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 | Entrepreneurship E252

Starting point is 00:00:13 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.

Starting point is 00:00:40 When 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 bloodbath, 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 and capital. That's not the case anymore. All of a sudden, for the first time maybe in the history of the world, the made ingredient is no longer just capital. For the first time ever, the only thing.

Starting point is 00:01:10 you need is. What is up, young and profitors? You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting podcast where we interview the brightest minds in the world and unpack their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your daily life.

Starting point is 00:01:30 I'm your host, Halitaha. Thanks for tuning in and get ready to listen, learn, and profit. Young and Profiters, we have a very awesome interview in 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.

Starting point is 00:02:07 We absolutely love Shopify at Yap 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's stories, how they scaled, and how tech-like Shopify gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to do disrupt industries like never before. Harley, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Great to be here. Thank you for having me on the show. Very honored. Yeah, I'm really excited about today's show Young and Profiters. It's going to be a great day for all of us side hustlers and entrepreneurs because we have Harley Finkelstein in the building.

Starting point is 00:02:42 Harley is an entrepreneur, a lawyer, and the president of Shopify, which is a top commerce platform and one of our long-term sponsors at Young Improfiting Podcast. Harley is also an advisor to Filicious 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 T-brand, and is the host of a new podcast called Big Shot. In this episode, we're going to unpack Harley's lifelong journey as a serial entrepreneur, and we'll learn how he went from being one of the first users on Shopify to eventually

Starting point is 00:03:16 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 will 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.

Starting point is 00:03:52 and it was a challenge, and so the tool that I would use to solve that 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 sort of had a rough time growing up, but they immigrated from Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution to come to Canada 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 on 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 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.

Starting point is 00:04:53 And so it wasn't as 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'm Jewish. I was going a lot of bar-bibbut-mits 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 conga 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

Starting point is 00:05:33 hire me. I was 13 years old. I had, I had no experience as DJ. I probably looked like I was eight years old. And so it just, there was just no way it was going to happen. And my father said, 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 would make me 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

Starting point is 00:06:12 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 want to be the entrepreneurship company. We want to be the place where people go with an idea.

Starting point is 00:06:44 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, in Allbirds or a figs or a Jim 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.

Starting point is 00:07:04 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, you know, 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 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, is it's something as simple as, I love making beautiful blankets for my grandchildren.

Starting point is 00:07:43 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 Yakutori barbecue. you. I'm not going to ever become a yakatory chef, it's just not, but I love, I enjoy making it

Starting point is 00:08:11 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, you know, 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 buy through a certain period. So, for example, when you were in business and law school, from 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

Starting point is 00:08:50 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. It was really fun. I made a little bit of money, but more importantly, I really got deep into entrepreneurship. 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

Starting point is 00:09:27 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, need to 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 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 need to support my mom and sisters. And without my dad being around, it felt like I had to do something different. Working a

Starting point is 00:10:04 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, McGill University spends a lot of money on T-shirt, promotional T-shirts. So the first day of school, you got a T-shirt, a bag, and a hat that says McGill or says whatever school you go to, a 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

Starting point is 00:10:44 that were, 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 schmata industry, garment industry. It's some of the biggest clothing companies on the planet were built out of Montreal. So I knew that I had access to screen printing machines and I had 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, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:19 teachers 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 like T-shirts, but that wasn't really well. what I wanted. That wasn't going to be 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 for 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.

Starting point is 00:11:55 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, the 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. tribe were the entrepreneurs. They were the people that I just, I always got along with them. I felt like a

Starting point is 00:12:33 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 asked 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.

Starting point is 00:13:08 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 edition 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 use Shopify in 2006.

Starting point is 00:13:35 It's so cool. You know, 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, from 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.

Starting point is 00:13:59 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 about 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 is starting a business was capital. You needed money.

