Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Harley Finkelstein: We Are Living in the Next Renaissance, How The Next Wave of Entrepreneurs Will Change the World as We Know It | E252

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

Growing up, Harley Finkelstein had a passion for entrepreneurship. He became one of the first vendors on Shopify, and his T-shirt company became a survival tool for him in college. He realized that he could never see himself working for anyone else. Harley is now the President of Shopify and a respected entrepreneur. In this episode, Harley unpacks his lifelong journey as a serial entrepreneur. He will explain why we are currently in an entrepreneurial renaissance and how to thrive in the new “connect to consumer” world.   Harley Finkelstein is an entrepreneur, lawyer, and the President of Shopify. Harley is an Advisor to Felicis Ventures and one of the “Dragons” on CBC’s Next Gen Den. He received the Canadian Angel Investor of the Year Award, Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 Award, Fortune’s 40 Under 40, and was inducted into the Order of Ottawa. Harley starred on Discovery Channel’s I Quit, and recently co-founded Firebelly, a modern high-end tea brand.  In this episode, Hala and Harley will discuss:  - How Harley came from “forced entrepreneurs” - Becoming one of the first vendors on Shopify - How Shopify revolutionized online business - The Entrepreneurial Renaissance - Why more women are becoming entrepreneurs - Reverse engineering your business momentum - Why Harley co-created Firebelly Tea - The Connect to Consumer Era - Why 2023 is the year of the entrepreneur - And other topics… Harley Finkelstein is an entrepreneur, lawyer, and the President of Shopify. He founded his first company at age 17 while a student at McGill University. Harley completed his law degree as well as his MBA at the University of Ottawa, where he co-founded the JD/MBA Student Society and the Canadian MBA Oath. Harley is an Advisor to Felicis Ventures and one of the “Dragons” on CBC’s Next Gen Den. He received the Canadian Angel Investor of the Year Award, Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 Award, Fortune’s 40 Under 40, and was inducted into the Order of Ottawa. From 2014 to 2017 Harley was on the Board of Directors of the C100, and from 2017 to 2020 he was on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). He is currently on the Board of Operation Hope, a nonprofit providing financial literacy empowerment and economic education. Harley starred on Discovery Channel’s “I Quit,” and recently co-founded Firebelly, a modern high-end tea brand. Resources Mentioned: Harley’s Website: http://harleyf.com/about/ Harley’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harleyf/?originalSubdomain=ca Harley’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/harleyF Harley’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harley/ Harley’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HarleyF Harley’s Podcast “Big Shot”: https://www.bigshot.show/ Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/ Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘podcast’ for 30% off at yapmedia.io/course. Sponsored By:  Zbiotics - Head to ZBiotics.com/PROFITING and use the code PROFITING at checkout for 15% off. Pipedrive - Go to youngandprofiting.co/pipedrive and get 20% off Pipedrive for 1 year! Relay - Sign up for FREE! Go to relayfi.com/profiting Indeed - Claim your $75 credit now at indeed.com/profiting Rakuten - Start shopping at rakuten.com  **Disclaimer: Cash back rates on Rakuten change daily. More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com   Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review - ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala Learn more about YAP Media Agency Services - yapmedia.io/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of YAP is sponsored by ZBiotics, Relay, Rakuten, Pipedrive, and Indeed. ZBiotics is a probiotic that breaks down the byproduct of alcohol so you can avoid rough mornings after drinking. Go to ZBiotics.com-sash-profiting to get 15% off your first order when you use code profiting at checkout. Take control of your money with Relay, an online banking and money management platform that puts you in complete control of your cash flow. Sign up for free, go to relayfi.com-profiting.

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I was sitting in tax law class five minutes from where I'm standing right now. In that three hour lecture, I built store 136 on Shopify. I remember that feeling of hitting the launch button and then getting my first sale probably an hour or two later and that feeling that I was able to build a business in a matter of hours. I sat down at the beginning of the lecture as an aspiring entrepreneur and I walked out of that lecture

three hours later as an entrepreneur selling t-shirts that changed my life. You hear these people that have built these crazy companies like Izzy Sharp building four seasons. You realize that starting a business in the 40s and 50s and 60s was really, really tough. I mean, it was a blood bath, and if you didn't succeed, you lost everything, and the only way for you to really build was to bring on partners and raise money in capital. That's not the case anymore.

All of a sudden, for the first time maybe in the history of the world, the main ingredient is no longer just capital. For the first time ever, the only thing you need is... What is up, young and profitors? You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting podcasts where we interview the brightest minds in the world and unpack their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your daily life. I'm your host, Hallitaha.

Thanks for tuning in and get ready to listen, learn, and profit. Young and profitors, we have a very awesome interview and store for you today. We're talking to Harley Finkelstein, the president of Shopify. And I'm so pumped for this interview, because as most of you know, Shopify is one of my longest running sponsors. And I use Shopify to sell my LinkedIn secrets masterclass. We absolutely love Shopify at Yat Media. In fact, we're starting a branded series with Shopify.

We'll be interviewing entrepreneurs from some of their top shops to learn about their founder stories, how they scaled, and how tech-like Shopify gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to disrupt industries like never before. Harley, welcome to Young & Profiting Podcast. Great to be here. Thank you, Bradman, the show. Very, very honored. Yeah, I'm really excited about today's show, Young & Profiters.

It's going to be a great day for all of us side hustlers and entrepreneurs because we have Harley, Frank Osteen in the building. Harley's an entrepreneur, a lawyer, and the president of Shopify, which is a top commerce platform and one of our long-term sponsors at Young and Profiting Podcast. Harley is also an advisor to Felicious Ventures and one of the dragons on CBC's next Gen Den, which is essentially Canada's version of Shark Tank. He also recently co-founded Firebelly, a modern high-end tea brand and is a host of a new podcast called Big Shot. In this episode, we're going to unpack Harleys' life-long journey as a serial entrepreneur

and we'll learn how he went from being one of the first users on Shopify to eventually leading the company as its president. We'll discover why Harley believes we are currently in an entrepreneurial Renaissance. We'll pick his brain on the future of e-commerce and we'll gain insight on how to thrive in our new Connect to Consumer World. So Harley, let's start off with your background story.

You call yourself a lifelong entrepreneur and it turns out entrepreneurship actually runs in your genes. Can you tell us a bit about your family history and why you call your parents forced entrepreneurs? Well entrepreneurship for me has always been about solving a problem. It's sort of the tool that I've pulled out of my tool belt since I was a kid because I wanted to do something and it was a challenge and so the tool that I would use to solve the challenge would be entrepreneurship. That is very

different than what my father, my mother, my grandparents went through. My father came to Canada from Hungary in 1956 and his parents were Holocaust survivors. He'd sort of had a rough time growing up, but they immigrated from Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution to come to Canada in when he was a little boy. And when my grandfather, his father, came to Canada, he didn't have a job, obviously, he didn't speak the language, he had no money. And so the only thing that he had that was accessible to him in terms of making money, putting food in the table was starting a small business. And he spent pretty much his entire life until he passed away a few years ago, selling eggs at a farmer's market. He got a little kiosk and found a couple farmers and

began to sell eggs to consumers. My father had sort of a similar, similar experience when after he finished school, after he finished college, he was looking around trying to get a job, couldn't find one, and he himself also used entrepreneurship as a way to solve his problem. In his case, he was starting a young family and he needed to make money. And so it wasn't his dire as my grandfather, but entrepreneurship and becoming an entrepreneur for my father was also about survival. If you fast forward till, I guess, 1996 or so, I'm 13 years old, I'm living in Canada at the time,

and I want to be a DJ. I was going, I'm Jewish, I was going a lot of barbed-butt mitzvahs at the time, and I just thought DJs were just the coolest people I'd ever encountered. They were these magicians where they would take a group of people, a couple hundred people that were sitting down, that were lethargic, that were eating their dinners.

