This is serious podcasting over here.
Sean, the last time I did this...
Actually, I literally pulled up the date of it.
It was in 2020. I think you were in, like, a wife beater.
And then you went to the bathroom and I heard you flushed the toilet.
I'm serious, dude. That's how far we've come here.
Hey, we haven't come that far.
These things... That still might happen today.
I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to 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.
In fact, I've given out to them as like, at events.
But their headline doesn't make sense.
It's sensory essentials that bring delight to everyday moments of care.
Is that— It's hand sanitizer!
Perfume? Oh! It's hand sanitizer!
Anyway. So check this out.
This story is pretty crazy.
This person starts out, she's distributing hand sanitizer in Africa where, you know, like sanitation, super important.
People get really sick because they don't have clean water to be doing blah, blah, blah.
And she gets this idea.
Like, what if I made hand sanitizer sexy?
Because at the time PURELL...
It was all like PURELL...
Exactly. Exactly. And if you think about Purell, Sam, what does it smell like?
Alcohol. It's like something you get at the hospital or from a teacher.
Exactly. Horrible smell.
Smells like tequila.
The form factor is 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's like, I'm gonna make it smell good.
I'm gonna make it look good.
I don't know if you've seen the cases of it.
It's basically like clear - It's like this sort of like almost Johnny Ive designed case.
Exactly. If Apple decided to go to the hand sanitizer market.
And she'll do collaborations, right?
Like Hello Kitty, Disney.
I mean, this is a whole different level of vision around hand sanitizer.
So she comes up with this idea, she goes on Kickstarter, and she raises $67 ,000.
She's like, okay, great.
$67 ,000. I could do a first run.
First year, I think she does like a million dollars in sales.
COVID happens and obviously people care about hand sanitizer way more during COVID.
Business just explodes.
Recently, this is now 2025.
It was just acquired for $880 million.
This hand sanitizer company.
And I love this story.
This year it's going to do 130 million in revenue and $55 million in EBITDA.
Wow. Exactly. Incredible.
And they're on Shopify.
There you go there's your plug well thank you thank you but dude isn't this a crazy story and how cool is this basically this this concept of like how do you take an ugly thing or like just a commodity utility utilitarian product but then apply like high fashion to it apply luxury to it and create your own category you know it sells for more it's it's the only hand sanitizer people gift to each other like you were saying you gift it my wife saw it she's like oh I just got that as a gift for our kids teacher on their last day of school.
You would never gift Purell to somebody unless you're trying to tell them something.
I have one of the cool, so we have a few million stores on Shopify, we're about 12 % of all 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...
This is because I'm a pejorative, it's not like boring products becoming very sexy.
And then, I don't know if you guys saw this, but literally a week ago, Dyson came out with this thing called the Pencilvac.
Have you guys seen this?
Yeah. Anyways, so, Dyson, the guy, the man, the founder, he actually did this press conference.
It's on YouTube now, I just checked.
He's amazing. Have you guys noticed - He's totally amazing.
Isn't it like a seven minute demo and he just came and dropped the mic on With a Epic Vacuum?
I think it's even lasting as like five minutes.
But exactly, there's like millions of views on this demo for a fucking vacuum cleaner.
And actually what I thought about, like one, Dyson's not a new company.
They've been around for a very long time, but this idea that he took something fairly boring, Made it way better and now he's able to actually leverage modern media like YouTube to actually tell a story I've been a bunch of people like are actually gonna buy their first Dyson product because of this video that ever did before Have you guys ever read about him Sean?
Have you read about James Dyson dude?
You and David Sinner.
I won't stop talking about James Dyson dude, like I started reading his book He's just like the man, but he's basically it sounds ridiculous.
He's Steve Jobs of vacuum She was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs But he was like he's like this type of person where he's like the inside wiring needs to be beautiful he's like, that's my guy.
But he took, I'm really interested in this idea of people who take none serious things, very serious, so vacuum, hand dryers, whatever, and I think it's so freaking cool.
And he is like that type of guy where he was like building the first prototype for like two or three years to the point where he was, I think he went bankrupt, but he still kinda kept at it.
Amazing, but you can sorta look across a bunch of different, like, 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 direct to consumer.
Is there really? That's one of those ideas that I thought that was silly.
Yes, Carly, just go ahead and log in and just start reading out all the numbers for these brands.
I'm not gonna do anything like that.
But what I will say, there's, you know, actually, let me, let me show you, I'm going to give me one second.
You guys know my best friend, David Siegel, I think you've had him on the show.
He's the founder of David's Tea, he's made, you know, took his company public.
He's awesome. $100 million of dollars.
