Tobias Lütke

25:18But eventually someone told me just like you will never find someone who gets as much a shit about this as you do. And you have to run this. So I'm like, okay, I take this more seriously and learn some of the skills. I love actually being better stuff. I find learning the entire point of it. So I started focusing a little bit more on this. We had some money saved and said, okay, let's do some marketing programs. We just actually didn't really do marketing until this point. We didn't have money for it. I separated out in like five different programs. We did five different tests to see if any of them would help us grow with business.

25:52And then turns out all five worked. And I'm like, okay, clearly we need more money. And so when I started talking about venture capitalists, we started doing going this route. We were actually a six year old profitable company going for venture capital, which is like totally the wrong way around. But it became clear to me that this was not a... I thought of Shopify a bit as a lifestyle business, like as in like we'll make profit. And then we just sort of tinker on it. And it's going to be reasonably small affair. But like it became so important to so many people so correctly that it was very clear that I had to support it differently.

26:25Okay, all of a sudden it's like I went back to venture capitalists, we raised money. And then things just been very, very, very quickly. And five years later... What did you do different when you got the influx of venture capital money? I think maybe money in general, but definitely venture capital money. It's an amplification of everything that's already there. Basically, but I think what we see do is they accelerate the process of revealing everything that actually would have happened otherwise. And I think in a way I'm super thankful that we went with very winding and non -standard way because we were just a very good business at this point.

27:01Really, we made every dollar count. Like we're just like really very, very good at being effective. Once we had the money, we were like, wow, that's a lot of money. I mean, a couple million dollars. It's an incredible amount of money. And let's invest that just as wisely, even more, also bigger sums into these marketing programs we were sort of setting up. And it just turned out that it was just this incredible... Like this was just a time where the internet was clearly there. Everyone had broadband. Like e -commerce, I mean, there's no one confused about this. The iPhone, you know, there was just a lot of happening at the same time.

27:35You have a growth just went totally into a different year. And so, learned how to put an executive team together although lots of our wonderful people like that. Because we just have prioritized learning as a, you know, thriving on change, learn things quickly. I mean, funny enough, no one of us ever worked in a public company in the city, even really, like I kind of had to figure out what that even really is. But like we figured that was a good thing for us to do. So in like 2015 we went public... I was at the experience. Profound, actually. I'm not super sentimental, but like, you know, writing the first line of code for something and then like, about 10 years later, like, just being with Bella in New York's stock exchange.

28:19Like this is like, man, that is a surreal experience. Yeah. This is a significant percentage of what's possible to do in the word of capitalism. Really, right? Like it's just like... And not what you set out to do. No, no. I call it, as if this is not a fortune cookie, it doesn't sound very good. But it's like, feels like collaborative inquiry into a question. And a question is, what would the word look like if like entrepreneurship would just be significantly simpler? What people do it more? The beautiful thing is that question is like, as if we're sounding yes, as an answer. And the degree of it, yes, was not absolutely unclear to me.

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30:32Did you find that the functional aspects of the technology of an online store is pretty similar from company to company? The thing that makes it different is the story you're telling within that technology. You're spot on. It's exactly that. It's the first 80 % of the same for everyone, which you can give them right over that and just set them up well. The next 20 % are different for absolutely everyone. It's for creativity. It's for story telling. It's for narrative. It's for explaining the reason why you exist. Even if you go to Shopify .com today. This is what we tell our customers. On the top there's a video that's linked which says why do we exist?

31:12Which is actually just what was not there that needed to be there and why this product have to be created. The best entrepreneurs tell that story. We live in Toronto. We go to vacation with my three boys and we go to Caribbean. It's always like, has this sort of pirate quality to it. We like to play poker. For every reason, I found a shop for the store. Pirate themed poker sets. I don't know how many people there are that really want this to exist. But I'm so excited to play with golden duplicates, poker, in the Caribbean with my boy. My life is not 100 % better because of it. But that vacation is 10 % better.

31:58That's so worth it. It's the thing that you want that probably no one else wants. Exactly. All of the niches that are interesting with somebody now have a place to live. Exactly. Someone's aesthetic said this is a thing that should exist. And there's like a thousand true fans involved for this. Maybe that's all there is. But you can make a living with it. And it turns out winter is so big that if you have a thousand true friends, you have a lot more. Because the difference between someone who appreciates something and someone who is utterly excited about something is like me right now telling you about this.

32:34There's a virality to just good ideas. And in the traditional vote of retail, that wasn't allowed because a lot of retail before the internet was dictated by merchandising executives. If you made a product, you had meetings with the merchandising executives at Wal -Margantarget and other places. And they had limited share space. And maybe making cost -benefit analysis, like how much profit margin does your product have, how much space do I have? Where can I put it? So the channel by which products could be sold was one which optimised a way, everything that was interesting for some, but made it appealing to them most.

33:15And I think a lot of the consumerism that people sort of verify is not because people love stuff too much. It's because people hate the stuff they get. Right? The quality is not there. And so what's actually intact again because of a oneness of a distributed internet and this sort of global brainstorm about what other things that ought to be existing and the voting for dollars is that fully intact great products can be created and can be marketed and can be found. And then there's these incredible systems like Facebook's advertising engine which says, hey, you can actually probably find people who like pirate theme and poker.

33:53It's like, this is like possible now. You can connect to people who are utterly delighted. And so this is the engine which is driving it all. So the idea that if a thousand people in the world are interested, that could be a good business, whereas in the old model of the world there would be no way to ever... You would never... Nobody would ever know. Exactly. And it wouldn't make sense to do it where you are because where you are, you might be the only person interested. Yes. And there was no avenue to get to the other. That's exactly right. If that would have remained the case, I think the word would feel very muted compared to what it is.

34:25There's just like a vibrancy that doesn't exist. Because again, products matter. People love the things they buy. Like people buy wonderful objects for all sorts of reasons. Because I want to feel connected to the people who created it. Because I love the story. One of our incredible success stories, very early, was Kylie Jenner with her lipstick brand. And just like it went incredibly big. Because when I grew up in Germany, sort of a star, first time I was like Michael Schumer, her former Levant driver. And so you would see him on television all the time. And he was being advertising for toothpaste.

34:59And it's just like even to a nine -year -old that felt dissonant. It's like it feels very much by doing this, he's sort of using his reputation. Like he's drawing against the bank account of reputation people. Right? Like he's sort of using it to benefit the coagate or whoever. Now, like with Kylie's lipstick, that's so her. That's like every transaction is actually additive. Like people have a stronger connection to her. And I think it's just very pure. It's a, this is why I'm so excited. Like I hope to do this my entire life. Because I just like, I love this base. How difficult was it to scale along with the interest?

35:40We were a public company for a few years. We learned how to be a public company. We grow for like very, very good. And then COVID started. And so we were under shelter in place. Or basically for a year and a half in Canada. So it was extremely tweaked towards the over -bundance of caution. So that was difficult for a company. Of course, when you work with a lot of small businesses and against, we have millions of small businesses on Shopify. I mean, they are the lifeblood of our economies. Right? Like 80 % of the people, 60 to 80 % of people in every country work with small businesses. But we are fragmented if you're, I don't know, any of the large companies.

