Shopify: Tobias Lütke. How a snowboarder built a $150 billion business (2019)

25:35Yeah, I mean, that would have been the natural thing to do, to go year-round. Again, Scott and I said we wanted to start a location in town. But I really, doing the development of it, I was now spending all this time, Like I was tweaking the software. I did not stop programming. I was just, okay, now let me try things. Let me make it faster. Let me use different approaches. And so increasingly, I got people sending me emails and asking me if I would license Snowdevil to them because they wanted to start something similar. People were saying, hey, can you just license? You built this. Can we use it for our e-commerce shop?

26:14Right. And exactly because it was just different. It wasn't a normal grid. It told stories. It was clearly modern. It was sort of Web2OE. And so people were saying, I would love to just build my business based on that foundation. I mean, amazing. It reminds me so much of the story of Squarespace. And Squarespace was essentially started because the founder, he couldn't find a good way to do a blog and a website all in one. And so he basically created his own way to build a website, right? He did it himself. It's a similar story here. Similar story. Yeah. What I needed was something that helps me in the journey of entrepreneurship from scratch.

26:54And I'm not that different from other people. Like, if I needed this at some point, there's going to be at least a couple thousand people who also need this. So this was like spring 2005. At some point, Scott and I just said, OK, skateboards or software? It was pretty obvious that we should go with software. When we come back in just a moment, Shopify starts to gain traction but still needs money. So Toby heads to the Bay Area, buys a used bicycle on Craigslist, and pedals over to Sand Hill Road. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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29:38Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2005 and Toby and his co-founder Scott just made a huge decision to pivot their snowboarding company to a software company. And to help them do it, Toby calls up his friend, Daniel. Yeah, so we decided it's going to be software. And I called Daniel, who's a really good friend, my best friend, really, who was in Germany, and said, hey, here's what I would like to do, and I think I need another half year to build this. Do you want to spend a summer in Canada and we do this together? And we could work together and that would be fun. So you and Daniel spent that summer, I guess summer of 2005.

30:19That summer became like a year and a half, but yes. A year and a half trying to build this software together. Exactly. At what point do you stop selling snowboards? Around that time. It was basically the summer and we didn't reopen afterwards. You just didn't reopen. How did you come up with the name Shopify for this software? It was Scott's idea. We talked about what we wanted it and putting shop and simplify together was pretty straightforward. And then we went, I think, on GoDaddy and registered with.com. And there you go. That take people back and saying, oh, yeah, those times were different.

30:53All right. So you've got Shopify. You're building this thing. And really, it sounds like from that moment, from the beginning, you're thinking, this is going to be our business. We're going to build the software that will enable people to open e-commerce sites easily and simply. Exactly. There's so much to building business. There's so much complexity. And if you get an order, how does this money make it to you? Where do you get shipping labels from? How do you make a truck show up to actually send it anywhere? Shopify just does all these things for you. That was a goal because, you know, that moment that I described there, I got my first sale, we got our first sale.

31:35From that point on, I can never get that again. But that was such a profound moment. What I want to spend my time on is, can't I just have other people have that experience? That became sort of a guiding principle of how we build a company. And I have to imagine that you've got to at some point raise some money to pay for server space, pay for the costs associated with building this technology and then marketing it. When did you first start to think about bringing in some money? So around that time, we asked friends and family for money. This was like 2006, 2007? Yeah, around 2005. if we did around.

32:19Like Fiona's parents, anyone you knew with any cash. Exactly. People from my family. I mean, you know, amazing that people trusted us so much. And how much money did you think you needed at that time? It was$200 ,000. Which is a lot of money. And when people said, Toby, what do you need$200 ,000 for? What would you say? Here's the experience up to this point. This is valuable. I know it's valuable because I would have needed it and there are more people like me. But meantime, all these sort of like people were still asking you for this. And what were you saying to them? Were you saying, hang on, we're working on something.

32:55Just hold tight. We'll get it to you. Yeah, I kept a weblog where I sort of talked about my experience building it. I also had a landing page collecting emails, which is now, of course, part of the… And the landing page was Shopify.com or… Yeah. And here's like a demo, which we pointed people to Snow Devil to explain why we were doing this. And by the time we launched in 2006, I think we had 4 ,000 or 5 ,000 emails. So that seemed like a lot. Wow. Yeah. All right. You've got the seed money. You've got… A small office. We ended up taking a very small office space. We actually moved above the coffee shop.

