“$100M dollar brands are being built for boring products” - Harley Finkelstein of Shopify

this is serious podcast over here sean the last time i did this actually i i've literally pulled up the data that it was in twenty twenty i think you were in like a wife beater and then you went to the bathroom and i heard you flush the toilet that's so far we've come here hey we haven't come that far these things that that still might be it might happen today i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to see from at all in it like a days off on a travel never look back i have a shopify crazy business story for you guys go to your internet browser real quick and go to touch land dot com harley you might no touch oh yeah of course i i in fact i've given out them as like at at events but their headline doesn't make sense it's sensory essentials that bring delight to everyday moments of care i is that it's hand sanitizer perfume few yeah it's hand sanitizer so so here check this out this story is pretty crazy this person starts out she's distributing like hand sanitizer in africa where you know like sanitation super important people get really sick because it's you know they don't have clean water to be doing blah blah blah and she she gets this idea like what if i made hand sanitizer sexy because at the time pure is all like pure exactly if you if you think about pure l sam what is it what does it smell like alcohol it's like something you get at the hospital or a teach from a teach exactly horrible smells smells like tequila the form factor is not like nothing you nothing to brag about nothing to show off it was a very pure utility product and what she did was she just reimagine it basically has a luxury product so she took hand sanitizer she's like i'm gonna make it smell good i'm gonna make it look good i don't know if you've seen the like the cases of it's basically like beautifully it it's like this like sort of like almost johnny iv designed it like exactly exactly if if apple decided to like go into the hand sanitizer market you'll did collaborations right like hello kitty disney i mean this is whole different level of of of of vision or around ensign has so she she comes up with this idea she goes on kickstarter and she raises like sixty seven thousand dollars she's like okay great sixty seven thousand dollars i could do a first run first year i think she does like a million dollars in sales covid happens and obviously people care about hand sanitizer way more ordering in covid business just explodes recently this is now twenty twenty five it was just acquired for eight hundred and eighty million dollars this hand sanitizer company and i love this story it says it was gonna do took this year gonna do a hundred thirty million in revenue and fifty five million dollars in eb wow exactly and incredible and they're on shopify there you go me here's your plug well thank you thank you at this a crazy story and how cool is this basically this this concept of like how do you take an ugly thing or like a just a commodity utility utilitarian product but they apply like high fashion to it apply luxury to it and create your own category you know it it sells for more it's it's the only hand sanitizer people gift to each other like you were saying you gift it my wife saw it she's like oh i just got that as a gift for like our kids teacher on their last day of school you would never like gift pure to somebody unless you're trying to tell them something i have a you know one of the cool so we have a few million stores on shopify were about twelve percent of all like us e commerce right now one of the things that i'm seeing a lot of right now are these what i think would be considered to be fairly you know this is because how majority but it's not like boring products becoming very sexy and then don't know if you guys saw this but like literally a week ago dyson came out with this thing called the pencil vac if you could seen and it was like so to like dyson like the the guy the man the the founder he actually did it like this press conference it's on youtube now i just he's amazing have you got amazing isn't it like a seven minute demo and he just came and drop the bike i think it's like i think it's even i think it's like five minutes but he exactly but there's like millions of views on this demo for a fucking vacuum cleaner and actually what i thought about it like one he he's been dyson not a new company they've been around for a very long time but like this idea that he took something fairly boring made it way better and now he's able to actually leverage modern media like youtube to actually tell a story i've bet a bunch of people like are actually gonna buy their first dyson product because of this video that never to be have you guys ever read about him sean have you read about james sis dude you and david center won't stop talking about james dyson dude like i i started reading his book he's just like the man but he's basically it sounds ridiculous he's steve jobs of vacuum he was steve jobs before steve jobs but he was like he's like this type of person where he's like the inside wiring needs to be beautiful like that's a guy but he took i i'm really interested in this idea of people who take non serious things very serious so vacuum hand dryers whatever and i think it's so freaking cool and he is like that back to a guy where he was like he's building the first prototype for like two or three years to the point where he was i think he went bankrupt bankrupt but he still kinda kept at it amazing but you you can sort of look across a bunch of different like i'm having my coffee now like my em mug right like this idea of adding a small heater to a mug i think it's like seems kind of boring em is a great shopify of store so i've been following them since pretty much day one i mean that's a huge company now both in wholesale but i'll really humor that that's one of those ideas that i thought was just go ahead and log in and just reading out all the numbers for much doing like that but what i i will say there's you know actually let me let me alicia you i'm gonna give me one second you guys know my best friend david siegel i think you've had him on the show yeah founder of david ts made you know took his comedy public awesome made a hundred millions of dollars him and i have this like tea business on the side we started doing the pandemic called fire tee it anyways like we tinker like you guys do on weekends we have this idea it's literally i'm showing you prototype right here you can kinda see it it is literally like our way we we think that dura flame needs to be disrupted that's a great idea yeah so like we literally priced time you're on the podcast exactly we we had this idea in two thousand twenty and actually so now david and i have we were working prototype it's actually you can read it it's literally made from canadian soft wood it's a hundred percent kiln drive like great out branding it's called flint which we think is a cool name for it but you look across all these different categories of things that most of us as consumers take for granted and there's always this like ten x version of it like my wife's really into she could hate me saying this she's really into karaoke have you've ever gone and tried to buy a karaoke machine there are companies that rent them to because they're so big and clunky like right someone should go and like disrupt the karaoke machine business like that to me is it's such a brilliant idea or you know tools like you move into a new house and you kinda need like you know random tools most of these tool companies as you buy like at you know home depot that can't get all look good there's actually a couple like beautifully designed almost almost like the touch land version of tools selling on shopify people misunderstand tam to their detriment total addressable market everyone kinda looks at tam as being this thing which is like what is the like there's there's a pie and i'm gonna take a bigger piece like it's that it's a static number yeah it's it's very much like zero sum and funny enough you know sequoia has said this publicly that's saw anything i think i could say it now but like the reason sequoia invest in shopify fifteen sixteen years ago was they looked at the tam of retail smb in the planet and they effectively forecasted if shopify would have a meaningful percentage of that market