Starting point is 00:14:22 And so if you read any business books about the Rockefellers or the Rothschilds or the Vanderbilt's. In every one of those early stories, there's always a banker or a bank involved. Someone goes to the bank and takes that a loan. 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

Starting point is 00:15:02 to 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

Starting point is 00:15:32 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

Starting point is 00:15:50 from Germany who comes to Canada in the early 2000s because he met a girl here in Ottawa and he needs to get a job. 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 snowboard 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,

Starting point is 00:16:18 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 for 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 a million dollars. And that was really the genesis of Snowdevil, which was that original snowboard shop. So now you're in 2004, 2005 or so, and there's very few online stores,

Starting point is 00:16:56 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. 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's hearing from all these different entrepreneurs

Starting point is 00:17:22 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 Shopify has been able to change the main ingredients in terms of what do 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. while Nike convinced the entire world that if you have a body, like an actual human body,

Starting point is 00:18:02 you are an athlete, as opposed to if you get paid to play professional sports, you're an athlete, or if you play Division I football, you're an athlete. Nike can convince 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 with 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 where 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

Starting point is 00:18:40 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 U.S. But for anyone listening, if you, you know, if you think about your favorite brands, right now I'm wearing kids, sneakers, James Perth's 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

Starting point is 00:19:22 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 hours to put up. And you think about how long, you think about that, like, that was impossible 10 years ago. And 20 years ago, that was unfathomable. No one even had the, like, audacity to 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 Figgs, or you look at Ben Francis at Jim Shark, or Tim and Joey at all. or any of these Richard Fashinova, 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

Starting point is 00:20:04 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. At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. and I'm really picky when it comes to my employees.

Starting point is 00:20:27 My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world. And when it comes to hiring, I no longer feel overwhelmed by finding that perfect candidate, even though I'm so picky because when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post noticed. Indeed, sponsor jobs help you stand out and hire fast by boosting your post to the top relevant candidates. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored ones, according to Indeed data worldwide.

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Starting point is 00:21:18 Just go to Indeed.com slash profiting right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indie-dollar. Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash profiting. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, indeed, is all you need. Hello, young improfitters. Running my own business has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, but I won't lie to you. In those early days of setting it up, I feel like I was jumping on a cliff with no parachute. I'm not really good at that kind of stuff. I'm really good at marketing, sales, growing a business, offers, but I had so many questions and zero idea where to find the answers when it came to starting an official business. I wish I had known about Northwest Registered Agent back when I was starting Yap Media.

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Starting point is 00:22:29 So when you want more for your business, more privacy, more guidance, more free resources, Northwest Registered Agent is where you should go. Don't wait and protect your privacy, build your brand, and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash Yapfree and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash Yap free. Yeah, and I think one of the main things that 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.

Starting point is 00:23:11 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 know, 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, 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,

Starting point is 00:23:36 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,

Starting point is 00:23:54 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 people buy your courses in? I can see in Shopify where people are logging in from. It's like a dopamine rush.

Starting point is 00:24:21 It's amazing, right? You see this incredible map of people all over the world. that want 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 now 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, yeah, certainly. There are more people doing it. But if you are ambitious and you have a great product or a 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

Starting point is 00:24:50 so. And, I mean, you're already doing so well. You know, you're running with what you're already working on. But how I think about people who fundamentally, like, 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, try 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

Starting point is 00:25:31 until they find something that sticks and then they can invest in scale into the thing that actually sticks. And you can fail 10 times and it doesn't really matter. 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 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.

Starting point is 00:26:12 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 like 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 sat down in the tax dollar 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 that changed my life. It changed my life not just because the t-shirts

Starting point is 00:26:52 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 was 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 icky 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.

Starting point is 00:27:37 And if I want to do that, there was only one company that I thought was doing it, and he 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 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.

Starting point is 00:27:59 I don't care about anything. I just want to help build this thing. 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, you know,

Starting point is 00:28:30 we didn't have a CFO when I started. We didn't have a CMO. We didn't have a head of, like, 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 like my personal Hartley's mission, the Venn diagram overlap is almost entire. It almost completely overlaps because I care so deeply about entrepreneurship because of what I've experienced, what my grandparents experience, what my parents experience.

Starting point is 00:28:56 So like, 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 referral program for agencies or helping to build the first app store or the theme store or helping to develop Shopify Plus or enterprise offering, taking the company public in 2015 on the New York Stock Exchange. I'd never taken a company public before.

Starting point is 00:29:31 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 asks me or 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, or add as much value as you can, and everything kind of takes care of itself that way. Yeah, I totally agree.

Starting point is 00:30:01 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 sometimes it doesn't matter necessarily, right? Like, I think about this a lot. So Shopify, we're about 10,000 people at Shopify.

Starting point is 00:30:22 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 started companies, we're founders ourselves, we have businesses 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 medium-sized companies? Probably. But the way to get, real scale, real leverage. And the way to sort of get the, it sounds so cheesy, but like the one plus

Starting point is 00:31:00 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. 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's it better. I think you have to sort of, like, you can work at a company and still be an entrepreneur. Totally.