33:33I got that first sale. Okay. We never got internet line. We always used bare Wi-Fi. Right. Built some desks, and that's from where we worked. And it's time to launch. You've got 4 ,000 emails or so from the landing page. And did you just send like a blast of emails saying, okay, we're live, we're here, we're ready to go? Is that how you launched it? That's exactly what we did. So just a blast email. And what was the response? So people signed up to just try it out, which was really, really exciting. And frankly, we are still business running on Shopify. That actually started on that day, which is remarkable.

34:07But it was a lot. I mean, think about what an online story is. It's to most of our customers, this is their livelihood. If that thing is not there suddenly or something goes wrong, the business is defunct, which is a huge responsibility. And people were trusting free guys in Canada. And was it free initially? It started out free. The first year, we decided against the multiple-tier monthly cost. Subscription, right. Because we figured that it's going to be so hard to get people to trust us that making it cheaper would be more likely for people to give it a try. And the model was, I think we charged like 3.5 % or 3.75 % per sale.

34:48It was a complete failure of a business model because basically everyone who didn't expect to have sales thought it was amazing. And people who expected to sell a lot, that was way too much money. So we ended up switching it a year after launch, actually the night before my wedding, for a reason I will never figure out why I did that. The night before your wedding, you switched to a subscription model? Yeah, and we grandfathered everyone, but suddenly everyone called us and said, hey, I promised my so-and-so that they can use this for free, and suddenly it costs money. And so I got all these phone calls during my wedding.

35:21So it was a bit stressful. So you changed the model in 2007, still living with your in-laws. Yes. But now married with your in-laws. Yeah, yeah. How many people, do you remember, like in those early days, like the first year or so, actually signed up for the service? I mean, there's a couple of thousand accounts, and I would say like maybe 100 active. And in year two, we had an interesting event. I mean, this is, I think the Indianapolis team won the Super Bowl around that time. And they actually had a, or a local newspaper actually had a Shopify store created, which they started like two days before the Super Bowl.

36:05And it just was selling T-shirts with the front page saying, we won the Super Bowl. Oh, wow. Like a picture of what the newspaper would look like if they actually happened to win. And then they ended up winning and they sold tens of thousands, I think hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of these t-shirts on that day. And that was like a stunning experience for us because that was so like someone just had a really good idea in an office and turned it into like a real economic event. You know, these events started accumulating. People were kind of experimenting more with online retail. the new businesses were starting instead of people coming to us saying, hey, we want to reduce costs and switch to you.

36:49It sounds like it was a slow burn, though. It wasn't like an overwhelming rush. It was like incremental, you know, 2006, 2007. But you're still, at this point, you're still operating off of the seed money you raised and any revenue you were generating? Yeah. How was the money situation? Was it just self-generating? Were you? No. No. It was, we had paying customers, but we were going, trending towards zero fast. Like we eventually, I mean, we did basically run out of money around this time. We luckily met an angel investor who ended up putting, I think,$400 ,000 around 2007. And that saved us as an individual by the name of John Phillips.

37:35I think part of the reason why I invested is because his parents were in Ottawa. And I think he wanted something else to do in town rather than just visit his parents. But he also really liked the business. So he ended up becoming our investor and basically mentor to the company. It was a very prescient investment because I think at that time the company was valued at$3 million. Around this time, 2008, Scott leaves. He decides, I want to move on. What do you remember about that decision? I mean, it was, he had the job of CEO. I think he just realized at some point that where the software industry was going is most of the people who were CEOs were actually highly technical parts of the founding teams.

38:23I think he also realized that I will end up being the person who will care most about this company in the long run. And so, you know, that was okay. We decided to part ways. Were you worried about it because he was a CEO? I was hugely worried about it because I was not convinced that I should have a CEO job. But someone told me that if a great VC invests in your company, they would have a network to find the right kind of CEO. And so I was like, OK, well, maybe I really should talk to venture capitalists. And that was the time I traveled to Silicon Valley to talk with VCs. So just to be clear, this is 2008.

