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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/00426bd56b2ce7d4

This is serious podcasting over here. Sean, the last time I did this, actually I I literally pulled up the date of it. 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.
I'm scared.
That's how far we've come here. Hey, we haven't come that far.
But I want to
I'm putting my all in it like a day's off. On the roadless travel, never looking back. I have a Shopify crazy business story for you guys. Go to your internet browser real quick and go to touchland.com.
Harley, you might know Touchland.
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 uh is that perfume? It's hand sanitizer. So here check this out. This story's pretty crazy. This person starts out
She's
distributing like hand sanitizer in Africa, where you know, like sanitation is 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 Purel.
Exactly. And if you if you think about Purelle, Sam.
What does it what does it smell like?
Uh alcohol. It's like something you get at the hospital or a teacher from a teacher. Exactly.
Horrible smell. It smells like tequila.
Uh the form factor is not like
Nothing to nothing to brag about, nothing to show off.
It was a very pure utility product.
And what she did was she just reimagined it basically as a luxury product.
So she took hand sanitizer, she was 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. It's basically like clear beautiful.
like almost Johnny Ive designed like case. Exactly.
Exactly. It's if A if Apple decided to like go to the hand sanitizer market. Hello Kitty, Disney. I mean, this is a whole different level of of of of vision around hand sanitizer.
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 can 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 during COVID.
Business just explodes.
recently it 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 all it's this year's gonna do a hundred thirty million in revenue and fifty five million dollars in Ebita.
Wow. Exactly.
Incredible.
And they're on Shopify. There you go. There's your plug. Well, thank you. Thank you for plugging up. Dude, isn't this a crazy story? And how cool is this? Basically, this concept of like,
How do you take an ugly
thing or like a just a commodity utility utilitarian product.
but then apply like high fashion to it, apply luxury to it.
And create your own category. She you know, it it 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 and 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 L 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 stars on Shopify where 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 gonna sound pejorative, but it's not like boring products becoming very sexy. And then I don't know if you guys saw this, but like literally a week ago, Dyson came out with this thing called the pencil vac.
Have you guys seen this? Yeah. Anyways, like so to like Dyson, like the the guy, the man, the the founder, he actually did like this press conference. It's on YouTube now. I just checked it. He's amazing. Have you guys seen amazing? Isn't it like a seven-minute demo? And he just came and dropped the mic on the epic. I think it's even left. I think it's like five minutes, but exactly. But but there's like millions of views on this demo for a
fucking vacuum cleaner. And actually what I thought about like one
He he's been Dyson's 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 bet a bunch of people like are actually gonna buy their first Dyson product because of this video they never did before. Have you guys ever read about him? Sean, have you read about James Dyson?
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. But he was like he's like this type of person where he's like the inside wiring needs to be beautiful. He's like that type of guy, but he took
I I I'm in really interested in in this idea of people who take non serious things very serious, so vacuum, hand dryers, whatever. And I think it's so frickin' cool. I uh uh and he is like that type of guy where he was like
building uh the first prototype for like two or three years to the point where he was uh I think he went bank bankrupt, but he still kinda kept at it.
Amazing. But you you can sort of look it across a bunch of different like I I'm having my coffee now, like my ember mug, right? Like this idea of adding a small heater.
To a mug.
I think is like seems kind of boring. Ember is a great shopify store. So I I've been following them since pretty much day one. I mean, that's a huge company now, both in wholesale but also in consumer. That's one of those ideas that I thought that was. Carly, just go ahead and log in and just start reading out all the numbers for the I am not going to do anything like that. But what I I will say, there's you know, actually let me let me show 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's Tea. He's made you know took his company public. Many hundred millions of dollars. Him and I have this like uh tea business on the side we started during the pandemic called Firebelly Tea. Anyways, like we tinker like you guys do on weekends. We have this idea. It's literally I'm showing you a prototype right here. You can kinda see it.
It is literally like our way at we we think that Duraflame
Needs to be disrupted. That's a great idea.
So like we literally created the last time you're on the podcast. Exactly. So we we had this idea in 2020. And actually so now David and I have we have a working prototype. It's actually you can read it. It's literally made from Canadian softwood. It's 100% kiln dry. It's a great 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 10X version of it. I like my wife's really into she can hate me saying this, she's really into karaoke.
Have you ever gone and tried to buy a karaoke machine? There are companies that rent them to you because they're so big and clunky. Like someone should go and like disrupt the karaoke machine business. Like that to me is such a brilliant idea. Or, you know, uh tools. Like you move into a new house and you kind of need like, you know, random tools. Most of these tool companies you buy like at you know, home deal.
Depot, they're gonna look good. There's actually a couple like beautifully designed, almost almost like the touchline version of tools selling on Shopify.
People misunderstand Tam.
to their detriment, total adjustable market. Everyone kinda looks at TAM as being this thing, which is like, what is the ex like there's there's a pie and I'm gonna take a bigger piece like it's a static number.