Him and I have this like a 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 kind of see it.
It is literally like our way up.
We think that Duraflame needs to be disrupted.
That's a great idea.
So like we literally created a company.
You talked about this last time you were on the podcast. Exactly.
You talked about this.
So we had this idea in 2020 and actually so now David I have, we have a working prototype.
It's actually, you can read it.
It's literally made from Canadian soft wood.
It's 100 % kill and drive.
We have 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 10X version of it.
My wife's really into, she gonna 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.
Someone should go and disrupt the karaoke machine business.
That to me is such a brilliant idea.
Or tools, like you move into a new house and you kind of need random tools, most of these tool companies you buy at Home Depot, they can't get it to look good, there's actually a couple beautifully designed, almost like the touchline version of tools selling on Shopify.
People misunderstand TAM to their detriment, total addressable market.
Everyone kind of looks at TAM as being this thing which is like, there's a pie and I'm going to take a bigger piece of the pie.
It's a static number.
Yeah, it's very much like zero -sum and funny enough, you know, Sequoia has said this publicly So I think I could say it now, but like the reason Sequoia did 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 were actually growing the pie itself, right?
There's like this positive sum that someone who's starting, you know I don't know the person behind Touchland, Sean, but presumably this person didn't necessarily, she wasn't in, or he wasn't in this industry previously.
Maybe he wasn't even an entrepreneur previously.
But is that the story you told yourself when you were doing it?
Because when you're doing it, I mean, you got - No, you can't.
You almost cannot do it.
You actually have to almost imagine, let's just use Flint for a second.
By the way, this is not for sale yet, like this is a prototype.
So you can't go buy it.
But let's just... What you would do for Flint is you'd say, Okay.
What is the, what are the products in the market?
The biggest one is Duraflame.
How much does Duraflame sell a year?
What's the answer of that?
I think it's something that, I think it's like last time I was like, half a billion dollars.
And it was 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 7 -Eleven, I should also pick up my, my Flint as well.
So what you have to almost do as an entrepreneur is, you really have to broaden out the horizon of what is the potential.
Kat Kohl and I were just speaking last week.
Kat Kohl, who's the CEO of AG1, they're doing $600 million a year with AG1 with one single skew.
There is no way, Chris, who's the founder of AG1, there's no way that Chris thought about that, basically they didn't just grow their piece of the pie, they grew the pie infinitely, And I think those are the best entrepreneurs for me.
100 % database growth in just two years visit hubspot .com to hear how HubSpot can help you grow better All right back to the pot Have you guys heard a Sean did you ever meet Eric Ryan?
I think he spoke at the hustle con that you spoke at I didn't meet him, but I Know you never invited me to speak at hustle con I was just attendee, but I did attend the one also was anybody speak at hustle con just to say the thing Yeah, and we've actually decided to create our own called Yeah, we're the opposite.
I remember him speaking, and he was brilliant.
So people who don't know Eric Ryan, he did, what?
Method soap. So he basically went into a boring soap category and made it sexy and kept ingredients you understand on the back of the bottle.
That was the big trend.
But the bottle was pretty?
The bottle was pretty, and the photography was pretty.
They would do a photo shoot instead of it being...
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 were like, kind of like dating but they haven't really defined their relationship yet, but they're cleaning up their house together.
And that's what the, that was the photography on the website.
Moise did that too, right?
Moise did that with with Native and sold for $100M to Project Gamble.
Yes, Eric actually did it with Ali vitamins.
He also did it without Welly band aids and he has a new thing that he's doing it with, but I don't know what the new thing is.
Just shop it, you look at Ritual, Rich's 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 100 million, this is public information, they put it out there, $100 million in annual revenue, 80 % of it's recurring customers.
So you basically set them a follicle of hair, they analyze and they send you a shampoo specific for what you need.
I think that personalization stuff for shampoo, Obviously, I don't know if you guys take supplements, I take like eight a day.
I wish I can basically just take one pill that has exactly what I need specifically for me.
Do those eight a day actually do anything?
It's a little bit of correlation versus causation.
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 red wine with on weekends and so I can't necessarily draw a direct causality to it, but certainly I do think that and honestly it's not that big of an inconvenience if it helps me by five percent or 10%, I'll do it.
I'm also, I do every year for my birthday, I do something called prenova, do you guys know prenova?
I've been doing it since I was for the last six years every, my birthday's in November, every year.
That could make for a pretty bad birthday one year, you gotta be careful with that.
That's it. That might be a buzzkill.
The issue with that is obviously false positives, which I have just decided.
I think entrepreneurs and founders tend to be on this side of the equation, which is I prefer a false positive than a false negative.
