything. So what, how is that to deal with and people, you know, sitting there refreshing the stock price instead of pushing code sometimes? Yeah, I mean, we've always had a somewhat inspired policy internally, but I mean, it's hard to do this in a digital world now.

if anyone was seen to look at the stock price or it was on the monitor or something like this in doing a presentation, like you had to buy like donuts basically Tim Horton's is kind of anything. I know Tim Hortons have been. Yeah. All those maple donuts are delicious. So whenever you saw Timbitts in the kitchenette, you knew someone got caught. That's kind of like.

That's hilarious. I think that helped. I don't know if it helped. but that was there as a little bit of a touchstone along those lines. So people knew to not like spend all the time at least talking about it. The other thing is like I made a point of this many, many, many times with great frequency as in the run-up. I reminded everyone, we did not get 50% smarter in the last like two months. No.

So, you know, just like because of the stock went up. 50%. Like, it's just, this is like, just to remember, like, at some point, the stock will go down 50% and we also didn't get 50% worse or demo or whatever we want. Like, it's not, this is, this is not us. Like, we work on the real market value of this business, which is unknowable. And what the stock market is trying to do is creates consensus plus a million other things that, like for what, like the approximate value given current long-term thinking, like,

the time horizon of the market shifts itself. And there is times where the market loves potential, of which we have a ton. And so there's times where market just values performance, or which we have a ton too. But our market price was very reflective of those things multiplying together. And when all the potential goes out, that just can look like this.

So I don't know how much it helped, but it was all the God at the moment. Because, I mean, the market beta drove Shopify to insane levels, and then that came out again. So the roller coaster was pretty severe. I don't recommend that to most folks. And yes, people, like, but from a perspective, you're asking specifically from an employee perspective, which is much more complex. It's easier to reason about these things in the abstract and in the sort of society level,

but this is very much an individual kind of experience. because everyone, like, this is the weirdest part of experience is that everyone around you joined at different times and so there's no common ground. There's no shared experience. And of course, the people who might, like, who have a worst experience, like, axiomatically have to, like, they'll have to spend most time either, you know, talking about it or just trying to figure out what that means for them. So, so you end up in this situation where, like, you're going to be acutely,

aware of some really unfortunate unfair, like, occurrences of timing. Like, I think I even put that into a post. Like, it's like, the way we've designed our compensation packages with stock options and RSUs, it's just like, sudden, like, the market beta matters a lot, right? Like, it's like, and, and confidence of the investor classes. It's like, if Russia invades Ukraine the day before. you join, your lifetime earnings might be very different than the day, if you would have joined a couple of days earlier or if a stock grant would have been a couple of days earlier.

And that just seems like a weird dependency for like figuring out how to compensate people, right? So anyway, well, you made a tool for this. This is, I've reached out to you the second I saw this because I said, why doesn't this exist? But how come this hasn't existed before? So we'll pull it up on the screen here for the audience who's watching in video. And, you know, there's obviously two pieces to comp. You can have some stock, you can have your salary.

And you said, well, I think what you said was, let's give people the ability to scenario plan because this is new. Most people who come work at a company have never had stock options. I don't know of 100 people coming to work at Shopify in 2022. I don't know, maybe half of them have had this experience. Maybe half had it.

That sounds about right. Yeah. And you're in Canada too. So in Canada, it's not like there's many Shopify's there. I mean, you had RIM, but it's like a handful. So maybe explain what you built and how it's been received by the employee base. And we have it on the screen now, so you can actually sportscast it, if you like, and describe what we're seeing here. Yeah, I think what I talked about earlier is a good setup.

It's sort of framing because, you know, like, you know, I, my background, last time we nerded out on, like, our tech backgrounds, right? Like, I'm very much a techie of all of, like, I don't know, hacking central casting, right? Like, it's just like, I like, I like, I love computers, I love software. I thought about that. That'll always be a programmer. Eventually, what I realized, though, was I really just like building systems. And computers are programming. They're fantastic for people who like building systems because you write the code, you design system,

and then it keeps doing it forever. Sort of in my, at some point, I had to. to make these decisions about like what do I want to do and do I want to do the CEO thing for longer public companies, these kind of things. And sort of clarifying idea

there was, you know, actually most of the consequential systems in the world are actually both, you know, human systems like the companies themselves and, you know, incentive systems. And just like, like, like how do you, you know, it seems like every problem

with solving in the world is a problem for which you need a lot of people working from very diverse backgrounds, working together. with aligned incentives and just like, you know, basically all I'm talking about is the modern company. So I find sometimes when something that we all do causes a very bad, like it's sort of an observably bad outcome. Variable is probably best.

Like bad. Yeah. It's not necessarily bad. It can actually be very good. Yeah. Yeah. Flip a coin. It's like a decision making in a poker hand, you know.

Yeah. Could go really well or could go really bad. Right. And I think it just seemed like the decisions were on the wrong side. Like I think the company, like, I'm a big fan of treating the company as like a professional, like a professional sports team, everyone's adults. Like people have agency, right? Like, and about their decisions.

And so we were thinking about like, well, like, I actually ran some polls. Like we just picked like, we found like the exact salary, but the most. of people in the company shared for various reasons between different groups and just like surveyed how much they think they earn. And we got like almost no agreement back. Like everyone. They didn't even understand what their compensation was. Yes.

Even though it's in a document somewhere and it comes into their bank account, but it's not easily discernible to them. I've seen this happen before. I've had to explain to people. Do you know what you got paid last year? Here's your salary. Here's your bonus. Here's your carry in a venture.

here's what your future earnings will be. And they're like, yeah, I don't make that much. They literally don't know how much they make. And it's usually they underestimate, I find. Yeah. I've seen the same dynamic. And it's really not like, I'm not blaming the people at all. It's just extremely complex.

We have leaked the implementation detail of highly complex financial instruments to like the institution of a business. employment for tax optimization purposes mostly, right? Like, this is why like a lot of equity happens, which, you know, it's all fine and good. But, like, you know, these complex instruments usually come with owners manuals. And like, there's actually rules governing how much we can say about the potentials of these things because we don't, we can't make statements about, you know. For a looking statement.

No Bueno, yeah. So, so in the end, it's like. This seems really unideal. We used tools like everyone as like workday. I don't know how much this is our usage of workday, but when I looked at what is what you actually see, especially when the stock price is like underwater compared to when you joined in your workday instance about your stock.

And just like every cardinal sin of your X was kind of, the entire line of your equity just disappears when the strike budget is zero. So I actually, I had people in, like not my own. office, but like on and in Zoom cause were extremely upset because they actually thought it was once it zero is out, it never comes back. They lost it. They don't have the option. It was just removed from the

UX. So anyway, like, I'm, I'm basically like, probably oversharing here, but like, we're like, okay, so two things we're going to do. First, we're going to take over the UywX. Like, this is, it's a product company, we are good at this. Like, all shop for doors is takes an insane complexity of a world of commerce and makes it usable by by, hopefully, everyone.

So this is the same problem. Let's go build the UX. Now, what do we want from this? Once we own the UAX, can we actually move agency over? And so this is sort of went into this concept of, can we just let people choose? Because, you know, sometimes executives coming in said, like, hey, I would actually, like, yes, you're doing 50-50, but can I have like slightly more? If this is available to executives, it should be available to everyone. Exactly.

Exactly. If you're a top employee, and you're sophisticated when it comes to your equity, your RSUs, restricted stock units for people who don't know that, you're going to be like, hey, listen, you were going to pay me 200 grand, you were going to give me 40,000 in options. I already made money at my last company. I'll take 100, but can I get a little more equity? Exactly. And it's a negotiation that people are willing to have with the top 5% of the organization, but it's so hard to do that with everybody, but you found a way to make it easier, which is, this is like a mortgage calculator. You know, sometimes you go calculate your mortgage.

You got your score. You got your down payment. And so people can actually understand and move sliders back and forth. I probably need to speed up on this. I mean, the biggest changes we made here is like we actually just moved everything to like, here's your annual income. Like it's calculated based on, you know, the grant value. Like we just like figured out a heuristic by which we can convert the old system and new system. and then everyone got an offer to here is what the new system,

what your wallet size is. And for everyone who opted in, which was basically everyone. Now it's like something where every quarter you make a decision and you get the stock options that you choose and you get them at that value. So like then, so this is like,

like this is actually where the real differences are in the system. So we've moved completely away from a three-year grant. You're just getting whatever the agreed value is is the one you're getting. There's some discreet value. counting, I think as you have in the screen right now, but like, it is for people to choose RCS or stock options depending on what they want. So if I take more stock, I get a little extra because I have more skin in the game, I take it. And it's more risk.