Yeah, it's it's very much like zero sum. And and funny enough, uh, you know, Sequoia has said this publicly. I'm sorry I think I could say it now, but like the reason Sequoia didn't invest in Shopify.
15, 16 years ago was they looked at the TAM of retail SMBs on 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 we're actually growing the pie itself, right? This like this positive sum that someone who's starting, you know, I I don't know the person um behind Touchland, uh 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 he wasn't even an entrepreneur. But is that the story you told yourself when you were doing it? Because when you're doing it, I mean you guys can't. No, of course you can't. That's the th the you you almost cannot do it. You actually have to almost imagine like, you know, let's just use Flynn for a second by the way, this is not
for sale yet. Like it's just a prototype. 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 m products in the market? The biggest one is Duraflame. How much does Duraflame sell a year or something what's the answer to that?
Yeah, I think it's something I think it's like we last time we tried was like half a billion dollars.
And it's like Home Depot lowe's these sort of home hardware stores. But then one of the things David and I were thinking about is like, why are these not sold in convenience stores, right? Like why do I have to go to Home Depot for it? Why if I'm picking up like my weekend beer at a bodega or a seven eleven, I should also pick up my my Flint as well.
So what you be you have to almost do as an entrepreneur is you really have to kind of like broaden out the horizon of like what is the potential. Yeah, Cat Cole uh and I were just speaking last week. Cat Cole, who's a CO of AG One, they're doing six hundred million dollars a year with AG One.
With one single skew.
There is no way Chris was a founder of AG One. There's no way that Chris thought about that like, you know, like
Basically they didn't just grow their p their piece of the pie. They could they grew the pie.
In like infinitely.
And I think that's
I those are the best entrepreneurs for me.
Have you guys heard um Sean, did you ever meet Eric Ryan? I think he spoke at the HustleCon that you spoke at. I didn't meet him, but I um
No, you never invited me to speak at HustleCon, I was just the attendee, but I did attend the one. Yeah. And we've actually decided to create our own called uh Super HustleCon. Yeah, it's not a shit.
Um
But yeah, I remember him speaking and he was brilliant. So he for people who know Eric Ryan d 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. But the bottle was 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 those like pharmaceutical commercials where they show a cartoon germ and he's getting sprayed? It was like
Two really hot people who are like kind of 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 on the website. Moyes did that too, right? Moyes did it with with Native and sold for a hundred million dollars to to Project Gamble. Yes.
Eric actually did it with Ali vitamins. He also did it with uh Wellie Band Aids and he has a new thing that he's doing it with, but I don't know what the new thing is.
I mean I I I have like like you look at sh just Shopa, you look at Ritual, which is vitamins, or Seed, which is 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 public information, they put it out there,$100 million in annual revenue, 80% of his recurring uh customers. So you basically like send them a follicle of hair, they analyze and they send you a shampoo specific for what you need.
I think like that personalization stuff for shampoo, even I 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.
Do those eight a day actually do anything?
It's a little bit of of
You know, correlation versus causation.
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 out more and I'm eating much better and I'm drinking far less, you know, red red wine with with on weekends. And so uh I can't necessarily draw a direct c you know causality to it. But certainly I do think that and and honestly it's not that big of an inconvenience if it helps me by
five percent or ten percent, I'll do it.
Um I'm also I I do every every year for my birthday I do something called Prenova. Do you guys know Prinova? Yeah.
Yeah, you know. I've I've been doing it since I was
uh for the last six years every uh my birthday's November every year go to New York and for a a pretty bad birthday one year uh you gotta be careful. I mean that's the the the issue. The issue with that is obviously false false positives, 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.
Have you maybe you could answer this. You're you're actually the only person I've asked this publicly.
Uh 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 um if you are if if for forget the billionaire thing for a second, because I don't think that you don't need to be a billionaire to do that. Do you know any fat billionaires?
I I do, but I don't want to say anyone's name or you you probably know them also. Uh but I I I
Maybe maybe maybe they were the thyroid issue. I do believe that if you have the means and you can have
You know, uh if you can have h like house you know, housekeepers, for example, or you can have a chef at home. It's like if you have a chef at home, no one's going to their chef and saying, Make me super unhealthy food.
Usually if you hire a chef, you say, I want to eat really well. Here's what I really like. Um, so there's almost no excuse. Same thing with a 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 up 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 have rich. I have a personal trainer who comes to my house. Okay. I'll find a way.
The the w the will finds a way. And if I'm I wanna door dash something, I'll door dash away. So if you if you didn't have the trainer come to the house, you'd be in way I I suspect you'd be way worse off than it's not. Also you have gotten way healthier over the last half.
