I'm gonna join us for the top of 5. Don't be coming out. Hey! Hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. I'm going on, I'm going on. You'll let your winner try it. Rainman, David Satt! I'm going on, I'm going on, I'm going on. And it said, we open source it to the fans and they've just got crazy with them. Love you guys! Nice Queen of Kinwah! I'm going on, I'm going on, I'm going on! I'm going on, I'm going on! I'm going on, I'm going on.
Okay, everybody. This is a real honor. So this is an incredible founder success story. Just your average everyday CEO founder of an $82 billion public company sitting here. So Toby and I met a few years ago. The origin story of Shopify is pretty legendary, which is that he was in Whistler, snowboarding. He met his future wife there, Canadian. They moved to Germany. Toby started a store to sell the snowboards. Then moved to Ottawa, my hometown. Helping a bigger from Ottawa. That's one dust. I think you're one of the first developers of Ruby actually that really commercialized. And Toby built a website to sell snowboards, but then abstracted that, started to sell the software that sold the snowboards. And fast forward, that is what Shopify has become. And it's been quite an incredible success story. A, because you were able to raise a lot of money building a business in Ottawa. B, because then you took it public on the NASDAQ. C, you got a lot of COVID tailwinds. D, you had to deal with COVID headwinds. But then along the way, you've really been very transparent and honest about the culture of building companies. And some of the mistakes you've made you put out there. We're gonna talk about those in a second.
But I wanna start with more macro because we just had Ray on stage. You run a big e-commerce business. You see consumer spending. We know that the consumer is the largest part of GDP. So we must have a sense of whether the consumer is turning over. We're seeing all the headlines as they're a recession, as they're not, hard landing, soft landing. Where is the economy from your vantage point?
Yeah, so, I mean, you have an amazing perspective, but I don't think it's a, it's a, it's a credible witness to the entire economy. It's about half a trillion dollar has been transacted for Shopify in its lifetime. And it is really, really fun to do the analysis on it, but like fundamentally, the products sold on Shopify are not, are the products people want, not the products people need. And I think this specifically shifts the landscape a little bit. What be, and also the other fun thing is, it's really good for falsifying bad media narratives, because as always, it's like everyone puts up a chart and says this is the answer. And then we get to dig in one level deeper and actually see what are the constituent parts underneath the chart and everything, the story changes. So, we definitely see people react. Like we know a recession is going on, or at least it changes behavior, but particular way in which it changes behavior is probably not a fully explored story outside of Python notebooks and Compysite Shopify. Because fundamentally what people do is, in most categories, they shift one quality level downwards. So, if you ended up like shopping at like medium spend level, you might look for fast fashion afterwards.
In some cases, in our case, this means people might drop out of the Shopify ecosystem and go to purchase, maybe clothing at Walmart or something. In some cases, on the top of a market, we don't have every LVMH brand or Shopify, so people might have purchases there and actually arrive at a challenger brand and that is on our platform. So, honestly, the numbers actually are unchanging, the dynamics that make up the numbers are changing from all of this factor. That's fascinating.
Have you, when you think about building the business, I think Stripe's mission is something like to maximize the GDP of the internet. Is that roughly your mission as well? I think, second order, yes, but honestly, Shopify prays about the ultra-entrepreneurship of people reaching for independence and it's really causing entrepreneurship to be a more casual thing rather than this huge decision. Like, being able to be an entrepreneur in your lunch break so that you can maybe escape like a career which you chose for wrong reasons and you will kind of people, like you discover, like myself, you will kind of personally really can't work for other people and retail and building shops and businesses has been around for a long time, thousands of years. It's something, it is one of the most accessible mechanisms of independence. And as the internet is just a huge part of economy now, like the ease by which you could start a stand in the buzzer needs to somehow be translated to the digital world. And I, I mean, we talk, you guys talk a lot about policy and incentive systems and what's important. I do think the thing that's missing and sometimes in these conversations is friction. Like honestly, friction shapes the world so much more than like what laws or what policies anyone gonna pass to cause more entrepreneurship. But if you make it harder, you're gonna get less of it. And frankly, most people in the world work for small businesses, like depending on where you look, 60 to 80%. So that seems like an incredibly aligning mission. We're gonna maximize entrepreneurship, give people independence, a path to escape the drudgery of whatever they may be doing, be in control of their own lives. That's very empowering.