You're like, it should be risk adjusted to some degree, right? Like, and frankly, we've in some cases, like just for cash flow purposes, we actually want people to take, to, to, to check options because they, yeah, they are playing that purpose on our side as well. So we have an ability to offer incentives for people to go into options, which we are not doing much with. But in the future, you can imagine that they might, like, if everyone's in cash, maybe there's more discounts for on the options to get people into that or whatever. I think there's a, it's just a lot that becomes a lot easier. And there's a common ground truth of what everyone is making that doesn't, like, that you don't forget that you're also getting equity.

We don't forget that you like us use, like, like, this is pre-tax and post-tax. And like, it just, everything becomes very comparable easy. In this market, we're all sick of hearing so much bad news. My God, layoffs, inflation, funding drying up. But early stage investing is slowly starting to heat up again. Trust me, I know I'm doing all these meetings. So all is not lost, folks. It's not all bad news.

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I have a Basquiat. I'm so proud that I own a little bit of that. And when I see the picture, I just think, oh, that's awesome. I own some art. Super innovative of what Masterworks has done. And Masterworks, if you didn't know, is one of the only startups in the world to become a unicorn after its first fundraise. They've done so well. There's a huge wait list to get on the platform.

But you can skip the line, JCal style at masterworks. com.io slash twist. That's masterworks. dot i.o slash twist so you can skip the line. See important regulatory aid disclosures at masterworks. com. It's great about it too, I think. You know, you had this great post where you're like, hey, listen, we're not a family. We're a sports team. We're here to win. We're here to get better at our jobs every day. Everybody's got a role on the team. Everybody should be thinking about their contribution. And listen, if you don't make a contribution, like you can't be on the team,

And that's kind of how teams work. Whereas in a family, if you're a screw up, you're still part of the family. Like, we've all got somebody in the family who's a complete screw up. But being a product first company like this and then letting people have agency is so brilliant because what I find is sometimes people will come to you as the leader of a company. And I've been through this to a much smaller scale. But they're looking at you like, well, why are you doing this to me? Or like, I am, this is being put on me.

I don't have the ability. I'm just a victim here. And it's like, you're not a victim. You chose to work at this company. And now we're making it even easier for you to choose long term versus short term. Hey, maybe you need cash now. You got over your skis with your mortgage or you got to take care of a parent. You don't want to go long.

You just need cash. Great. But you can set it quarterly. That's a bold decision. My God, the finance organization must have fought you on quarterly. It must have been like, no, Toby. Yearly, every two years. What did they say to you when you came up with this?

idea. Well, I asked for by week, like twice a month. I just wanted to do it with a paycheck, to which they pointed out rightfully, but a lot of our, like, our European employees, like, are getting monthly. So, like, anyway, um, you asked to do it twice a month. The finance team must have spit the coffee out. I, I, I just wanted to do it. I mean, you always ask for, you know, the ideal thing. When you figure out where you land. But like, um, uh, yeah, like, I just basically wanted to make it, like, super independent of, uh, like, you choose how you wanted. And, like, it comes to you in terms of cash, or stock,

depending on what you, what you choose. Again, stock's a little bit down. You get actually more stock because, again, the money is like, you know,

stock goes up. Whatever you've, like took a stock, you have in a bank is worth more. Like, it's kind of, it works, like,

think about the counterfactual to, if you would have been on the system all along. Like, like this would have been, like, the internal, a lot of internal complexity would have not existed with this system, which is interesting because, like, I mean, I've been trying, frankly,

to get to the system for many years. It's not, like, it wasn't the first time we talked about like this. And I have a particular sort of propensity for wanting to rethink things, especially if everyone does the same thing, then I get really suspicious of it. That's usually a way to do it better. I don't, by way, I don't know if this is better. like that I will report back. There are clear downsides that people can level at it.

Like, for instance, it's clearly not as retentive as like a free option grant, right? Like, um, right. So what you're saying is, yeah, if you, if you want to lock people up, give them the gold in handcuffs, like making them negotiate every couple of years, you could lord it over them a bit more. So if you were in lorded over mode as a, as a management team, you were like, well, we can kind of have our thumb over these folks. But I suspect if you want the best folks, giving them agency creates a less parental child

relationship and more of a peer relationship. That's exactly what I'm going for. You're spot on. I did. You liked my note on leadership. I wrote one on leaving well, which is like, there's basically three things you can do in a company. You can leave too early, which sucks for you.

You can leave too late, which actually sucks for you. for the company and you can leave right on time, which works for everyone. And I think the sort of retentive component of stock options, like we go in handcuffs, they, very often just simply cause the bad sides of these things. It's like people who actually really want to be somewhere else, stay around because they have to. And honestly, that just actually doesn't work for the company or you. You become more bitter over it. I think everyone should be working where they can be a superstar.

Yeah. So it's, I like, I'm not too hung up on it. I don't know if you've been following it. I don't want you to have to comment on other peers to your company, but I will. You know, you look at Google and Facebook now, you know, Sundar is like, you know, people need to recommit and Facebook is like, you need to reapply to another part of the organization. And they won't even do layoffs, right? They won't take the medicine, just say, we're cutting 10%.

They're like, we're going to reorganize, make. all these units smaller, you have to reapply to go to another place, and a lot of this has to do at stock comp, a lot of it has to do with kind of like forcing people to reapply for their jobs, and it's dysfunctional. And to your point, if you're a player, if this was the NBA, we want you to get as many minutes in the game as you deserve. And hey, if our team has, you know, we don't have enough minutes to go around, maybe you would be better off playing for a team with the worst record and playing more minutes. Maybe that's better for you. And that's really what you want as a boss. Nobody wants to deal with this dysfunction. And the dysfunction at Google has really

built up, you know, Google's initial idea, I remember talking to, I'll just say, senior, senior people, Google, leave it at that in the early days. And they were like, we have a money printing machine. We're hiring every talented person we have, we can find. And if they're super smart and talented, we'll figure out what job they do later. And then somebody told me like, and if they're working here, they can't build a competitor. It was literally Google took the money printing machine and was like, it would be like somebody like the Yankees or like the Knicks being like, we have so much money at the Lakers. We're just going to pay the top 10, these 10 players to be on our bench as backups, even though we know we can't put them in the game, so they're not on other teams that

could win the championship. It was a crazy move, but nobody wants to live with that dysfunction. Yeah, I mean, it's game theoretically perfect to do it, right? Like, it's like, it's a great strategy. Like, I mean, I think Google actually literally had a bench, right? Like, they've even called it that for a while. I don't know. Like, I think, I mean, there's cycles and there's fashions. And I think, I'm almost suspicious about how these stories end up being reported. I sort of see, like, how, I don't know, like, people end up writing.

I mean, obviously writing about Shopify. And, like, it's amazing the ability by people to sort of, like, turn something into something that sounds like this sort of brash, like, random decisions. that came on a whim that actually, like, I happen to know, we've been, you know, discussing, you know, from philosophy, like sociology and first principles for like three years. And like, we built something completely different, but like, you know, so a ball for iceberg component of it is being, like, reasoned about. And, you know, I think actually all this is probably good because, um, uh, because I think

most companies are just I think they're starting to see their role again as companies, right? And I think people have tried to move companies into the realm of, I don't know, like sort of mock academia a little bit and that has downsides. And I mean, I don't mean, but like I think

there's some companies which went so far to like move like see what value there is in daycare to extract and run the counterfactual to the rest of the industry to like make make the place a little bit more like that. I think that's like outrageous and I'm glad I never had to participate in better kind of experiments on the employee side. So like I think, you know, humans are awesome and like, there's so much better than everyone seems to think, you know, like just like like, you know, it's hard to create environments which

are creative. but like if you put your mind to it and don't like just copy everything that worked for others and try to build something that's like uniquely worth it for kinds of type of problems that you are solving and that arguments your company culture you end up with something that just creativity comes from everywhere

and where people hopefully fall in love with the products you're creating and where they're kind of everyone's holding each other accountable or actually reaching over of, you know, someone falling behind and, like, helping them and saying, like, hey, here's, like, the thing you're missing. And, and let's work on your growth so you can be part of this team. And, you know, that's exactly what everyone wants, isn't it?