39:03You decide, I better go to Silicon Valley, find a venture investor who then can help me find a CEO. Yeah. So you fly out there in 2008 with a couple of appointments? Yeah, a couple of appointments and just drinks with friends and people I knew in Silicon Valley. That was the first time I came to Silicon Valley. Did you have a deck? Absolutely not. My intention was to build a 20-people company. That's what I wanted to do. A 20-person company, super efficient, providing the software to people, not a massive company. Because you wanted to have, you just wanted a sustainable, nice life. Yeah. I didn't need the money because I didn't think this was a venture I was building.

39:46And so I went not really being too worried about the results. I was more worried about the amount of money it would cost for me to fly to and back. To fly to the Bay Area. And accommodations and so on. Where did you stay? I'd say a little hostel. At a youth hostel? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like in a bunk bedroom? Yeah, I had a roommate. Like incidentally, who was also a computer programmer, so it was actually great. I actually bought a bicycle on Craigslist. And did you go for a week or two weeks? I was scheduled to be there for a week. I ended up staying, I think, two and a half maybe. Because what happened pretty quickly is, you know, I would have my first meeting.

40:25And again, this is me biking. From the youth hostel? From the youth hostel, too. down Central Road and showing up. And they probably already thought, who is this? And so I would have the first meeting and I had my notepad and they would ask me. It started out, I was sort of explaining the business. But then they would ask me some questions about usage and market size, these kind of things. And some of those I could answer and they would get really interested. But the problem was that very quickly they asked me questions I couldn't answer. Like there was questions around CAC ratios and lifetime value and all these kind of things.

41:08I would write down the terms. I would then look up what we meant. Usually I would get an equation back because it's some equation that you're supposed to apply to a business. I would then go to our database and get all the relevant data, plug them in the equation. I would get the numbers. So I had one more question I could answer the next meeting. And so basically, this is how I went through these meetings. I remember that, I mean, I ended up getting the kinds of term sheets people actually, frankly, dream about, which I was mostly, like I got benchmark offers. From that visit? Yeah, probably from meeting three by the time I kind of figured out.

41:47So people actually really were, there were some people who were interested. Some people were interested, but all the offers were always conditional on moving the company to Silicon Valley. They all said, well, we'll support you. You've got to move it here. Yes. So I got the offers. I got term sheets. And some of them referred me to potential CEOs. I had a bunch of late night meetings with people who could take over as CEO of the company. Because you did not want to be CEO. Because I wanted to play with technology. That was what I was good at. That was my identity. So I said, okay, clearly, if you want to do this now and if I get good numbers, you're going to give me this later.

42:22Eventually. So you figured I don't need to. Let's slow this down. I go back. I talk with my team. I think about this. And how many people are on your team at this point? There's about just five people. I had someone for customer support. I was doing all the customer support initially. And then eventually the rest of my team told me my English wasn't good enough. By the way, how are you paying people? This was now after we got angel investment. I still wasn't taking salary. But your runway was not very long. No, but there was income now. We were still burning, but it got slower and slower. Because there was income coming in from subscribers.

42:58Exactly. So I go back, and then we're talking 2008. So Lehman Brothers at some point. Now the world was falling apart. Lehman Brothers collapsed. The markets collapsed. 2008. You've got term sheets that you've kind of rejected. And now you're about to face a global financial crisis. So basically, I got this around this time notice that term sheets will no longer be honored because everyone needs to tighten bells and so on. Basically, initially, I thought we were toast. When we come back after the break, how the global recession actually turned out to be a huge opportunity for Shopify. and how Toby Lutka learned to do the job of CEO, a job he never wanted in the first place.

43:45Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

44:00Welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2008, and the global financial crisis hits. At this point, Toby Lutke is the CEO of Shopify. The VCs who had been interested in investing weren't quite so interested anymore. And Shopify didn't have that much runway. The money was running out. But then something surprising happened. It turned out that lots of people who were newly laid off had lots of ideas about starting their own online stores. People who lost their jobs could reach for their own independence and engage in entrepreneurship using Shopify. And they said, why don't I give this a go?

44:43Like, I'm going to try this thing I always wanted to try, right? Wow. I mean, did you start to see users and subscribers start to tick up? Yes. You saw a measurable change in 2008, 2009? We thought the numbers would fall off a cliff. And what they actually did is they started climbing and accelerating. So you just anticipated a completely different outcome. Yes, I was ready to think about how to tell people that I can't meet payroll at some point. And instead, basically in 2009, the company now hit first time sort of cash flow neutral. Like we can write out whatever downturn this is and start thinking about long term investment like infrastructure projects and so on again.