But somewhere along the way, you had to write this memo, incredible memo, we are a team and not a family because somewhere along the way, your team got distracted from that mission. Can you talk about what happened in that moment and why you had to do it and what it's like afterwards? You were kind of about that.
I, it's an internally memo that I wrote that leaked and apparently struck a chord with a lot of people. I think that was actually leaked in a, in package as a cancellation attempt on me, which I think Backfire is really gratifying. And, and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and around me and definitely disagreeing with literally every proposed way to go about it and solving it. And so, you know, there was a lot of distraction and Shopify is over-seen itself. That's also cancelled term common carrier, where it had Elizabeth Warren selling marks selling billionaires, tears on them, and Trump on the other side selling whatever Trump was selling. And I like that. That's a big tent company. That's exactly what you want, right? Because it's a weird idea to segment the internet into these various components.
And so, then there was another thing that happened, another thing, and we had obi-slack channels go way past self-healing, and it ended up becoming this incredible complexity. At which point, I wanted to remind everyone, hey, we're trying to cause a particular thing for people to reach for independence. It's really not for us to pre-select here. Like, let people, as long as they do something legal, we support them. And in fact, we are just pushing them behind the tool. Like, your screwdriver is not going to tell you that you can't screw in something into a wall because you're a Republican voter. So, like, it's just like, simplify this whole goddamn thing and just say, like, hey, we're showing up to make this the build cool shit. We'd be filling out parts of giving us shit. But like.
As part of that principle, you mentioned LVMH before. I actually, if I look and compare your business to LVMH, which I've done, I actually think it's quite similar. Because if you talk to Bernard Arnow and you see the infrastructure of what they've built and the abstractions, you've done that. It's just you're 40 years separated and you're technological and they're much more procedural, but they do the same things, which they plug in these great businesses, they empower them to run, et cetera. Have you ever been tempted to more vertically integrate and like you see categories and you think to yourself, wow, maybe we could do more, we could enable this or we could lower costs even further or we could, you know, if we own this kind of a business, we could build logistics for everybody. I mean, you kind of tried to do it a little bit. Explain that journey.
The decision is obvious, like, can we make it easier for other people to look amazing? It's not our job to be the front. I mean, if it's the quip of my investors who are almost all Americans, it was obvious like only Canadians can build this company because you're trying to be nowhere. You're doing it to an executive opposite. Make other people look good. And so that's pretty deeply ingrained. That's called the NTGA helping. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so now I mean, I don't want to do Shopify Basics or something like this, but it would be totally a side quest for us and I'm big on main quest. So I want to keep things.
You bought Deliver, but a week ago when Flexboard Fire, their CEO, you sold Deliver to Flexboard and then the same day, which is fucking boss, you signed a deal with Amazon. That's not what I was pretending to. Although that's how it was portrayed was a covariance. Can you just rather have a conspiracy theory tweet that went viral on this that it was all a plan of Bezos and he put the guy in to run Flexboard to get this deal done and then jettisoned out and totally crippled. I give him my highest recommendation. He's a wonderful man.
You should have a CEO. Amazing. Yeah, I mean, I think people, conspiracy theory talk is really, really fun, but I think people massively underestimate how hard they are to execute.
I like this, sounds very, very educated. No, like the, again, here's what my friends who build a lot of free companies on Shopify say. They say it's like most fun, like they treat it as a video game. Many of like do it over and over and over again and I want them to keep building these businesses and they turn, but they flip them or they stop at certain point.
Why is all the same? At some point they are getting to the point where like, okay, the next two years of my life I'm going to build warehouses and deal with operational excellence and I make online stores. I make products. I make business what I want to do. So I'm like, okay, cool. Like Shopify is big. I'm going to pull the complexity of figuring out logistics into Shopify because then I can amortize it over the total millions of stores that exist. That was a plan. We bootstrapped it, but like we can't run it in the end. So this is like an event to Flexport because that's their main quest and I think that's all totally okay. I'm super profound at surrounding their companies. I think that's why I'm celebrating that Ryan is coming back and also Ryan is totally fucking awesome.
Why did you do the deal with Amazon? The deal with Amazon is mostly about by the prime. But look, a lot of us made out of Shopify challenging Amazon story and it's a good story. But maybe this is a bit about me. I'm a product. I'm not a product of business school. I'm an engineer. I'm a blue collar engineer. I'm a programmer in Germany. I had a Meister. I could have gone for a tournament trip town to town doing this European thing. I grew up for open source. It's positive sum. It's not fighting for percentage points. We can build so much more if we work together.