Like, so we're hiring where people were, like, super signed up for this kind of thing. We pay extremely well for, like, but we paid in an almost paternalistic way where we make all the decisions about what's good for you. And so this is, this was our opportunity to just switch over to something. thing that's cohesive of a way you want to run the business. Well, I mean, you're also going to self-select for people who want agency. And the people who want agency, I think, are going to correlate with people who make good decisions on their own.

And when you're running a business, I mean, speed matters. You've got serious competition. You want people to make decisions. And you don't want people sitting around. A lot of companies have had big challenges because nobody wants to make a decision. And that's kind of why startups exist. How many times have you been slow? down by time-consuming tasks like data entry and rescheduling all these meetings. Imagine

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That's right. H-E-W-A-R-E dot com slash twist for $1,000 off. And hey, welcome to the Twist family, Helpware. Let's talk a little bit about layoffs. You had to lay off a bunch of people. That's a first for you. How did you come to the decision and, you know, just how was it for you as the founder to have to go through that? I think for the first, I think that was the first time you had to do it.

at that kind of scale, yeah? It was definitely the first time I did it. It was, I mean, crushing is the only work. It's like, it's, it's, I see, I, I believe in, like, there's well-defined, uh, different tasks. I, uh, you know, build a company that's really, really, really worth working for.

And, um, I feel like every job offer is, um, our commitment that this is the right place for you to join. Like, that your career is going to go better than you join here. Um, and our mission is going to move further than you. then you join here. This is like actually the concept of employment is the agreement that this is like the optimal thing, a thing to do for the next.

Alignment. Right. There's alignment between these two things. Yeah. So it's crushing partly, like for multiple reasons, it's as you had the individual experiences, which, and you hear about it, of course, and you want to do people right. And you have to tell people that you're going to do something which is going to be a very consequential thing in their own careers and that they have no agency over that is actually

where we have like to make a decision for them and sometimes for no fault of their own. It's crushing because I made these commit like I see that I have made these commitments and in some cases I probably was wrong. Some people should have taken like an offer of a company that didn't have to go through this. Now I couldn't have known this back then, but still it's falling short of my own standards. So some of our hardest days. I, the reason why we had to do it, well, I mean, we could have also chosen not to do it.

Like, it would have been possible to potentially not do it. I think that would have been easier on everyone, but actually worse on the people that might have been affected. This is like, this is a hard thing to argue for and people ought to take the other side for me to steal, to steal man this. But the reason why I say this is like, we had to, hire a head a lot for the e-commerce explosion that we talked about earlier. Just like the servers, right?

The servers should have been had next year or maybe even two years capacity. So you're hiring what for a year or two years from now in terms of what you're thinking? Yeah, we've been more than, oh man, we more than doubled. So it's like up 6,000 people in two years or something like, or more even. Like it's, we expanded our lot because, you know, there's, you know, like we, we not want to compromise product. We see for instance, customer support as product. It's like, again, we meet people

very early in an entrepreneurial journey. They are often, they are courageous, but like, their commitment waivers, they might actually call us to, to ask what's the next task. They, like, they, they are not sophisticated yet. Like, like,

they are on a learning journey, but there's a lot of new things to learn after they start, like, there are often people start the shopperest, before they incorporate or do anything else. So, so, you know, that's, then, then, then someone talks to us, we see this as actually our product represented, it's set up through web browsers for people. And so that required a lot of, you know, getting, getting ahead.

And because we didn't want to compromise these, this, the quality that they set for ourselves on those things. So, you know, there's also some reasons where we had to build capacity ahead of, demand because it just takes a while to hire you and onboard. And when we didn't need, once we knew, like once we had the data, it's like, well, we can now engage in saying, okay, well, let's change

the job you're doing, let's find something else, let's, but or allow people in certain groups, like maybe start a bench, right? Like that's not fair to everyone else, right? So in a company dynamics, perspective, it's just, it would compromise a company we are in the way for you solving problems. And so we really the right decision. Yeah, I mean, to steal, man it for you, like, everybody comes into this concept, like, we buy in that this is a dynamic environment.

And the reward for working in a dynamic, competitive, capitalistic system is that you can win, you can lose, you can make mistakes. And so everybody kind of buys into that. And it's double opt-in. people can leave at any time and the company can change its plans and that's why the West and capitalism in the West has won versus authoritarian societies that can make unilateral

decisions to pick winners like literally in a competition where the government can pick the winner say China or any other country they can't beat competition rabid dogged

gritty competition will always win will always win. And we were sitting here, I don't know, last year or two years ago, I had some debate with my best days on all in sometimes.

Oh my God, like China's going to roll us. And I was like, I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure that, you know, if they don't let entrepreneurs battle it out in the arena,

you know, that's why we're battle tested here. And you have this giant competitor in Amazon. You've got to wake up every day and these two gladiators go at each other. This is the next jump of point

I wanted to go to you with you. they have a tenuous relationship, an unpure relationship with their partners. You have a pure relationship. You support people who want to sell stuff on the internet. They only work with you to the extent you help them. Amazon studies the people on their platform. And let's just be honest, you know, call it what it is. Amazon basics, 50 other white label brands, they copy them.

They pull the rug out from under them. And, you know, it's becoming a bit of an antitrust issue for, Amazon. So obviously you don't have to comment on their antitrust issues. But I'm curious when people call that customer support line you talked about and customer support as a feature as an actual product is brilliant. Shout out to Tony Shea, rest in peace, our friend from Zappos, who really, you know, I think set a standard here for everybody to hit. I lost a good one there. It's so brutal. I was just thinking about him a lot when I was up Burning Man. And, you know, you think about his contribution there and you think about

what your advice is to those people who are selling when they come in to your ecosystem. What does a person say on the phone? Like, hey, should we put our stuff on Amazon? Or should we go direct? How do you think about that? If you were giving advice, let's say, one of your siblings or a cousin started a store, what would you advise them privately and say, like, here's how to think about getting something out of being listed on Amazon or maybe here's the things you should be concerned

about? I mean, so this might be very case to surprise you. I wouldn't, like, reflexively say no. it depends a lot on what you're selling. I mean, if you're selling any kind of necessity, you definitely want to be on Amazon because that's where people look for them. But it can be a right strategy

as long as you go in the eyes wide open. Amazon is in no way doing something here with the store brands that hasn't been done in retail forever. This is exactly what Kirkland is. This is like, you know, there's like a trader Joe, I think is the sort of North American version of Aldi, right?

Like it's just like all its store brands. The retail industry is, like a beautiful manifestation of capitalism in its very pure form. Like, what's an all, right? The question is always like, what do you need to differentiate yourself? Like, if you have a unique product, like that's, and go on Amazon, you soon will not have an unique product. Same with if you go on AliExpress, you will also very quickly not have an unique product anymore.

But if a particular product is, like, we find that very rarely it's actually the product straight up. But again, in our capitalist like in our Adam Smith society, we tend to think about economics a little bit too much about

utilitarian value. Like goods and so like are much more about there's a lot more emotion in there. There's a lot more like belonging in there. There's so like the story. It's a story that like you like there's

there's like how often have you had this situation there? I don't know. Like you, you encountered someone who uses a similar brand, maybe like car type or or something you're excited about. And you feel an instant connection because there is one. Like this exists. This is not made up, right?

This is hobby book. So, you know, so if your core concept of your business is that you stand for something as a business and that you have, like, that there's a community of people. Like, then you should probably be everywhere

because you should look for people who are opting into your idea and your worldview. We've been everywhere and that can involve Amazon. Like, people are making different choices about this, you know. So, you know, we have a lot of Shopify stores. People who were on Amazon and then they publicly got, you know, copied and left there. And I think, I don't know what the current state is with all birds,

but they have a complex history, for instance, and they are one of our favorite stores because they start on Shopify and then public as one of our customers, which is just such a cool. That's extraordinary. Wow, I didn't realize that they were built on your stack. Yeah, yeah.