how big of a company we could be what they missed was that that rush in the pie itself right this like this positive sum that someone who's starting you know i i don't know the person behind touch land sean but but presumably like this person didn't necessarily like what she wasn't in or he wasn't in this industry previously maybe it wasn't even an entrepreneur but but story you told yourself and you were doing it because when you're doing it i mean you got know you can't that's the the you you almost cannot do it you actually have to almost imagine like you know let's just use flynn for second by the way this is not for sale yet like this is a so you can't go buy it but let's just like you you what you would do for flint is you'd say okay what is the what are the products in the market the biggest one is dura flame how much is dura flame sell a year what's the answer of that you know i think it's something i think it's like we last time which i was like half a billion dollars and it's like home depot low is these sort of home hardware stores but then one of things david i were thinking about is like why are these on sold in convenience stores right like why i have to go home depot before it why if i'm picking up like my weekend beer at a bode a seven eleven i should also pick up my my flint as well so what you be you have to almost do as an entrepreneurs you really have to kind of like broaden out the horizon of like what is the potential yeah kat cole and i were just speaking last week cat cole who's a ceo of a g one they're doing six hundred million dollars a year with a g one with one single sku there is no way chris is a founder of ag one there's no way that chris thought about that like you know like basically they didn't just grow with their to their piece of the pie they could grew the pie in like infinitely and i think that's those are the best entrepreneurs for me have you guys heard sean did you ever meet eric ryan i think he spoke at the hal khan that you spoke at i didn't meet him but i no you never invited me to speak i was just attendee but i did attend i also received speaking at just to say the thing yeah and we've actually decided to create our own called shit hustle con yeah charlie charlie but who actually helpful harder there's money con yeah instead of it just shit we're we're we're still on the opposite so yeah remember him speaking and he was brilliant so he people don't know eric airline that he did what method soap so he basically went into a boring soap category and made it sexy and made it like kept ingredients you understand on the back of the bottle that was like a the big trend the bottle is like pretty the bottle was pretty and the and the photography was pretty like they would do like a photo shoot instead of it being like you know there's like pharmaceutical commercials where these show it cartoon germ and he's getting sprayed it was like two really hot people who are like kinda like dating but they haven't really defined their relationship yet but they're cleaning up their house together and like that's what the that was the the photography of the website boys did that too right mo that with with native and sold for a hundred million dollars to to pro gamble yes eric actually did it with ollie vitamins he also did it with a well band aids and he has new thing that he's doing it with but i don't know what the new thing is man i i like like you look at just shop you'll at ritual rich vitamins or seed which is probiotic probiotics there's a company that i think is really cool they're called pros p r o s e they do personalized shampoo based on hair type they're doing about a hundred million this is this public information they put it out there hundred million dollars in in annual revenue eighty percent of is recurring customers so you basically like said them fo of hair they analyze and they send you a shampoo specific for what you need i think like that personalization stuff for shampoo you obviously like i don't know if you guys take supplements i take like eight a day i wish you know i can basically just take one pill that has exactly what i need specifically bit for me to just eight a day actually do anything it's a little bit of of you know correlation versus c colonization my all of my lipids are getting better and i think there's definitely some correlation to it although as part of my taking all these supplements i'm also working up more and i'm eating much better and i'm drinking far less you know red red wine with with on weekends and so i can't necessarily draw a direct you know causality to it but certainly i do think that and honestly it's not that big of an inconvenience if it helps me by five percent or ten percent i'll do it i'm also i i do every every year of my birthday i do make called p do you guys know p yeah yeah you know i've been doing it since i was for the lost six years every my birthday a member every year but on making for a a pretty bad birthday one here you gotta be careful that that's the the issue scale the i main issue with that was obviously false false positives right which i have just decided i think entrepreneurs and founders tend to be on on this side of the of the equation which is i prefer a false positive than a false negative right have you maybe you could answer this you're you're actually the only person i've asked is publicly but i've never got a good answer how can you be a billionaire today and be unhealthy like how can you be a fat billionaire today i would i would i would get rid of the billionaire i think if you are if if create the billionaire thing for a second because i don't think that you you'll need to be a billionaire to do that you know anything fat billionaire i do but i don't wanna say someone's anyone's name of course you you probably know them also but but i i i it doesn't make maybe maybe they were a thyroid issue i do believe that if you have the means and you can have you know if you can have like house you know house keepers for example or you can have a chef at home it's like give a chef at home no one's going to their chef and saying make me super healthy food usually if you hire a chef you say i wanna eat really well here's what i really like so there's almost no excuse same with the personal trainer it is very difficult to go to the gym it is much easier to go to you know the gym if you have a trainer waiting for you that you're paying for or someone showing at your house so i do think that is easier for you to be in better shape if you have means see this is why i'm an outlier i defy all the rules i rich i have a personal trainer who comes to my house okay i'll find a way the the the will finds a when if know sean to door to ask something that i'll door got say the so if you if you didn't have the trainer come to the house you'd be in weight i i suspect you'd be way worse off also you have gotten way healthier over the last hand that's right yeah you know when i had my first child bailey is now my my daughter's eight when i shu so dave siegel again bringing it up again like dave's a couple years older than he said kids before i did he basically said to me when i was having bailey like look if you can afford to having an annie he actually described as he's it's gonna be a marriage saver and i didn't really understand what it meant and what he meant was like just everything that is easier as a new parent at home i was you know shop was already publicly traded i worked seventy hours a week he's like just if you could afford to nanny you should do this and i didn't really know what he meant by the whole it it's a marriage saver in hindsight i now do because like some of the stresses that i think some people have you just they don't go away they're just less you lessen them when you have certain like like lux in your life and i i don't i do i mean i grew up without money so i didn't grow up in that in that world i don't take that for granted but i do see how it gets these things these things get easier i heard an interesting story about actually last week was with the person i'm not gonna name but he's like a he's a billionaire there and he's at him he's a big time investor and he was telling stories about how he we were talking about shopify i was actually talking about how i met with met with you and i was like man harley so charismatic like it totally got me bought in into shopify even more and he was saying he's like yeah