And within a matter of minutes, they would have them doing a congal line. I mean, it was just, to me, it was magic. I want to be a DJ, and so I called around a couple DJ companies, and of course nobody would hire me. I was 13 years old. I had never had, I had no experiences, DJ. I probably looked like I was eight years old. And so it And so there was just no way it was going to happen. And my father said, well, why don't you start

your own DJ company and hire yourself? And I did. And although my parents didn't have a lot of money, the one thing they did help me with was they made, they would make these business cards. Every crazy little idea I had as a kid, my dad would print these business cards on the family computer. And so that was sort of the first time where I realized that

this idea, this concept called entrepreneurship, is not only a great way to survive and a great way to put food in the table, but also most things that I wanted to do, most challenges that I encounter, what if I took an entrepreneurial approach to that? And I've been sort of building companies ever since. I love that. And it's so true what you're saying. Sometimes we're waiting for gatekeepers to tell us yes or to give us a job to hire us.

But if we take agency over our own lives, start figuring out how we can leverage our passions and our hobbies to create a business, we can go ahead and do what we want to do and we don't really need permission from anybody else to do so. The number one question I get often when people find out that I'm the president of Shopify,

you know, Shopify, we wanna be the entrepreneurship company, we wanna be the place where people go with an idea, and on the other side of our software, they end up with a business. In some cases, maybe a multi-billion dollar business that changes the world or changes their industry, like, you know, an all-birds or a figs or a gym shark has done on Shopify.

So the question I often get is, okay, I love the idea of entrepreneurship. I'm creative, I'm ambitious, but I don't know what to start. I don't know what business to go into. And what's so fascinating is after a line of some very simple questioning, it becomes so obvious to them,

exactly what they should start. And so I start by asking them, what are you into? What is your hobby? What do you do on Sunday afternoons when you're tinkering? What do you do in the shower in the morning, what are you thinking about? I mean, what kind of ideas? And often they're like, well, you know, I've like, I've been tinkering on this this idea for a while. And I think that I want to make the most beautiful, you know, kitchen

appliance. And it's, it's really cool. But I kind of built it for myself. And I'm like, well, why don't you consider building that for other people? In other cases, it's something as simple as, I love making beautiful blankets for my grandchildren. Obviously, the next comment is, well, what if other people would find value in your blankets? And they would say, well, wait a second, maybe that's it. And it's so funny that there are so many people searching for what they can start their entrepreneurial journey doing when, in fact, it's literally right in front of them. And that's not to say that everybody needs to commercialize their hobby. Something should just be hobbies.

I mean, I love yakitori barbecue. I'm not going to be ever become a yakitori chef. It's just not, but I enjoy making it for my kids and for my wife and for my friends. So some hobbies can be hobbies by themselves. But a lot of the time, the hobbies, the things that we tinker on in our garage after work on nights and weekends, that may actually be the thing that becomes your life's work and it's right in front of you. Yeah, totally.

And sometimes you start a business just to get you by through a certain period. So for example, when you were in business and law school, for my understanding, you had a t-shirt company and that's how you decided to pay your way through school. You weren't getting money from your parents. And you also wanted to make sure you were able to go to school full time. So you decided, I can't get a job. I need to just have my own business. So tell us about this t-shirt company and how it enabled you to thrive during your college years. So I mentioned when I was 13, I became a DJ shortly thereafter. My family and I, we moved to, we left Canada, moved to South Florida. And I went to high school there and all through at high school, I was tinkering on this DJ

business and was DJing parties for friends and DJing weddings and DJing all types of corporate events. And it was really fun. I made a little bit of money, but more importantly, I really got deep into entrepreneurship. You know, one of my friends were playing sports on weekends. I was trying to figure out how to expand the business to figure out what new equipment could I buy

that I could rent out to clients. And in 2001, I finished high school and I moved to Montreal, back to Canada, to go to McGill. And that was the year where our family really suffered some real hardship. My dad was no longer around and my mom and sisters, I have too much younger sisters needed support.

And so I knew that I wanted to once again use this tool called entrepreneurship that I had been working on all throughout high school to solve that problem. The problem was as follows. I wanted, I was a first year student in a new city and I loved, I loved going to school. I wanted to be a student. I wanted to be a regular college kid, meaning I want to take a full course load, but I also needed to support my mom and sisters and without my dad being around, it felt like I had to do something different. Working a part-time job was not going to pay the bills, and I wasn't willing to take

a part-time or a reduced course load. And so I began to ask around, what kind of business do you think I should start? Just like people ask me now. And a friend of mine said, Miguel University spends a lot of money making on t-shirts, promotional t-shirts. So the first day of school, you got a t-shirt, a bag, and a hat that says, Miguel or says, whatever school you go to. I friend of mine said, you should consider

maybe doing that. And when I thought about it, I had two unfair advantages. The first unfair advantage was I was a student. So therefore, I was potentially going to be making t-shirts for myself, which I thought had the potential an unfair amount of empathy because I literally was in the shoes of the people that were,

or I guess in the t-shirts in that case, of the people that I was going to sell t-shirts to. So one, I felt an unfair advantage because I myself was going to be a consumer of the product I was going to make. And the second thing was Montreal has a very rich, schmutz industry, a garment industry. It's some of the biggest clothing companies on the planet were built at a Montreal. So I knew that I had access to screen printing machines and I'd access to people that had been in the business for a long time if I only, you know, I just had to find them. And so all throughout college, all throughout my undergraduate degree, I made T-shirts for universities.

It started with McGill and then expanded. By the end of my undergrad, I was making T-shirts for dozens of universities all across Canada. I would say that was me, really, the focus there was really more on forced entrepreneurship rather than passion-driven entrepreneurship. I liked T-shirts, but that wasn't really what I wanted. That wasn't meant my life's work. It was a means to an end, and I needed to make money. And it turned out it was a really good business. We didn't make a ton of money, but we made enough money that I was able to

before tuition and help my mom and sisters. A mentor of mine convinced me as I was finishing college to consider going to law school and the hypothesis that he had at the time was law school will be like finishing school for entrepreneurship. You'll learn how to write better, how to be more articulate, how to think differently, how to critical reason. And this particular mentor happened to be teaching law through University of Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada. And he said, why don't you apply to the University of Ottawa law school? And if you move here, you know, at least you'll have me in town because I'm going to be

teaching there next year. And so I applied to one school, University of Ottawa, I luckily got in. And I moved to Ottawa in 2005, had no friends, had no family here. And the second I moved here, I did what I always had done was I tried to find my tribe. And by that point in my life, I was 21 when I started law school. My tribe were the entrepreneurs.

They were the people that I just, I always got along with them. I felt like a real community. And even though all the different entrepreneurs were all in different industries, there's something that like when you start a business and you're responsible for payroll, you're responsible for covering the cost and covering overhead, something changes, some sort of chemical changes in your brain and the only other people that really can understand you are other

entrepreneurs. And so I'd ask where all the entrepreneurs hung out and I was directed to a coffee shop and I met a group of really incredible young entrepreneurs and one of those entrepreneurs was this programmer, this brilliant programmer named Toby and he just moved to Canada from Germany and he was telling me that he had built this online snowboard store and he thought the snowboards were a good idea but the software behind the snowboard store was a really great idea and he was going to stop selling snowboards and focus on the software and allow other people to build beautiful online stores.