It's super and great, like, amazing entrepreneurs. And so it's just, so I guess what I'm saying is, I don't have a straight up answer because it really depends on, like on you. Amazon is just a sales channel at the end of the day. It's a very good one. at times it might be the best in the world and for some categories at least. And people should like, the entrepreneurship is tough enough.

Don't say no to a channel for some idealistic reasons or do it if that's cohesive with your brand. But like maybe Amazon can play a role. I love the idea of just putting a sliver of your product offering there to kind of acquire customers, get the brand out there so people don't get nothing when they go down the site, but then have these more unique things. And, you know, I think there are some, you know, sharp-edged, sharp elbowed business practices that I think we do need to think about with them. I think they should just get out of the basics business, like get out of the house brand business.

And then just this idea of like maybe leaning on people about their pricing, like it should be up to the merchant to decide what the price is in whatever store they want. If they want to charge one price on their store and one price at Target in person and one price at, you know, know, Amazon, that should be, you know, up to the merchant themselves. Let's talk about like the pace of delivery. There was this idea that like everybody wanted everything immediately. And then I've seen signs that maybe for some categories, if you need deodorant or quart of milk, of course, yeah, get it to me as quick as possible.

But it does seem like maybe we went too far in fulfillment and people are now choosing, I could get this a little bit slower if it was cheaper or can I get less boxes? Maybe you can talk about what you're seeing there in terms of fulfillment. What do consumers want and what's the best practice? Yeah, I mean, I'm need deep in this, right? Like, because we're building warehouses and all these kind of things. So, like, it's, I mean, that is probably a favorite, like, I just find the delivery world and the fulfillment world to be absolutely fascinating.

It just has all the kind of components of like 90s piece, like, computers. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, where you build your own computer from like components and and and your motherboard, get your power supply, buy, yes. Yeah. Put some memory in. Well, and then you go to Radio Shack and get a faster quartz and soda it in because that's the best way. You know, it's just like like like people are doing these super unscalable, non-productized things to like building a muscle car. You're like a chance of carburetor. I need to put different rims on this. Yet we are expecting every

retailer to go through this. It's clearly not, um, uh, uh, meant to be for them. And so this is actually something Shephyr is trying to fix, of course. But like sooner is better, but like there is a, depending, it is exactly this sort of necessities

sooner is everything. So it's almost like, like if you can't meet, make, get things this fast, don't play. It's like it's no, there's no demand past like two days, three days speed.

If you are in, uh, another category like, uh, anything that's like something you want, rather than something you need. Like, you know, sneakers, all birds or whatever. Sooner is better.

It's a better experience. It's a digital equivalent, I guess, of when you go in a physical store and music is perfect, lighting is great, the stores don't squeak. The people, the help is, like the store keeps are friendly. And so it's part of experience. It will get you the thing you really want, which is lifetime customer value, it'll get repeat customers because, you know, a lot of

the first sales actually have met margin, especially with the sort of occurrences of advertising changes now. And it's really afterwards that you pick up margin. So it's a big part of that, but it's not nearly, like, it's a failure, it's a curve. It drops off at like probably seven days at which point, like never again. And it depends on, again, but it is, it's usually a little bit earlier. But we separate this out in a couple of things. And what we are working on super hard at Shopify is that in the future, even for the smaller retailers, what you will see on a product page is a shop guarantee, which says this thing will either be the few, like tomorrow, two days from now or before a weekend. Those are actually the three things of significance.

The last one is overlooked. because a lot of the things that people want, they want for the next weekend. That's a super common thing. Ah, that's fascinating. It's like your home projects, like you know you're going to play. You have time to unbox.

You have time to unbox. Just unboxing all this stuff coming to our houses. It's a little bit time consuming. It is. So these have the free guarantees that we think are of a lot of value. We are going to have thousands and thousands and billions of dollars. we allocate 1,000,000 people and billions of dollars we are going to allocate towards making it so that

from a buyer perspective, they can get things with such guarantees from as many small businesses as possible. That's fundamentally hard to do, but it's very valuable. And no one's built this. What Amazon's built is a very different thing, which is unique to them. They have warehouse of 20 million skews, whatever,

and all of them can randomly be boxed together. That's not the way small, small, medium businesses work. they have smaller catalogs and so on. The details don't matter. They'll get it done. And I think that, you know, like at this point, we found that there's an increasing amount of small businesses

that actually have started rightfully renaming free delivery to sustainable. Like actually, like slower delivery options is what I meant to say, to more sustainable because it, like the faster it goes, the most likely it goes on a plane, which is not carbon neutral at all. So, you know, I think people will pick different places on this. Some people will always want the fastest. In terms of the abundance we have in society,

I was just reading an FT article before I got on the show, and they were just talking about how there's now all these examples of GDP going up while emissions go down. And you're like, well, of course you can have both. It's called technology. It's called thoughtfulness. And I'm finding as a consumer, and maybe it's because I have kids and I'm getting older,

but I'm just thinking about my footprint. I'm thinking about waste. I'm making, you know, my iced coffee at home instead of buying a ton of blue bottle boxes. You know, I got rid of the salsa, cases of salsa coming, you know, Laquois, train coming every two weeks with cases and just drinking iced tea instead. And I do think people really care about that footprint. Let's talk about payments. You got, you have your own payment channels now, right? You have Shopify payments.

I think you call payments. Yeah. And then we have shoppery payments. which a lot of people have some familiarity with, right? Because that's when you buy something from someone and you get like a code and then it all just sooms true. I love that. Oh, that's so smooth when you just go to a website and it's got shop pay.

So you're kind of like going against Stripe. They're a PayPal. You have that built into the system. Why would people use the Shopify payments versus Stripe? It's basically a wash on terms of cost, but it's just more simple and elegant? Well, it's actually like, a lot of the software

underneath Shopify payments at Stripe. This is one of the longest standing partnerships and technology. We're actually sometimes wondering with Patrick about if there is any other partnership that has seen both companies grow as much as Shopify did and Stripe did from the point where we

started first partnering almost 10 years ago. And, you know, like, so that's been really, really one of the great success stories there. So Stripe is our technology partner for a lot of these components.

They certainly have enough a big enough chunk of logistic software and a word of commerce software to keep us busy. So why did people use it? Well, I mean, it's the reason people come to us now.

It's like it's, it's, it's, your conversion rate is going to be massively lower if you don't have shop pay. It's such a common, like, like card abandonment rates on every non-shopify e-commerce software

are through the roof because people get to the checkout, can't find shop here and leave. It's death. It's death to fill out my information again. Like literally, I see this sometimes where I'm like, I'll wait till I'm at my desktop or my, for some reason, this website is not letting me auto fill. And I'm like, how do you not get auto fill right in 2022?

Like, this is table stakes. But, you know, I understand they got some small store. They don't even go through the user checkout. process ever. They just set up their store. They never even think about the U.S. because, I don't know, whatever they're selling, you know, some bespoke product. They're not software experts. What do you think about this buy now, pay later phenomenon? Is that like here to stay and people love it or is it faddish? How do you even think about that and in your role in it? I mean, so it's something people buy. I mean, it's something

we offer for emergency wanted. And it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, There's some groups, it's extremely popular with, partly because, I mean, there's a lot, like, the credit cards are engaged in, they're taking a lot of risks, which, you know, to their credit, they're courageous companies. Because, you know, usually companies of their size are not courageous. So the way this courage manifests is like in fees that they are pushing. And, you know, like consumers on one side are deciding, hey, maybe I should just get a debit card and just use buy no pay later to basically get credit back. And because that actually allows the underwriting to happen to people who are willing to do it much more economical. And so that's one aspect. It's especially with younger purchasers.

That's a very, very common thing. This is why you see buy no pay later so much. Or why initially it became such a big thing so quickly. And then, you know, high AOV, for, it's a big unlock for high AOV for high cost merchants, like the mattress, Peloton bikes and so on, like things that cost, like a big, like fairly big outlay is perfect. Considered purchases. Yeah. It can take a considered purchase and maybe make it a little more, yeah, take a little bit of the friction out, right? Like, yeah, okay, if I'm paying for it monthly, I mean, I don't, I don't need to do it. And like, sometimes I get these offers and I'm like, wait a second.