Starting point is 00:31:39 You can feel like this is, like Shapa 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.

Starting point is 00:32:13 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 re-qualify for this role. And if next year I don't re-qualify, 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.

Starting point is 00:32:38 We're an award-winning social media agency. I have a podcast network. And now I have business partners. 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 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.

Starting point is 00:33:08 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, Holla, 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 or brother or friend. Most people end up starting businesses with people that are just like them.

Starting point is 00:33:29 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 room together, dorm room together in the case of Facebook, for example. But actually, the people that you want to build a company with, for the most part, need to have very complimentary skill sets, not the same skill sets, but rather, like, 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 listening to this right now

Starting point is 00:34:00 and you're in college and you're in a faculty of management, business, or you're in the 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, 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 going to bring something so different to the table that ultimately you are going to form an incredible relationship. And everyone's going to kind

Starting point is 00:34:40 of 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 the 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 are 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?

Starting point is 00:35:16 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, U.S. business registrations, and you go to the Census Bureau, the U.S. 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's a fairly large jump. And now we're actually sitting at that

Starting point is 00:35:55 five million mark pretty much every single year. So just from a strictly objective criteria perspective, there are more people today, if you just look at the U.S. alone, starting business ever 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 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,

Starting point is 00:36:33 that's what they double down on. So first of all, there's less of a connotation, a negative connotation that if I start something and it fails, it means I'm a failure. Instead, it feels a lot more like if I start something and it fails, maybe it just wasn't the right thing. Let me try something else. That's the version. The second thing is you have this new emergent. I actually tweeted also about this, that, you know, the creator economy is fake. It's just the economy. Obviously, it'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 want to build the world's greatest pen. And I'm going to make this pen and then I'm going to

Starting point is 00:37:07 go and find people that want to buy this pen. Or using the example earlier, I made this new appliance or this new beautiful blanket, and I'm going to make more of it, and then I'm going to 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.

Starting point is 00:37:25 And it's not just, you know, obviously, everyone talks about, you know, Mr. Beast, and I have some feastables here. But it's not just Mr. Bees. Like, all of us are on, not all of us, a lot of us are on social media. We inherently have audiences. You may have 100,000 followers or you may have five followers, but you have an audience.

Starting point is 00:37:42 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, which is one of my, my Moby Dick was supreme. I really wanted to get Supreme on Shopify for a very, very long time.

Starting point is 00:38:04 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 go 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.

Starting point is 00:38:44 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 a direct relationship, whether it's through social media. I remember years ago, the Wendy's account was like, had a real personality. and a lot of these social media accounts of big brands actually have personalities to the extent that

Starting point is 00:39:09 their fans, their consumers want to interact with them. And so you have a couple 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 relation than a consumer. But also, they're experimenting. They're trying new things. A couple years ago, one of the cool things I thought that Oreo did, which is owned by Mondalies, 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.

Starting point is 00:39:40 So each of those things on their own 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 with Drake has built. You see these traditional, would be a traditional musician,

Starting point is 00:40:01 completely expand their scope of what they're actually being. 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 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 like Canada Goose OVO collaboration, collab jackets. Or you go to a Ferell 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

Starting point is 00:40:38 expanding from just being 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 at a 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 renaissance happening. Young and profitors. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're

Starting point is 00:41:21 procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character of flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you. So it's key to understand your six types of working genius.

Starting point is 00:41:49 The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick Lensione and he is a business influencer and author. And the working genius framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the work that you're not. Now, let me tell you a story. Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention, so I like to rally people and I like to invent new things, I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like enablement, which is one of my working frustrations. So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one. I don't like it when people slow me down. I don't like handholding.

Starting point is 00:42:23 I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire. But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody else can fill the enablement role, which I do have, K on my team. So working genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team, helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel, and it's also helped me in hiring. Working genius is absolutely amazing. I'm obsessed with this model.

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Starting point is 00:45:33 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?

Starting point is 00:46:11 A couple things. I can tell you just my own, my own experiences. So my grandmother became an entrepreneur in her 50s. My maternal grandmother, she started a little textile business because honestly, she wanted my grandfather's business was not going the way he wanted. And she wanted to supplement their income. And she wanted to actually help with that. She wanted to participate in commerce and the economy.

Starting point is 00:46:32 And so she did so in sort of 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.