And I thought that was an amazing next evolution or next addition for my t-shirt business moving from promotional t-shirts to direct to consumer retail t-shirts. And I became one of the first customers to you Shopify in 2006. It's so cool. Shopify is such a big household name now and to think that it really started off as a shop where Toby was selling snowboards and he just thought, oh, for my understanding, people were asking him, can I use this software for my own business? So let's talk about what it was like to start a business before Shopify. Like,

how did Shopify really revolutionize small business? Okay, so let's talk about the history of entrepreneurship. And if you go back, if you think about the history of entrepreneurship, it is the history of currency, which is but as old as time. So the idea of starting a business, the idea of commercializing something, selling something to somebody else goes back thousands and thousands of years. The problem I think is that the main ingredient historically starting a business was capital, needed money. And so if you read any business books about the Rockefeller's or the Rothschild's or the Thunderbills, in every one of those early stories,

there's always a banker or a bank involved. Someone goes to the bank and takes that alone. And then with that loan, with that capital, buys infrastructure, buys a building, buys raw materials, hire somebody. And so effectively up until very recently, you needed money to start a business, which, okay, if you had access to money, that's great.

But most people, I certainly had no access to money. So that was out of the question for me. But it also meant that if the business did not work out, the cost of failure was dramatic. So much so that, in many cases, even still today, when people take out these bank loans, start a business, they're leveraging their house, they're taking a second mortgage out.

If they don't have a mortgage, they take a mortgage on their house, they're using credit card debt in some cases because they have no other access to capital. But that idea that you needed money to start a business is so very much baked into the fabric of entrepreneurship. And what I think changed in the kind of early 2000s as the internet began to become more

prevalent as access to the internet from a consumer perspective became more prevalent was all of a sudden for the first time maybe in the history of the world, the made ingredient was no longer just capital. It was beginning to shift towards resourcefulness because what happened was technology software in particular gave anyone leverage, it gave everyone these superpowers. And so here you have this brilliant immigrant from Germany who comes to Canada in the early 2000s because you met a girl here in Ottawa and he needs to get a job. He can't get a regular job because he

doesn't have his working papers. He's not a landed citizen of Canada. He doesn't have a social insurance or security number. But he's told, hey, you can go start a business. And he looks around and he sees there's lots of snow in Canada and decides I'm going to start a snow-work business. And then he looks at what tools are on the market to do so. And you basically have two options. You either have to sell on a marketplace, like an eBay or an Etsy type marketplace at the time, where it's easy to sell, but you're not really building your own business, you're effectively renting customers from the marketplace,

or you have to spend a million dollars to have a company like IBM build you an online store. The ingenuity and the thoughtfulness of Toby's decision was, I think I can do better. What if I wrote a piece of software myself to allow me to sell these snowboards? I can have independence, I can have a direct relationship, it's not going to cost me million dollars. And that was really the genesis of snow devil, which was the original snowboard shop.

So now you're in 2004, 2005 or so. And there's very few online stores. E-commerce as a percentage of total retail is probably sub 2% at the time, like 98% of retail still happening in brick and mortar stores. Maybe one or two percent is happening online and I'm being generous there. But Toby has built the software to sell these snowboards and he starts talking about the journey of building an online store. And because of his relationships in the Ruby on Rails community and because of his relationships in entrepreneurship community, he community and because of his relationships

in entrepreneurship community, he's hearing from all these different entrepreneurs like me saying, hey, what you built here is dramatically better than anything out there. Maybe I can build an online store. Maybe I can try my hand at modern retail. And so by focusing on the software rather than the snowboards, he's been able to change the main ingredients

and shoplice being able to change the main ingredients in terms of what you need to build a great business. And effectively, the last 15 years or so has been spent on inviting as many people as possible to join this idea of entrepreneurship. If you have an idea in the shower and you have ambition, it's interesting. Nike did this really well. Nike convinced the entire world that if you have a body, like an actual human body,

you are an athlete. As opposed to if you get paid to play professional sports or you're an athlete or if you play division one football, you're an athlete. Nike can give it to anyone that if you have a body, you are an athlete and therefore they sold shoes to athletes, which is everybody. What we're trying to do a Shopify is we're trying

to do something similar, which is everybody. What we're trying to do is Shopify is we're trying to do something similar, which is if you have ambition, if you have interesting ideas, gnawing at you in the shower and while you're walking to the bus or you're on your way to work or in the car sitting in traffic during your morning commute, maybe you are an entrepreneur. And the idea of transitioning from aspirational entrepreneur to actual practical entrepreneur, I think is made possible or made much more possible because of software like Shopify. And today we have millions of stores on the platform. I think we're about 10% of all e-commerce in the US. But for anyone listening, if you think

about your favorite brands, right now I'm wearing Kis sneakers, James Pritz pants, and a blue-salt hoodie, all my favorite brands all have beautiful, incredible online stores and they're all powered by Shopify. Yeah, honestly guys, I have to say I love Shopify. Shopify is one of my sponsors and I'm not just saying this because they're one of my sponsors, but I have a Shopify store and it took us a couple hours to put up the store and I sell my masterclass LinkedIn course on it. I'm one of the biggest LinkedIn influencers.

And we've made over $200,000 in like five months on our Shopify store, just using our built-in community no paid ads, nothing, just sending people to our Shopify store that took a couple of hours to put up. And you think about how I think about that, that wasn't possible 10 years ago. And 20 years ago, that was unfathomable. No one even had the audacity, even consider, I can start something at my mom's kitchen table

or at a coffee shop, and that may become a multi-billion dollar company. When you look at people like Trina at Figs, or you look at Ben Francis at Gymshark, or Tim and Joey at Allbirds, or any of these Richard at Fashion Nova, you look at these brands that didn't exist 10 years ago, and today, they're not only great companies,

they are leaders in their spaces, in their verticals and their industries. That never happened before. No one who started a company 10 years earlier was a leader in their space in the history of business and commerce and retail until right now. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.

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That's Rakuten.com. Yeah, and I think one of the main things that really stands out with Shopify is the fact that you have direct access to your customers. So if you're on an Etsy or an Amazon or an eBay, you can't really keep track of your customers or retarget them or send them email campaigns. And that's a really big part of the process when you're trying to build a brand. So I think that's a really big differentiator to me.

Well, that's why you mentioned this earlier, but one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about and writing a lot about is this idea of an entrepreneurial renaissance. And I think the reason that we're living through some of the most interesting times, and if you will, if you'll follow me for a second, we are living through an entrepreneur renaissance

is because for the first time ever, the only thing you need right now is ambition. Now, you have to build a great product or great service. I mean, your course is successful, not because of Shopify, your course is successful because it's a great course, and you're delivering a lot of value. But the opportunity or the ability to bring it to market, to do, to have distribution,

that anybody in the world can buy your course and learn all this amazing new skills that is powered by technology and Shopify leverages the technology and the software to do this. And think about just in terms of geographic distribution. You can sell your, I mean, I don't know if you know this, but do you know how many countries your course people buy your courses in?