Maybe you could answer this.
You're actually the only person I've asked this publicly, but I've never got a good answer.
How can you be a billionaire today and be unhealthy?
Like how could you be a fat billionaire today?
I would just get rid of the billionaire.
I think if you are, forget the billionaire thing for a second because I don't think, you don't need to be a billionaire to do that.
Do you know any fat billionaires?
I do but I don't wanna say anyone's name.
Of course. You probably know them also.
Maybe they were the thyroid issue.
I do believe that if you have the means and if you can have 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 wanna eat really well, here's what I really like.
So there's almost no excuse.
Same with a personal trainer, it is very difficult to go to the gym, it is much easier to go to 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 a chef, I have a personal trainer who comes to my house.
I'll find a way. The Will finds a way, and if I want to doordash something, I'll doorda Abbot and find a way.
If you didn't have the trainer come to the house, you'd be in way, I suspect you'd be way worse off.
Yeah, and also you have gotten way healthier over the last handful years.
That's right, yeah.
You know, when I had my first child, Bailey is now, my daughter's eight, so when I had her first child, so Dave Steagall, again, bringing up again, like Dave's a couple 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, he actually described articulated as, he said, it's gonna be a marriage saver.
And I didn't really understand what it meant.
And what he meant was just, everything is easier.
As a new parent at home, shop was already publicly traded.
I work 70 hours a week.
He's like, if you can afford a nanny, you should do this.
And I didn't really know what he meant by the whole it's a marriage saver.
In hindsight I now do, because some of the stresses that I think some people have, you just, they don't go away.
They're just less, You lessen them when you have certain luxuries in your life.
And I mean I grew up without money, so I didn't grow up in that world.
I don't take that for granted.
But I do see how these things get easier.
I heard an interesting story about actually last week.
I was with a person I'm not gonna name.
But he's a billionaire and he's a big time investor.
And he was telling stories about, we were talking about Shopify, I was actually talking about how I met with you, And I was like, man, Harley's so charismatic, like, it totally got me bought into Shopify even more.
And he was saying, he's like, yeah, man, I've met with Harley a bunch of times.
I know him well. I've met with Toby a bunch of times.
He goes, and I've actually met with Stripe a bunch of times, the Collison Brothers, 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 was like, why?
And he said, whenever I'm with the Collison Brothers, We talk all about interesting philosophical things and like what their hobbies are and things like that.
And whenever I'm with Tobi, the only thing he ever talks to me about is Shopify.
That's all he ever wants to talk about.
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 the market forces.
This is the beauty of this founder led thing.
I mean, I think the Collinson brothers obviously are this great example of a founder led as well.
They're obviously private, so you don't have the exact valuation of it.
But I do think that this era of founder -led companies, people that just really give a shit, there's no way to replicate that or to emulate the give a shit.
And I don't wanna, I actually wanted to spend some of the time episode where I was like, actually, Harley, I know you a bit now.
But Toby is like, he's still mysterious to me because I've never met him.
But he seems 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 seems super.
I mean and 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.
I mean that's, if you think about Shopify.
I think I said this at the time 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 a triple threat phase where like every - Is there like a, can you put a threshold onto that?
Like a number of people or something?
Yeah, I would say like for us it was like zero to, I don't know, Dunbar's number, you know, that concept Dunbar's number.
50 or 150? Yeah, I think it's 150, 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 150 or so.
It's like that, you know, Swiss army knife.
In those days, the Shopify, I did BD, I did sales, support, partnership with the App Store Partnerships Program, I was also the lawyer.
I mean, I was a General Counsel, I wasn't really a good lawyer, I'd only practiced for a few months, but - Like, right about a call call?
Yeah, 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 mark it for us around like the Series A or Series B where now like where more people can sort of slot into the right roles, meaning like you don't do one thing, but you do a couple things quite well.
That was sort of I was chief operating officer, and so I looked after a couple big organisations.
We built a sales organisation, we began to think about different areas of product post -pandemic.
so like 2021, 22, a couple of things had to change for us.
One is we were bloated, we had like 14 ,000 people.
That didn't work, we brought it down to what we are now, which is around 8 ,000 people, and 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 flexport.
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 quests.
But the third thing that happened and sort of in this new phase of Shopify, new shape of Shopify is these like spiky objects.
And what that really meant was, we basically brought in a new leadership team.
And part of that process was Toby and I sort of thinking about like, what are the things that we think 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 traditional roles of like, you do this, but rather like based on our strengths.
and as part of that Toby's not on the earnings calls anymore because it just, I got that.