36:19You can sort of represent the interest of the entire company really well to like politicians. Or so we need to know about your needs or whatnot. The small businesses have very little representation in this way. One thing that always happens every time of crisis. And certainly during, you know, .com and financial downturn, where I encountered this. But the small businesses really, really suffer. A lot of them go out of business very quickly. We have no credit. We don't have inventory. We can't absorb a downturn of spend. So like I went in front of company and said, look, all of us made life decisions.

36:54We made decisions to not become doctors. We made decisions to not become nurses. Like we can't help for health crisis here. But the thing that we can do as our mission is just make more small businesses get to other side of us than otherwise would. Like let's try everything we could. So we figured out overnight how to extend credit to people and from all the balance sheets and like all these kind of things. And this wasn't clear to us initially, but maybe should have given the patterns. Well, if no one can leave their house, we can start playing a completely different role in the world. So we just chucked out all the plans in the roadmap, all the work that we did ended up being pointed at like a thing that just gets businesses to other side without having to lay off everyone.

37:38And it worked really, really well. We doubled it in a year. We actually had the craziest insane things inside of a company. We had to like be on call with all internet providers who were running auctions on server capacity because like the world couldn't produce more chips anymore. So all the ones, the computers that made up the internet were all the computers we've had for a while. And it's like, you all had to kind of ration basically. There's so many stories there. But like from a corporate way, Shopify exploded and ended up being very much talked about. And I'm super proud of what we did internally, but basically almost fell apart.

38:20It was just such a stressful time and so difficult to manage. And so many people decided they're just like, they've had enough, this is so hard. And I had to do like live two different lives externally and internally and try to sort of, I felt like I kept a bomb from exploding by just like trying to wrap it from all directions and get my arms around it. So I was a really, really trying time. But also just kind of, I think that really, really tested us. How much customization can a store get through Shopify? You should not be able to tell that you're interacting with a Shopify store. Like they look completely lift.

38:54And again, sovereignty is a word I use a lot. It's like if you don't have ability to make the design of a look of it, feel anything. Like your vision, then I would feel as a failure as Shopify, even if you continue using us, because our job is never to constrain you. The thing that's under our control is that we want to go and make it so that you can be as creative as you can. Do you have competitors? I mean, for a while people made a lot of shopper and Amazon being competitors. And do you think Amazon is a competitor? No, I never did. I once ran my mouth because I was starting to get annoyed with the question.

39:31I said that Amazon is trying to build an empire and Shopify's arming rebels. And apparently turns out Jeff Bezos is a very, very big star wars fan and never saw himself as stuff. So like that turns out to be a really, really, unbecoming analogy. So, and then like it got quoted a lot. And so anyway, no, I think Amazon has an extremely worthy rival. I think competition always feels like someone dying in the end, but a rivalry is a wonderful thing, because you get to inspire each other to be better. These days, we actually work super closely together on many things. So it's hard to even make a rivalry.

40:07A very strong one of your stores. Let's say one of your biggest accounts had great success selling a product. Would you then ever manufacture the same product to try to compete with the person? We would never ever manufacture product. That would be incredible. So that's a different question. When you went to Amazon, for example. I think even, I don't know how much business actually cultural for Amazon even, but it's just a consequence of being a marketplace. Because again, the internet often 90s. Sorry to go back there. But like there's a bunch of idealism encoded here in the way a shop of it works.

40:39Because in the 90s, again, I grew up in a very small city. Nothing terribly interesting happened ever. I think Julius Caesar founded it. That was probably the most interesting thing I'd ever happened there. So 2000 years ago. At some point, the internet came to town. And then you sort of explored it. This was this new thing. It was fantastic. For the first time, you could interact with people without having to call into a radio show or something. The people who were everywhere involved. And that was incredibly liberating. You could serve a website to everyone. And it's up to you. There's no license.

41:11I needed no license to start Shopify. I just had a machine started to respond to requests. And it's an incredibly liberating affair. So it was promising an incredible decentralization of power and of opportunity. And so unfortunately, a lot of aspects of the modern internet are actually quite centralized. So we wound up with one search engine and maybe two or three social media networks, sort of different. There's one in every category. And everything store, literally. Obviously, it's super convenient because when there's a search box, you can type in exactly the widget you want. You'll get it and you purchase it.

41:53It makes perfect sense. And maybe even this ideal. But I come at it from another perspective. I'm like, well, what if we take the ideals of the 90s? Everyone has their own side and everyone has their own sovereign individual. And really explore that. Would it work? And it turns out in e -commerce is actually really, really valuable. It works as well. And so it's almost a bit of a clash of visions for how the internet works. And now people would argue Shopify itself is a one big piece of software that hosts all of them. And maybe that's also not exactly the spirit of a early internet. But fair enough, I think it's an implementation of the same ideals.

42:31Tell me about your relationship to coding. I love coding. I mean, I sit down and sit at a night, but I have time. And I just put headphones on. And I always have a couple of things that I want to get done. It's like my fault. What are the type of things you like to get there? Sometimes I make games. Sometimes things called games or games in general. But just people decide from this time to this time we are making a game and everyone should share it. It's almost, it's not even, there's no prizes. It's just like a convenient excuse for creating constraints. Creativity must have constraints. So I love the artistry of it.

43:10The only way to be a good programmer is to be a very, very good learner. Because you have to understand the problem domain that you're trying to solve so well that you can actually write software against it. There's so much wonderful things about it. It fits my brain in a way that like I almost can't access this sort of creativity in any other way. So anyway, I think it's deeply creative. It's deeply interesting. And it's a wonderful craft by itself. I personally use a Japanese programming language which I found in 2004 when I could make all choices. Like my own company I can now use really, really weird things that I could never use and then this programming language out of Japan called Ruby.

43:53That's what I built Shopify in. And again, because it felt like when I was using other programming language, it was felt like I wanted to paint like let's say an oil painting, but someone could give me crayons. It just did the way I said it. It does mismatch. And then I found Ruby and it's just like I found that my brain ran on Ruby even before I knew of it. So I'm using this language because it really feels like it like connects with me at that level. How has AI impacted Shopify? I consider myself so incredibly lucky here because like again, I saw technology kind of grow up and I've been part of this industry long enough that I've seen when a new platform came out.

44:33Like we connected all computers through internet and then the phones came out, which was another platform and it made things so interesting. I didn't expect to have another one of those. I think this is the best. I always thought Shopify was a company that sort of is a bridge between the real world and the sort of world of internet and technology because really software I make is so that other people can help themselves to everything that technology has to offer for their own pursuit. But like software was always pretty autistic. It doesn't understand the meaning behind anything or so. It just like it blindly follows.

45:08And I think AI is increasingly allowing people to have collaboration around intent, actually conversations that lead to more creativity. And so with chatbots or conversationals or so like we see this, it's deeply integrated in our software. We are super excited about it. So I think it's an incredible privilege to actually have to reinvent all software again. It's certainly it's not daunting to you. No, I love it. It's an opportunity. Yeah, I don't like stasis. I don't know if this was true, but I would have probably retired now if it wouldn't have happened for AI. But AI gives me like I again, I love the task I've gotten myself in life, which is a really deeply care about volunteers on Shopify and this kind of idea.

45:52So I found my gifts early like with programming. I cultivated them to be hopefully very good at them. And then through Shopify I managed to give them away, which is I think really the meaning of life is to share the gifts that you have cultivated. And so the technology capabilities coming. There's so much more we can do for people. We used to do a survey and I wish we would have done it more. And in the survey, we had lots of questions. And one of them sort of added on a whim was, do you know someone who within 24 hours would respond to an email or text message about an entrepreneurial question?