I can see and Shopify when people are where people are logging in from. It's like a dopamine rush. It's amazing, right? You see this incredible map of people all over the world that wants to consume your products and your services. Again, go back 20 years ago in order to do that. You had to open up locations in every one of those countries and how you don't.

And so in many ways, there's a lot more people participating in entrepreneurship today. And so you can sort of say, well, doesn't that mean there's more competition? Well, certainly, there are more people doing it. But if you are ambitious and you have a great product or great service and you want to get into the hands of consumers all over the world, there's never been a better time to do so. And I mean, you're already doing so well. You're running with what you're already working on.

But how I think about people who fundamentally don't know what to do or what to try, they can try five different things. And if four fail, that's okay, because the cost of failure today is so damn low, and they can focus on the one that does work. Or maybe all five fail, and they can try another five things. That idea that you can start trying your hand at a business

that may change your life, may change the entire world, may change the industry for the price of a couple cups of coffee at Starbucks. I mean, that is incredibly compelling and meaningful to me. And I think that's remarkable.

Yeah, I think that's really amazing. The fact that people can iterate until they find something that sticks and then they can invest in scale and the thing that actually sticks. And you can fail 10 times and it doesn't really matter. And it's not a big investment like you said. I'm going to touch on that later but first I want to understand how you climbed your way to become the president at Shopify. So you were always an entrepreneur. You probably had

a couple of choices after you graduated school, start my own company or join Toby. So how did that all come about? I had this moment. I was sitting in tax law class, five minutes from where I'm standing right now in Ottawa. And in a matter of, I think the course was three hours, it was three hour lecture. In that three hour lecture, I built store 136 on Shopify. It was a T-shirt store. And I remember that feeling of hitting the launch button and then getting my first sale probably an hour or two later and just to be fully transparent. I'm pretty sure the first sale came for,

I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure that came from my mom or a friend of mine who I was talking to, but that feeling that I was able to build a business in a matter of hours. And then by the time I set down in the tax law class, at the beginning of the lecture as an aspiring entrepreneur, and I walked out of that lecture three hours later as an entrepreneur

selling t-shirts all over the world, that was incredibly the change my life. It changed my life not just because the t-shirts made money. It changed my life because it opened my eyes to what is possible when you marry ambition and technology. What is possible when you marry a great idea with incredible software? And I think part of it was after that, I knew the T-shirt thing was going to be a good thing for me to do from a financial perspective, you know, law school and business school is expensive and my dad at that point was still not around. And so it helped me do all the things I needed to do in the short term. But in the long run, I think it was quite clear to me now that my life's work, my Ike

guy, if you will, was going to be helping other people try their hand in entrepreneurship and helping more people experience this idea of self-actualization and independence and survival and creativity through the lens of business creation. And if I want to do that, there's only one company that I thought was doing it that any shot at becoming the world entrepreneurship company and it was Toby and it was Shopify. And so I finished school and I called Toby as I was finishing and I asked him if I can come and join him and a small handful of others, mostly engineers. And I walked in and said, I'm just here to help. I don't care what you call me. I don't

care what my title is. I don't care about anything. I just here to help. I don't care what you call me. I don't care what my title is. I don't care about anything. I just want to help build this thing. And for the most part, my job for the first couple of years was like this kind of Swiss Army knife, let the engineers and designers and R&D folks build incredible software. And we have and have always had some of the smartest people

building software here on design, engineering, development, programming side, incredible product minds getting together. I mean, Toby's vision around product is unrivaled in my opinion. But my job was, how can I help? How can I commercialize this? How can I get more people to try it?

How can I, we didn't have a CFO when I started, we didn't have a CMO, we didn't have a, there was nothing. It was just a bunch of people building really great software. And because I think I found a company whose mission, like if you think about Shopify's mission and my personal Hardly's mission, the Vendiogram overlap is almost entire.

It's almost completely overlapped because I care so deeply about entrepreneurship because of what I've experienced, what my grandparents experience, what my parents experience. So I believe in the value of what this is. And there's no company that allows me to drive that to have a bigger impact in that vein than Shopify. That was about 14 years ago, and I've been here now for a third of my life.

And in terms of becoming president, just I've always sort of looked at my role here as how can I have the biggest impact, whether it's starting a partner program, or a furl program for agencies, or helping to build the first app store or the theme store or helping to develop Shopify Plus or enterprise offering, going, taking the company public in 2015 on the New York Stock Exchange, I'd

never taken a company public before. So therefore my job was, given the skills that I have, given the ways I think I can add value, how can I be as valuable and as impactful as possible through the process? And even to this day, usually when someone tells me about a problem, my first answer, my first reaction is, how can I help? And I think if you go about, if you find a place that you really love and you feel like you can do your life's work there, I think it behooves all of us to just be too good to ignore, add as much values you can and everything kind of takes care of itself that way.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think something in terms of your journey that I took away from is that you don't need to be an inventor or a founder to be an entrepreneur. Like I very much consider you an entrepreneur as the president of Shopify, even though you didn't necessarily invent or found the company.

That's right, because some as it doesn't matter necessarily, right, like I think about this a lot. So Shopify, we're about 10,000 people at Shopify. And if you think about it, like, a lot of people that work at Shopify really self-identify as entrepreneurs, not just because they think it's cool, because fundamentally, like a lot of us have, like we start a company as we're founders ourselves.

We start, we have businesses running, I mean, I have this tea company called FireBelly that I started a little while ago during the pandemic that I love. So Shopify very much is a company building software for founders This is running, I mean, I had this tea company called Firebelly that I started a little while ago during the pandemic that I love. So Shopify very much is a company building software for founders by founders. So you have so many great entrepreneurs working at Shopify. Now could all of us go out and build our own small companies or even meet them.

So it's companies probably, but the way to get real scale, real leverage and the way to sort of get the sounds of cheesy, but like the one plus one equals 10 is by all of us sort of combining our efforts, combining our energy, combining our passion, combining our hours in the day for a single pursuit, for a single mission, which is make more entrepreneurs, help more entrepreneurs be successful. And I think that you can choose to go do your own thing. You know, some of my best friends are one person businesses or two person businesses

that they run and they love that. But I wanted to have a bigger impact and specifically around how do I help more people become entrepreneurs. And again, there's no company that does it better. I think you have to sort of like, you can work at a company and still be an entrepreneur. Totally.

You can feel like this is, like Shopify has always felt like my baby, but I'm not the founder, Toby's the founder, but Toby has always made me feel like this was also my baby. And that's one of the great parts of working for an incredibly inspiring, thoughtful leader. And you want to seek those out, you want to look at like, are the people that you're working for, the people you're working with, the people that work for you, are you surrounded by people who have the same ambition drive and frankly character? And if you do, why would you ever want to leave? And so dismiss some of the spells of your title or, you know, where you are in the org chart. I find that stuff works itself out over time. I didn't start out as Shopify's president. I've worked really hard to show my value. So,