Specifically around prime, prime is a credible brand. It's probably a better brand than Amazon in some cases. There is a plausible future in which the purchases of buyers, as we call it, just want to buy everything through prime because that's the trusted brand. I think it would be very bad for my company and I think a lot of my customers, if they would have to fire Shopify just because their customers ask them to provide Amazon by the prime services. It's much better to work with them. In that way, you look at Amazon prime as Visa or something. It's just a technology. It's a club of users. Shopify supports 86 different payment gateways. I wrote 42 of integrations myself. I'm curious how you do look at Amazon as a competitor and your advice to this entrepreneur class of how they, knowing what you know, should engage with Amazon.
There has been a lot of hand-wringing. We see it with the FTC and Lena Kahn's obsession with Amazon and third party fulfillment and Amazon house brands. You referenced Amazon basics. You just said basics, but obviously that's what you're referring to. What is your analysis of is it in the best interest of a shop to put their inventory on Amazon knowing the Amazon is kind of like the Borg. They will study your product. They will grind you down. They will lower the price. Then the coral area to that in part two.
What are you seeing in consumer thinking? As we watched every single product get copied so quickly, fast fashion or fast gadgets, everything gets copied. What I myself and a lot of other people doing now is retreating to brands and you mention trust. Is there now the pendulum swinging to, I'm not trying to find the lowest price and the cheapest product. I actually want a brand that I can trust. Some people are wearing a certain brand of shoes here that they really like. Maybe you could talk about those even. It's name, Jason. Laura Pianna. I have a pair now. They are buttery. I literally put them on and I was like, I don't know if I deserve these. How do you get myself back up for wearing $1,200 slippers? Apparently these guys don't care. They are like, I know I know you are the richest guy on the stage and you are wearing $16 shoes and you guys are wearing $1,200 shoes. I think that's why you are the richest guy on the stage.
你在消费者的思维方式中看到了什么?当我们看到每一样产品都被迅速复制时,如快时尚或快速电子产品,所有东西都被抄袭。我自己和很多其他人现在正在转向品牌,你提到了信任。现在是否有一个摇摆的钟摆,我不再试图找到最低价和最便宜的产品。实际上,我想要一个可信赖的品牌。这里有些人穿着一种他们真的喜欢的鞋子品牌。也许你可以谈谈这些品牌。它的名字是Jason. Laura Pianna. 我现在拥有一双。它们非常柔软。我刚穿上它们,就想,我不知道我是否值得拥有它们。怎么才能让自己为穿着1200美元的拖鞋而振作起来呢?显然这些人不在乎。他们说,我知道你是台上最富有的人,你穿着16美元的鞋子,而你们穿着1200美元的鞋子。我想这就是你成为最富有的人的原因。
Let's talk about Amazon. I'm Amazon first, look, I'm Amazon's like, everyone should study the company. They are absolutely incredible. I again do not think about, I do not like thinking about who gets which percentage. I think it really messes with people's actual analysis of what they ought to be doing, especially entrepreneurs building in space. Amazon is a rival and rivals are there to inspire you to be better. If you treat anyone, if you compare it in a different way, I think you're causing a category mistake. Maybe in the more physical world, absolutely there's really a clear finite pie. Maybe you need to bring a different mindset, but if you're anywhere close to software, it's positive, so I'm everything's growing. I think that's, I would say about Amazon.
You said that you have how many payment providers? It's 86. 86.
Breakdown, stripe and ad-gen for a second.
Why? Why? Why do 86 payment providers even exist? Yeah, that's an excellent question. And has to do with.
Go back to your friction point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Byzantine world of entertainment.
To regulatory and entertainment. So that's all just regulatory and entertainment.
I mean, look, some of these payment gateways, I really hope my team disabled them. And I implemented them in 2004. Here's what you had to do is you had to take the credit card, put it into an Excel spreadsheet and upload it to an FTP site.
So that's exactly as secure as you can imagine. But that's what's the state of the art at a certain point of time, as such as it is.
I have very low. Maybe this is where my extraordinarily low opinion about the orthodoxy and the status core comes from. But it's stripe and alien and maybe to a. Sometimes brain-tree are much more competent implementations of this fundamental idea. And they're massively complex. Like, again, they're interchangeable because at the end of the day you can do a lot of what you need to do with free API codes.