45:28Okay, meantime, you are the CEO. How are you doing as the CEO of the company? I'm not good. I mean, my team was very, very patient with me. There was a lot to learn. It's a very subtle job. And, you know, wonderful things about computers is when you tell them what to do, they'll keep doing it and they'll do it forever until you stop. Turns out humans are not like that. Humans are different. Yes. So there was a very large learning curve. And I would say 2009 to 2010, I truly held the company back from what it could have and should have probably become. You held it back? Yeah. What do you mean? Like if you come from engineering, you know something is always a bottleneck.

46:11And the moment you remove that, something else becomes a bottleneck. And it's the same goes for companies. At this point, I intentionally slowed down the growth of a company a little bit just because I needed it to be manageable for me. and I was wavering on the most important decision which was is this a lifestyle business or is this actually a venture and by this point your revenue is over a million dollars a year which sounds like a lot but obviously you've got huge expenses you've got a growing staff did you ever get the feeling like oh my god all these programmers and people are now working for me and they're depending on this thing and I don't know if this is going to work Guys, it's crushing.

46:54It's a crushing responsibility, right? Like, it's, you're responsible for everyone who is there, right? Do people have families? People have families. People have kids. My family, like, it's not a wealthy family. Like, it's, I mean, people gave me money they didn't really have. Like, up to this point, it was really just money from John Phillips, from my family, and then for the last year for my father-in-law who gave me money to meet payroll. He was giving you money to meet payroll. And we were living together and had dinner together. It's amazing that this worked. I mean, I just couldn't believe he was doing that because he was a bureaucrat.

47:35This was his savings. Basically, he was putting his life savings into this money bonfire. everyone was just unbelievably supportive because they somehow believed in this idea. Did you have trouble sleeping at night? Pretty often, yeah. You know, like, so one thing I found about the entrepreneurial journey, or at least mine, is you basically exist in two different states. There's the state of things are coming together, and I think if we do this, we're unbeatable. And the state of complete dread, and we're dead. We're dead tonight. and I don't think that actually ever went away. I still to this day have this.

48:18The thing that changed is it used to be like a month in one state and a month in another, and then eventually became a week, and now a day, and now this can happen. I can switch three times before breakfast. But at the bottoms, the bottoms are deep, and the implications of what failure means is it just means so much. It changes everyone's life story to a significant degree, right? How did you manage that? Did you go for long runs? Did you take Prozac? What did you do? I basically just programmed, which actually often wasn't the best use of my time. Would you talk to Fiona about it, your wife? Yeah, she was unbelievably supportive.

48:59Yeah. So around this 2009 period, you're really wavering on this decision, right? Which is, do you build a nice, stable lifestyle business with Shopify? Or do you try again for big money, for VC money and make this thing huge? So what happened? So I would look at my bank account multiple times a month and just compare what it was last time. And if it was going up, basically we said, okay, should we invest this in another team member or should we attempt marketing? So I finally said, okay, I'm going to save and try five different ideas for marketing programs. We said if any of those meaningfully accelerate our growth, then I have to go fundraising again and actually go on the clock towards an IPO or to eventual exit.

49:52Because the money really you needed for marketing at this point. At this point, we were held back by not engaging in marketing. You got five projects and you went to your team and you said, you guys come up with something? We need ideas. We voted on the ideas. We came up with things and we tried them. And what worked? All of them. They all work. Every single one of them. What were the ideas? We did adverts. This took a little bit longer, but we released a book on the concept. We just tried to, like we sponsored actually a podcast. You know, like every one of those we tracked and it's like these were directly mathematically trackable.

50:32Like we made the money back in like five, six months of these investments. And then we were like, okay, okay, now we're not talking about fundraising anymore based on, isn't it cool that we're going after this market? Now we're talking about, I have a formula, and I need to plug bigger numbers into the formula. And so then picked up the phone, called the venture capitalist, which really impressed me, and said, okay, you were right, this is a venture. I have data. So you go back out to Silicon Valley. You convince a few VC firms to invest. You raise, I think,$7 million. Yeah, so fairly modest. I mean, this sounds like massive numbers to the years of those times.