man i've met with harley a bunch of times i know him well i've met with toby a bunch of times he goes and i've actually met with stripe a bunch of times the the carlson brothers and and they're an amazing company and he was like i think they're roughly worth the same right now but he was like i think shopify is going to be worth ten times more than stripe and i i was like why and he said whenever whenever i'm with the call brothers we talk all about like interesting philosophical things and like what their like hobbies are and things like that and whenever i'm with toby the only thing he ever talks to me about is shopify that's all he ever wants to talk about he won't he will only talk about shopify and because of that i think that obsession even when your company is worth a hundred and fifty billion dollars or whatever it is that still comes into play it's not just market factors or the market forces is this for the beauty of this founder led thing i i you know i think the calls and brothers obviously are a great example of of federal led as well they're obviously private so you don't have the exact valuation of it but i do think that this this era of founder led companies people that just really give a shit there's no way to replicate that or to emulate the give a shit and i don't wanna like i i actually wanted to spend some of the time episode where i was like actually harley i like i i know you a a bit now but like toby like he's still mysterious to me because i've ever met him but he seems like like i think he has this one quote where he goes my wife's says i'm an immigrant to the human condition yeah that sounds that that seems stupid i mean i add and to to his credit because he is so self aware he truly like he's incredibly self aware he knows what he's really good at and that's if you think about shopify i think i said this is sam when we were meeting but like you think of was the phase of companies like at the beginning of the first phase of a company everyone needs to be swiss army knife like everyone do everything and then the second phase it's like more like what i call like triple threat phase where like every is there like a could you put a threshold onto that like a number of people or something yeah i would say like for us it was like zero two i don't know dunbar number you know that concept numbers number or one fifty yeah hundred and fifty something like that which is like comes from tribal times where that's how many people any human can remember at any one given time so i would say like zero to like one fifty or so it's like that you know swiss army knife in those days in a shop that i i did bd at its sales support i built the app store partnership program i was also the the lawyer i mean i was a general counsel be i i wasn't really a good lawyer i'd only practice for a few months but like some better call saw yeah i did i i didn't i didn't have a we didn't have a cfo at the time or anything like that it's just like swiss army knife time and then i think eventually you can almost market for us around like the series a or series b where now like we're more people people can sort of slot into the right roles meaning like you don't do one thing but you do a couple things real quite quite well that was sort of i was a chief operating officer and so i looked after a couple big organizations we built a sales organization we began to think about just different areas of product post pandemic so like two thousand twenty one twenty two a couple things had to change for us one is we were we were over we were bloated we'd like fourteen thousand people that didn't work we brought it down to what we are now which is around eight thousand people and we we quite like our size right now we had a couple businesses that were not the right business for us to be in one of them was shipping and fulfillment we ended up selling at the flex port so we began to think about like side quests and main quest what our side quests let's get rid of them let's focus on the main quest but the third thing that happened sort of in this new phase of shopify and ship shop is these like spiky objects and what that really meant was we we basically brought in a new new team new leadership team and part of that process was toby and sort of thinking about like what of the things that we think we we truly should be spending our time on meaning the highest value for shopify and that meant that like we kinda rearrange the company not necessarily around these like traditional roles of like you do this and but rather like based on our strengths and as part of that you know toby not in the earnings calls anymore because it just i got that i can do that i think i can do that at a at at a really great level i think i can eventually be world class those earnings calls i'm gonna focus on that and toby is going to run product for shopify that has been ultimately one of the greatest transitions i think this is my sixteenth year at shopify to twentieth and we've been public now for about a decade but you can get there right away you have to almost go through these phases in order to to figure out what your spiky object is that's pretty it also it's pretty rare i think if you look at how many ceos are the best storyteller in their company it's actually not most but they don't wanna give that up and so i think even in there you didn't even mention it but there's a sort of almost like a very telling thing that he had though didn't have the ego to say i need to with the front man also did to be the lead singer even the best drop to she'll refers to me is the lead singer the band like i think a lot of companies throw around this idea of mission shopify mission is very simple but increased the amount of entrepreneurs on the planet that's it and we increased it by by adding more entrepreneurs to shopify who otherwise were aspiring previously dude how do you hire people if that's your mission that's a hard that they did like like all your employees would be fucking quit well actually the best part is we end up hiring mostly entrepreneurs people that have had some that entrepreneurship in some way has deeply affected their life for me meet my my my my hurt or holocaust survivors they after the holocaust it went to hungary in the fifties as hungary got really bad hunger hungarian and revolution happened canada led in forty thousand hungarian immigrants in nineteen fifty six my grandfather came here with my father and and his siblings they came to canada my my grandfather ended up selling eggs at a farmer's market his whole life that that that egg stall it's called le ten still stands it's like five kilometers from where i'm standing right now so entrepreneurship for me is deeply personal because it allowed my family to survive and also create the life at all that that allows me to be here my version of that is when i i i moved i grew up in south florida i moved to montreal to go to mcgill one of seventeen it thousand one and my dad is no longer in our lives i had to support myself and my my mom and my sisters and so i started t shirt company that t shirt company would eventually become an online t shirt company and i would become one of the first merchants to shopify that's kinda how i got here but and toby comes in a very different way he's an an immigrant he lives in germany meets someone wonderful woman who becomes his wife named fiona he moves to canada can't get a job as new immigrant wants to start a snow board shop and finds an incredibly difficult to do so writes a piece of code to sell snow boards which would then eventually become shopify you know our our buddy george mac has this great phrase where he says people only remember you're weird meaning any behavior that's standard that you do might be very useful but it's not very memorable yeah and so you know sam was asking about toby just now and you know i think like he said you he's a bit of a mysterious character he's not somebody who's out there doing a bunch of podcasts and and public things i'm curious what's what are some stories of his weird like you know what's a behavior or a thing that he does that's non standard there are a couple things that i think define you know his his leadership really well shopify like one fundamentally is that he spends a lot of his time using like all the newest tech constantly he's cons the newest white paper on a new a new element that just came out like this site and