46:30And the amount of people who said yes was something or something like 70 something percent. Then initially I was super impressed by this because I would have imagined this would have been much, much lower. So then we have the idea of let's try this in general population. And it turns out it was like 9%. And we're like, okay, well, what's happening here? Very simple. What's happening here is that only the people who knows someone who is done entrepreneurship actually try to build businesses. Because otherwise it just seems like impossible. So the model having the model. Having someone having demonstrated that's possible.

47:07Having someone when you run out of options answer the question. It's so hard. How do you incorporate something? It's like who knows? It's different depending on where you can't even read a book about it. So now you sign up for shop before you have like a thing called Sidekick. You can have a conversation with it like infinitely patient. Super intelligent knows everything about entrepreneurship can tell you how your business is really doing. And do all sorts of tasks for you and you start out with a co -founder. Right? Like which is beautiful and cost like no equity. It's like it's just like there to push you.

47:37And so I love all that. Is there any advantage or disadvantage to being based in Canada? Canada had a perfect culture for doing something like this when I started. And if it would have been in Germany it would probably have been too much. It would be too friction for you. You would have to like you have to like you need to start with 50 ,000 dollars which I didn't have before you can incorporate anything. So I call Canada basically America for Europeans. Like because it's just like it's such a fun mix of the two. So it made it very easy when we started and built it and always found good people.

48:11I think there was advantage of not being in Silicon Valley. In fact four commerce specifically in many ways it made it harder. But like Silicon Valley really committed itself to make money for advertising. And it's such a good business model to make money for advertising that if you do anything else you're running all of time to quickly. You can't make money fast enough. It's so much slower to build something that you tried money for like monthly, like Shopify. So I think there were some advantages there and you know it did this funny thing. I don't know if it's how real it is but like I only realized this years later I'm curious what you think about this.

48:48I would travel to Silicon Valley and then I would have meetings with people and I would ask them millions of questions about how to build companies because I was trying and figured out. And then I would write everything down and try to figure out which of this makes sense and then I would localize it if it's a good idea to Shopify and I wouldn't implement it. And it took me a long time to figure out that in this conversation I didn't actually hear the real answers to what other people are doing. I usually got the highlight reel or actually van bishops. Often I got the ideas they have that their wish would be true and they're currently working on.

49:20And I compared that to my average. So compared for highlight reel that I got from Silicon Valley to what actually was going on in company, then I implemented some of those things. I ended up with like some of the better version much earlier than anyone else on these kind of matters. And in a way it actually almost had effect Shopify into being a better company than it could otherwise be. Because if it would actually been closer to everyone we would have a much better model for what the companies around us are actually like. It would have made it more ordinary exactly allowed us to just be in a way extraordinary and different right like there's value and difference of the same.

49:55This is conversely exactly. Yeah, if it's the same why do it? Yes, exactly. Yeah, we like it's like it is an axiom that if you want to be better you must be different because if you're the same you end up in the same. This is the way the sentence continues and just finding different constraints that like mean that you end up different means that you have a chance at being better because otherwise you don't. So distance actually is more valuable than people think. How do you think growing up in Germany impacted you? I think Germany initializes your acceptable minimum quality higher. And I think that's a good thing and a bad thing in a lot of ways like I remember going to the MoMA at some point I think one in San Francisco and there was like a detailed arms exhibit.

50:41He's a designer from this wonderful products for Brown and I loved it but it looked like my house growing up. It's just like we've always beautiful objects were like that's little lever. I think it's a good thing to have a good time and I think it's a good thing to have a good time. I think it's a good thing to have a good time and to have a good time and to have a good time and to have a good time. I think it's a good thing to have a good time and to have a good time and to have a good time and to have a good time. So I call it minimum lovable product. What's something that actually someone might actually love if it turns out to be good and I think that ended up making a difference.

51:30How do you think about that? That sounds good I think. We can know what the bar is for us but it's very hard to know what the bar is for someone else. But you cultivated an incredibly well refined taste. Something passing your quality bar is an acid test that it's high enough in the market. If it's high enough for you it's probably high enough for everyone. That doesn't mean it's going to be successful. No and also the opposite is like often I would miss things that ended up being very successful just because that looked similar to something I saw when I was younger and didn't seem so revolutionary now.

52:05Right now and what to the people at that time it was revolutionary. Yes.

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53:50How many employees do you have now? Shopify is 8 ,000 people. About half in Canada and the United States. Yeah, a public company. 120 billion dollars mark -cap kind of thing. How did the business change when it went public? I think it just got better. This is another one of us. Everyone said it was always telling me go public as late as possible. I just couldn't find it. I tried to get people to argue from first principles for this idea. It seemed very derivative. Other people are going public later. What does that have to do with you? It's a worst reason. I felt a certain difference of the institution of being public.

54:39I wanted to share. Develop your gifts and then cultivate them and share it widely. I had wonderful investors and they were fully trusted. I could not bid more if I tried. Battery doesn't charge past 100%. I can get a new set of private investors. But I think what's much better is become a public company. Have some people hopefully early in their career make bets on you. Then they grow over company together. That's going to work well. They are going to be successful and there's going to be a kinship or a relationship that's being developed and worked perfectly. Some reasons. Some people have the experience of going public and feeling shackled by the experience.

55:21But you didn't have that experience. To be fair, I should say that I just retain control in a way that helped. I started a company. I think Shopify, at least while I'm there, would do very poorly if my job would have to become like consensus builder. Because to me, the consensus always finds the least objectionable option. What I'd want to do with building, I want to build work -class things. To me, that comes from a really big piece of software. Shopify, feeling like it's written by a single author in the end. It isn't. It's thousands of people working on it. But there's got to be one consistent narrative style.

56:06You can't switch perspective out of a certain writing style. It's in from one screen to the next. And so in the same thing for a company, if again, even investing a company is a vote. If you're voting with your investment money for a company and you want to participate in a vote, and that is a company run by their founder, I think what you want is that founder to be in control of a company. Because that's what you don't want. You will need to have some very different, like let's call them founder -run companies and managerial -run companies. Managerial -run companies. The job of CEO is totally different.

56:41The job is to create a plan. The CEO doesn't actually have a legitimacy to decide exactly what the company does. People think so, but it's not actually like that. But legitimacy is a thing that's built. And what the CEO does is it creates the stakeholders a plan and then creates legitimacy in the plan. And the plan is then followed by everyone. Like it's the plan that has authority. The CEO just has ability to influence a plan heavily. That also makes these companies very, very hard to adjust. Right? Like so, if you want to pivot or something, you need to make a new plan and explain why you didn't screw up the last plan.

57:17Right? So this is why large companies often have a hard time incorporating AI quickly or something like this. Or doing COVID. Founder -run companies are different. The fact that the slot is filled, that the person is there who has all, in my case, the 20 or 21 years of being there for every decision step. Every step. I can talk with greater authority to what the Shopify way is about something. Like how to make this. Like and therefore when COVID happens, the day that happened or when AI comes out, I'm actually not beholden to the roadmap because the roadmap is this because it comes from figuring out what the exact best things are to work on right now.

57:58But if reality's changed, that is clearly known something different because otherwise, reality didn't actually change. I think they are underappreciated how different they are. Founder -run companies and managerial -run companies. And neither is better than the other. Like in fact, in most business sectors, I think Founder -run companies are mess. They are hot mess of chaos and how to predict and how to work for. And things change on a dime. For the right people, this is the best. They love this energy. They love ability to creatively impact the entire thing. Like just ideas matter in the best cases.