I still believe every single year my job is to requalify for this role. And if next year, I don't requalify, then I'm not entitled to have the honor of being the president of this company. I think that's a really great way to think about your careers. Yeah, totally. I know from my own experience, so I'm the president of a company called YAP Media. We're an award-winning social media agency. I have a podcast network. And now I have business partner, so I started as the inventor, as a founder by myself. And now I'm giving equity to the people who, like you mentioned, were there to serve from the start. And then eventually, you know, they've become your business partners and their entrepreneurs

equally as much as I am even though they didn't invent the company. And you can go so much further now because you have deeply committed people around you, all rowing in the same direction. You can just do so much more that way. Yeah, and they fill my gaps like where I'm not the most operational. I've got the big ideas

and you know, they're the ones executing a lot of the times. It's so interesting, you say that, Halle, because I actually think a lot about this. One of the other questions I get is I'm looking to start a business, I need to find a co-founder, I'm thinking starting with my sister, brother, friend. Most people end up starting businesses with people that are just like them. In fact, you notice this, if you look at a lot of early founding teams, they all went

to the same high school together, or the same college together, they lived in the same dorm together, dorm room together in the case of Facebook, for example, but actually the people that you wanna build a company with for the most part need to have very complimentary skill sets, not the same skill sets, but rather figure out everyone's yin to everyone else's yang, and that is not necessarily the person you were friends with in high school,

in fact it may be the opposite. So if you're a listener this right now and you're in college and you're in a faculty of management, business, or you're in faculty of engineering, you are probably going to have more success starting building, scaling a business with someone who is not currently in your faculty. In fact, I would suggest that it is you will find more alpha, more leverage, more abilities if you as the engineering student goes across the street to the law school.

And then after the two of you get together, you then go across the street to, I don't know, like the hospitality faculty. And those are the people you should get together because all of you are gonna bring something so different to the table that ultimately you are gonna form an incredible relationship and everyone's gonna kinda know their place and what they can work on in a really nice way, which

I don't think you'd get if you're just going to start a business with a person that you've hung out with for the last 20 years. I totally agree. Let's talk about the entrepreneurial Renaissance. You say that entrepreneurship is having a Renaissance moment and you recently tweeted three reasons. Number one, more people are starting businesses than ever. Number two, creators of the next generation

of entrepreneurs building brands. And number three, large established businesses are modernizing their tech stack. So I'd love for you to shed more color on each one of these points and tell us why this entrepreneurship renaissance is happening right now. Well, the fact that more people today, so if you look, if you like, don't take my word for it,

let's just look at the actual numbers. If you look at business registrations, the US business registrations, and you go to the Census Bureau, the US Census Bureau, it's all public information, they had this great PDF. Effectively, since 2004, till 2018 or 19 or so, you saw approximately four million business registrations every year.

It's fairly consistent. It's pretty flat. And then something happened as sort of the pandemic kind of came about. You saw this spike. It actually went from four million a year to five million a year. I mean, that is, that's a fairly large jump. And now we're actually sitting at that five million mark pretty much every single year. So just from a strictly objective criteria perspective,

there are more people today, just look at the US alone starting business never before. Then there's two other things. Then there's sort of the philosophy. This idea that failure is the successful discovery of something that didn't work, as opposed to failure of being a scarlet letter that you wear with you,

that you, you know, it affects your esteem, it affects your ability to function. That is also changing because the cost of failure is so small, people are not realizing that they may want to try two or three things and see what works and, you know, throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. And the spaghetti noodle that sticks, that's what they double down on. So first of all, there, there's less of a connotation, negative connotation that if I start to mean it, and it fails, it means I'm a failure. Instead, it feels a lot more like if I start to mean and it fails, maybe it just wasn't

the right thing. Let me try something else. That's the first thing. The second thing is you have this new emergent, I actually tweeted also about this, that the crater economy is fake, it's just the economy. Obviously, that's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but what I meant by that is usually when you're starting a business, you start with product and then you build an audience.

So I wanna build the world's greatest pen and I'm gonna make this pen and then I'm gonna go and find people that wanna buy this pen or use an example earlier. I made this new appliance for this new beautiful blanket and I'm gonna make more of it and then I'm gonna go and sell it. Well, for the first time ever,

you actually have people now that first have audiences that are thinking about how can I add more value to my audience. And it's not just, obviously, everyone talks about Mr. Beast and I have some feastables here. But it's not just Mr. Beast. Like, all of us are not all, that's a lot of us are in social media.

We inherently have audiences. You may have 100,000 followers or you may have five followers, but you have an audience. And if you are putting out content and you're putting out information that is valuable to them, you have a really good relationship with that audience. They trust you. They want to hear from you. They want to understand you. And so now, if you are putting out great content about the future of the skateboard industry,

that's one of our new story, Supreme. It's one of my, my Moby Dick was supreme. I really wanted to get supreme on Shopify for a very, very long time. And finally, now they're on Shopify. If you're putting a great content about the skateboard industry, maybe you should think about designing a skateboard.

Or if you feel a blog about soccer, for example, and how the soccer industry and soccer come into America versus the World Cup, maybe you should start selling soccer balls. because you know your audience already has an interest in that particular category. So actually, I think this idea of the creator economy, it's just the economy except that there's this really cool advantage, which is that you have a built-in audience for your products. And maybe third of all, just sort of on the larger companies, a lot of companies either never sold direct to consumer.

If you think about the CPGs, for example, Heinz Ketchup, has a store on Shopify. Heinz Ketchup, never sold direct to consumer, Heinz would sell through a grocery store, but there's some people that really care about, like they're obsessed with Ketchup, they love Ketchup. And they want to buy direct from Heinz called Heinz at home. And for the first time ever,

those big brands are actually having direct relationship, whether it's through social media, I entered from every years ago, the Wendy's account was like, had a real personality. And a lot of these social media accounts have big brands actually have personalities to the extent that their fans, their consumers want to interact with them. And so you have a couple of things happening with the big companies. One is the big companies are beginning to act a lot more entrepreneurial.

They want to have a direct relationship with a consumer. But also they're experimenting. They're trying new things. A couple of years ago, one of the cool things I thought that Oreo did, which is owned by Mondalees, is you can put, as a Christmas gift or holiday gift, you can personalize Oreos. So there's someone in your life that loves Oreos. You can make Harley's Oreos, happy holiday, something like that. That is really interesting. So each of those things on the drone are kind of interesting. When you combine those things, you see big companies acting very entrepreneurial. You think you see creators just on the creator side.

Think about these artists, like these musicians. People like Drew House with Justin Bieber's brand that he built. Or OVO would Drake his built. You see these traditional, would be a traditional musician completely expand their scope of what they're actually building and selling and creating. When I used to go to a concert when I was a kid, I would go to the merch table. It was usually some sort of like shitty screen print on some basic t-shirts, like Fruit of the Loom t-shirt, and it said like, I don't know, the Rolling Stones on the back was a bunch of tour tour dates.

Well now you go to these concerts, and you go to like a Drake concert and they're selling a Canada Goose OVO collaboration collab jackets. Or you go to a Furell concert and you see some of the crazy stuff he's selling that like cosmetics at the concert that he's created himself. So big companies are actually entrepreneurial. Artists are now actually expanding from just being a artistic creators around music and art and film to actually creating product.

And then, of course, you have just more people generally becoming entrepreneurs. And more people saying, I make amazing chicken soup. And now I'm going to sell that chicken soup to the world. And I think when you combine all those things, you see people that traditionally had not entered entrepreneurship doing so. And they're scaling out of pace that just has never been seen before. And that's why that's a long answer to a very short question. But that's why I think there's an entrepreneurial. You're right, Nassau is happening.