I can zero percent and I can pay for it over three years from my iPhone. Maybe I should do that. And I'm like, I don't care. But it does seem to be a really elegant solution for some merchants who, like you're saying, have those headwinds against them. Maybe it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

It makes, I know some of the data. Again, it's not a universal solve, but for some business, it is a absolutely massive change. and then made a massive difference, yeah. Like a massive difference for their cash flows, massive difference, like expansion of their products, you know, the amount of people who could purchase it. So again, your credit is, I mean, our economies are built on top of credit, right? Like our economies get, you know, for better for worse, right?

Like, you know, like sometimes people are bad with credit. I think that periodically occurs and then we usually go in, some kind of correction. But, like, there's a lot of brainstorming about how to do credit well, and it's like now starting to be done by companies. Like, you know, a firm is just extremely good at it. Yeah, Max is brilliant. Yeah.

Exactly. I mean, he's like sort of, I mean, he's done this kind of underwriting, even at PayPal back in those days. So he's been thinking about this longer than everyone else. And, you know, the software industry is like just the way, of their books, gives new possibilities. And, you know, the credit cards are all, you know, as if they continue like this,

just pushing everyone to like rethink of, you know, where the underwriting ought to occur. And so I think it's, I mean, to your point, competition is good. And so I'm, you know, if all the buy now, pay later, they'll eventually do, it's like, get the credit card products to be improved to, to absorb some of, you know,

experience of this. because it's just kind of, it's structured more fairly, it's a lot more above ground. It's more clear how much it costs in the end. Yeah. Then I think that's good. What they're paying. They get this like huge credit card bill and they,

everything is obscurified. And, you know, Max is really smart at architecting these things. He's going to know like, yeah, this, this 25% in this cohort. Yeah, no problem. Let them rip. They can, they'll pay their bills.

They got a job. We got the, we got the data here. They're going to pay their bills. Hey, this group, yeah, we might want to pump the breaks or give them a different deal and just make it up front and, you know, throttle them if need be. But yeah, I am looking at it going, I hope people aren't maxed out on their credit cards. Yeah. And they're doing buy now, pay later. That's the only one I'm worried about is like, those two groups of people are competing to empower people to make purchases.

I just hope that they have insight into what each other are doing in some way, right? Yeah. I guess the merchants do and your technology does. I mean, they do. But that's the right thing to worry about, you know. When you're hiring people today, we've seen some generational shifts. Like, we're Gen Xers. We just want to work and crush it, put 50, 60 hours a weekend. Like, we take really pride in careers. What are you seeing with these younger generations, because you're hiring a lot, I'm sure, plenty of millennials, obviously, but you've got a lot of Gen Zs probably coming in. and I'm assuming your work from home mostly. How are you managing this younger workforce?

We hear a lot of like, maybe they don't have the same work ethic, some of them, maybe they don't want to come to work, labor participation in the United States. I don't know if you track these numbers, but we're, you know, in 1999, we had 70%, now we have 61, 62%.

Like, we've got a whole swath of people missing from the workforce here in the United States. I don't know about Canada. I do find my Canadian, I have a lot of Canadian employees, and I find they stay longer, they work harder. more consistent, more appreciative of the job.

I don't know if that's your experience as well. It definitely is mine. But how do you think about employment and hiring and just managing great people in a time when it seems like maybe some people don't want to come work? A lot of people are opting out of working. I mean, we should acknowledge that there's probably an unbroken chain for as long as humans have been around, that one generation voice about the next one's book ethic, right? Like, so probably because I think work looks different in a way, but like, and us Gen X's included, every generation will wrestle with a couple of really, really, really, really bad ideas that are just kind of get very deep into the firmament and then people like have to just sort of work out, right?

Like, I, you know, that might have been communism at some point, you know, like, and, and, you know, hopefully people are paying attention to the report cards there, that society's got back for how that goes. It definitely doesn't work out. No, it really doesn't. It's like there's a lot of reasons for why you should not want that. It's so weird that people are like, hey, tell me more about socialism and communism. Yeah, yeah. Just type in Russia breadlines 80s. Like, when we were growing up in the 80s, they were like, on the news, they showed you people in line to get one of one type of bread.

Like, anybody want that? Like, one type of bread out of store and there's not much left. I'm not even making this. Like, this is not as me making a veil statement about the next generation. Even like, I'm just sort of offering an example of like here's like a real confusion that existed that, you know, existed. Although, I mean, I do know there's flirting with that direction of a particular spectrum again. I think, by the way, I think the bread lines, it's actually funny. People are, like, actually having pretty fond memories of these breadlines.

I know enough people from East Germany that were actually, like, there was... Simplicity of it? So, which is, of course, post-factum rationalization after you have no skin in the game anymore. However, I think the real tragedy is always the waste of human potential, right? Like, again, zero authority to even choose how you're going to contribute to the greater good, right? Like, it's that seems like a... Like, we should stop aspiring to that, right? When someone, like, I don't know how you steal men,

that that somehow improves society, right? So just think about how everybody just didn't have the tyranny of choice and everybody just contributed to one type of bread. We all just had wheat bread and it was incredible. Yeah, it's some weird, like post, it's some weird throwback to simplicity maybe or something that was elegantly. simple and it's like, no, that was not elegantly simple.

That was a lack of abundance and suffering and starving and boredom, like, and a lack of freedom is what it was. So is your assertion there like that, um, uh, the, the sort of anti-book, Reddit, uh, sort of if you make a category out of this, this is sort of a current thing that, that, that's the problem. I, it's, it's interesting. I mean, we see some of this in companies. Like, sometimes there's a,

sometimes we see things directly reflected that was like trending, like a while ago in Antiburg as an idea, just like that comes up in a GNA. It's, I mean, that's a quiet quitting. Like, I'm going to phone in. I'm going to do the least amount of work. Like your manager should be able to figure that out. And this has always been people who phoned it in.

The one I think is the most fascinating is the people who have three jobs and their developers and they're so good at it. They're like, here's how to manage your three concurrent phone calls and laptops and the desktop monitoring. Like there was a story in the Wall Street Journal today about this like desktop monitoring software that has always existed in customer support, by the way. Or if you're a trader or if you work at a sales desk or you work in finance, they've always had your desktop locked down. They know your keystrokes. They have to because there's money on the line and transactions and all this kind of stuff.

But that kind of stuff is, you know, people are now having to think like if there's abuse in the system, I think bad management. are like, well, there's abuse in the system, therefore everybody has to suffer. And it's like, I don't buy that, but I don't run a, I don't run thousands of employees, I run dozens. But how do you think about the abuse in the system as portrayed in the media and subreddits?

Because I don't even buy that. This is like a wide-spread problem. I think it's like a 5% problem, if that. It's a small, but, uh, it's a small thing that people make it out to be, but it's also like absolutely fascinating in terms of, it's a problem that couldn't exist any other decade.

Like, in an office, it's just like you can't, you can't do free jobs if you have to show up to the office. So, like, so, so I have not encountered the, like, person who is so good that they can actually truly do free jobs well. I, I'm, I think there's lots of people who potentially would have a capacity to do this, but I don't think they could pull off a context switches. So, like, I just don't, I don't fear that. as a kind of thing.

If it did, if they did, it's in my mind, if you have somebody on your dev team or your sales team or a writer, whatever it is,

and they're so gifted, they can pull off three jobs concurrently without anybody knowing about it. That's a failure of the three managers at the three companies they didn't identify

their excellence and make them the CTO or VP of engineering. You didn't challenge that person. If that's like having Steph Curry on your team and you never thought to tell him like,

you know what? You should shoot them threes. You should shoot from the logo. Like, let it rip, kid. Like, that's the failure of management to recognize excellence. I, I was, I mean, you're thinking exactly where. I have, I think people have a tendency to solve problems at a wrong layer, like, and spend a shit on a work on investing into, like, somehow making it work.

I think almost universally these problems, if it was a problem that people encounter, are actually problems with performance management. Clearly, there's no clear set of expectations of what you want from someone. And if your performance management isn't well good enough to say that, hey, this person is utterly underutilized and therefore should have, like, could do so much more for a mission or is like totally phoning it in because they're actually like in like free zoom calls at the same time and have a camera splitter that goes into all directions. and like then when it's

I don't know like this should just show up now it's certainly harder to do in a digital world but like again like also at hiring you you like this is everyone has to like this an exercise for every company individually but like part of your hiring process is like

I mean depends on what you need but like we want hardworking smart ethical people because if you only get two of those things, a third one will kill you every single time. So in all these instances, you're missing ethics because you're kind of defrauding. It's a fraud. It's a big of a word.