Yeah. You know, when I had my first child, uh Bailey is now my my daughter's eight. When I had her first child, so Dave Siegel, again, yeah, bringing it up again, like Dave's uh a couple of years older than me, he's had kids before I did. He basically said to me when I was having Bailey, he's like, look, if you can afford to have a nanny
Uh he actually described articulated 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 everything is easier as a new parent at home. I was you know, shop like was already publicly traded. I work seventy hours a week. He's like, just if you can afford a 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 th you lessen them when you have certain like like luxuries in your life. Um 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.
Uh about actually last week.
I was with the person I'm not gonna name but he's uh
Like a he's a billionaire and he's an um he's a big time investor. And he was telling stories about
How he uh we were talking about Shopify. I was actually talking about how I met with met with you and uh I was like man
hardly so charismatic. Like it totally got me bought into Shopify even more.
And um he was saying, um, 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 um Stripe a bunch of times, the the Collison 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 10 times more than Stripe.
And I I was like, Why? And he said, Whenever I'm with the Callison 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$150 billion or whatever it is, that still comes into play. It's not just market factors or m the market forces.
It's this is the beauty of this founder led thing. I mean, I you know, I think the Collinson brothers obviously are this great example of founder led as well. They're obviously private, so you don't know 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 to or to emulate the givea shit.
And I don't want to like
I I actually wanted to spend some of the time episode where I was like
Actually, Harley, I like I I know you uh a bit a bit now, but like Toby's like he's still mysterious to me'cause I've never met him.
But he seems like a like I think he has this one quote where he goes, My wife says I'm an immigrant to the human condition. Yeah. That sounds that that seems super I mean and and and 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 at Sam when we were meeting, but like you think of the phases of companies, like at the beginning of the first phase of a company.
Everyone needs to be a 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 can you put a threshold onto that, like a number of people or something? Um yeah, I would say like z for us it was like zero to I don't know, uh Dunbar's number, you know that concept Dunbar's number one fifty or one fifty. Yeah, hundred and fifty, or 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. Uh in those days at Shopify, I did B D, I did sales support, um, partnership. I built the app store and partnerships program. I was also the the lawyer. I mean, I was a general counsel because I I wasn't really a good lawyer. I'd only practiced for a few months, but better calls all. Yeah, I I I didn't I didn't have a C we didn't have a CFO at the time or anything like that. So it's 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.
Um, that was sort of I was chief operating officer, and so I looked after a couple of 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 up 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 of businesses that were not
the right businesses 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 quests. Like what are 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's new shape of Shopify is
Um, these like spiky objects.
And what that really meant was we basically brought in a new new team, uh new leadership team. Um and
Part of that process was Toby and I sort of thinking about like, what are 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 kind of rearranged 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's not on the earnings calls anymore because it just I I got that. I can do that. I think I can do that at a at a at a really great level. I think I can eventually be world class to 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's Toby's 20th, and we've been public now for about a decade, but you can't 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 cool. It also it's pretty rare, I think.
Th 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 no uh didn't have the ego to say, No, I need to be the front man also. I need to be the lead singer.
Even though I'm actually the best drummer. So that refers to me as the lead singer of the band. Like I think a lot of companies throw around this idea of mission. Shafi's mission is very simple.
Like increase the amount of entrepreneurs on the planet.
That's it.
And we increase 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 thing to like like all your employees would be fucking quitting.
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, my my my my grandparents are Holocaust survivors. They w after the Holocaust, they went to Hungary in the 50s, Hungary got really bad, Hungarian Revolution happened. Canada let in 40,000 Hungarian immigrants in fift 1956
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 uh his whole life.
That that egg stall, it's called La Capitan, still stands today. 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 that 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 when I'm 17 in 2001.
And my dad was 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 use Shopify.
That's kind of how I got here. But
And Toby comes to it in a very different way. He's an immigrant, he lives in Germany, meets someone, uh a wonderful late woman who becomes his wife named Fiona. He moves to Canada, can't get a job as a new immigrant, wants to start a snowboard shop and finds it incredibly difficult to do so, writes a piece of code to sell these snowboards, which would eventually become Shopify.
You know, our our buddy George Mack has this great phrase where he says
Uh 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. Uh and so, you know, Sam was asking about Toby just now.
And
Yeah, I think
Like he said, 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 at Shopify. One fundamentally is that he spends a lot of his time using like
all the newest tech constantly. He's constantly reading the newest white paper on a new a new LLM that just came out. Like this idea and I don't think that's uncommon. I think you'd see that with Patrick or Zuck, 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 100 billion dollar or trillion dollar companies.
Toby's in this group of people that are super technical, that know more about the the the the code base than anyone else on the planet. The other thing that I think is is um important is one of the things he does every year is 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
Yeah.
Incredibly specific.
Uh.
direction of like what are we going to build this year.