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Just go to ind.com slash profiting and support the show by saying you heard about it on this podcast. www.indeed.com-profiting. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need indeed. Yeah, and I'm going to ask some follow-up questions and you hit a lot of points. And we talked a little bit about this in the beginning

in terms of the fact that it's not as costly to launch a business anymore. It's not as risky. You can iterate. There's not a lot of shame around having a failing business anymore. Also, the fact that you just need to be creative now to, you just need a good idea to launch a business. So I have a couple follow-up questions. One is about women starting businesses. So as I was preparing for this show, I was surprised to learn that more than half of the business owners on Shopify are actually women, 49% of people who started businesses in 2020 were women. So why do you think that women

are embracing entrepreneurship? A couple of things. I can tell you just my own experiences. So my grandmother became an entrepreneur in her 50s. My maternal grandmother, she started a little textile business because honestly, she want my grandfather's business was not going the way he wanted and she wants something there and coming, she wanted to actually help with that.

She wanted to participate in commerce and the economy. And so she did so in the vein of forced entrepreneurship. In 2016, my wife and I were, we had our first child, we had our daughter Bailey in 2016, and we would take these walks around the block near our house every day with Bailey. She was born in June, so summertime in Canada, very nice. We'd walk around, and my wife would say, I wish there was an ice cream shop here. That conversation evolved into eventually her saying, I'm going to start an ice cream shop, and she ended up building this great, amazing ice cream shop and brand called Sunday School.

So, but from a personal perspective, a lot of the women in my life have also become entrepreneurs and have taken an idea or a problem and solved it through entrepreneurship. But I also think that there is far more resources today available to anyone that wants to an entrepreneur, whether it's a woman or a man or anyone for that matter. That's the first thing. The second thing is entrepreneurship can be started from anywhere. And specifically around the time the pandemic where we were all sheltering in place, we're all at home, it became clear to people that they can actually translate their energy at

home into building a real business. And I think that's why you sort of have this, you know, that's one of the reasons you see so many more people starting businesses because the pandemic gave us a lot of time at home to think about, what do we want to do? What do we want to create? How can I share my gifts with the world? But I think the bigger one is this.

I think it has a lot to do with mentorship and role modeling. Now that you're not, not only is more than half the entrepreneurs on Shopify women, you see not, not only is more than half of the entrepreneurs on Shopify women, you see incredible, like how it'll like you, you see all these incredible women female entrepreneurs that are kicking ass right now, and you're like,

wow, I think I can do that too. She kind of looks like me, or that person kind of reminds me of me, like you all of a sudden inherit this incredible audacity. And that audacity has allowed more people to participate, who otherwise traditionally did not. Whereas in the past, if you think about entrepreneurs, close your eyes, think about entrepreneurs, you think about like Steve Jobs, and you think

about like people like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, if you're in tech, for example, you think about mostly dudes, because historically, those were the ones that were on the front cover of Forbes and Fortune, all these magazines as the world's greatest entrepreneurs. That's no longer the case anymore. Now you see people like Kylie Jenner, who, whether or not you agree that she was self-made or not, that's a different debate. She is now on the cover of Forbes as one of the youngest billionaires for creating a company

Kylie Cosmetics on her own. And I think that is creating this incredible flywheel of more people, more momentum, more participation. And by the way, it's exactly the reason what you're pointing out is exactly the reason that I ended up joining the Board of Operation Hope. Because for me, one of the things that I had in my life, even though the entrepreneurs in my life, my grandparents, my parents, they were not successful, quote unquote, entrepreneurs. They didn't make a lot of money.

I knew enough people in my life that were entrepreneurs that were small business owners that it didn't feel foreign to me to actually try my hand at it. And what I've realized through John Hope Bryan is the founder of Operation Hope is that that's not the case for more most people. Most people don't know entrepreneurs. They don't know anyone who owns their own business. And because of that, their likelihood to start is far less than it would be for someone who actually does know entrepreneurs. They don't know anyone who owns their own business. And because of that, their likelihood to start is far less than it would be for someone who actually does no entrepreneurs. The idea that this program that we've created with Operation Hope called

one million black businesses, one MBB, is by 2030 to create one million new black owned businesses and help create one million more black entrepreneurs. And part of it is that those one million entrepreneurs, they build great businesses, they're successful. But it also means that more people in those communities who traditionally don't have a lot of entrepreneurs see people that look like them, that speak like them, that act like them,

try their hand at this thing. And that's what we think will create this incredible flywheel of expanded entrepreneurship. That's awesome. And where can people find out about Operation Hope? If you just look up Operation Hope, just OperationHope.com, you can see all about it. It is really amazing. And by the way, it's mentorship, it's education, it's money, it's assistance. If you need an accountant, we can introduce you to one. If you need to talk to someone to do product photography, we have a great list of resources, but it helps more people discover

something that has been out of reach for a lot of people for a long time. And I'm here for it because I think it's not for everyone, but for some people, like entrepreneurship is unequivocally the way they're going to find their life's work. And I think once you find your life's work and you get a chance to work on it over a period of many decades, man, things get really, really fun. Yeah, I have to say I love my company and it is so much fun being an entrepreneur compared to working for somebody else So I totally agree. Okay, one more follow up question

So I knew you mentioned the creator economy and the fact that a lot of people are sort of reverse engineering They're passed towards entrepreneurship. So it used to be you create a product like you said Then you'd go out and try to find an audience now a lot of people have have built an audience and they try to figure out what product that audience would want. What are the benefits or the advantages of being a creator entrepreneur as opposed to starting with the product first? I think there's something about momentum in business creation. And I think what is easier, it's not easy

because business creation is not easy. And frankly, entrepreneurship is not easy. Like we're not changing physics here. Most businesses fail. The good news is that now if you fail it's something you can try something else. And you're not gonna necessarily lose your house, hopefully. But business momentum is a real thing.

Here's the best example I can give you. During the pandemic, my anxiety levels sort of skyrocketed. I was drinking way too much coffee. I was at home by myself working. So one of my best friends, David Seagull, said, hey, let me actually get you to start drinking more tea. And I never drank tea before.

And he's like, I'm gonna curate and sort of create this box of really high end, like the best green tea on the planet. And I'm gonna create product for you. Like, I'm gonna make you a special, hardly box of tea. And I fell in love with it. Like, I drink tea every afternoon,

I drink coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. And so I began to tell people very slowly, very seldom, very subtly, hey, you know, I'm thinking about trying my handles, this little T company, I'd post something on an Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn, I'd tell us a few friends. And all of a sudden, people started asking me weeks later, hey, like, how's the T company going?

Are you still doing that thing? I was like, yeah, it's working on it. It's really cool. I'm gonna start in, you know, my second shop if I store, my first one was 2006, my second will be 2020. I'm really excited. And then we launched. And I remember when we launched,

I had this list in my mind of like, I'm gonna send this the link to like 25 people who've been bugging me for all this time asking when I'm launching. And those are my first 25 customers. And once I got that, I had much more than 25 bought. Maybe it was like 18 of them or 12 of them bought, but it just gave me this incredible confidence that maybe it might be a mountain of something.