Starting point is 00:46:53 And that conversation sort of 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. 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 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

Starting point is 00:47:27 the time of the pandemic where we were all sheltered. 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 are not, not only is more than half of the entrepreneurs on Shopify women,

Starting point is 00:47:58 you see incredible, 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

Starting point is 00:48:19 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 are 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.

Starting point is 00:48:44 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.

Starting point is 00:49:18 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 Bryant is the founder of Operation Hope is that that's not the case for 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.

Starting point is 00:49:42 The idea that this program that we've created with Operation Hope called 1 million black businesses, 1MB, is by 2030 to create 1 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 business, 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,

Starting point is 00:50:08 that act like them, trying 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 Operation Hope.com, you can see all about it. It is really amazing.

Starting point is 00:50:23 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

Starting point is 00:50:50 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 know you mentioned the creator economy and the fact that a lot of people are sort of reverse engineering, their past towards entrepreneurship. So it used to be you'd create a product, like you said, then you'd go out and try to find an audience. Now, a lot of people have built-in audiences, 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

Starting point is 00:51:27 creation. And I think what is easier, it's not easy because business creation is not easy. And frankly, entrepreneur is not easy. Like, we're not changing physics here. Most businesses fail. The good news is that now if you fail at something, you can try something else. And you're not going to 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 Siegel, said, hey, let me actually get you to start drinking more tea. I never drank tea before. And he's like, I'm going to curate and sort of create this box of really high end, like the best

Starting point is 00:52:02 green tea on the planet. And I'm going to create product for you. Like, I'm going to make you a special Harley 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 sold very subtly. Hey, you know, I'm thinking about trying my hand to this little tea company. I'd post something on 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 tea company going? Are you still doing that thing? I was like, yeah, I'm working on. It's really cool. Like, I'm going to start in, you know, my second Shopify store. My first one was 2006.

Starting point is 00:52:36 My second one 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 going to send this the link to like 25 people who've been bugging me for all this time asking me when I'm launching. And those are my first 25 customers. And once I got that, I'm not sure all 25 bought, maybe it was like 18 of them or 12 of them bought, but it just gave me this incredible confidence that maybe I'm onto something. Now, maybe that was artificial. Maybe that was just luck and maybe, but it gave me the drive to keep going. It's to go from chapter one, which is launching to chapter two, which is, okay, now I've got to find a real scalable channel of which to find new customers. And that's what I think

Starting point is 00:53:18 is so compelling and so fascinating about the creators, a creator is turning into entrepreneurs. They have their 1,000 true, true fans already, you know, built in, but it has to be authentic. The reason that there's a very famous story in the 80s of Brad Pitt doing, creating his own toothpaste, and it failed. Of course it failed because nobody associates Brad Pitt. I mean, he's graded 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,

Starting point is 00:54:02 here's what we're going to do, here's what we're to do next, and then releasing it, Obviously, he's got a huge audience, but he turned his subscribers and his audience into consumers, into participants, into fans of what he was making. Now, partly starting Firebelly 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 there's something that their audience wants and they want, and they've had dialogue

Starting point is 00:54:34 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 subreddit pen group, because you're in the subreddit pen group and you always talk about the best pens and you think you've created a better pen and maybe your only, 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 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.

Starting point is 00:55:11 And I think that's why it's really, really compelling. By the reason why I think some of these celebrity brands, even some of them that get a bad rap, I don't believe all of them deserve a bad rap. I mean, I was very close to Jimmy Butler creating Big Face coffee. I remember 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 MBA bubble opens up

Starting point is 00:55:36 and people go back to their towns, that he wants to create 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 products and better accessories for the coffee. And I realize that this is not a promotional product.

Starting point is 00:55:56 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.

Starting point is 00:56:15 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.

Starting point is 00:56:28 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 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 connect to consumer and the future of e-commerce. So I heard you on Bloomberg, you talked about the future of e-commerce moving from D to C to C, direct to consumer to C. Can you talk to us about that and why you think things are changing? You remember how we talked earlier about that for a period of time, there were consumers that were interacting with Wendy's, like the windings, the fast food chain, almost like Wendy

Starting point is 00:57:04 was a person. So something 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 wallet for that product to exist in the world. The reason that I wear allbirds, I think they're great shoes, high quality, but I believe what Joey and Tim were doing with Alberts 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 Albirds or it's other brands like Alberts. 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.