But like, no, I mean, people know when they're doing unethical stuff. Yeah, it's unethical to at the very least your colleagues around you, right? Like the rest of your team, even if you don't believe that companies, like a verbi of consideration for ethics as well. well. But like your colleagues certainly shouldn't do this too. Yeah, no, it's completely unfair. Listen, you got to go. I think you got you for over an hour. It's so great to talk to you and it's so great to see you. By the way, you know, I do private company investing. That's my thing. I invest in 50, 100 companies a year. But I was watching the stock market the summer and I sold like a

bunch of these like ETFs. I had a bunch of stuff. And I was like, I'm going to pick the 10 companies that I think make the most beautiful product and have the great leadership. And like literally bought Shopify shares this summer. So this entire thing, I now have to do a disclaimer. I'm a shareholder. And I was just talking to Tim Ferriss actually in the like last year. Talking about like how amazing like you are as an executive and thinking from first principles and building this stuff. And like you have to make bets on people and their vision. And it's just such an easy bet for me, at least, to bet on you for the next decade. I'm buying shares in companies that I think 10 years. from now, I feel comfortable that, like, the leadership will have done a great job,

just listening to their customers and building products and making them like 10% better every six months, whatever it is, five or 10% like compounding, you know, innovation, you know, innovation is just so powerful. And just watching you build this company has been so great. And I'm just super stoked to be a shareholder now. So, yeah, back to work for you. I can't get back to the second hour anymore. I don't let you go back to your meetings.

I'm, I, this is all you allow me out of my cave. But that was a super nice thing for you to say. So it's like, I'm like, that's, that's extremely kind. So thank you very much. Yeah. All right. Listen, brother, it's, it's great to watch you do that. If you want to go work at a great company, I don't know if you guys have a bunch of

open wrecks now or probably some strategic ones. You know, this is, I think, going to be one of the great companies of our generation, Shopify.com. Go look at the job postings. And if you want to build a. a store and be an entrepreneur, like it really is an incredible career path to sell stuff online again.

How many merchants now? How many, just as we close here, how many people are? Over two million. That's unbelievable. The thing I'm seeing is all of these now, I'm following all the influencers, like TikTok, YouTube, etc.

And they all kind of like top out in their ability to make ad revenue. And they're like, you know what I should do? I should do what Kim Kardashian does. And I'm just watching. the influencer set. So I literally found an influencer. I wouldn't say which one in Canada.

And I was like, you should be an entrepreneur and we started talking. I was like, I'll give you $25,000 to just incorporate and see if you can build a business out of this because you got past a million followers, but there's like 10 different ways.

And the first thing I said, is like, what about creating like Shopify store? And like the people in your orbit, you could just sell like this kind of branded product and then mash the content to the product. And like, yeah, that's incredible. And like, just great.

that you exist to empower people to be entrepreneurs. It reminds me of eBay back on the day, you know. They're just empowering people to have agency in their life. All right, brother. Thank you so much. Cheers, brother. See you soon. Always fun to be on.

Always fun. Thanks for having me. Okay. What an amazing interview with Toby. So candid. Great guest. And we really thank him for coming on and giving us so much of his time. Next up, producer Rachel is back with OK Boomer.

Enjoy. OK Boomer. I understood the assignment. everybody, thank you for listening to this segment of OK Boomer. Today, I'm talking to a reoccurring guest, Jules Turpac. If you don't know, Jules is a digital culture commentator. And today we're going to be talking about our lives moving more and more online. So hello, Jules.

Hey, Rachel, how are you? I'm good. So before we start the show, where can people find you on social media? I have a lot of people asking. Yeah, at Jules Terpak, I'm mostly on Twitter and TikTok, I'd say. Awesome. And I know you do most of your videos remote, but I kind of like being in person. So do you mind if we just switch this over to your office?

I guess. Awesome. All right. We're going to do the rest of this, actually, in-person with Jules. And I'm going to go hop on a train over to Grand Central and see her there. See you soon. Bye. All right.

Thank you, Jules, so much for having me today in your office. This is one of the only recordings I've done, IRL. I don't do that many. So this is pretty cool for me. I'm uncomfortable. Yeah. Well, you know what? Somebody's got to do things to make you uncomfortable.

And honestly, I would be way more uncomfortable if I was in the metaverse. I don't know about you. But today I want to talk about is the metaverse where we're going because we already have apps like Be Real that everybody knows I'm a huge fan of. We're posting those Be Reals basically at the same time as you were friends. You get one notification a day. It's instantaneous. if you don't know what Be Real is, Google it, you're living under a rock.

We always talk about it on the show. But it got me thinking if we already have apps like Be Real, where we're watching our friends doing what they're doing at that very moment, the exact same time we are. What's the next step? Like how more instant can we possibly get? Yeah, like you just said, everything's becoming more instantaneous. So the news cycle is getting so much shorter when it comes to like on Twitter and TikTok,

like if you weren't talking about something within the first 12 to 24 hours, like the wave has already passed and we're seeing that with Be Real too in terms of almost like replicating the in real life experience. So like everyone kind of feels this collective feeling of being somewhere all at once. Yeah. It's what we're seeing on Be Real. I mean, that's not new. Like Twitter, I think has always had that more instantaneous feel to it when the current event happens. Like you run to Twitter because you can search the name of the current event and funneling in, it's everything in real time. that was most recently tweeted. So that's always been there.

And in terms of like clubhouse and everything, we're just getting, yeah, inching more towards collective experiences online to, again, replicate this in real life thing. We're seeing a lot of full circle situations with Netflix starting to do weekly drops. Like, yeah, the cable always was in the past because people, they're finding that people love that more in the way that led, like, the streaming service to social media transition and like everyone talking about something all at once and feeling that embraced together almost.

We were kind of talking about that too before this recording started, how interesting it would have been if there was like a be real, like all centered around euphoria. So yeah, you can't like watch euphoria with your friends. You're in a different city. But what happens if the like HBO people knew exactly like when the shocking times were going to happen in euphoria. And every time that happened, you'd get a notification. You would have to take a photo of your reaction.

Like seeing those like immersive experiences happening that entertain. can't be that far away from what we're doing right now. Do you think that there is a chance that Netflix or Hulu or HBO is going to come out with their own social media platform anytime in the near future? I don't know about that because I think we're all very overwhelmed with how many social media platforms we have. I said this in an article with like tech crunch of like we can only compartmentalize like first of all our identity and also like spread our minds with so many ads.

with so many apps. Like social media apps right now, there's more than five that are strongly positioned. Like, how many can you click through during the day? You know, I have my typical rounds of Twitter, TikTok, Instagram. And for me, I can't really go over that. Like, I don't get on Facebook or Snapchat anymore because I'm like, it's just too much for my mind.

So we're going to see in the situation. It's kind of this, I don't want to necessarily say monopoly or like these super app situations where like there are certain platforms that are all encompassing and take the power over every single aspect. of this industry is what we're kind of seeing. We're seeing TikTok just is now about to release TikTok now, which is separate from the TikTok app. It's going to be a copy of Be Real.

So, yeah, we're just seeing that. And like you had talked about earlier today, like Instagram's trying to inch that way as well. So, yeah. That is super interesting too. It's funny how we saw Instagram kind of try to copy Be Real in a report that came out. And basically there was like, yeah, like they're creating it internally. It'll probably come out as like something.

that comes out in your story. Everyone that I was talking who was like, why would we want Be Real for our Instagram story? Like we already have close friends. Be Real is for, at least for me, I don't know about you. Be Real is even smaller

than my close friends. And then there's another platform copying it. Snapchat, I believe. And both of them like kind of tried to sort of copy it. And TikTok just came in. Basically the same exact. Yeah, no remorse.