And it's not based on necessarily like, you know, survey, it's based on his deep intuition of how the product needs to evolve. And in some cases, you know, it's it's
Um, you know, Shopify run some of the largest flash cells on the planet, like for Supreme or Taylor Swift or these these massive, you know, crazy throughput thirty thousand transactions a minute type stuff.
So sometimes it's like, you know, we have to be able to like to to have this type of throughput. And other times it's
Look, the future retail is not gonna be just online, it's gonna be everywhere. And Shopley has to make it super easy to sell across every surface area. I announced two weeks ago uh we're doing it with Roblox inside of like
basically the roadblocks 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 something like Roblox, I forget what the the the DAUs are, but like it's it's ridiculous. I think um there's like seven hundred million monthly users in the metaverse. I think the largest chunk of those are on uh are in Roblox. It's like a hundred and a hundred billion dollar industry today. It's gonna be like nine hundred and thirty billion.
in ten in by twenty thirty, I think. So we're like effective. 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 does that also, but ultimately what he's I think incredibly good at is the intuition on that. The second thing is I think he spots talent really well.
Um, he finds these people across Shopify that are un
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's in GitHub, he's looking at their commit and he's like
I like the way they wrote that. I'm actually going to 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 we're kinda talking about it earlier is that
I think he what he's done for me is he sees a better version of me than I even I see from me. I see pretty good version from me. I've always been someone who's somewhere, 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 gear. There's a fifth gear.
And he's like and and his expectation of me and and frankly the I think the entire team is that we requalify for our job every year.
And it's one thing to to expect that your team is gonna requalify.
Frankly, he ha he also believes he has to requalify every year. And the pressure that he that you know, like he hasn't put more pressure on anyone else than he puts on himself.
Um, that I think is an amazing thing. Does someone like him 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's special?
You know, I think a lot of people end up starting companies and working like, you know, spending their lives working with people that
They probably would have been friends with in high school.
Toby and I are
Totally different.
I'm very I'm like
Power extroverted. I love being around people. So remember, I came to Shopify as a merchant first. I moved to Ottawa in 2005 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 McGill here in Montreal had gone had d became you know a 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 school that I was helping to pay for or that I was that I was paying for. I was paying my mother's rent at that point.
A mentor of mine convinced me to go to law school.
Not to become a lawyer, but he sort of he looked at law school as being
Um, like finishing school for entrepreneurship.
And he was he was a lawyer. He was teaching law at the University of Ottawa. He said, Come to Ottawa, go to law school here. You're never gonna practice law, but we it I we I think it's gonna make you a much better entrepreneur. You'll learn, you know, how to critical reason, how to write better, how to think better, how to articulate yourself better.
So I moved to Ottawa, have no friends, never been to Ottawa before. It's the capital of Canada, never been there before.
get there and I'm like, where are the entrepreneurs? Those are my homies. Those are the people I always hang out with. And I met Toby through that.
And at the time he was just transitioning from snowboards to software.
And this is before I ended becoming an early merchant.
even in two thousand and five, he was thinking about what the future of the internet might look like. So I remember do you remember g can you give us a bunch of those quotes? Yeah, I remember him I remember him saying like, for example, one of the things that that like payments should have been into should have been built into browsers.
What?
He's like
Yes. Like the people that made browsers completely fuck this up. Payments should should be natively integrated, not through a third party, but natively built into 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's product to make those things much easier.
The other thing I think that that he had done that
I thought was incredibly inspiring as someone that, you know, praised at the altar of entrepreneurship was
At that point, there were a couple companies. There was a company called Magento, which ended up getting acquired by Adobe. There was a company called Demandware that ended up getting acquired by Salesforce. There's a company called ATG that ended up getting acquired by Oracle. And there's a company called Hybris that ended up getting ended up getting acquired by SAP.
And those are sort of the players there. There were some other ones too, like Yahoo stores, but like no one is really doing like major GMB 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 ex get get it going right away. And what if we were able to give
the smallest of entrepreneurs of companies of ideas, the same tools that traditionally only the biggest companies could have. What would happen then?
Well the end result is that you like
We now have to do it.
There's now been a trillion dollars.
transacted on Shop over over a trillion dollars transacted on Shopify. And yes, we have some very large stores, but the majority of those of that GMV is the long tail small businesses and those homegrown success stories, companies like Fashion Nova or Gymshark or all these companies that started out 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.
And I'm like
For twenty nine dollars a month. I think it was twenty four dollars a month at the time.
Like that was a dramatic um uh insight from me that okay, if you if you if you couple ambition and incredible product technology, you can actually change the entire
Like
trajectory of entrepreneurship on the planet at a huge scale.
Where where has he been wrong? Where's the weakness? Where's the the human side of that? Yeah, so he's sound amazing. Are you guys familiar with the Enneagram?
Yeah.
Okay. So the Enneagram is a sort of uh there's a lot of these personality things. The Enneagram is the only one, frankly, that I think is worth any w worth any any any review.