51:14It was insane. And do you remember what the valuation was? Like$25 million. At this point, once you're bringing in$7 million, those venture capitalists are also buying a seat on the board. You've got to develop a board. You're now, right? and you've got to have regular calls with them. If they email you, they're expecting you to get back to them. Was that stressful or overwhelming or was it helpful? I thought it was very helpful. I've always had a fantastic relationship with all the people who invested in the company, partly because I told them straight off the bat, like saying, I'm not going to pretend I know things I don't know and I really hope you're going to help me in this journey.

51:54And so I think our relationship has always been, We were all on the same side of the table trying to build this thing. And I hope at any rate that I'm a fairly quick study, right? And so bit by bit while running Shopify, it provided all the kinds of situations I needed to learn the skills I needed. Did you have to – I mean was it still five or ten people? Was it still – when you came with that 7 million? I think at this point it was about 20. About 20 people. Okay. And so all of you guys are really doubling down on marketing, getting the word out. and what kind of businesses were being launched on Shopify?

52:30I mean, the Internet Direct businesses, new businesses like, you know, Sunclass business, watch business, you know, just new ideas, boosted boards, like, you know, Allbirds. Yeah, Allbirds launches, yeah, right. Great examples of the kind of business that were coming out. And 10 months after the Series A, Jeremy and Trevor from Bessemer came to me and said, you are still massively constrained by money. How about instead of you spending a bunch of months on fundraising, we'll just quadruple the valuation of a company and put much more money into this thing because you can grow this way faster. They basically saved me from doing a fundraising round.

53:14They said, we see the potential here. We're going to give you$15 million more. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was just so obvious. And this is why I said earlier that I had the company back because I knew this would happen. You knew it would happen, but you said you had all this anxiety about all these people. So if you knew it, what explains the freaking out? I think I was looking at what I had to do, like the HR problems, the systems I had to build, everything, like all the decisions. And I thought if I also would be sitting on a perpetually exploding rocket ship right now on top of all that that's happening, I could not deal with it.

53:51I needed to take another year of a breather. before I could actually deal with those things simultaneously. 2012, I think you finally move out from Fiona's parents' place. You have a kid at this point. Today, you've got three. Yeah, I think I want to say it must have been 2014 that we actually moved out. So we were living, I think, for 13 years, actually. You had raised$100 million in 2013. You're still nervous about... Well, I was making basically minimum wage. So if Shopify would have given me more money, I would have probably given it back because I figured Shopify could use it better than I did.

54:32So, yeah, and Fiona had income. So that had to work. And presumably your lifestyle didn't require a whole lot of money. No. As long as I had my laptop, I was good. All right. So you guys are balancing, like, raising kids. And this company is really starting to take off. Like end of 2013, you've got 80 ,000 customers, about like 300 employees. But in a lot of ways, I mean, you're still under the radar. Like no one knew who you were. Yeah. Well, like that was by design. So like my board members always said Shopify turned out to be a company only Canadians could have built because we said our job is to make our merchants look good.

55:12Like this is why we exist. So we wouldn't put Shopify on the merchant stores. At this point, these investors we would meet would ask me, you know, I'm looking at these numbers. This is a significant company. How come I've never heard of you? And I said, you bought something from Shopify the last half year. Because basically everyone did. If you bought something online and it wasn't on Amazon and you liked the experience, it was Shopify. So it just doesn't say Shopify. You don't go to Shopify.com. It's where other people build their home on the internet. And so we are happy with that. We didn't even put Shopify on our buildings.

55:48You didn't put the name Shopify on the buildings? No, no. You were in 2014, you were named the CEO of the Year by the Globe and Mail, which is one of the biggest papers in Canada. So that was really one of the first times people even heard of Tobias Lutke. Was that weird for you? Because, like, now you're recognized and people are like, oh, my God, who's this guy? And you just moved out of your in-laws' house. Yeah, exactly. It was pretty surreal. It's not something I was seeking. Especially because you thought you were a crappy CEO. They're naming you the CEO of the year. Four years before that, you're still struggling to figure this out.