58:33Like the best idea wins, doesn't matter who said it. But if everyone disagrees, there's someone who can just say, be a good over for the best idea. And this is it based on this kind of thing. Rather than the highest paid person said so, would you say you trust your instincts? Yes. I think instincts are your entire lives, experiences, rolled up and ready for instant decision making. I think people should trust them more. It's just you have to cultivate your instincts. You also have to learn a lot. And sometimes people end up trusting all the instincts. That can go poorly. But I think for engineering and for business and strategy, I don't know, I'm just not thinking.

59:10Do you question yourself? If you have an idea, do you question, is this going to work? How will it work? All the time. I never MS hard on anyone else's ideas as on my own. I actually sort of discount my ideas significantly. Because I just like the conversation. I work with absolutely incredible people. And the worst thing that you can ever do as a leader is just like, constrain the upside. I want to raise the floor by just navigating around just bad things that have been tried on work or won't work in this case because I can spot those. But I don't want to tap the upside. How difficult is it to recruit people?

59:46I mean, the moment you have like a bunch of like 20 people in a company, you're really in a people business. It's like you're drafting the team, you're finding great people. I've hired people who have worked on for 15 years, like before and is it hard? It's super hard. The thing I found that makes it really, really easy is just be very clear about what you want and who you don't want. I think people are not ready enough to, like, I almost talk people out of coming to Shopify. Sometimes I just explain, look, this is again, founder and company, therefore if you come from Siemens and you're very, very used to everything, being just like, operationally fantastic, then none of that stuff happens here.

1:00:22Right? We are just like, you know, we're a company, we're like, we try our very best, but everyone's a world. People have to put on their cape and be heroes. Yeah. And that's the way it works. So what are your reading habits? My wife is in a completely different circadian cycle to me. Like I would be a knight all, if I would let me. And she's a light sleeper. So we're both in bed at 10 and I read to one. So it gives me a wonderful time. I have my Kindle that doesn't cause too much light, so she doesn't wake up. And I mean, I read sometimes fantasy. I make it so that every third book has to be a book that I think I will disagree with.

1:01:02There's one of my things that has been a fun habit. I tend to read books that are older at this point. Actually, Mark and Tristan has gotten me on this. Just like, I was like, I read too many current issue books, which were all the same book in the end. And I was complaining to him and he said, just like, just read books that people recommend that are more than 40 years old and then you only read books that still get test of time. So that's been actually wonderful habit for past recent years. What are the kind of things you'd like to learn about? I think everything is interesting. I've never found anything that's not interesting.

1:01:36I teach this to my kids. No one of my kids is like allowed to say that anything is uninteresting. They can only say this isn't interesting to me yet. So it is actually a wonderful way to do it. I mean, obviously I study excellence. I just love reading about excellence in every other field. I love biographies. I also try on different hobbies. If someone I really admire has a hobby that sounds surprising to me, I try it on. I really, really, really go into motorsports, which has just been so incredible. I call it Zen Buddhism at 200mph. It just focuses me in a way nothing else seems to be able to do.

1:02:13I do endurance racing. Endurance racing driving. Yes. So what's an endurance race driving? How long is that? The most famous race is 24 hours of Le Mans. You do that with a team of three people. I'm training for doing it next year. This year I've done a 24 hour race at Daytona. The team is the hardest thing I've ever done. I was delirious driving at 2am after all. You haven't driven for four hours with 61 other cars. One of the most beautiful things about motorsport is that you do it like amateur and pros together. There's no tournaments where you can play with the best tennis players. It's like a swell because it's too much of a weakling.

1:02:56But in motorsport, one of the free drivers is an amateur. If you're fast amateur, you can go find fantastic pros that we can learn from. There's always so much to learn. I just love doing difficult things with interesting people. I serve the through line in my life. The consequences are dire. Play a big role. I think so. I didn't even ever drive a license in a car. I just had one German and I had a six -buyer. I never drove. I don't even know if I truly love cars. But I would invite it to a track day. Friends just put me with them and I would. They put us in these cars. They gave us instructions.

1:03:39They let us go on a track. Then they immediately put me in two laps later. I thought I did something wrong. But then they told me my tank of gas was empty. It was 40 minutes later. I'm like, how do you start? I lost. This has never happened. It was just incredible in this way. You were so concentrated in what you were doing. Yes. I'm stopped essentially. Because what I realized is racing is there's a perfect lap time out there. It's physically possible to calculate this. I imagine. The actual lap time you get is with some total of all your inadequacies as a driver. So you're competing against this.

1:04:22If you're competing against a track, the other cars are obstacles to this. But you get this immediate feedback. After every turn, you feel it. You connect it for your ass to the car, to the ground, to the feeling of the movements in the car. You get the lap time at the end. You just know if you did well and you know that you're getting better. You're connected to the ground at the bottom of a tire. It's basically four playing cards of contact patches. That's all. From them, you can ask up to 100%. If you ask any more, it's bad. You don't want to. You're trying to get this close to 99 .99 % of what the grip can do.

1:05:03And then you invest it either in going straight or in two turns. And so it's like it's immediate feedback visceral, higher adrenaline, skill building. So that's wonderful. So I love it. Do you feel like every lap you're aiming to get the perfect lap over and over again? You're chasing something, right? So you're chasing this thing that's like just elusive. And again, you have to accept that you cannot drive perfectly. I've never been externally motivated, oddly. I've always been internally motivated. I just believe we meet the person we could have been at the end of our lives. And the point is to try to minimize the difference.

1:05:44This is kind of what else is there? That is you cultivate your sets of skills. And then a longer way, you share them again. Would you say you spend most of your time in your head or in your body? In my head. To me, self is sort of camera, add up structure, like analyzing the day, the situation. Like again, how can I show a better tomorrow? There's the types of books I am drawn to over once that talk about these kind of things. It's, uh, growth is good. How does being an engineer impact you as a CEO? I think engineering is a great preparation for it. Good companies are complex adaptive systems.

1:06:25There's good deal of game theory in incentive system design. Engineering is like how to get a large system to end up doing the thing that it is supposed to do. Right. Like it's like that's basically what you get contributed to do. Especially for kind of engineers. Like I did a lot of like internet and network engineering. They're like, this might be too much in the weeds, but like a moment, there's a network cable. You don't know if a thing that you send on a wire will arrive on the other side. So you actually have to build the system with like in such a way that self healing. Right. Like you have to build a system that like if something is out of order, the packet doesn't arrive.

1:07:01But it can recover from that. I think that sort of really odd is a terrible way of talking about it. But I think knowing how to build complex systems that orchestrate together and to run like global e -commerce platform that heal themselves in with unforeseen, hard to predict problems actually is kind of pretty amazing preparation. From building companies because they happen to also be very non -deterministic. So it's pretty good.

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1:09:10Tell me about efficiency. When do we benefit from efficiency and when does efficiency not a good thing? I used to talk a lot about efficiency and I think it's still the right way to get it. Because people are more familiar but I'm actually more very against waste. And it's actually a different thing. Like to me, like wasting things, it's just like it's a crutch for your craft. Like I think great craftsmen make the most out of what they got. Yes, those things can also be described as being inefficient. But it's actually not the inefficiency that's offensive to me. It's just like actually the waste that's produced because that ends up being like, especially it usually accumulates.