i don't think that's uncommon i think you'd see that with patrick or z but there is a category of these like super technical founders that did not exist historically at least if they did they weren't running hundred billion dollar or trillion dollar companies toby in this group of people that are super technical that know more about the the the code base than anyone else in the planet the other thing that i think is is important is one of the things he does every ears it basically you know during christmas break he spends his time running effectively the priorities for the company and january first every single year i don't know for the last decade or so the whole company gets an email and it's incredibly specific direction of like what are we going to build this year and it's not based on necessarily like you know serve it it's based on his deep intuition of how the product needs to evolve and in some cases you know it's it's you know shopify i run some of the largest flash shelves on the planet like for supreme or taylor swift or these he's massive you know crazy throughput thirty thousand transactions a minute type of stuff so sometimes it's like you know we have to be able to like to to have this type of throughput in other times it's look the future retail is not gonna be just online it's gonna be everywhere and shopify has to make it super easy to sell across every surface area i announced weeks ago we're doing it with roadblocks inside of like basically the roblox universe that now we're embedding commerce in into there as well toby didn't say go do like roadblocks what he did say was make sure that everywhere where consumers are spending their time there is a way for our existing merchants to easily turn on that channel and it turns out like in some like roadblocks i feel what the the da are but like it's it's ridiculous i think there's like seven hundred million monthly users in the med i think the largest chunk of those are on are in roblox it's like a hundred a hundred billion dollar interest industry today gonna be like nine hundred thirty billion in ten by twenty thirty i think so we're like affect so that's the type of stuff that he does is that he he doesn't necessarily like i know some ceos will go and talk to customers he doesn't it also but ultimately what he's i think incredibly good at it is the intuition of that the second thing is i think he spots talent really well he finds these people across shopify that are obvious people and he gives them the room to do their very very best work and that ability to completely ignore an org chart and rather focus on impact and like hey that person i saw like you know he didn't get hug he's looking at their commit and he's was like i like the way they wrote that i'm actually gonna elevate that person and let them do something you know something much bigger much more creative and and then probably the last one i would say that you we're kinda talking about it earlier is that i think what he's done for me is he sees a better version of me than i even i see for me i see pretty good version for me i've always been someone who's someone you know fairly confident in my ability to get better at stuff but he basically always shows me that there is a new gear for me and he's like you don't even know that that gear exists yet but like you think you're in the fourth year there's a fifth gear and he's like and and his expectation of me and and frankly i think the entire team is that we re qualify for our job every year and it's one thing that to expect that your team is gonna qualify frankly he he also believes he has to recall every year and the pressure that he that you know like hasn't put more pressure on anyone else that he puts on himself that i think is an amazing thing do someone like can evolve into this like jedi master type of guy or when you had twenty people or ten people or whatever it was was it clear that this guy special you know i think a lot of people end up starting companies are working like you know spending their lives working with people that they probably would been friends with in high school toby and i are totally different i'm very like power extroverted i love being around people remember i came to shopify as it merchant first i moved to ottawa one two thousand five to go to law school not to become a lawyer a mentor of my t shirt comp my t shirt business that i had in college at miguel here in montreal had gone a became you know pretty good deep t shirt business i was able to pay for my tuition and my rent and help my mom and my two sisters were going to private the school that i was helping to pay for that i i was paying for i was paying my mother's rent at that point a mentor of mine ke convinced made to go to law school not to become a lawyer but he thought of he looked at law schools being like finishing school for entrepreneurship and he was he was a lawyer he was teaching law receive of ottawa he said come to ottawa go to law school here you're never gonna practice law but with i think it's gonna make you a much better entrepreneur you learn you know had a critical reason and how to write better how to think better how to articulate yourself better so i moved to ottawa have no friends and never been to ottawa before the capital of canada never been there before get there and i'm like where the entrepreneurs those are my homie those are the people i always hang out with and i met toby through that and at the time he was just transitioning from snow boards to software and this is before i becoming an early merchant even in two thousand and five he was thinking about what the future of the internet might look like so remember do do do you remember can you give us a bunch of those quotes yeah i remember i remember i'm saying like for example one of the things that that like payments should have been into should have been built into browsers like what it's like yes like the people that made browsers completely fucked this up payments should should be natively integrated not through a third party but natively built in to browser that makes total sense identity should be built into browser entirely so he was thinking about all the deficiencies of the modern web and then trying to effectively adjust shopify product to make those things much easier the other thing i think that that he had done that i thought was incredibly inspiring someone that you know praise the alter of entrepreneurship was at that point there were a couple companies doing e commerce there was a company called be gen which ended up getting acquired by adobe there was a company called demand where that ended up getting acquired by salesforce there's was a company called at g that ended up getting acquired by oracle there there's a company called high that ended ended up getting acquired by sap and those are sort of players there there are some other ones too to like yahoo stores but like no one is really doing like major gm or volume on those and i remember him sort of thinking that to telling me that the problem with all of these companies is that they're built for existing entrepreneurs that there's never been anything built for aspiring entrepreneurs meaning if you have an idea in the shower in the morning you can then go to your desk and and get get it going right away and what if we were able to give the smallest of entrepreneurs of companies of of of ideas the same tools that traditionally one of the biggest companies could have what would happen then well the end result is that you like we now have there's now been a trillion dollars transact on over over a trillion dollars transact on shopify and yes we have some very large stores but the majority of those of that gm is the long tail small businesses and those homegrown success stories companies like fashion nova or jim shark all these companies that started at their mom's kitchen table that grew super super large so those are a couple of the things in the early days that completely changed my perspective on one how to think about building but remember also like my own experience was sitting in in law school hitting the launch button on my online store my t shirt shop and all of a sudden i was getting sales from like ireland i'm like for twenty nine dollars a month think it was twenty four dollars a month at the time like that was a dramatic insight for me that okay if you if you if you couple ambition and in credible