But um 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 and willing to take charge. Now go to three.
The achiever. Self assured.
Uh, what is that? Self assured, attractive. There you go, charming, ambitious, competent, 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 like man.
That is. So first of all, it i for anyone anyone listening, like if you are working in a team with a a bunch of different personalities, it's a really effective thing to do to actually figure out what they are in the Enneagram. I 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 challenger, being an achiever.
He is really tough.
I mm 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 outsized 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 doesn't 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 they'll have me and as long as
He's there.
because I believe he is the the he is the CEO of the Shopify requires. No one will care more about that.
Um but that doesn't make it easy right. And like I know other companies, I talk to my peers, other companies are like, Yeah, uh, you know, like there is um
uh not a softness, but there was a collegiality to their culture.
that doesn't happen at Shopify. It's not it's not that we're not collegial. It's just like that's not what we're trying to achieve.
Did you guys uh ever have acquisition offers? You talked about how Magento sold and these other guys sold. Was there ever a moment where uh 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 have gone?
If you look at the history of
IPOs particularly in tech.
You will notice that Shopify from a market cap perspective when public at a much earlier stage.
And most companies did.
What I will tell you is
We first of all did not return phone calls from corp dev teams early on.
Specifically because we didn't want to get into that.
headspace, 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 about and thinking about it. And like we just didn't want that 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 you begin to inadvertently or advertently start a process in your mind of of begin to think about what if
What if the number is right? What if the terms are good? What if they have a s you know
What if I there's a space for me at this company where I can, you know, the the pitch that a lot of these companies make, these big, you know, MA.
conglomerates 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 want to 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 one is Clavio. You know, Andrew is the founder of Clavio went public. Um
last year and then Fiji, who was at the time CEO of Instacart, is on our board, went public as well. So you you've had a couple IPOs though, but generally companies are and and in the case of uh 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 want to get acquired. We want to be independent. But were there ever times where you were like
I would like to I would like to take this deal. This would be nice. No.
There um uh true true, th there was not. We uh we did we did a a s very small secondary on I think it was the series B.
Which allowed me basically to buy a house, a down payment on a house.
And what's your philosophy? Are you are you like a de risker over time or are you like
fuck it all the eggs in this basket. Like what's your philosophy around that?'Cause it's it's tricky, right? Like even if you believe it' money money is so money's a mob so my so you know, I mentioned my dad wasn't around um when I w once got to college. My my dad, you know, he was I love my dad is a great guy, but my dad really never made it as an entrepreneur.
Um, and growing up, um, money felt emotional to me.
that some weeks we had and some weeks we didn't. We never we never you know, we always had food on the table, for example, but there were times where I r I remember as a kid often my mom would come and sit me down and say, Hey, like we're gonna have to, you know, tighten our belts this this this month.
And the the tightening of the belt happened.
A lot.
Um during my childhood.
And so
When we went public, yeah, for the first time I had real money. I was able to um I you know, I I was on a a ten B five one, which we in Canada we call an ASTP, an 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, than than Shopify. Um, 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 our belts.
And that
that that's not 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 Shofi? Was there what was rock bottom?
What was the low?
Cool. Um
Covid was really, really hard. Um, maybe not for the reasons that, you know, you guys
I mean
Remember, Shop If I went.
From something like
Um
I don't know, maybe pre Covid we were a t thirty billion dollar company.
I think I think in two thousand nineteen you were at one point six billion.
And then two thousand twenty, you're about three billion.
That's a bump. And it was a big jump in in everything.
P what happened during the pandemic was I mean, e commerce as a percentage of total retail was sitting at around fifteen percent in the US.
So fifteen percent of all retail was done online.
And then effectively you had this pull forward during the pandemic, where like we jumped very quickly to
twenty something percent. Sean, d to answer your question, what was the hardest time at Shopify, you know?
We almost didn't make it. We grew from one point five to revenue gold. Can I finish my fucking story, guys? So uh so there there was there there was this manic
Like period inside a Shopify. Like all of a sudden all these this pull forward, for example
Like everyone all of a sudden needs to go online. All these laggards that were just physical retailers eventually came online. And I think at that point it was like just
Get shit done.
And then
twenty twenty two happened.
And like the market started going
The other way.
We kind of 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 w 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, you asked me about the different phases. That's where I think that sort 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?
Um, 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 recalibrated everything.
Um that was really hard. I wasn't sure.
I I knew Shapley would make it.
Um, I wasn't sure if I was gonna make it. Was there ever a time where you thought that Shopify wasn't gonna make it? Pre IPO for sure. I mean uh post IPO things, you know, we we went public.
w at a time where we sort of knew what the next 10 years would look like. We were profitable. We were making money. We were, you know, we were subscribing to this whole like, you know, you know, grow grow top line and also grow bottom line. Um
But pre pandemic there was a pre
Pre IPO, there were I mean that that was hard, right? Like I mean, we were bootstrapped for a while. There were times where we didn't know if we can cover payroll.