I can do that, I think I can do that 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 16th year at Shopify, it'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 figure out what your spiky object is.
That's pretty cool.
It's pretty rare. I think that if you look at how many CEOs are the best storyteller in their company, it's actually not most, but they don't want to 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.
Didn't have the ego to say, 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 Toby refers to me as the lead singer of the band.
Like, I think a lot of companies throw around this idea of mission.
Shopify's mission is very simple.
Increase the amount of entrepreneurs on the planet.
That's it. And we increase it 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, all your employees would be a fucking quittin'.
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 grandparents are Holocaust survivors, After the Holocaust they went to Hungary in the fifties.
Hungary got really bad.
Hungarian revolution happened.
Canada let in 40 ,000 Hungarian immigrants in 1956.
My grandfather came here with my father and his siblings.
They came to Canada.
My grandfather ended up selling eggs at a farmer's market his whole life.
That egg stall, it's called Le 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 allows me to be here.
My version of that is I grew up in South Florida, I moved to Montreal to go to McGill when I was 17 in 2001, and my dad was no longer in our lives.
I had to support myself and 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 Toby comes to it in a very different way.
He's an immigrant, he lives in Germany, meets someone, a wonderful 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 then become Shopify.
You know, our buddy George Mack has this great phrase where he says, people only remember you're weird. Meaning any behavior that's standard that you do might be very useful, but it's not very memorable.
And so, you know, Sam was asking about Toby just now and you know, I think like you said, he's a bit of a mysterious character.
He's not somebody who's out there doing a bunch of podcasts 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 couple things that I think define, you know, 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 LLM that just came out like this.
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 a hundred billion dollar or trillion dollar companies.
Toby's in this group of people that are super technical that know more about the code base than anyone else in the planet.
The other thing that I think is 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 1st, every single year, for the last decade or so, the whole company gets an email.
And it's incredibly specific direction of like, what are we going to build this year?
And it's not based on necessarily like, you know, Serbet, it's based on his deep intuition of how the product needs to evolve.
And in some cases, you know, it's Shopify runs some of the largest flash sales on the planet.
Like for Supreme or Taylor Swift or these these massive, crazy throughput, 30 ,000 transactions a minute type stuff.
So sometimes it's like, we have to be able to like 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 Shopify has to make it super easy to sell across every surface area.
I announced two weeks ago what we're doing with Roblox inside of like basically the Roblox universe that now we're embedding commerce into there as well.
Toby didn't say, go do like Roblox.
What he did say was, make sure that everywhere where consumers are spending their time, there is a way for our existing merchants to easily turn on that channel.
And it turns out, like in some of the Roblox, I forget what the DAUs are, but it's ridiculous.
I think there's 700 million monthly users in the metaverse.
I think the largest chunk of those are in Roblox.
It's like $100 billion industry today.
it's gonna be like 930 billion by 2030, I think.
So we're like effect, so that's the type of stuff that he does is that he doesn't necessarily like...
I know some CEOs will go and talk to customers.
He does it 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.
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 gonna elevate that person and let them do something, you know, something much bigger, much more creative.
And then probably the last one I would say that, and we're kind of talking about it earlier, is that I think what he's done for me is he sees a better version of me than even I see from me.
I see a pretty good version from me.
I've always been someone who's somewhat, 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 his expectation of me, and frankly, I think the entire team is that we re -qualify for our job every year.
And it's one thing to expect that your team is going to re -qualify.
Frankly, he also believes he has to re -qualify every year.
And the pressure that he, that, you know, like he hasn't put more pressure on anyone else that he puts on himself.
That, I think, is an amazing thing.
Do someone like him evolve into this, like, Jedi master type of guy?
Or when you had 20 people or 10 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 my t -shirt business that I had in college at McGill here in Montreal had gone it became you know pretty good teacher 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 that I would 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 thought if he looked at law school
as being like finishing school for entrepreneurship.
And 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 going to practice law, but I think it's going to make you a much better entrepreneur.
You learn 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, have never even 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 up becoming an early merchant Even in 2005 he was thinking about what the future of the internet might look like So do you remember?
Can you give us a bunch of those quotes?
Yeah I remember him saying like for example one of the things that like payments should've been built into browsers I'm like what?
He's like, yes Like the people that made browsers completely fucked this up Payments should be natively integrated, not through a third party, but natively built in to browser.
That makes total sense.
Identity should be built into browser entirely.
So he was thinking about all the deficiencies of the modern web, and then trying to effectively adjust Shopify's product to make those things much easier.
The other thing I think that he had done that I thought was incredibly inspiring is someone that praised the altar of entrepreneurship was at that point, there were a couple of companies doing e -commerce.