product technology you can actually change the entire like trajectory your entrepreneurship on the planet at a huge scale what where has he been wrong where's the weakness where's is the the human side of sounds amazing are you guys familiar with the yeah okay so the is is sort of there's a lot of these personality things graham is the only one frankly that i think is worth any worth any any any review but so he is an eight the challenger characterized by a strong desire for control independence and justice they're assertive decisive and driven by a need to protect themselves and others they're often natural leaders confident in willing to take charge now go to three the achieve self assured what is it self assured attractive they go charming ambitious comp energetic at their best they are a role model who inspires others but they have you know basic fears of being worthless basic desire to feel hits man that is so first of all if for anyone anyone listening like if you are working in a team with a bunch of different personalities it's a really effective thing to do to actually figure out what they are on the we've we've looked at i mean i've i've i've looked at every one of them we've had coaches on staff at shopify for over a decade this is the one that i think is the most valuable so knowing that toby being a challenge of being an achieve he is really tough i mean when i bring him an idea he will beat the shit out of it to a level that i have that i have not even considered yet so it is not easy to work for him but it is incredibly meaningful because what you end up with is outs outside personal growth he won't say twenty words when two will do he'll say two and if if the two are correct and even though they may not be the most polite way to say it he care he is he is seeking the best result like that that is why he should be you know i will work at the company as long as he'll have me and as long as he's there because i believe he's the the he's is the ceo the shopify i requires normal care more about that but that doesn't make it easy right and like i know other companies i talked to my peers other companies are they're like yeah you know like there is not a softness but there was a c to their culture that doesn't happen at shopify it's not it's not that we're not c it's just like that's not worth trying to achieve did you guys ever have acquisition offers you talked about how mag magenta sold and the other guys sold was there ever a moment everybody sold where you guys had an offer or a discussion that you had to take seriously and you had a fork in the road moment you obviously ended up independent but was that always was that the only way this could've have gone if you look at the history of ipo is particularly in tech you will notice that shopify from a market cap perspective when public at a much earlier stage than most companies did what i will tell you is we first all did not return phone calls from corp dev teams early on specifically because we didn't wanna get into that head space that line of thinking and it wasn't what we were interested in we wanted to build a hundred year independent company and we knew that those phone calls may result in us having meetings and talking to them and thinking about it and like we just didn't want it in our minds it just that feels like a real distraction in fact you guys know this too because you're you both invest in a lot of companies once you take that phone call from a corp dev person at a big company you begin to inadvertently inadvertently start a process in your mind of a begin to think about what if what if this number is right what if the terms are good what if they have a you know what if there's a space for me at this company where i can you know the the pitch that a lot of these companies make it's big you know m and a conglomerate they make is like well you can do what you're doing at your current company but you can do it here with more scale so ultimately we didn't wanna necessarily have that even in our minds so we didn't return those phone calls first thing second thing is we went public at a very early stage because one we thought it would be the best way for us to be independent longer term and two we felt the company was ready for it like the product was ready the business ready the team was ready that's not really the case anymore i mean other than two companies i'm very close to the one is cla you know andrew who's founder of cal went public last year and then fiji who was at the time ceo of insta carter's on our board went public as well so you you've had a couple ipo though but generally companies are and and in the case of you know most of these companies they're much larger they're in the tens of billions of dollars of market cap before they actually go public so or we just didn't wanna get acquired and we want to be independent but with there ever times where you were like i would like to i would like to take this deal this would be nice no there truly there was not we we did it we did a very small secondary on i think it was a series b which allowed me basically to buy house a down in the house and what's your philosophy are you are you like a der risk over time or you like fuck all the eggs in this basket like what's your philosophy around that because it's it's tricky right even if you believe money money is so money's is so my so you know i mentioned my dad wasn't around when i what's got the college my my dad you know he was i love my dad's as great guy but my dad really never made as an entrepreneur and growing up money felt emotional to me that some weeks we had in some weeks we didn't we ever we never were you know we always had food on the table for example but there were times where i i remember as a kid off and my mom would come sydney and say hey like we're gonna have to you know tighten our belts this this this month and that that tightening of the belt happened a lot during my childhood and so when we went public yeah for the first time i had real money i was able to i you know i was on a a ten b five one which in canada called an ast and automatic share distribution plan so i was able to take a lot but i mean i don't think there's any better investment for me my family then than shopify but i've taken money off the table so that i feel like my family is secure my children are secure we we're never gonna have to tighten in our belts and that that that's on a flex that that truly makes me feel i'm able to do better work because i know that i have a nest egg that is protected what was the hardest what was the hardest moment at shopify was there what was rock bottom what was the low who covid was really really hard maybe not for the reasons that you know you guys i mean you remember shopify if i went from something like i don't know maybe pre covid we thirty billion dollar company we like over your revenue i think i think in two thousand nineteen you're at one point six billion and then two thousand twenty you're about three billion that's a big jump and it was a big jump in in everything i like what happened during the pandemic was i mean commerce as a percentage of total retail was sitting around fifteen percent in the us so fifteen percent of all was on online and then effectively had this pull forward during the pandemic where like we jumped very quickly to twenty something percent sean did to answer your question what was the hardest time in shopify you know we almost didn't make it we grew through from one boy five when old yeah gonna can i finish my fucking story guys yeah so so there there was there there was this manic like period inside a shopify if like of a sudden all these this pull forward for example like everyone of us sudden need to go online all these lag that were just physical retailers eventually came online and i think at that point it was like just get you done and then twenty twenty two happened and like the market started going the other way and like we kind found ourselves with a much larger team we found ourselves with a lot of side quests shopify also for the first time ever i think we we were not profitable so i think that sort of post covid hangover was was really tough for us and that's kinda where like i think you know yes asked me but the different phases that's where i think through of the next phase came into play which is okay like do we we we need to figure out like what what do we care about what