1:09:49And then it's very high interest. I mean, I think the ideal thing to do to build is something that's beautiful all the way through, including the processes. And therefore, which are not wasteful. And efficiency is almost a secondary property of that. And then there's times where you just need to be just a step out of this because you're doing something that's only needed once. And then it's just like kind of doesn't matter. Like sometimes you just need to do really unscathable things to do it. Action causes information. And instead of going and building an entire like piece of software, just pretending that it exists is like a really good thing.

1:10:24Like startups learn this. Like they just like put something in the market, which might just be a landing page. And they only build it and people are actually interested in it. I got so lucky. I built all of Shopify before I told anyone. Imagine it would be wrong. I mean, it kind of was. I sort of like edit up like dogedly pursuing it and eventually making it good. But yeah. So what's your relationship of efficiency? Well, I too don't like waste, but I understand that in the process to get where you're going to get to the best, sometimes the time aspect of it's not near control. That's right. And sometimes the number of iterations it takes to get it right is not really near control.

1:11:03Totally. So it's not inefficient to do a hundred versions. Yeah. If you're hunting for this thing, that's world class. It is very it gets tricky, but even talking about efficiency, right? So like I can tell you the way I loved to write code with my colleagues early. Like myself philosophy on code is like for every problem, as probably a hundred lines of code that's of it extremely elegantly and no one in the world smart enough to find votes. So we end up needing 5 ,000 lines of code to to to actually like didn't skills issues and maybe to make it readable enough to other humans who will end up having to make changes in the future.

1:11:42And sometimes people do hundreds, thousands of millions of lines of code for something like this. And that's inefficient. In order to find votes, what we've done is we set ourselves constrained. We just loved these constraints where we said, okay, we are going to build this feature and we start in the morning and we pay a program to people in front of computer, we sort of keyboard back and forth. And at the end of the day, we would throw away our code and we would ship the feature the day where we could implement all of it in the day. And it would fully work out of way to the end. And that just meant we ended up like really learning about the problem.

1:12:17So this is similar to what you say to me that's incredibly efficient because I want the efficiency in the product. I don't I think the process. People should not talk about efficiency to find the sound deputy that leads to the best possible insight and. You can't know. Like sometimes you're just a vessel for right. You're coming right. You can help sound deputy, but just like really deeply understanding the problem which you explore through code. Well, sometimes or not understanding it at all. Yeah, that's true. Is the other way because sometimes coming at it from. That's true. Not knowing what's possible allows you to do things.

1:12:51Yeah, yeah. I did not know that the word hated ephemous. Like everyone lost a lot of money doing dot com. No one was going to invest into like ephemous software. Right? Like I just didn't know. I also didn't know that it's usually like a couple hundred people working on it. I just tried it and I used a better programming language and everyone else at least one that fit me and then it worked. It happened. Tell me the difference between hiring someone who's very experienced versus smart beginners. Okay, so we had two kinds of intelligence. I think. Yeah, I'm just like fluid intelligence. And then there's of crystallized intelligence.

1:13:23Right? Like so it's described to do fluid intelligence is essentially the sort of curiosity to be having like. I want to figure this out. This is just like how quickly can you pick something up? How are you like do you like playing with ideas? Like in my interviews with people I try to find a thing that they're very passionate about and then ask them about. I make changes to what they're passionate about in such a way that they have to like re imagine something like if someone is like really into soccer for instance. I'm like, okay, we all wake up. This crazy thing happened. Of course, stopped rotating quite as quickly and gravity is now 0 .7.

1:14:020 .7 or for G. So 30 % less. Which positions in the game of soccer and are being more important? Right? Like so and I have no idea what the answer is. Yeah, yeah. But I want to play with ideas. Right? That's fluid intelligence in this moment. I love that. Then there's crystallized experience which really is wisdom. If you've been programming for a long time, you've picked up a lot of patterns. You know what not to do. In so many situations, you can say the words, oh, this is another one of those. And already have an idea for how to solve it because you've encountered the problem before. I'm making this distinction because this distinction is actually invisible in a very, very, very profound way day to day.

1:14:44When you work with your colleagues, it's like your colleagues are incredibly helpful to have a project. But you don't know what side it's coming from. What happens, though, is that again, in the world of like just AI comes and suddenly everything is new. Suddenly the patterns end up not actually matter so much. And I had this incredibly interesting experience as well, like some of the best engineers will be put on the project that really, really, really need to succeed. And we put them on really, really, really need to succeed AI projects and they kind of didn't contribute. And they're like, well, hold on, why is that happening?

1:15:18And then we put an intern on it and it just everything just goes incredibly well. And so I think what's the magic is for people who end up just doing both. Because unfortunately, what I've observed in these 20 years of spreading Shopify is that some people are okay with the overall amount of intelligence we bring to bear to be the same. And slowly it's all converting from fluid to crystallized. They are day to day just as helpful. But they've stopped cultivating their skills. They've stopped reading the books, they stopped tinkering with new technologies. And you just don't know. And then everything changes and suddenly you find out very quickly.

1:15:58But some people keep it and then they compound. And that's like, when that happens, it's just magic. People were deeply curious, but also know a lot. There's no better thing than it's intoxicating working with people on new problems like this. And so also with people I'm incredibly drawn to. What is chaos engineering? Well, that's a solve for things being too derivative, too static. I think Stasis is death. When things are static, that means you're not advancing. And if you're not advancing, that means you're sliding soon. You're right like backwards usually. And so, okay, what's chaos engineering?

1:16:38Well, chaos engineering has a fun history. Again, this incredible thing that so many millions of people trust us with their livelihood is very real. And then there's downtime because some piece of hardware failed. And everyone is going, well, look, a piece of hardware failed. It's an act of God, so to speak. It just happens. And like, well, if it happens, then it means we have to engineer around it. We have to build the redundancies to make that not affect the system. And what I hear back is like that it's just hard to test because it happens rarely. I'm like, cool. Let's make up potential failures.

1:17:16Yeah, so I lock into our server farm and turn off service. And like I just started doing that. And it was better than doing it. But when something fails, it usually is at night. And then pages sometimes are slapped through and then suddenly you have a real problem. So let's make this actually happen more frequently because if failure is more common, it's actually easier to reason about. It's actually bad that failure is rare. If it's a real part of a system, you want it to be frequent. So initially, it was, I did this manually and then it good. And you get good at solving the problem. Exactly.

1:17:46You build, you just know what this thing is. This later actually, a Simtalyp wrote a fantastic book on this exact thing called Anti -Fragile. He's a point of name about for this kind of phase. He said like, hey, after you break a bone, after it heals, that part of a bone is the strongest part of a bone. And no language on planet Earth actually has a word for that kind of thing. No culture has discovered that certain things get better by breaking them or disrupting them. Or even more of the concept is clearly all around us. So, Pierce Engineering, so I mean, very quickly the operations people figured out, where they can just settle alerts on me logging into servers.

1:18:25So they had plenty of warning. But we encoded into the system, they ended up building a random thing that something failed, more frequently. It became a thing. And then eventually, I kind of laughed it so much as a thing, but I wanted it in company, because I'd also done one thing to be too static. So, you don't want every day to be the same, because that's like boring. Boring. So, we just come up with annoying stuff to do. We had like use your mouse if you're non -dominant hand days. It's just like, it's such a budget move, not a big part. It's like challenges. Yeah, just like today, you have to put your mouse on the other side of a keyboard and just have to make do.