56:28Yeah, that's exactly. You perfectly summarized my experience, honestly. We didn't quite know what they were writing, so it was a little bit of a surprise to me what came out of it. But I love, and this is something I and Daniel talked about, and Scott, we all talked about this in the early days of going for beer after a week of programming. He said, what would happen if this just doesn't work? And this was before investments and so on, so it felt a little bit easier to even think and conceptualize these kind of issues. And we said, that would be okay, because you know what? No matter what, we're going to learn a lot.

57:08This is going to be part of all of our life's journeys and all of our stories and we will be able for the rest of our lives to do things we couldn't do if we wouldn't embark on this journey because there's no way that the residue learning of this is not going to be significant for all of us. You guys go public in 2015. You went public because presumably your investors wanted, you wanted to kind of give them return. People had waited a long time. This is 2015. People started giving you money in 2004. Was that the reason why you went public? It probably would have become the reason eventually, but not at this point of time because the investments only happened five years before that.

57:50And I took the investments knowing that I'm going to be raising the clock to either go public or get sold. That was the duality of outcome. And by the way, this is true for every person who sells shares in their company. Just most people don't realize that that's what's happening. But I went into the venture world pretty clear-eyed about what it means. And so I really wanted to set up a company to become an independent public company because my private investors have all seen Shopify perform under promise, over deliver, month after month and board meeting after board meeting. All of them fully trusted the company and further good performance was not really buying us anything new.

58:33Today, I think there's a good chance that anyone listening will have purchased something on a site that's powered by Shopify. There's a very good chance. And since we're talking about stats, here's the most gratifying of all the numbers related to Shopify. And it's actually the north star of a company. Every 52 seconds, someone has that experience of getting a first sale. Wow. The one that you described. And in so many cases, someone is going from being a builder to now being an entrepreneur. You know, it's like there's so few things that you can do that actually change your identity to a meaningful degree, right?

59:10And this company's heart is really, really the entrepreneurial process and trying to make this simpler. What's been so fascinating is that this initial idea behind Snow Devil, the idea that being able to write computer software is like a specialized tool on a climbing trip. If I wouldn't have that specialized tool with me, I would have had to turn around because some walls I just couldn't have overcome. And then what Shopify really is, it's a software I wish they would have found, right? It takes all these vertical walls and turns them into inclines. It's not flat. It's still hard to build a business.

59:50But at no point do you need... It's not a technical client. Exactly. And so because of that, significantly more people succeed in building businesses. Because there are just not these discouraging experiences which make you give up even though you shouldn't have. And so what we have found is the best thing we can do for the business of Shopify is find another one of those things which is an incline and just flatten it as much as we can. And every single time we do it, more people succeed and more businesses get created. Toby, in 2004, you did not even have a work permit in Canada. Today, you are wealthier than you could probably have ever imagined.

1:00:29It might be weird to be a billionaire. I mean, it's totally crazy. Is there any part of you that could have imagined this? No. Honestly, even now that you talk about this, this sounds crazy to me. I probably try to just not think too much about it. It's hugely gratifying, but it's also, I think the important thing is just that I remind myself how much of this was luck. The most amazing, welcoming, wonderful family here in Canada to support us along the way. The incredible timing of when we started. Like this is not a kind of company that could have been started even two years later, right? It needed to be started right then, and it needed to be ready and good by the time the opportunity around the financial crisis came around.

1:01:19All these things, when we went public. And luck is such a major component of the entire journey. So, like, why am I the person who ended up, you know, winning the lottery five times in a row? I don't know. You like equations and numbers, so you sort of half answered my last question. But quantify it for me. What percentage do you think of this journey is luck and what percentage do you think is your incredible skill as a programmer and your talent? I think it's – I don't know. You know what? I can't quantify it. It's a huge component. I would say it's 90%. Luck. Basically, all I can do is enjoy it and be honest about what happened here.

1:02:03And it's definitely the best idea I've ever had. And I hope that I can run this to the end of my career because I think that would be amazing. That's Toby Lutka, co-founder and CEO of Shopify. And by the way, back when we did this interview in 2019, Toby revealed that he had his own secret side hustle on Shopify. Do you have like a secret Shopify store like J.K. Rowling has like, you know, pseudonyms? Do you have your own like secret shop? Yes, of course. You do? Yeah. What do you sell? Socks, mainly. It's my best seller. Yeah. What's the store called? I'm not telling you.

1:03:06includes Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, John Isabella, Alex Chung, Carrie Thompson, Carla Estevez, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.