what is the right team size what are our focus areas do we have the right people leading the company and that was sort of this like we recalibrate everything that was really hard i wasn't sure i i knew shop would make it i wasn't sure if i was gonna make it was there a time where you thought that shopify what's it gonna make it pre ipo for sure i mean i post ipo things you know we we went public at a time where we sort of knew what the next ten years would look like we were profitable we were making money we were you know we were subscribing to his whole like you know you know grow grow top line and also grow bottom line but pre pandemic there was a sorry pre pre ipo there i mean that that was hard right i mean we were bootstrap for a while there were times where we don't know we can cover payroll but you know i think you have to be a little bit you know crazy naive sean and i you know my last company we were gonna do about twenty or seventeen million the year we sold but i sold early in the year sean has a business that is in like you know he's got a hands at a bunch of things that are that that are potentially in the in the similar range i don't wanna speak for him but i don't think either of us have experienced this like fifty hundred million dollar range where i'm like oh then i could just like manage like three amazing people who do most of the work i'm in the face now with my business for i'm like everything is fucking hard like if someone if someone quits i gotta go do the work and so what i wanna know is like does go i go away does it get more fun no no it doesn't but actually like i don't think any of this gets easier you just have different problems it's it's like the but it's like the magic number we all this magic number early on as entrepreneur especially if you grew up the way that i know you know sean sam and and i grew up the way week like we all have this number on i earth when i get that i can think of i can basic extrapolate my passive income from it and that's gonna pay all my expenses that i can do and then the you hit the number you're like it's like there there it's bullshit it's complete bullshit there is no magic number just like there is no stage of a company whereby you are cruising it's just different problems right so the problems that i have with with at at like at seven thousand people and a hundred billion hour market cap are very different than what it had with like seventy people what what which problems do you enjoy more this is my favorite ninja shopify because as going back to the whole spiky object the thing that i think i can add the way i can add the most value shopify is through storytelling and i believe now the microphone that i have because of shopify size allows me to do it at this crazy scale and i think for that it means that like my life's work gets to be more amplified today than it did ten years ago i remember you be you've always been lyric and good at talking you are now much better you are always you're are always good now you are like really great do you have like a do you have like a writer like is there someone who's gonna watch this i'd be like this bit hit no you got you guys asked me for notes you guys asked me for notes this morning had to like literally sit down and write you notes myself no yeah i but i don't even think that i don't even know what i wrote you but sean i dm them this morning and i was just like hey saw that you know whatever i'm excited for the pod today and i was like you know the best episode episodes tend to be where the guest come in with you know these use three or four bullet points i gave him some guidelines it's like you know i was like no i said i noticed she hadn't filled out the prep doc we we usually send a guess like a prep doc and they fill it out and then it gives us kinda like a you know some options of where you can go in the conversation and he goes prep doc dude let's just hang and i was like oh yeah oh i gotta be gotta be cool okay my bad yeah so so i mean i had i've i have a team of people that help me with things like what preparing for but no i this is this is me there's no notes there's no you should like i actually heard a couple of stories recently that have really inspired me okay i'm gonna give you a little like the framework that i think most people underestimate okay so there's a story in sports lebron james spends a million dollars a year in his body the numbers is actually kind of irrelevant but the idea it is directional correct lebron james spent a lot of money on his body and he has certain you know treatments and coaches and like protocols that he follows that the average athlete is not following in fact we went to an nba team and i said how many of you guys have chefs and less than half of that team in the nba raise their hand i was like this is insane i i couldn't believe the owner would even allow that but like for lebron every meal is dialed every you know every hour of the day is either recovery it's it's building or it's you know it's playing and so lebron does that in his field i then talk to somebody who knows peter till very well i go you know it's weird because peter he's not like a smooth talker right he's actually like the opposite is a bunch she stumbles but when peter teal goes on torn and he does it like every you know seven to ten years he's got this message and in boom he'll get like a ton of p his message is very effective so he's not very efficient with his words he's very effective and what you know if you remember he did one where it was universities are a bubble yeah right he and he went on a whole tour that and then he launched teal fellowship underneath that and he did one which was competition for losers and he has these like slogan almost like marketing slogan that come for losers then he launched zero to one his book that was all about how to build a monopoly and he did one with when trump first ran he was like you know and for founders went ahead we wanted flying cars but all we got was a hundred and forty characters yeah now peter did not write that line in fact what my friend told me is that peter actually kinda like has a guy who follows him around that's listening to all peter thoughts and it's sort of work chopping his bits like a comedian would like a pull like a politician speech writers would and they actually like craft the message and they write it out and they gaze basically get him prepped for me he's not showing up and just wing it and because maybe he's not that great at wing yet david rubin does the same thing that you know he i i know david actually has a even a larger team because he does the show when he does the tv show when he obviously with carlo and stuff so i don't necessarily have a writer per s i do have people that kind of remind me of like hey like remember that like this is kind of the direction i'll give you the best example earnings calls i meet with my my jeff hoffman my sort of amazing our amazing cfo my jeff and our ir team and i'm like alright what are the three or four things that like that we wanna we wanna say and then i basically take it and and i i you know heart hardly arise it i make it sound like me so could you give an example so an example is like we wanna get we wanna be on roblox or something on the roblox thing it's really about the fact that shopify is no longer an e commerce company where the commerce ever everywhere company okay right and that's what's important so i'm using roadblocks is effectively a proxy for explaining that you may not necessarily you know wanna sell in roblox if you're selling hand sanitizer but if you if you're selling another product and your audience spends time in roadblocks or or in some sort of in in a you may wanna access it by being on shopify you are default selling everywhere right right the story isn't where on roblox the story is where now the ecommerce we're out of commerce everywhere also on pinterest in instagram we there's there's literally a spotify check a a shopify for spotify channel where you can actually if you if you a large if you're beyonce and you have an artist profile like the size of beyonce you can sell sacred which is our cosmetic line on shopify inside of her artist pro when rumors are you're gonna be on on chat that's rumors yeah we we're not gonna go there today but you but exactly we wanna be wherever you you you effectively have consumers so earnings was three weeks to ago and