1:19:09But the end of the day everyone was quite good at it. Right, like, what are some of the ones besides the left hand mouse day? So the best thing we did. And this is like, I feel extremely lucky that this happened. We were in a negotiation, we had some possible landlord. Eventually, he threatened us to just kick us out of like a office, right? And we were already starting to, you know, we were going to build another office because we were outgoing this one and we were kind of getting pretty tired of finding him passed out every night on some couch somewhere. This was like, was an entire thing. Like, so this kind of the situation with all the landlord did not work for either side.

1:19:48But we were like, what would we actually do if we would be kicked out? Right, like, and Dan and my co -founder said, well, we should really have a plan B for this. Like, we should know what to do. Let's think about this. And we sort of said, okay, let's have a session, let's think about what we actually do. And by the end of the session, we were like, you know, let's make that plan A. Like so, we send everyone an email the next weekend that Forbes wouldn't work in the office for the next month. And we all work remotely now, like to build some empathy for a few people who work remotely to us. We just shut down the office.

1:20:20This was in 2016. I mean, day one was, no one got anything done. Turns out, some people didn't even have actually have reasonably internet. So we went to each other. Our interns, we used to surf lunch. So some of our interns were completely dependent on this and almost staffed. So we had one cook in the company. He asked if he can buy a taco truck and all it won and just like drive sandwiches to people. So everyone kind of meant some people met in coffee shops. Everyone kind of made it work. Like by day free, they were cracking. So that was really cool and a cool experience. And then a couple of years later, COVID happened.

1:20:55And we were like, fuck, we trained for this. We trained for this. We knew we had our systems were so well set up for this eventually because we figured out how to have a culture that actually understands etiquettes about like video calls and like we had this all kind of figured out. And so some of these things ended up being really, really, really lot bearing for our culture. And our good things, we randomly delete meetings, real current meetings. We often delete all of them every year and a half or so. We figured we'd go to ones come back and the bad ones, no one wants to tell the person who started it.

1:21:28That's a bad meeting. So it's like a garbage collection thing. No meetings. Just delete them all. And I mean, if it's a meeting with an external person, it stays, of course. But all internal meetings get deleted and people hated it. Now it's like people cheer. They're so happy. It's like completely unstructured time for actually doing craft. What are some of the requests you've made of your team that would likely not have come from other CEOs? I mean, like I really tried basically everything at some point. Like when they started a company, I again, I didn't take a salary for a long time. But everyone who got salary burned the same amount of money.

1:22:07Like if you started basically straight up communism, it's funny to think about this now. But like I think deriving some of the capitalism values from first principles is also a good thing. A good exercise. And then I read a book, they actually a paper at some point. They called it the tyranny of structuralistness. It was fascinating. I think it was like about the 1960s feminism movement. But basically the thing they analyzed wasn't important. What it basically said is, a hierarchy always exists is what it said. If the only choice you have is are you documenting it or not documenting it? And then it made the case that documenting it was way better for everyone.

1:22:42You know, and just really, really changed my mind on some of these things. And so I don't even know if it was that interesting. But what I really loved was this idea of some things are simply true. And the choice that you make is are you documenting it or not? And I found a document. Sometimes that means I have to tell people I inconvenient things. But it's just more honest. Recently, this is a memo which a bunch of people have read online. Where we just said, like, look, using AI reflexively to solve problems is a baseline expectation now. You like two and a half years in AI tweets around just play with them and try them.

1:23:23And if you find they can help you with something that's valuable to you, that's good. And you know, there's always a really adopters like me, we're just like trioph. Right? Like that's some people really resistant. Some people are like, well, I'll wait and see. And I think that's actually that's pretty optimal. I actually don't think it's terribly efficient to like try absolutely everything. That's a lot of work. Like in the same way, I'm now reading books that are 40 years old. Right? Like let's do the things that stand for test of time. But I think in performance, if we have someone who uses AI a lot and well, and someone was just as good at their craft but doesn't, the person who's using AI, for instance, in engineering is just like significantly more productive.

1:24:08How do we think about this in terms of performance management? And like the only correct answer here is, well, that affects things. Like so that person who isn't, we need to tell them that that's what they're competing for now. Right? Like because if no one says, hey, this expectation is set now, then suddenly their career goes away or isn't going as well as it should based on their skill. And that's unfair. Yeah. So anyway, send a memo about this and just explain this. And apparently that captured the imagination. So interesting. How was it received? I mean, yeah, like internally everyone's like, oh, that's cool.

1:24:47And I mean, it has some language about before you ask for a grow headcount, tried with AI first. And they are now so the media did an entire construction out of this about this being a layoff notice, which it really wasn't. I just want people to have instances of playing with AI. We create a lot of internal tools, just sort of activists. We teach, we have channels, we have get -togavours, best in evening AI tinkering, fast now that people have put together. Just like, it's actually our non -engineers who have taken the call the most. They're just incredible things coming out of sales team. So it's like, it was an unmitigated success inside of a company because it did share the excitement with AI.

1:25:28Because, well, if it's expected, I should predict it on this and turns out, you know, the funny thing about AI, at least the large language model says, fundamentally, you communicate with them, right? You write to them, be quite a prompt, but really it's like, it's a document, a conversation, you tell them to do something and you provide context. You know, who isn't very good at communicating? It's usually for engineers. So in a lot of ways, it's actually a wonderfully democratized life skill. Yeah, like, there's a lot of fantastic communicators in every group of a company and they are really having a moment to shine because they can just like describe how to be helpful for this thing and then it is.

1:26:07Have you experimented with vibe coding? Yes. I love the name, actually. I am now aspiring to cause vibe entrepreneurship or vibe business growing or whatever. It's not as catchy. You know, you've become like a spirit animal to the vibe coding movement. It's so ridiculous. Yeah, the picture is so perfect. It's like the headphones, it's fantastic. Yeah, vibe coding is really, it's funny, right? Like programming is very much early in this, right? Like, and I love programming. I also love programming with AI. It feels exactly like back in the day when I was working with friends, two people in front of a monitor.

1:26:45Now I have like someone with always time and we can do it together and have a second person looking, quote unquote, person looking over my shoulder. Some programmers also just toilet some. It's like, there's a lot of like reading a lot of documents and learning an API. I just like it just knows it. It's wonderful. So you gave an example of writing that note to the staff and then the media misrepresenting it. Yeah. And have you been misrepresented in any other way? I mean, like there's lots of history there. Like Shopify is a platform. We like, white tent. We had like, you know, two fours of 16.

1:27:19You had the, it was a little bit more and it was Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, campaign stores on Shopify, right? Like an every and a lot of internal consternation with that. Like people wanted us to commit to being a, to a site. And I thought it was quite ridiculous. But like I didn't think there should be a sort of a liberal Shopify and a conservative Shopify that seems ridiculous. Other than by law, are there any censorship rules that you have? That's not what you will put on Shopify. Yeah, there are. There's an acceptable use policy, which is a thing sort of the conclusion that a lot of industry has gotten to.

1:27:55These are living documents. They can't, they have to change because divisiveness or edginess, maybe. Edginess on a spectrum. Like my pirate poker set is probably like, it's probably not zero because poker might be seen as gambling. So like let's put it like 0 .1 % on the edginess, right? So this has always been something. It has to be a living document. You have to create acceptable use policy, but you do also have to have a big tent in some intestinal fortitude to deal with this because these are usually valuable societal commization as long as there's no harm implied at which point it's like.