It's basically offerised capture and purchased directly. And so they look interchangeable, but what's happening behind.
I mean, they're great businesses. They're great businesses.
Specifically, yes.
Okay, so there's. But to be more leading to your commission, I think.
You guys have shop.
You know, all these things eventually are the things that these guys interact with. They're not going to know what's behind the scenes. They know that it's shop pays one click, it's elegant, it's amazing. I used it this weekend. Buy with Prime same kind of concept.
So what is it that you guys, you as a business, your shareholders will say, Toby, get as much margin as possible.
And obviously you're going to look at that and say, well, hold on, if I'm running a trillion dollars over my network, 50 basis points, all of a sudden adds up to a lot of net income for me. So you're going to go and do it.
That's like a no-brainer. What happens to those companies? What do they do where you would actually go back to your shareholders and say, ah, no, I'm going to pay more to these guys tomorrow than I do today because it's critical and I can't do it.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot more than me, sorry. Like honestly, we have to see companies go from one payment gate to another and everything about the business changes and they kind of don't know why. There's the card acceptance rate are really, really different between them.
There's a huge amount of machine learning goes into like what at which point you want to accept which card performance is a huge one.
Like this is sort of a really invisible one because like latency to compute or in the world of computing, it's sort of like pollution in the real world. It's like a negative externality sort of bestowed upon the next layer and other people. But like in e-commerce, you can just really see it.
Like it's your sales are going to go down and it's usually, okay, a card gateway is that have the largest issue with performance and these kind of things that have to use basis points games to attract customers.
So we've actually seen sets going down in this way, both stripe and add in excellent.
That's also, I mean, if you're asking about what makes these businesses and do they have a fun job?
I mean, they're building trust relationships to the brand question really with the CFO office, right?
This in business software, just like consumer software, you know, attention matters or engagement as it's called usually.
And you want to, like if you have a trust relationship, if a CFO of a company, you are going to be hired for more and more services and there's a lot of services related to the flow of funds.
I think there's lots of opportunities just bringing it back because you're trying to make me commit about making a value-start statement that's kind of a zero-sum statement about two or three companies here.
You have a lot of opportunity in this space. It's like there's a lot of fantastic new rails that are being built in a crypto world.
We're not so cool on this right now, but soon we are going to be cool again because this is the way humanity works and then we get to build and there's some really, really good technology underneath it or which is quite ready.
There's also, I mean, I don't know when the last time both the credit card network was created but certainly a long time ago and there's a good deal of business bringsmanship that's going on from that side and I think there's some opportunities to build together.
Tell us about what you're doing in AI.
You launched a co-pilot.
It's literally like anybody could become their own business person. It's really incredible.
Do you want to talk about that for a little bit?
Every time. This is my favorite thing about Shopify other than the fact that we as a business sit on the same side of the table as the merchants, the partners, the best thing we can do for Shopify for our business model is actually make our customers more successful. It's an incredible simplifier and it's incredible how many businesses are actually really doing a fakery cosplay on top of a principal agent problem really. It's much simpler for us.
The other thing that I'm so excited about because I only had that as a hope than I started but then it's proven out is that this thing I said about the friction in the process. Every single time we shipped something that reduced the friction by a meaningful amount, we actually had more successful business being built. So we really, really proved that out in the numbers. Great example is a payment gateway. Again, initially you had to make a choice. When I had to get my payment gateway for my snowboard store, I had to have two hour interview with someone in American Fork, Utah and then mail my passport to them. Not a copy. That's the friction that existed for just formation. Now it's like it's not a writing. Everyone just, the first time someone buys something, we tell you, hey, where is the money supposed to go? The amazing thing about AI is there's some problems we can't address with friction removal which is actually like the experience in life kind of thing.
My grandmother had a printing press, a place, a copy shop, a fake letter presses and these kinds of things. I was like, as a kid, doing the lead, like, coding, like, typesetting, the actual old stuff, the firm was hugely impressive. She started this business. So I had, in my film there, the concept of starting your business is a plausible solution to problems you might encounter in your life. That's probably true for most of the people you talk about in the entrepreneur realm, but they have this experience. That's just, I mean, this is what's so good that your podcast and just society talks more about this being a possibility, but still people can't see themselves in it. If they do, often they do it in a sort of reach via desperation. Plan B for so many people on the other earth is better than Plan A. It's one, it's because they have learned to downgrade. They've made the switch at some point. That's fantastic. But many, many people reach risk, I think, maybe is-
Exactly. Yeah, people's default setting and it worked for surviving on the planet, but maybe it doesn't work for the modern era and taking risk is more bold. So what does the co-pilot do?