i i love earnings i i go i do my earnings call i think analyst calls then i do in my media tour in this case i did i did tb t which which i think those guys are killing it i did cnbc and did some bloomberg stuff i noticed that there were a bunch of other companies that i because i listened to earnings calls a couple days before in a couple days after just to kinda hear the tonality of the reporters and the journalists but also of of the executives and sebastian from i i think it's a car or something he basically came out i think it was sebastian and he said hey i'm i after his earnings call the whole thing was done by ai that actually was it was wasn't even with him it was basically an ai em his voice and that's who did his earnings call and it would may it made a splash a couple of articles about it and so i listened to it i was like yeah like that's like a a five out of ten and maybe you can say it's a six on or seven and ten because he saved a lot of time and so it was effective but there was a zero in my view there was zero personality to it and then i watched a bunch of other kind of quote of a professional executives that were that did their earnings calls like the p g guys for example or the folks over at best buy and i listened to their earnings calls and i i'm like they they sound like they're reading a scripts if you go back you don't have to is but you go back and listen to shopify earnings calls you'll hear things like okay i know what i just said and i know you think that's surprising i'm gonna repeat it again because it's really important and i'll use voice inflation and i'll use repetition and it doesn't and and what i've done and what i hear back from it's it's like theater what i hear back from both analysts and investors is that they find our earnings calls to be so much more interesting because what they actually hear is our personality they hear the passion my voice for we give a shit about this stuff too and and i so i i think that there is there's probably a right balance where you have people around you that are giving you sort of the macro things but like if i start talking like peter till i'm it's not authentic and therefore i don't think it'll be as effective and so i think there's a balance that i'm trying to find and and so i i you know i've been i've done forty earnings calls now the balance i have is tell me what are the most important things that we need to hit and then let me kinda of find my own way of of negotiating it into the call right i like that you like studied the game film of the other earnings call that that was what i was looking for that like kind of that extra that you go to the others other name people i mean ben off is fantastic at it do you so toby came out with this like memo that was like hey it is a baseline expectation it didn't come out that it was leaked but yes yeah it was leaked something leaked i always assume those are like intentionally leaked i i would have intentionally leaked that if i was him i think it hindsight some of these things when when they do get leaked you're like you know blessing better for worse kind of thing but yes but the point is in it he was basically like you ai is a expectation based on expectation you gotta learn these tools the way to the way to get go to them is use them a bunch and you gotta start solving problems using this was there was a the general general ethos i'm curious you personally harley day to day what's your ai usage are you like you know a lot a little just chat other tools like what are you actually personally just using either professionally or personal in your personal two things one is i mean i use chat db i i really like the fact that now it's like i i like the history side of so for example like back to you sort of longevity every time i get a blood test i uploaded a chat eb in in folder called a longevity and health and so now i can ask questions although i do find and if i say like i had a blood test last week i uploaded it knew and i said compare this to my last one and it compared it to one from three like for like a long time ago and i was able to spot it so it's not a hundred percent but i like using that quite a bit too i i gave a keynote summit last week i literally fed my entire keynote script into chad tb and i said hey and what parts of these do you think are confusing if any like where am i where am i losing the thread here so i think that i use chad in particularly o three the o three model on a daily basis sort of like you know how my like just screens here so based on my screen next me i always have that open i really like claude for other projects so for investing for example you know lin my wife and i do a little bit of investing we we own some apartment buildings so i have a file for real estate which is every time i get an update from the property management company i feed it in i find claude is much better for analyzing existing documents i find that chad is much better for sort of reaching out into the public sphere like the web and bringing things in together those are the two i i used the most and then back to sort of the earnings calls one of the things we did was we basically made all of shopify legible and we built like about a dozen mc p's instead of shopify so usually in preparation for an earnings call i will go to let's say wanna talk about like shop capital i'll go let's i wanna talk about like we we launched it in the uk so let's say i wanna i wanna talk about that in your earnings call i'll go to the capital leader and say hey give me a couple of the highlights for uk a new one for us i wanna talk about how it's going this time i just went to the vault and literally went into like cap the capital program because everything is legible i was able to pull most of the data on my own the the personal jury still at whether or not i missed because when i talk to the leader of capital i get some of the nuances and i'm like oh you just said the sort of thing and like actually i'm gonna take that and run with that even though it wasn't you didn't intentionally mean to leak it to me or tell it to me whereas using basically like the shopify vault which is where we i'm able to access all this data through the mc i i find that i'm basically getting a lot of headline stuff but i do wanna make one point one of the things that that got missed on to on toby memo now or the email now is that there was a term he used that i'm surprised more people haven't picked up on which is like ai were like like being reflex and part of what he's trying to get the company to do is to be reflex about the usage of ai so that rather than sort of make it a sort of i'm i have a project and now like i'm working on my own oh know what i should also use ai and see what i can get from chat or claude or ant philanthropic or something like that or complexity the this idea of making it reflex part of our day to day work is really what he was trying to do and in fact so much so that he created this like this new friction which is before you can go and hire someone on your team you first subs had to subs too shopify to to the hiring manager to the talent team why ai cannot do it better and one of the things we're noticing there is by actually creating this like friction of saying like before you go and hire you must first do it what ends up happening is people by the end of subs why they need to hire someone that ai i can't do realize that they actually should have ai i can do a bunch of that as well that is very different than what you're hearing i think in most companies which is let's just use ai as part of our you know if i could design something in fig or in can i'm gonna use ai to help with that this idea of it being reflective is sort of what we're trying to do i like that a lot that's cool that's a that's a great little nuance and and sort of tactic you know i like these sort of either incentives or systems where you do one thing but it has all these downstream impacts like right now people are talking about the us like oh the deaf it it's so crazy buffett has always said this thing he's like oh simple i could solve the deficit sit in two minutes here you go if we run a deficit sit over three percent nobody gets to keep their job in congress that's straight watch watch what hatch i mean that is you you get to do that at at a companies i mean back to like the phase of the company at at at the phase of size of and end and