1:28:31Like the laws are very clear and we act super fast. This is another area where AI is so fantastic. We can hold very sort of complex cases up to policies and decide super quickly. So the internet is just kind of really getting much better because AI was insanely difficult to institutionalize these things because these platforms are so big. You're a service provider, but you're not a content creator. That's right. We don't provide amplification, right? So we don't make an editorial decision. So we host. Now, if people purchase, then like this economic value accruing to it. And a lot of people, some people anyway make a case that that's like an act of direct support.

1:29:15That is a hard case to make in my mind. Well, you don't support any of the things that are on the platform. Right. Exactly. We are hosting provider. We are like a street. Like we are not terribly unlike the streets that were used by the FedEx truck or FedEx truck itself. Right. Like it's just like it's infrastructure. So anyway, at least this is the way we see it. Smart people can disagree about these things. There's no perfect answer to this. So we do our best. Yeah. But it seems like if it's against the law, that's a fair amount. Oh, yeah. That's easy. That's a clear line. Yeah. But anything beyond that seems difficult.

1:29:49This is what we, like I think society should make this choice. I think that's the right process because yeah, like it should be well debated. And what you look for is to find the best set of trade -offs. What is some accepted assumptions you've questioned when building something new? I love just invalidating assumptions. You know, just again, we started off with one single salary and that became pretty untanning. Well, very quickly. So there's a long history about it. I used to think that I can convince people to just like, that something that wrong, my first reaction initially was that I would talk to people about why this went wrong.

1:30:29And like, we're just sort of like try to get them to do things differently. And like, I mean, there's some of that, but like I actually think, like there's almost two different visions for you and about it. Like it's like that we are like, perfectable and that we are like not. And if you accept what we are not, what it does is that you get inspired to just find for best set of trade -offs and building a company. And it's just like, I really had to change my mind on this, but now I really, really love it. I think everyone is allowed to be an intelligent actor in a local incentive system. If my comp plan is stupid and there's an activity that like overpays, even though it doesn't, I'm like, good for you.

1:31:07You hack the system. Let's go. Right? Like it's my job to make a system that's good. And that's an interesting game. Right? Like that's much more interesting. So I used to think that people had figured out how to build good companies. I definitely no longer think so. I think all companies are terrible, including mine. I think we will figure out in the next 20 years how to build good companies. But we are all going to be terribly embarrassed by the companies we used to run in the two for 2020s. And I now see it as my goal in life to be slightly less embarrassed by my company when everyone else was retiring with me at the same time.

1:31:36So I just think companies are understood and underappreciated. Like what else exists that allows just a ton of fascinating, deeply caring, inspiring people to just get to spend that day together, working on worthwhile things. But then in our case, we make tools. So those tools have others. And it's just like it's great. It's like its companies are technology themselves. And we should all be glad that they, I know they have a bad rap at times. And because sometimes, you know, they do dumb stuff. But I just like, I love companies. I think they're so cool. So I think the university, so only other thing that's socially acceptable for you to just like go all in on like a researching something, right?

1:32:19Like and if it wasn't for university and for companies, how do you actually channel your craft into something over a very long period of time, aligning incentive software? Tell me some of the things you've changed your mind about over the course of your life. Oh man, I would be fun to prepare for. I would love to think more about that. Things I changed my mind on. Like I mean, I used to think business is bullshit. No, I have to. Like, like maybe it is, but like no, I'm invested enough that like I can no longer claim that. I have lots of strong opinions that I attempt to hold weekly. I actually we love and people change my mind.

1:33:02I, for instance, like we were perfectly office -centric culture. Like culture, we build amazing offices. My co -founder, design, floor space, we open -source them. They ended up being like template for many tech companies building their places. And just like we designed everything for like certain deputy and people just like drawing people through building and like just making more of these kind of things. So I was like totally against remote work and then COVID happened. And I committed a company to just only remote work. Right? So we were probably the largest remote company in the world. And people got real rip lash from this.

1:33:36But like, I mean, it's still remote now. It's still remote. So since COVID you've gone remote. Yes, we have gone remote here. I need advantages and disadvantages. Okay, right off of that, it's worse. I think, I mean, it's probably surprising to hear from someone who's committed for it. It's worse because it's like, the office does so much for us. The community. It's like you ship something, you do something. You walk to water cooler. Someone gives you a fist bump. The afterglow of that lasts weeks. Right? Someone sends you a fist bump emoji on Slack. You forgot about it in a minute. It just doesn't hit you.

1:34:15So it feels muted to do remote work in these things. Or at least the bland version of it. So it's harder. It's a little bit like training for my iPhone at altitude, I suppose. I hadn't done that. But that's what people say. That's really hard. I believe them. So why do you do it? Well, there are significant advantages as well. And it's a set of traders that is is worth doing for some companies in some cases. In our case, the problem was we like we've started in order. We're the biggest office. We relocated lots and lots of people there. But it's a small city. It's a million people. And they're having a lot of great technology people.

1:34:51But never as deep as I can never say it would be. We had offices in Toronto and Montreal, New York. So we had this adoration. We're like everyone in the offices. And it up like going to rooms and usually talking to other offices on the screen. No one there. Like so often already. So it was like this really weird form of hybrid that just like felt first and all other options. And so what we ended up saying, okay, we are going to be remote by default now. And we get really, really good at this. And this required just like complete like I said, don't port the office online. Port the internet to the company.

1:35:31Right? Like because on the internet there's like communities of excellence that are all remote. Like a lot of the big open source software of our world has been written. But people will actually never met to make it even more geeky analogy. Like do you know what word of warcraft is? It's a video game that I've heard a bit, but I don't really. So like lots of people playing together doing very complicated things. So like 40 people are going doing something very difficult to cross a lot of coordination. There's real excellence as people doing something for first time in the world. And there's like cultures of excellence that form online.

1:36:03If people were to never met each other. Funny enough, my wife is actually a ran and world of warcraft guilt. Like like like like so she ended up having more experience. How to run a remote culture when I did it. And so I learned from her. And so they were like, okay, well, it's been done. Therefore it's something we can figure out. And I think we did. And so now the people who work for a company can engage in like a really amazing lifestyle design. Like some people just choose to move downtown. Some people choose to move to out to the cottage. And it's just like talent is incredibly well distributed.

1:36:36And so it's actually worked really, really well for us. And I still wouldn't recommend it for everyone. And I would never recommend it to a new company. Like especially we sort of early days. Finding itself. Yeah. Like we have lots of rituals such as, I mean, once a year, like next month we get everyone for a week to Toronto. Including from Japan and everyone in the world. Like just like for a week we just, we've got a big industrial hall. And we have like a big creativity and like just events. And because building relationships is very hard. Motelay. But if you're doing it deliberately, you can also make up for a lot of time by just, and this is my conference.

1:37:15It's great. How is your company structured different than other companies? It's very functional. I believe in craft. You can be the best paid person in a company as a craft person. Like when I use craft person, that means not manager. So we think most companies have too many managers, too many layers. All our managers were hired as programmers, designers first. And then like because we think it's, it works best to work for people that have a job. Full appreciation of the craft. Yes. You are yourself trying to cultivate. This is just like not usually done in industry. And I just find it's, I don't understand how this works.