Um
But
You know, I think you have to be a little bit, you know, crazy naive.
Sean and I, uh 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
Uh, you know, he's got his hands at a bunch of things that are that that are potentially in the in the similar range. I don't want to 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 phase now with my business where I'm like
Everything is fucking hard.
Like if someone if someone quits, I gotta go do the work. And so what I want to know is like
Does it 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 like the but it's like the magic number. We all have this magic number early as entrepreneurs, especially if you grew up the way that I know, you know, Sean, Sam, and and I grew up. The way that we like we all have this number in our when I get that, I can think of I can basically extrapolate my passive income from it, and that's gonna pay all my expenses and I can do.
And then the you hit the number like it's like
There they're 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 dollar market cap are very different than what it had with like seventy people.
Wh wh which problems do you enjoy more?
This is my favorite stage of 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 to 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 lyrical and good at talking.
You are now much better.
Uh you're always you're 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 and be like this?
No, you guys ask me for notes you guys ask me for notes this morning. I had to like literally sit down and write you notes myself. No, there's no name up. Yeah, exactly. I don't even think I don't even know what I wrote to you but I DM'd him this morning and I was just like, Hey, uh saw that, you know, whatever. Excited for the pod today and I was like
You know, the best episodes where the guests come in with, you know, these three or four bullet points. I gave'em some guidelines like, you know.
No, I said.
Uh I noticed you hadn't filled out the prep doc. We we usually send a guest 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 dog.
Dude, let's just hang.
And I was like, Oh yeah.
Oh.
I gotta be
I gotta be cool. Okay, my bad. Uh yeah. So so I mean I had I've I have a team of people that help me with things, like when I'm preparing for but no, I this is this is me. There's no notes. There's no but 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
Okay, so there's a story in sports that LeBron James sends a million dollars a year on his body. The numbers is actually kind of irrelevant, but the idea
I is directionally correct. LeBron J James spent a lot of money on his body and he has
certain uh 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
Uh less than half of that
team in the NBA raised their hand. I was like, this is insane.
Um 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 but it's building, or it's uh, you know, it it's playing.
And so LeBron does that in his field.
I then talked to somebody who knows Peter Thiel very well.
And I go, You know, it's weird because Peter
He's not like a smooth talker, right? He's actually like stutters a bunch, he stumbles. But
When Peter Thiel goes on tour and he does it like every, you know, seven to ten years
He's got this message and boom, he'll get like a ton of PR. His message is very effective. So he's not very efficient with those words, but he's very effective. And what you know, if you remember
He did one where it was uh universities are a bubble.
Yeah. Right. He and he went on a whole tour of that and then he launched the Teal Fellowship. And he did one which was
Competition is for losers.
And he has these like slogans, almost like marketing slogans that come just for losers, and then he launches 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 point they had, we wanted flying cars, but all we got was 140 characters. Yeah. No 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 of Peter's thoughts and then sort of workshopping his bits, like a comedian would, like a pol like a politician speechwriters would.
And they actually like craft the message and they write it out and they g basically get him prepped for media. He's not showing up.
And just winging it.
Because maybe he's not that great at wing it.
Uh David Rubinstein does the same thing that you know he's a I know David David actually has a uh even a larger team because he does the show and he does the TV show and he obviously with Carlisle and stuff. So I I don't necessarily have a a writer per se. 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 Hoffmeister, amazing our amazing CFO, I meet with Jeff and our IR team. And I'm like, All right, what are the three or four things that like that we want to s we wanna say? And then I basically take it and and I I you know hard hardly arise it. I make it sound like me.
So uh can you give an example? So an example is like uh 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 just an e commerce company or the commerce everywhere company. Okay, right. And that's what's important. So I'm using Roblox as effectively a proxy for explaining that you may not necessarily, you know.
want to sell in Roblox if you're selling hand sanitizer. But if you if you're selling another product and your audience spends time in Roblox or or in some sort of in in the metaverse, you may want to access it by being on Shopify, you are default selling everywhere.
Right.
Right. The story isn't we're on Roblox, the story is we're now the e commerce we're now the commerce everywhere. Pinterest and Instagram we there's there's literally a Spotify channel a sh uh a Shopify for Spotify channel where you can actually if you're if you're a large if you're Beyonce and you have an artist
profile like the size of Beyonce, you can sell Sacred, which is her cosmetic line on Shopify inside of her artist process. And rumors are you're gonna be on on Chat GPT.
That's rumors. Yeah. We're not gonna go there t today. But but exactly. We wanna be wherever you you you effectively have consumers. So earnings was three weeks ago. And I I love earnings. I I go I do my earnings call, I then do my analyst calls and then I do my media tour. In this case, I did I did TBTN, uh, which which I think th those guys are killing it. I did CNBC, I did some Bloomberg stuff.