Now maybe that was artificial, maybe that was just luck, maybe, but it gave me the drive to keep going. So go from chapter one, which is launching to chapter two, which is, okay, now I get to find a real scalable channel of which to find new customers. And that's what I think is so compelling and so fascinating, but the creator, a creator's turning into entrepreneurs, they have their 1000 truth, true fans already built in, but it has to be authentic. The reason that there's a very famous story in the 80s of Brad Pitt doing a, creating

his own toothpaste, and it failed. Well, of course it failed because like nobody associates Brad Pitt, I mean, he's great at a lot of things, but no one associates him with having especially good dental hygiene. However, someone like Mr. Beast, who's well known for loving chocolate, who has to eat a particular type of chocolate

because he has certain health issues, creating something like feastables and allowing, inviting his audience in to participate in the journey of building it R&D samples. Here's what we're going to do here's what we do next and then releasing it obviously has got a huge audience, but he turned his subscribers and his audience into consumers into participants into fans of what he was making. Now, hardly starting Firebally T versus Mr. Beast could not be more far apart. I mean, that is like, those are different extremes. But in the middle, I think you have a lot of people who have these built-in audiences, and they know what their audience really wants.

And if they're something that their audience wants and they want, and they've had dialogue about this, but it doesn't yet exist, that is a perfect opportunity for them to create something brand new and then sell it or offer it to their audience. And maybe it just stays with their audience. Maybe you're only selling pens to the 100 people in your sub-reddit pen group. Because you're in the sub-reddit pen group and you always talk about the best pens, and you think you've created a better pen, and maybe your entire your total adjustable market is everyone in that subreddit. That's okay, but maybe that gets you going. Now you're making staplers, now you're making all types,

you know, now you're making notepads and pens and paper. And I think that it just gives you a little bit of an early momentum start into entrepreneurship. And I think that's why it's really, really compelling. By the way, it's the reason why I think some of these celebrity brands, even something that get a bad rap, I don't believe all of them deserve a bad rap. I mean, I was very close to the Jimmy Butler creating Big Face Coffee. I remember like early days when he first contacted Shopify, he was making coffee in the NBA bubble for other basketball players

because there was no good coffee there. And then decides after the NBA bubble opens up and people go back to their towns, that he wants to create a big-faced coffee brand. And then I remember hearing from someone at Shopify who works very close to them, that he's actually going on a coffee tour to go find better beans and better ingredients and better product and better accessories for the coffee. And I realized that this is not a promotional product. This is not Brad Pitt selling toothpaste. This is genuinely someone who cares so deeply about coffee, making a better version of

coffee, coffee products, and selling to the people that also like Jimmy. Maybe you only know Jimmy as a basketball player, but now there are people in this world who really only know him as a coffee entrepreneur. And I think that is so cool. I love the creator economy because I coach people all the time on how to start businesses. And a lot of people just don't have product market fit. That's what I see a lot. They're putting out a product. Nobody wants to buy it. They don't have product market fit. When you're a creator, you can pulse your audience, survey

them, get to know what they want. You can pay attention to what they're asking you. You can iterate as you want. You can like build it as you go. So there's a lot of advantages there. So let's talk about another concept that you talk about. And that's connected consumer in the future of e-commerce. So I heard you on Bloomberg. You talked about the future of e-commerce moving from D to C direct to consumer to C to C. Can you talk to us about that and why you think things are changing? You remember how we talked early about that for a period of time, there were consumers that were interacting with Wendy's, like the Wendy's, the fast food chain, almost like

Wendy was a person. So some in dramatic has changed and I don't think it's obvious, but I do think it's profound. And what has changed is that every time we as a consumer buy a product, we're not just buying it for consumption reasons. We're also voting with our wallets for that product to exist in the world. The reason that I wear all birds, I think they're great shoes, high quality, but I believe what Joey and Tim are doing with all birds to create a more sustainable sneaker is fundamentally amazing. And I want to vote with my money with my wallet for more of that to exist, whether it's

all birds or it's other brands like all birds. The reason I wear James Purse is because I think there's no one who thinks more about black t-shirts than this guy and his team. I love people that are craft people that think so deeply about a particular thing. And so every time I buy out James Purse t-shirt, which is quite expensive, it feels like I'm endorsing this idea. And so I think today consumers have a very different relationship with the products, the brands, the companies that they buy from, far beyond anything we've seen in the past.

It actually reminds me of what we used to see 150 years ago where he was the consumer, went to the bakery and bought the bread from the baker. And you knew the baker's name and you knew their family and you knew what their birthday and or you went to the Cobbler and have your shoes fixed. And you knew the Cobbler's family, you knew the Cob's name and you knew their family and you knew what their birthday and or you went to the Cobbler and have your shoes fixed and you knew the Cobbler's the Cobbler's family, you knew the Cobbler's life story. That sort of town square model made commerce and retail very, very personal, very intimate

in a really wonderful way. And then, frankly, for the last 150 years or so, we had these big department stores which felt a little bit transactional. Whereas today, I think we're coming back to a more personal, intimate, authentic buying experience between consumer and brand or consumer and maker. And for that reason, I think the brands that you and I love so much, it's not just the product that we're buying. We're buying a participation in that community. I mean, it's kind of an amazing thing, but like, you buy a pair of sneakers on

Kith, for example, or on Noble, for example. And now you're kind of part of the Kith community. Now you're following them on Instagram as well. You're going to their pop-up events. If they have, you know, some sort of early release midnight on a Sunday night, you're staying up late and you're on the chats and you're on social media. And you're talking to other people that are waiting for the drop to come. I mean, the Supreme Communities, a perfect example of that. Every Thursday at 11 a.m., this massive Supreme Flash that happens, you're not just buying something from Supreme.

You're participating in the Supreme community in a way that is just unlike anything we've seen in, you know, 100, for the last 100 years or so. And so I think the brands that do really well have a deep understanding of that connection and they connect right to the consumer through multiple touch points in store, online, on social media, at farmers markets, through media, through concerts. I mean, brands are now putting out and making these mix tapes effectively on Spotify. I mean, that is like, not only do I love Supreme and I love their skateboards, but I wear their hoodies, but I'm listening to their playlists.

And then I can go on a Community Forum, I can go on their Discord channel, and I can talk to other people like that. That is Connect to Consumer. And that, by the way, is a much more interesting and exciting way for retail to operate. And I'm here for it.

I love it. That's awesome. Okay, my last question to you is 2023. You call it the year of the entrepreneur. We're approaching a recession. A lot of people would assume it's not a good time to start a business, but you say otherwise. Tell us why and your top advice for people starting businesses in 2023. I think I've gone through a couple things that are just, I have to say it. I'll say it again.

One is the cost of failure being solo. You can try something today. If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter. Yeah, you may lose $39, but think about the impact you might have, what may be the case if that actually is successful. That's the first thing. The second thing is, when I started my t-shirt business, Store 139 on Shopify in 2006, the main ingredient for me to be successful was I needed a lot of money because I needed to buy ads on AdWords on Google.

And the more money that I made, the more money I spent on AdWords, the more money I made, it was this sort of this virtual cycle back and forth. Today having more money is not necessarily going to lead to any success whatsoever. What is going to lead to more success is how good your product, how do you connect with your consumers, what kind of community have you built, what kind of content are you creating? That means that more people can participate and can start businesses, but it also means more people can build huge companies

with few resources by simply being resourceful. So creativity over capital and resourcefulness over resources. That, to me, is incredibly compelling. And then I'll go one step further, which is that today, if you at all the surface areas digital surface areas or physical surface areas where consumers are spending their time From TikTok to Pinterest from Spotify to YouTube all of these are these wonderful opportunities to engage sub conversations I mean if I was starting fire belly today versus two years ago I would probably spend a lot more of my time.

I know YouTube comments are kind of a weird place sometimes, but I would find some great videos on YouTube where people are talking about getting really geeky and really nerdy out on T and I would participate in those conversations and eventually after creating value for that community, I may say, hey, you should check out what I'm doing with Fireballity. I think it's really compelling. So that is a very different way to build a business. As an aside, I started a little personal project, sort of my weekend approach for the last couple, last couple of months has been this podcast called Big Shot.