Basically the same thing. It's like, oh, dang. Okay. So it is interesting. seeing that like this like almost like timed experience that would become a new normal in social platforms moving forward and be real as the app as we know what right now could cease to exist because we do want to consolidate the apps that we use just to become more user like more user friendly the one thing that um i do balance between though with apps is actually where i get my news um i love

like the axios app a ton like that's one of the apps i freaking love i use this one platform. It's called Feedle, mostly on my laptop, where I, like, sort through a bunch of, like, different news articles that come from newsletters. I don't use the Wall Street Journal app. I think, like, Axios, I guess, and Reddit would be where I get my news the most. But I'm always down to try new news app. So that's the only category of app that I want, that I'd, like, be interested in seeing,

like, a new one pop up. And recently you showed me a new one. You said it was called Volve. Volve or Valve? I'm not sure. V-O-L-B. Yeah. And it's basically, their tagline was TikTok for news, right?

And all the news that we see is just like, it fits within one screen. I think it's like half your screen. So it's really, really short. It has a visual. So it's like aesthetic pleasing. But it also has like, yeah. Yeah. Three to five sentences about something.

They're from vetted sources, whether it's like legacy media or just like more like established independent media on the come up that they curate from. but I've been utilizing it here and there over the past few weeks since I was introduced to it and that it does have that TikTok feel. Like you go on, you see like the quick bits of things throughout the day. You can pick your specific things that you're interested in. I did like, of course, like tech and like social media, all this different stuff. And so just a nice, like, quick bit of information that doesn't have like all the personal mixed in as like on Twitter.

I get a lot of my news. But like, of course, within that, those scrolls, there's a lot of like just people like shit posting or whatever. Yeah. So it doesn't have that. Do you think like there's going to be any other industries to come out and like TikTokify themselves, like how other platforms have been like be reeling themselves. How we've seen obviously news try to now TikTokify themselves with this Volvo app. But is there like anywhere else that you see could probably like pick up on this? I just feel like I can't think of a specific other one right now, but it's just the way things are moving in terms of, first of all, people's lack of focus.

But it's not even just like lack of focus. it's all a product of the information overload that we're all experiencing. So people can only, like, if they're giving more than 30 minutes of their day to something, that's like, that's a huge chunk of time. And people realize that. So there's all this consolidation in terms of length of media that's happening so that people feel like they even give it interest in the first place because if they see longer than 10 minutes on a video, if they see anything, they're like, I don't have the time for this.

There's a ton of stuff on the internet that I can be scrolling through that's shorter and might be more concise to give me my information. So it's kind of like all industries have to adapt to that type of messaging. I agree. I want like a podcast version. Actually, I don't know if I want this because I think I am definitely like a outcome of somebody that grew up. Even though like when I was little, I didn't have like a device or anything like that.

I don't think I really got into tech really heavily, probably until middle school. That's probably like we're the same age. That's probably when like we first were allowed to get on that kind of stuff. I see kids a lot younger. But we basically grew up with technology in like our, or like formative years, I guess. So I'm definitely a product of like the attention economy at the biggest sense possible. And I was in Trader Joe's the other day.

You have to go downstairs in Trader Joe's to the one I go to. No internet, right? So that's like my, my audiobook time. And I was like, you know, what would be really cool? That's hilarious. For, hear me out, TikTok for podcast. So they're like 30 second snippets. and they just bundles through like a bunch of 30 second snippets that I could like download, right?

So it would be like an hour of 30 second snippets or something. And if I didn't like a snippet, yeah, yeah. If I didn't like the snippet, just like top the side of my AirPods or whatever, I used headphones. But if I used AirPods, this would be cool. It keeps case. Like top the side of my AirPods, have it go to the next like 30 second snippet. And I'm like, whoa, this is crazy. Like my attention span is going so small.

I like I saw a tweet the other day and I retweeted it because it was like, we need shorter podcast. And I was like, yeah, like, love the 30 minute and under podcast. Like, that's how long my grocery shopping is. That's how long, like, if I'm going on a run, it's probably around 30 minutes. Like, that, that for me is, like, such a sweet spot. And then for YouTube videos, it is probably around 10 minutes for me. I think, like, I'd get a lot of good content from a 10 minute video, anything longer. I'd go to Hulu or Netflix. Like, by that point, you know, it's, it's, I would rather watch, like, a documentary or something. Obviously, there's like exceptions, like commentary videos where, again, I could like kind of get up and walk

around my house, like clean or something. But for videos that to sit down and watch, my attention span is totally 10 minutes on YouTube. That's a good point in the way, because I have friends yeah, like in the film industry and everything. And just like even the quick jump cuts in movies are just becoming shorter again to help people's attention. Also, it's like I saw like an author talk about on Twitter recently. You know, you're not competing with other books. You're competing with every type of media, which has always been true, but just like as this media landscape gets bigger and it's democratized and involves everyone, like every user online. If you're a public user and you post, you're a creator or whatever. It's kind of like an overused word, but like you're

competing with all this media. You're not just competing with books. Like it's affecting everything. How do you think like that's going to impact the creator economy moving forward? Or like creators as a whole, like you said in the movie industry, we've seen it impact things like jump cuts. Do you think is shorter attention span is going to affect the creators? Well, I think it just goes back to what we're saying, people needing to adapt in order to cater to the masses. Now you have to cater to people who just want short-form content. Of course, there's still going to be people who want to utilize long-form content

for a wide variety of reasons. But, yeah, creators need to get accustomed to be more concise in their messaging. And hopefully in doing that, they don't take away value, though, because they're, of course, in longer form, there's a lot more nuance, and therefore when there's more nuanced, there's more value. So people have to become great storytellers in order for it to resonate in a way that's like healthy for humanity. Yeah, no, you've seen this impact too on things, including writing.

I use like the Hemingway app, which is like a platform that you can use on your computer and it basically teaches you how to write like Hemingway, who is really famous for writing short, sweet, concise things. And it just kind of, it's like grammarly for making her stuff really short. and sweet. Like, I totally recommend it if people are trying to write, like, a newsletter maybe. And I'm like, whoa, this is kind of crazy. Like, trying to write things super clear and concise versus, like, how we were taught in school to try to do, like, creative writing classes. Meet the word count. Yeah, exactly. Hit a word count. And I'm like, whoa, like, how times have changed.

Like, I'm like, they really need to stop teaching kids to hit this word count and do a lot of these creative writings. That's so true. Because, oh, I had to take writing classes in college, even though I'm was like a STEM major. And I was like, you know what would have been great as a writing class for a STEM major is to learn how to write these like short, concise pieces because now like creative writing has not helped me. That has not helped me at all. Like nobody cares what color what this guy is.

They care what's happening with Netflix. You know what I mean? Yeah. And the creator economy has just showed the type of messaging that people are compelled by. You know, people who took over the writing spaces and just the media spaces before or, you know, more highly educated, had gone to certain schools. And like, the type of language a lot of people use in different books and everything, it's just like not appealing to the masses and it's not easily understandable for the average person.

There's also an element there, like, how concise can you make it in a way that is like, it's not dumbing it down. It's not simplifying information. It's just like, again, humanizing this information for as many people as possible to be compelled by it. So that these algorithms can pick it up and show it to your ideal audience as well. It's all weird. It's funny how, like, we're saying. this too across all different types of industries.

Like I mentioned this already that I love Axios and now that we're talking about it, one of the reasons why I really like them is everything's like a bullet format. So for example, like one of their newsletters that I love is called ProRata. It shows me all the recent venture capital raises that happened that they know of like that day. And all of them are done just in Bulletpoint. And it's like, this company raised to this much led by this person. And it tells me everything I need to know in like two or three sentences. And that's, for me, I absolutely love that.

And I wonder if that's going to kind of move over into things that we see over like books, because I read a ton. Audio books, I do listen to it two times speed. So I guess, or if I'm not listening to two times speed, it's definitely still sped up. I almost never listen to an audiobook, not sped up. But for which I guess that kind of already makes it a little bit more consolidated. so my brain is like keeping up with it. But for a book book, like one that I'm physically holding,

I don't read them on an iPad. I tend to just read them with paper and everything like that. I imitate it. It takes a long freaking time. It takes a while. And I am reading a book right now. I think it's called books. Oh, it is.

It's like an ad. It's called the confidence game. But it's actually taken me like so. And a Welsh's rapper is my bookmark. But it's taken me a long freaking time. to get through the first, and I don't mind it at all. It's a really good book. I'm like, highly recommend it.