I noticed that there were a bunch of other uh companies'cause I listen to earnings calls a couple days before and a couple of days after just to kind of hear the tonality of the reporters and the journalists, but also of the executives.
And Sebastian from I think it is it Clarna or something, he basically came out, I think it was Sebastian, um 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 him. It was basically an AI emulating his voice, and that's who did his earnings call. And it made it made a splash. There were 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 out of ten because he saved a lot of time and so it was effective. But there was zero, in my view, there was zero personality to it.
And then I watch a bunch of other kind of quote unquote professional executives that were out that did their earnings calls, like the PNG guys, for example, or the folks over at Best Buy and I listen to their earnings calls. And I'm like, Yeah, they they sound like they're reading a script.
If you go back, you don't have to do this, but if you go back and listen to Shopli's 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 inflection and I'll use repetition. And it doesn't s and and what I've no 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 by voice for we give a shit about this stuff, too. And and I so I I think that there is um 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 Thiel, I'm go I 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 40 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 kind 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 calls. That that was what I was looking for. That like kind of that extra that you go to that others others may be. Uh Benny Off's fantastic at it.
Do you uh so Toby came out with this like memo that was like uh
Hey, it is a based on expectation. He didn't come out with it. It was leaked, but yes. Yeah. It was leaked. I always assume those are like intentionally leaked. I I would have intentionally leaked that if I was him. I think in Heinzide some of these things when when they do get leaked, you're like you know, blessing. But the point is in it, he was basically like yo, AI is a expectation. Based on expectation, you've got to learn these tools, the way to
The way to get good at them is to use'em a bunch.
And you gotta start solving problems using this, um was the 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 GPT, other tools? Like what are you actually personally just using, either professionally or personal in your personal life? Two things. One is I mean, I use chat GBT. I I really like the fact that now it's um
Like I I like the history side of it. So for example, like
Back to sort of longevity, every time I get a blood test, I upload a chat GBT in uh in a folder called uh longevity and health. And so now I can ask questions. Although I do find if I say like I had a blood test last week, I uploaded by new one. I said, compare this to my last one.
And it compared it to one from three like f 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.
Um
I I gave a keynote at Summit last week. I literally fed my entire keynote script into chat G Bt 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 the thread here? So I think that I use chat G B T and particularly O three.
Um the E O three model on a daily basis sort of like
You know, on my sc like I have two screen here, so based on my screen next to me, I always have that open.
I really like Claude for other projects. So
for investing, for example. Um, you know, Lynn 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 ChatGBT 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 use the most.
Um, 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 MCPs inside of Shopify. So usually in preparation for an earnings call, I will go to let's say I want to talk about like
Shop like Capital.
I'll go um let's say I want to talk about like we we launched it in in the UK.
So let's say I want to go I want to talk about that in the earnings call. I'll go to the capital leader and say, Hey, give me a couple of the highlights for UK. It's a new one for us. I want to 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 jury still out whether or not I miss because when I talk to the leader of capital, I get some of the nuances and I'm like, oh, you just said this sort of thing and like I 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. Um whereas using basically like the Shopli vault, which is where we
I'm able to access all this data through the MCPs.
I I find that I'm basically getting a lot of headline stuff.
But I I do want to make one point. One of the things that that got missed on Toby's on Toby's 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 like be like being reflexive.
And part of what he's trying to get the company to do is to be
reflexive about the usage of AI. So that rather than sort of make it a sort of uh I'm I have a project.
And now like I'm I'm working on my own. Oh, you know what, I should also
use AI and see what I can get from ChatGBT or Claude or Anthropic or something like that or um complexity. The this idea of making it reflexively 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 have subs have to substantiate to 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 substantiating why they need to hire someone that AI can't do realize that they actually should have
AI can do a bunch of that as well. That is very different than what you're hearing, I think, of most companies, which is let's just use AI as part of our, you know, if I have to design something in Figma or in Canva, I'm gonna use AI to help with that.
This idea of it being reflexive 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, um, 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 deficit's so crazy. And Buffett has always said this thing. He's like, Oh, simple. I could solve the deficit in two minutes. Here you go.
If we run a deficit over three percent, nobody gets to keep their job in Congress. That's right. Watch. Watch what happens. I mean that is y you get to do that at at at companies. I mean back to like the phase the company at at at the phase of size of and and and scale of our company, we get to do stuff at s at this crazy scale. So simply by adding you know a simple
friction on hiring that says first substantiated, you actually see incredible results. Then you can evaluate. You can literally say like, Okay, well how how has hiring changed since that that that email was leaked?
How has hiring change 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 kind of interested in biohacking slash longevity. You're on a kick right now. What's got your interest? What have you what are you doing that's maybe uh uh you feel is is either interesting or working for you or you're enjoying it. Just give us kind of like a quick health dump.