And Big Shot is an archival of some of the greatest Jewish entrepreneurs that have lived the last hundred years. And I'm trying to archive these stories before it's too late, before the people aren't around. But when you hear these people that have built these crazy companies like Izzy Sharp building four seasons or Aldo Bedton and creating Aldo shoes, you realize that starting a business in the 40s and 50s

and 60s and frankly even the 70s was really, really tough. I mean, it was a blood bath. And if you didn't succeed, you lost everything, and the only way for you to really build was to bring on partners and raise money in capital. That's not the case anymore. Some of my most favorite stores on Shopify started at their mom's kitchen table.

They're totally bootstrap, they haven't raised any money. They're a one or two person operation, and they're taking a, you know, I mean, look at Viori or Al-O-Yoga or Jim Shark, think about how competitive they are to Nike and some of these companies are like five years old. I mean, this is an unbelievable time to start a business and it's because it's easier to start and it's easier to scale. And this is where the advantage goes to the entrepreneur because if you deeply care about

what you were building and providing in terms of value service product to the consumer, you're going to win because it's a lot easier for you to be authentic and for you to be like for you to actually get in front of potential consumers versus a big company with a big brand. Yeah. I'm fired up guys. If you don't consider this your sign, I don't know what you're waiting for. Start your small business, start your small company. If you guys want to get a $1 per month trial, you can go to shopfly.com slash

profiting all lower case. Hardly, it was such a pleasure. The last question I asked, oh my guess, two last questions. We do something fun at the end of the year. What is one actionable thing our young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? The first thing I would say is try your hand at a couple different things. This idea of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, it's not just a fun thing to say. Try a bunch of different things.

Even if you have a business that I don't know if all if Fire belly ever becomes a big company or not, but at some point I'm gonna try my hand at coffee because I've done the tea thing really well. Maybe we expand to coffee. Do I need to know, but who knows? Maybe it's gonna work and if it doesn't work, I can stick to tea and if it. Maybe we expand to coffee. Do I need to know? But who knows, maybe it's gonna work. And if it doesn't work, I can stick to tea.

And if it does work, now I have two product lines. Try stuff. The fact that you can do so right now with limited risk and you can discover things that don't work as the new definition of failure, just go ahead and do it. And by the way, if you don't know what to start, you're not really sure what to sell. Look at the stuff you're using.

Look at your desk right now. I got lots of notepads and I got lots of pens here and coffee mugs and stuff. If I were to start something, I'd look around and be like, I need like, why do posts? It's not like, they're just flimsy. I want a better version of posts. I'm going to go and try to tinker my garage in my little workshop at home and I'm going to try to make a better version of that. But find the stuff that you're already using or that things you're already making and think about what other people want to consume that as well. That's great advice.

And my last question is, what is your secret to profiting in life and this can be outside of profiting financially? I think the most important decision any of us make is our spouse or our life partner, wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever you want to call that person. A lot of people spend more time contemplating what cards they're going to drive or what

kind of sneakers they want to buy and not enough time thinking about choosing the right life partner. And I'm fortunate that I have, I think the greatest life partner for me in Lindsay is my wife because there's no way I can live at this level of, of energy, of excitement, of just get shit done without having this incredible foundation that is Lindsay. And I would encourage all of you to think deeply about that. If you have someone, cherish that person because that's kind of the secret to this whole thing.

That's so funny. People have been mentioning that on my podcast, way more frequently, there's always like themes that pop up every year and relationships and picking the right spouse is definitely a theme. It matters. Lindsay and I have been, I'll just get a little vulnerable for a second before we close. Lindsay and I have been seeing, we have been seeing a couple's therapist since we got

married. Like just like you go to the gym before you need to go to the gym, like we've been seeing a couple's therapist biweekly for nine years or so because we really believe that if that centerpiece of our life, which is our marriage or relationship, is not strong and sturdy and durable, nothing else matters. You need to have a foundation of strength to do all this other stuff. piece of our life, which is our marriage or relationship, is not strong and sturdy and durable. Nothing else matters. You need to have a foundation of strength to do all this other stuff. Whether by the way you're an employee, a founder and entrepreneur, you're a doctor, a lawyer,

you're an artist, whatever you do, you need to have that strong foundation. And the more I talk to people about that, the more I realize that most people have not contemplated how important that particular person is in your life. Well, thank you so much, Harley. This has been such a great conversation. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? Harley at Harley F on Twitter,

at Harley on Instagram. And of course check out Shopify.com. If I can be helpful to anyone, anyone who's listening that is starting a business now, I can promise you I can give you that much time, but please, please send me a tweet at Harley F for an Instagram DM. And I would love to be your first customer.

So if you launch something on Shopify, let me be your first customer. Just send me a tweet or a DM and I would love to do that for you. What a great way to close. Thank you so much, Harley, for your time. Thank you so much for having me. Man, what an amazing episode. Harley was so great to talk to you. I learned so much.

And I love how passionate he is about Shopify and entrepreneurship. And I totally agree with him. We're in this entrepreneurial renaissance right now. We have access to more resources than ever before to start and grow a business. You should feel really good about this because all you need is an idea and a lot of ambition. You don't need to be rich, you don't need to spend a ton of money on ads, and platforms like Shopify have made it super easy for the everyday person to become an

entrepreneur or start their side business. I think my biggest takeaway from this conversation is that creators are the next generation of entrepreneurs building brands. Creators have reverse engineered the way that brands are built. Before you built a product and then you went and found an audience. Today, creators build an audience first and then go build a product based on what they know their audience loves. And I love this because when you're a creator first, you can figure out what your customers want, what they want from you specifically and what problems you can solve for them.

And then you have built-in product market fit, which is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to running a business, actually making sure that there's ample demand for your products and services. And the best part is taking this approach is basically free. All you need is your phone, a computer, an e-shirt to go after, and your editing software is a choice. And remember, your audience is your phone, a computer, an e-shirt go after, and your editing software of choice. And remember, your audience is your choice too. We had Alex Ramonzion, who's a very successful entrepreneur and marketer, and he told me

that you should try to solve rich people's problems because they have the most money. And I say if you're taking a creator first approach, then try to attract rich people to your online community so that they have money to buy from you down the line. And remember, you don't need to be some huge famous creator in order to start monetizing. The creator economy is estimated to be worth $100 billion, and yet only 4% of creators do it full time. There's plenty of pie to go around, and small creators are all the rage right now when it comes to marketers. If you want to start your sad hustle or business, I recommend that you try out Shopify. Don't start something from scratch. Focus on your product, focus on your marketing. Let's Shopify do that hard back end work for you. You can sign it for

a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash profiting. And that's all lower case. Again, that's Shopify.com slash profiting for a $1 per month trial period. And I want to hear about your businesses. If you start one or want to start one, shoot me a DM on Instagram at YappwithHalla. I want to hear all about it. Thank you so much for listening to Young & Profiting Podcast. If you listen, learn to and profited, share this episode with your friends and family, and do take a minute to drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. It's the number one way to thank us. If you you like to watch your podcast, you can check us out on

YouTube. All of our videos are uploaded there. You can also find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. I want to shout out my talented Yap production team as always. You guys are awesome. This is your host, Halaataha, signing off.