Starting point is 00:57:45 I love people that are craft people that think so deeply about a particular thing. And so every time I buy a James Purst 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 you as 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 their birthday or you went to the cobbler to have your shoes fixed. And you knew 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

Starting point is 00:58:29 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,

Starting point is 00:59:14 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 Community is a perfect example of that. Every Thursday at 11 a.m., this massive Supreme flash sale 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 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 touchpoints. In store, online, on social media, at farmers markets, through media, through concerts. I mean, brands are,

Starting point is 00:59:52 are now putting out and making these mixtapes effectively on Spotify. I mean, that is like, not only do I love Supreme and I love their skateboards and I wear their hoodies, but I'm listening to their playlist. 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.

Starting point is 01:00:14 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, you know, 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.

Starting point is 01:00:32 I think I've gone through a couple things that are just, I have to say, and I'll say it again. One is the cost of failure of being so low. You can try some today if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter. Yeah, you may lose $39, but like think about the impact you might have. Like what may be the case if that actually is successful? So 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

Starting point is 01:00:56 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 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,

Starting point is 01:01:37 which is that today, if you look 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, to have conversations. I mean, if I was starting Firebelly 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 nerd like nerding out on tea. 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 Firebelly T. I think it's really

Starting point is 01:02:18 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 project for the 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 100 years. And I'm trying to archive these stories before it's too late, before the people aren't around. And when you hear these people that have built these crazy companies, like Izzy Sharp building four seasons or Aldo Bedsoon creating Aldo shoes, you realize that starting a business

Starting point is 01:02:49 in the 40s and 50s and 60s and frankly even the 70s was really, really tough. I mean, it was a bloodbath and if you didn't succeed, you lost everything. And the only way for you to really build was to bring on partners

Starting point is 01:03:03 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 bootstrapped. 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 Alaw Yoga or Jim Shark. Think about how competitive they are to Nike. And some of these companies

Starting point is 01:03:22 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 a 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 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 Shopify.com slash profiting,

Starting point is 01:04:02 all lowercase. Harley, it was such a pleasure. The last question I asked all my guests. Two last questions, we do something fun at the end of the year. What is one actionable thing our young improfitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? The first thing I would say is try your hand at a couple different things. Like this idea of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, it's not just a fun thing to say. Like, try a bunch of different things. Even if you have a business that, like, I don't know if firebelly ever becomes a big company or not, but like at some point, I'm going to try my head 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 going to work. And if it doesn't work,

Starting point is 01:04:39 I can stick to tea. And if it does work, now I have two product lines. Try stuff. Like, 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. Like, I got lots of notepads and I got lots of pens here and coffee mugs and stuff. If I were to start something, like, I'd look around and be like, I need, like, why to post it's not like, they're just flimsy. I want a better version of a post. I'm going to go and try to tinker in my garage in my little workshop at home, and I'm going to try to make a better version of

Starting point is 01:05:14 that. But find the stuff that you're already using or the 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, our, our, life partner, wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever you want to call that person. A lot of people spend more time contemplating what car they're going to drive or what kind of

Starting point is 01:05:40 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, who's my wife, because there's no way I can live at this level of energy, of excitement, of just get shit done without

Starting point is 01:05:56 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 a, we have been seeing a couples

Starting point is 01:06:22 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, our 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 or a founder, an entrepreneur, you're a doctor, 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

Starting point is 01:06:59 such a great conversation. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do. At Harley F on Twitter, at Harley on Instagram. And of course, check on Shopify.com. If I can be helpful to anyone, anyone who's listening that is starting a business now, I can't promise you I can give you that much time. But please, please send me a tweet at Harley F or an Instagram DM. And I would love to be your first customer.

Starting point is 01:07:20 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.

Starting point is 01:07:37 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.

Starting point is 01:08:00 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

Starting point is 01:08:41 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, a niche to go after, and you're editing softwares of choice. And remember, your audience is your choice too. We had Alex Hermozion, 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 then 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

Starting point is 01:09:21 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 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 Shopify do that hard back-end work for you. You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash profiting, and that's all lowercase. 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 Yap With Hala. I want to hear all about it.

Starting point is 01:10:06 Thank you so much for listening to Young Improfiting Podcast. If you listen, learned, and profited, share this episode with your friends and family, and do take a minute to drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. It's the number one way to thank us. If 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 app production team as always. You guys are awesome. This is your host, Halitaha, signing off.

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 | Entrepreneurship E252

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