So I sort of divide into two buckets, which is like I'm gonna die of one of two ways. I'm gonna either die because of cancer or I'm gonna die because of heart attack.
And so the cancer thing.
Um, it's not easy, but Pre Nova does a lot of that heavy lifting for me, or at least I'm forty one now. So I'm now getting the point where I'm I'm taking it a lot more seriously. So once a year, and there's pre nova's not the only one. Um I like it a lot. I like it so much that I actually invested in the company. My wife and I invest in the company a couple of years ago.
Um, 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, um
I I guess part of the product of Pre Nova is
You put on these glasses that are 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 somewhat I'm not claustrophobic, but I don't I don't I don't wouldn't want to stay in something like that for a long time.
Dude, when I went in, I watched Top Gun. I was like, Oh, what's a movie I should have watched, but I never did it. I just watched Top Gun. Top Gun. I do not want to be stressed out, I don't want to be scared. Dude, I watched the Zodiac Killer documentary on Netflix. It was great. Um I watched like Seinfeld. So that sort of takes around the cancer side. On the
Cardiovascular stuff. I'm I'm I just think clearly a clearly scan, which basically looks at blockages. So
What I'm trying to do, what I did initially was I just got a baseline of like where am I at right now.
The reason I like Prenova each year is because I basically can look over time how things are changing. If I have like a benign cyst on my on my liver.
Is it growing year over year? Now at least I can monitor that stuff too. So I to me those those are the two main buckets. Um and then I just try to do these like um
These misogyis is like one thing every year that scares the shit out of me. And the thing I really like right now is call twenty nine zero twenty nine. And uh Jesse Isler. Jesse Isler's thing. Jesse's uh he's done an amazing job. Him and Mark, who's his partner, co-founder. 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. I do it in Mont Tremblanc. You can do it in Vermont. But they created this incredible thing that allows
you not to have to travel to Everest, about Everest, and you actually can do it. And so I've been doing this this will be 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 to 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 nine twenty nine thing.
Yeah. Yeah.
Dude, how how many uh last question, how many um how many companies in the world are bigger than Shopify?
You guys are worth uh it looks like one fifty three today or something? Or
Months.
Whatever.
Casual. What's crazy is 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? It's kind of like crazy, for sure. I look let me let me let me one more call out for if you were listening to this and you were a company that actually like, you know, you you understand your business well, you see great growth potential. Like this idea of of avoiding the public markets
w 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 a better company. It allows I think the people that use Shopify find more confidence. I mean now we have companies like Hunter Douglas and Mattel and Birkenstocks using Shopify. I think you
I think one of the things they love about it as 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 chat GPT. So uh 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.
uh of all the companies that are out there right now and probably in the history given that like today's companies are bigger than everyone else
You are 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 when I talk to you, I'm like
He's just one of us he's like one of us. Uh and fuck, he's not one of us. Damn it. And then I like see the s I then I see the stats and I'm like
He's so good at his job that he's tricked me into thinking that he's relatable. You know me personally. We've like I I think I I said this at the beginning, right? I I was guest one eighteen. We are not saying my friend. We are not podcasting. We are the same. And and now you've 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 uh approachability to market cap ratio. You are you get the gold medal. I think that's the sweetest thing you've ever said to me, Sam. You know you know what's one of the best things uh I did after uh 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. It's cool. That alone I think has compounded every as good or better as my actual econ brand because it's now my earnings are growing, whereas like if I just reinvest it into business.
And not every business you can reinvest a hundred percent of your your your profits back into. And so
Just that one little habit, uh, has been very, very helpful for me. Well, that means a lot to me. It's actually clearly neat. I guess it we're doing this thing called chocolate milestones. Like uh basically it's it's our version of like the Emmys or the the Oscars for for actors or the Grammys for musicians. We give you these milestones awards. You guys are probably
Seen them around. This is the ten thousand one. So we get on for ten thousand orders, a hundred thousand, and a million dollars. Y'all are so slow. I got my milestone, but we're I'm already on the next order of magnitude. Like this yeah, it's so slow. How how you guys set these out. I mean these are heavy. We had to like ship them out and stuff. There's a lot of people. But anyways, so I get to g I deliver a bunch of these milestones in person.
Um so you you you need to get to a million first and I'll deliver your million one, Sean. But I meet these people when I deliver them and often what 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 a unbelievable endorsement as like, you know, it's one thing to use the product and build your business on it, but then also to
Invest your you know, your your hard earned money into be clear, not an endorsement, just a recovery of fees is what I was looking for. I said, Okay, I'm paying you guys this money, I'm gonna get it back in the case. Exactly. Let's be real here.
Yeah.
Dude, thanks for coming on, man. Dude, this is great. You guys are the best. I feel like I can rule the world of no

But I want to
I'm putting my all in it like my day's off On the roadless travel never looking back