1:37:55What size teams do you have? We love the team of four. This is our favorite. Like we start off with everything as a team of four. And what would the four team members be? Ideally, we talk about T -Shade people. It's basically people with a very wide set of skills. And one significant specialization in the middle. Like programmers who also have hopefully good taste, but also know enough about design, the point of like, you know, how the internet works. Just like sometimes people have a lot degree because they went later to the world of engineering. So we put teams together. Hopefully everyone has functioning understanding of everyone else's job.

1:38:33But also therefore have a deference to their specialization. Like we love teams that fall in love with the problems. We just like, I want them to go and like, if you're building a point of sale software, I want them to ideally build it in someone's store. So we send messages to our customers and say, this is weird, but like, can we rent space in one of your stores? Like can you just put like an office in there? And where people can just talk to you about what you need and work with you on these kind of things? So action causes information. We love to just go and like just just start building and ideally throw away what you build as you understand the problem better just like we discussed earlier.

1:39:14And then if a team has to become bigger after about eight or so, we split it into sub task. And then we have a system that also makes remote thing work. But it's called GSD, which literally stands for get shit done. And where every team is like, has a page of a project and they do updates and they can do that. So they don't have to have meetings with other people about informing them how it's going. It's just like everyone knows they can go on GSD and read and you can follow projects. And you have eyes now making briefs about all the projects in one area. So you know, just like avoiding all this kind of things that distracts people will build things.

1:39:53So it's easy to find out what's going on. Yes, like it's an active process. You're not like you can't sit there and expect like corporations team to book a meeting and then brief you and everything that's going on. It's at your fingertips. So it's all available. Yeah, I try to not do this sort of corporate baby proofing that it's like exists in a lot of companies. I've always found that especially the companies that call themselves to be the professional companies, when you look inside, they look like when you go to visit people, we would just have their first baby. Every electrical outlet has these things in them and all the corners are rounded.

1:40:28And there's like baby gates everywhere. It's like they're not moving for 10 months by way. Like they can't even get to these. But like it's funny because I know why it happened. But then if you go to a professional company, they have a dress code. You know, like what is that? You don't even trust your people to dress. It's like it's amazing. Right. We try to have not too much guidance, but a huge amount of tools. How would you describe the company culture? I mean, or like island island of misfit toys. It's like it's a random assortment of people that are all united in that giving a shit. I think then you make a product.

1:41:07People will feel it at some level, other than the conscious if the people will create it at the other shit. And there's nothing that allows you to think that. And so that's the thing that I think you know, it's a beautiful thing about Shopify is again, you're making a product that helps really inspiring people. Right. Like our customers are incredible. And it's like, I worked with a bank at some point and just like, I was so dismayed because I got the sense that they treat their customers not as their customers, but rather as their crop. They have a like fees to be harvested. And that's like an adversarial relationship with your customers.

1:41:45Like the hell, that's terrible. So the best thing we can do for becoming a bigger company growing tomorrow is to make our customers today more successful. Right. Like we're just like, we're the same side of a table. And I don't need to go around and tell everyone, hey, you need to talk with our customers. They want to do that anyway. It's like, it is really fun to have a meeting about e -commerce with Kardashians. It's just like really, it's also by way, they incredibly good entrepreneurs. Like immediately, like five minutes in a meeting, you will learn, of course, you've been incredibly successful because you're insanely smart.

1:42:18And you just understand this stuff at an intuitive level. And the way you do anything is how you do everything. Therefore your e -commerce strategy is absolutely mint. And that's a wonderful thing you find out. How has the scale of your business positively impacted the business? Like again, I love the small teams. I preach with small teams, we form small teams. I would have imagined that I'm going to grow a shop with a size. And then I'm going to stop doing this and then go work with a small team afterwards, because it seems consistent. I no longer think so partly because we figured out how to scale.

1:42:53I think Shopify is, and this often described as the largest small company imaginable. And I think that works quite well. The awesome thing about scale is it is such a gift to be able to be focused on more than one thing. Because focus is super important. And usually up to a certain size, it's either focused or unfocused. After a certain size, you can actually be focused on multiple things. And that's just such an amazing accelerant for everything. And you know what we're going to help. Because the burnout comes from too much focus on one thing. And like our sort of eternal theory of how to have the best in total career, if Shopify again, you can be an individual contributor for life, recall the mastery levels.

1:43:37You can just climb the mastery levels. And it gives you more compensation and career advancement. But we really celebrate it when people, like we call it do the jungle gym, like just take, go from one area, like follow down some zip line to a completely different area. Like I have an intern Anna and she's like at some point she ran an HR. And now when she did emergency acquisitions and then she joined product teams to work on point of sale. And eventually, like currently she runs real estate fast. She's like, Toby, why do you do this to me? Like, well, you're competent. You're just like, I have problems.

1:44:13You like solving problems. Let's go. And like for 15 minutes after Anna takes over real estate, she sounds boring. But you know, we have some cool real estate. We have suddenly everything is going well because she has this perspective of all these parts of a company. And it's like, that's also contrary to how people think about their career. Right? So the beautiful thing is when you get to build a company and you're as lucky to like have it be a success, as you can try to counterfactuals. Like there's multiple forms of failure. Yeah. And failures, of course, when the whole thing is like financially fairier.

1:44:48And like let's clear that bar. But there's actually almost a more profound failure of like at 10 years. So you wake up and you're like, you build a company you wouldn't want to work for. That feels pretty disturbing. Right? Like in a way, because like there's so many companies I would not want to work for. Why did I add one? Why is my life work to add one more to the stack? There's actually a build of company that's we're working for. Like let's focus on craft and giving it shit. It's fine that this stuff isn't quantifiable. It's fine that that sounds dumb when you say it. But it's true. And like may eventually sound smart when people figure out that it's actually working.

1:45:25Would you say you have a basic philosophy or is everything up for grabs? No, I think I have a basic philosophy about quality. Like I fundamentally believe no one sort of operates on their full potential. Like I think we all underperform our sort of hardware. But I think helping people get more out of whatever they got is like like that's what tools do. Right? The difference between modernity and 30 ,000 years ago is not genetics. It's like the tools we have. We can build houses, airplanes, get to space. We have the internet. We get to build us as a species. So I think the best tools in a world make people end up having been more ambitious when they're actually forward.

1:46:07Right. Like the possibility that you didn't know was possible. Exactly. You take it one step at a time. I think we make too much about this sort of people need courage. People should emphasize courage more than ambition, I think. And they have very different things. Ambition is an outcome. Like it's like this measured based on actually a goal. People should emphasize the courage and the habit to support getting into the goal. And to try fast. Win. Yes. Like a bias towards action. Right? Like it's like just do something and have courage to put something out there. Make something. If you don't make something in life, you can only be end up being defined by the things you consume.

1:46:43And I think that's a different existence. Very interesting. So we want more makers. That is my philosophy. So causing that is a thing. Shopify really is a mission based company. Some of our customers become many multi -pillion dollar businesses and say it's a year. One of our customers got two billion dollars of revenue before us did. Like we raised them and they won, which is like the coolest thing ever. And so they started on Shopify. So the heart is like all in causing entrepreneurship. And that just overrides all other priorities. And it turns out over time that actually arcs to the right business outcomes too.

1:47:16And if it weren't, that would be okay. Because that's what priority it does. But it happens to do it. Yeah, I mean that's the, like I feel so lucky. Because again, I would have insisted on it anyway.

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