Well, hopefully it helps you with courage. It maintains your courage because you courageously reach for, like, I'm going to try this thing in my lunch break. But here's someone, like VB survey people, the successful stores tend to, I think, with 85% answer that you had someone who would turn a text in 24 hours with a question about starting a business. It's massive predictor of success.
So I think what chat boards are already good at is like being patient and competent and answering your questions. There's a lot of questions they can't answer because there's, you know, just not the training set isn't ideal for niche pursuits such as e-commerce entrepreneurship, but that's something we can fix through, you know, wonders of fine-truining and these kind of things.
And so what does it do? VBonded to be like just like someone who sits next to you basically is like a chat you can ask questions about business, but like if you say, hey, I need my store to like look more like summer rather than fall or whatever. Now it will be able to help you with that and it will ask you questions. If you ask it to like what should I do in terms of product discovery or how can I increase sales, I saw on the demo it would say, hey, you should put these things on the front page and you may want to do this type of sale.
Yes. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. It's pretty amazing. It's honestly, I mean, sometimes it's unbelievably dumb. That's kind of all Shopify data not just that user, right? So there's a clear aggregation effect. That's why we'll affect the world.
You do. I'm always interested in the really outlier founders because they do business differently. They learn different tasks and different ways of managing people and we didn't get into it with Ray, but man, Bridgewater has a whole operating system of how they record people. It's very impressive. It's very intense.
You have a very interesting one where you released and it went viral a counter. So when you make a meeting, it tells you how much that meeting cost. And then you demanded everybody justify the cost of the meetings. I don't know if you're making them account for it on their budgets or not yet, but this resonated to hit a chord.
Looking at the success of the company, what are the two or three operating principles like the, I would say, a no meeting culture or a meeting if it's really essential culture? But what are the other two or three things that now when you look for running this company and getting it to the next level, which is going to be harder and harder, this is how we operate at Toby's Shopify.
Yeah, I take the founder role very seriously. I again, it's not about me, but it's like, I think companies that have, like, there is a founder slot which might be filled not in every company because they have a company who had found it. If the founder slot is filled, you have incredible ability to change the company, partly because the way I always loved social capital as a concept, and I think a lot about it, to me this is like a bank account, right? It's a balance that's deposited and the way any kind of value is deposited into it comes from storytelling. And the founding story is ever present in a company, therefore there is daily settlements into the account or accruing to a founder. And if a founder is not there anymore, it's sort of like someone deleted the private key and you can't spend it anymore.
So what am I spending it on? I want Shopify to be a company that is, well, first of all, it's really, really great for crafters. I, again, I apprentice, it's blue collar and approach engineering. This should be a crafters paradise and we just really, really, really make sure we have great teams and great environments for crafters to do their craft. And that's usually very small teams and so on.
There's a huge amount of anti-status quo bias. Like, it is just like, man, like the world is not that great. All companies are terrible. The only thing any of us gets to hope for is that at the end of our careers, we're going to look at the companies we built in 2020 and beyond or before and say, my company was slightly less terrible than other companies. That's the best anyone can do. To me, that's actually a helpful message because that reduces the complexity of the task. That's something I can do, just being slightly less terrible.
But the key thing is subtraction and this is where the founder slots energy comes from. It seems to me that it's only founders who subtract in companies. This is the meeting thing in a nutshell.
Everyone adds recurring meetings and gums of the system. I'm super pro great meetings but once every couple of year and a half or so, we randomly delete all recurring meetings. We're actually going to do random deletion of Slack channels and all these kind of things. Because they will come back if they're useful. So I think that gives you a sense. I don't think I have time for dissertation.
But again, it's super fun building companies. It's a really, really fun thing to do and taking it seriously is best I'll find it. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Questions, comments, comments, questions, comments questions glad you're still here on a serversothery. I'm a little person, that's my dog taking a picture of you. I wish you a driveway.
Send text, write it off. Oh man, I have a casual media place. We should all just get a room and have one big huge order because they're all just like this like sexual tension that we just need to release that house.