But it's taken me, like, probably, like, a week to kind of get through the first chunk of it, right? Which is a long time compared to, like, how I'm blasting through audiobooks. And, like... That's interesting. It's almost, like... It's weird because, like, books have chapters, but, like, YouTube on podcast has, like, every YouTube to put chapter marks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, like, books have chapters, but it's, like, when it's fiction books, it's, like, You can't just, like, read certain chapter. I mean, you can skip around. Yeah, yeah. And when it's nonfiction, you can kind of stick around. Like, I don't know, the storyline isn't always, like, crazy important, but that's interesting. I bet you, and this is just, like, like, looking into the future, I bet you there's going to be,

if this doesn't already exist, like, basically, like a spark notes, but still in written format for people like me who still like to read. Just tweets in a book. Yeah, like, basically a book, be like, like, yeah, this is Pride and Prejudice, but, like, only, like, a 10-page version, a Pride and Prejudice. Like, this is what happens. Tweet Threat of Threat of Fummer. Yeah, like a tweet-threadified version of classical books.

And like, I totally wouldn't be surprised if that happened. And maybe not for a book like where you're reading it for the craft of writing. Because there is something to be said about reading a book for the craft of writing, which I totally understand and respect. I know. Like, writers read out. Yeah. I totally understand the craft of writing. And, but I'm probably about for more informational books, which is tends to be what I read.

I'm not a huge, unless it's like a sci-fi book. Like, I don't know if I really read a sci-fi book that's been tweetified. but the informational books I'm talking about here, like to straighten it out. Like that can't be that far away. Like there's no way. Well, that's why like every like video is the future is such large messaging. Because at the end of the day, it like keeps you stimulated visually and also like obviously psychologically when you're learning everything.

And it is this weird thing of like people having to learn how to navigate video even if they are writers or whatever. like that is like the main way of communicating like across platforms right now. Everyone's trying to get their peek into video and, um, a company I work with often is Descript. Oh, I love Descript. And they have stats on like by 2030, how many hours a day we're going to be like watching or like immersed in video.

It's literally like 24 hours. But TikTok though is like the app that does it the best because you need to scroll through it and order you don't need to. I guess you probably can just, oh no, they they loop if you. keep it on. You need to scroll on it. So you need to look at the app. You need to be holding it. You need to be, it really does engage you in all senses. And it's funny. Like everybody wants like the most condensed version that gives you the full picture at the quickest way possible. And we've been seeing this a lot in efficiency. Yeah, with journalism where the increase in this

like right first, edit later culture where even news cycles, people are posting on the internet. and even though it might not be like the full story or accurate information, they just want to be the first have it posted. And then once more information comes out, they can edit it later. And there's a bunch of different news sources that talk about this. I know Ryan Holiday has written a book that has gone over this, like incredible amounts.

So he's great. It's like just go, go, go, no time for reflection or solitude. And then it's like, like you're saying these news sources that put stuff out. It's like they're just putting it out to be a part of. of the attention to comedy and have it have something out there for clicks and but like the information lacks value and nuance because yeah you've faced this though right with like posting and people commented before like oh you're late on stuff oh when it's like 48 hours later yeah because i wasn't posting about something within the first 12 hours because like you can't do rigorous analysis of a topic

or of a current event within that short of a time frame like if you're posting within the first 12 to 24 hours about something, it is a high emotion. Yeah. Reaction. It's, you can, well, there's an objective reporting like, okay, what happened. Yes, that's fine. Like, objective reporting, but like, if you're, you can't do subjective reporting, that is, like, diligent within that short of time frame.

Yeah. And for the vast majority of topics. Yeah. I completely agree with you. And do you think that's going to impact how young people, how our generation in particular watches the news because I know that's something that we're both pretty interested in the latest tech news. Obviously, a huge portion of our podcast is about that.

How do you think our generation in 10, 20 years is going to be consuming news? Well, I think our generation right now is like, I have a lot of positive to say by our generation, but like, I don't know the word it's reactionary, reactive. Like, just like, there's too much high emotion online right now. And it's causing a lot of polarization. And like, I don't just polarization, just like easy bullying and everything because people don't care about the context. They care about how this information is memeified to them on the internet and like how entertaining

it is. Everyone's like looking at things through an entertainment lens right now, which is disgusting. But it's becoming such an extreme that I think like we're slowly going to see like a peak soon and then like a 180 of people being like, this is not sustainable. And it's like terrible for my mental health. Mental health is terrible for humanity's health. But right now like we're seeing that like extreme on entertainment and memeifying everything. I even think people that are like a little older than us and having kids,

you're trying to see this like style of parenting where they're like taking their kids out to maybe this also was in part during the pandemic and people having the ability to leave super condensed areas and live in more remote areas. But I've seen my friends a little bit older than me, my age having kids and then being like, yeah, we do not want our kids exposed to like technology like we were. And I'm like, wow, this is so interesting because we're just now like seeing the like we're the generation that is having the effects of. of social media.

Yeah. So that's super, super scary. And hopefully, you know, in the next 10, 20 years like we're talking about, we'll still be putting information out online. But I don't know if it will necessarily be in the forms of like for you short form content over on TikTok. For me, longer form content over in podcasting. I bet you it's going to be something like brand new that we haven't seen before.

And I'm kind of excited to see what that's going to be. It's definitely like what is the next level of this all is interesting, which yeah, feels like it's an immersive side of things. And immersive technology, like, AI is democratizing a lot. But then, like, this more immersive technology is, it's expensive to get involved. And so, like, I think we've seen such a discussion about independent creators over the past three years, like, oh, this growth of creators and independence, blah, blah, but I can see it easily, like, when things are expensive, like, the power goes back to the big players in the game

and, like, institutions because they have the money to back people to thrive in these spaces. So, like, that's another interesting part of media. right now because it's really democratized right now because like TikTok you just film on your phone and you can post it and like it can be super casual but like this immersive stuff that's much more intense production. I also see like creators like you said right now it's so easy like the barred entry is pretty low but in a few years so now I can totally see these becoming like agencies owning certain like there's also Axel Weber is a TikToker that was like kind of accused of this I believe of coming from like an agency as a TikToker and like almost being being

planted, but basically, I think that the Disney kids, like how our generation had Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, like those people, like, as Disney employees, kind of have like TikTok employees and have creators, like, come to the app and owned under an agency. Obviously, they'd get paid a lot less, but at least it would be consistent work. Maybe they could have benefits. Yeah, and I'm like, huh, like, I think that's the next level of child acting. It's not mommy bloggers. it's not like Charlie DeMio like dancing on screen.

agency-backed kids. Yeah, it's like agency-backed children on TikTok. So. TikTok Clubhouse. Yeah. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Oh my God. Not to be confused with like the audio app or something.

Yeah, the Mickey Spears is. Exactly what I'm talking about. Britney Spears is Justin Timber like all the more part of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Like there will be. I can see it now. A TikTok or whatever the social media platform is, clubhouse. And that's scary. Like that's freaking, that makes me a little nervous.

There's a lot of conversations. going on about sharenting right now, though. I don't really, like, know what the, the two words together are, but it's like sharing and parenting? Yeah. Like, oversharing? Yeah. Um, I think we're going to see laws soon about kids on social media, which is like,

I don't even think that's like an obvious. Yeah. I'm just curious to what extent they'll be. Yeah. Because it goes into the conversations we talked, we're talking about off camera, like, like we, you don't have to have consent to record people in public, but now there's this conversation of what do you have consent to broadcast? And then the way of like news and like people on TV have to have a waiver form signed by

people that they're featuring in media. Like is that going to move on to social media? Because right now these viral content platforms, like there are strangers again getting memeified and blasted across the internet that were not asked to do so as well. And it goes back into the sharing thing. Like these kids don't, they like to dance whatever, but they don't have a say and what's posts about them online. and they don't understand what the digital footprint is.

And I don't think any of us understand the weight yet until something like we talked about in our last podcast, something bad happens and it's a wake up call for everyone of like the value of our data and the value of like our digital footprint. Yeah. And it's going to be interesting. It's really scary to think about, but hopefully. Yeah, I was like, we did end on a really negative scary note. Jules, thank you so much for talking to me today. I think this is a really good conversation talking about where we could be going in the future.

And like, I say quite frequently. Although I love having online friendships, I are all for me is definitely the way to go. I know this isn't your thing, but hopefully we can do this again soon. I enjoyed it. Thanks, Rachel. And thanks everyone for joining you. Thanks, bye.