scale of our company we get to do stuff at at this crazy scale so simply by adding you know a simple of friction on hiring it says first subs substantial you actually see incredible results then you can evaluate it you can literally say like okay well how has hiring changed since that that that email was leaked how has hiring changed since we added that friction thing it's very difficult to actually see the the efficacy of all these things when you're ten people well you look really healthy and you have a lot of energy i'm curious you you said you got curious and kinda interested in bio hacking slash longevity you're on a kick right now what's got your interest what if you what are you doing that's maybe you feel is is either interesting or working for you or you're enjoying it just give of like a quick health dump so i sort divide into two buckets which is like i'm gonna dive of one of two ways i'm gonna either die because of cancer or where i'm gonna die because of heart attack and so the cancer thing it's not easy but p nova does a lot of that heavy lifting from me or at least i'm forty one now so i'm now getting the point where i'm taking a lot more seriously so once a year and there's p was not the only one i like it a lot i like it so much that i actually invested in the company with my wife and i invest in the company a couple of years ago i think the way they do it i think the way the technology is moving the fact that here's a very simple thing a lot of people don't like going into these full body body mris because they get claustrophobic so a small you know i i guess part of the product of p is you put on these glasses that of these mirrors and the mirrors go backwards into a screen and i watched like the most you know fun loving light show that i can find for me that's seinfeld so i'm also some i'm not cost folk but i don't i don't i wouldn't wanna stay in something like that for a long time dude when i went in i watched top gun i was like what's a movie i should've have watched i never zach i just watch tommy talk yeah so i did the off like i i do not wanna be stressed out and i don't wanna be scared dude i watch like zodiac killer documentary enough like it was great you i mean that speaks volumes about your both your personality i watched like personality time and so so i that's sort of takes here on the cancer side on the cardiovascular stuff i'm i'm i just say clearly a clearly scammed basically looks at blockages so what i'm trying to do what i did initially is just got a baseline of like where am i at right now the reason i like print over each year is because i basically can look over time how things are changing if i have like a benign cy on my on my liver is a growing year over year now at least i can monitor that stuff too so i to me that those are the two main buckets and then i just try to do these like these is like one thing every year that scares the shit out of me and the thing i'd really like right now is called twenty nine zero twenty nine and jesse jesse thing jesse's he's done an amazing job him and mark who's his partner c cofounder they've created this incredible thing that effectively allows you to climb everest but you can do it from like colorado in my case i do it in quebec with mont t law you can do it in vermont but they created this incredible thing that allows you not have to travel to everest whatever is and you actually can do it and so i've been doing this this with my second year doing it and i and i like doing it not just because of the like high five it's cool to to to climb the emulate climbing everest but i like the idea of getting really scared that i'm gonna fail at it and therefore i train much harder and so my workouts actually are much better because i'm so scared of failing at this twenty ninth a twenty nine yeah yeah dude how many last of question how many how many companies in the world are bigger than shopify you guys are worth it looks like one fifty three today or something or months whatever one thirty you've been as high as thirty four two hundred ninety down by twenty billion dollars just one casual crazy like you're worth you're worth a hundred thirty four point five six billion like change that five six to like a five five and like that's like life changing you know what i mean crazy for sure as well i look let me let me let me one more college for if you are listening to this and you are a company that actually like you know you understand your business well you see great growth retention like this idea of of avoiding the public markets is is insanely silly to me it's been an incredible forty forty quarters in now it's been like an incredible journey for us it makes us a better company it allows i think the people that use shopify find more confident i mean now we have companies like hunter douglas and mattel and bur stocks using shopify like i think you i think one of the things they i love about so a product is that like being publicly traded provides some sense of stability well what i was gonna say was i i looked it up on chad so there are probably a hundred and twenty companies in the world bigger than you which means of all the companies that have ever been started of all the companies that are out there right now and i'm probably in the history given that like today's companies are bigger than everyone else you are in like the top a hundred and fifty it's pretty astounding and i think that like if there was a ratio of like somehow most relatable or like for some reason i talk to you i'm like he just one he's like what of us of us i and that's my friend fuck he's not one of us damn it and then i like see this and then i see the stats and i'm like he's so good at his job that he's tricked me to think that he's relatable mean you know me personally we've like i think i said this in the beginning right i i was guess one eighteen we are not today my friend we are not we are the same yet and and you had over seven hundred and fifty of them we are we're we are not the same and and but if there were a ratio of like i feel like i could do whatever he's done to flexibility your ability to market cap ratio you are you get the gold medal i think that's the sweetest thing you've ever said to sam you know you know what's one of the best things i did after that first podcast is basically every year for the last five years i take about twenty percent of what are my profits are out of my shopify store and i just buy shopify stock oh wow cool that's what i think has compounded every everybody as good or better as my actual become brand now my earnings are growing whereas like if i just reinvest it in the business because not every business you can reinvest a hundred percent of your your your profits back into and so just that one little habit has been very very helpful for me means a lot of me it's actually currently need i get we're doing the single called chocolate milestones like basically it's it's our version of like the emmy ms or the the oscars for for actors or the grammy for musicians we give you at these milestones and awards you guys have probably seen them around this is the two thousand one we get on for ten thousand orders a hundred thousand and a million going to pick y'all are so slow i got my milestone but i'm already on the next order of magnitude like this it's so slow how lot you guys set these out i mean these are heavy we had like share them out and stuff there's a lot of people anyways so i get i deliver the best person excuse yeah they're their heavy yeah so you you you need to get a million first and i'll deliver your million one sean but i meet these people when deliver them and awful when i hear is not only like obviously they built their business on shopify but many of them you know like they they're they're also shareholders which i think is like unbelievable endorsement as like you know it's was one thing to use the product and build your business on it but then also to invest your you know your your harder and money into be clear hack not an endorsement just a recovery of fees is what i was looking for i started okay i'm paying you guys this money i'm gonna get it back in the you made it you made it sound way less romantic than idea just try exactly let's be real here dude thanks for coming on man dude this is great you guys are the best i feel like got rude work i know why i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back but