There was a company called Bigento, which ended up getting acquired by Adobe.
There was a company called Demanware that ended up getting acquired by Salesforce.
There was a company called ATG that ended up getting acquired by Oracle.
There was a company called Hybris that ended up getting acquired by SAP.
And those were sort of the players there.
There were some other ones too like Yahoo stores, but no one was really doing major GMB or volume on those.
And I remember him sort of thinking that, 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 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, like we now have, there's now been a trillion dollars transacted on, 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 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 $29 a month, I think it was $24 a month at the time.
That was a dramatic insight for me, that okay, if you couple ambition and incredible product technology, you can actually change the entire trajectory of entrepreneurship on the planet at a huge scale.
Where has he been wrong?
Where's the weakness?
Where's the human side of this?
Because it sounds amazing.
Are you guys familiar with the enneagram?
Yeah. Okay, so the enneagram is this, there's a lot of these personality things.
The Enneagram is the only one, frankly, that I think is worth any, 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 does 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 basic fears of being worthless.
Basic desire to feel valuable.
Oh yeah, that hits, man.
That hits. So first of all, for anyone listening, if you are working in a team with a bunch of different personalities, it's a really effective thing to do to actually figure out what they are on the Enneagram.
We've looked at, I mean, 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 and being an achiever, he is really tough.
I mean, when I bring him an idea, he will beat the shit out of it to a level that I have 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 20 words when two will do, he'll say two.
And 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 seeking the best result.
Like that is why he should be, you know, I will work at the company as long as he'll have me and as long as he's there because I believe he is the CEO that Shopify requires.
No one will care more about that.
But that doesn't make it easy, right?
And like, I know other companies, I talked to my peers, other companies are like, yeah, you know, like there is a, not a softness, but there was a collegiality to their culture.
That doesn't happen at Shopify.
It's not that we're not collegial, it's just like, that's not what we're trying to achieve.
This episode is brought to you by HubSpot Media.
They have a cool new podcast that's for AI called The Next Wave. It's by Matt Wolff and Nathan Landes, and they're basically talking about all the new tools that are coming out, how the landscape is changing, what's going on with AI Tech. So if you want to be up to date on AI Tech, it's a cool podcast you can check out.
Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.
Did you guys ever have acquisition offers?
You talked about how Magento sold and these other guys sold.
Was there ever a moment?
Everybody sold. Where you guys had an offer or a discussion that you had to take seriously and you had a fork in the road moment, you obviously ended up independent but was that always, was that the only way this could have gone?
If you look at the history of IPOs, particularly in tech, you will notice at Shopify, from a market cap perspective, when public at a much earlier stage than most companies did.
What I will tell you is we, first of all, did not return phone calls from Corp.
Dev teams early on.
Specifically because we didn't wanna get into that headspace, that line of thinking.
That wasn't what we were interested in.
We wanted to build a hundred -year independent company and we knew that those phone calls may result in us having meetings and talking to them and thinking about it and like, we just didn't want that in our minds.
It just, that feels like a real distraction.
In fact, you guys know this too because you both invest in a lot of companies.
Once you take that phone call from a corp dev person at a big company, you begin to inadvertently or inadvertently start a process in your mind of begin to think about what if.
What if this number is right?
What if the terms are good?
What if they have, you know, what if there's a space for me at this company where I can, you know, the pitch that a lot of these companies make, the big M &A 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 Klaviyo, Andrew, who's founder of Klaviyo, went public last year, and then Fiji, who was at the time CEO of Instacart, who's on our board, went public as well.
So you've had a couple IPOs, though, but generally companies are, and in the case of, you know, most of these companies, they're much larger.
They're in the tens of billions of dollars of market cap before they actually go public.
So our, we just didn't wanna get acquired, we wanted to be independent.
But were there ever times where you were like, I would like to take this deal, this would be nice.
No, truly there was not.
We did a 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 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?
Because it's tricky, right?
Like, even if you believe - Money - money - so money is - so my - so, you know, I mentioned my dad wasn't around when I was - got to college.
My - my dad, you know, he was - I love my dad.
He's a great guy. But my dad really never made it as an entrepreneur.
And growing up, 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 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 month.
That tightening of the belt happened a lot during my childhood, and so when we went public, yeah, for the first time, I had real money.
I was able to, you know, I was on a 10b51, which 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 Shopify, but I've taken money off the table so that I feel like my family is secure, my children are secure, we're never gonna have to tighten our belts and 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 moment at Shopify?
What was rock bottom?
What was the low? COVID was really, really hard. Maybe not for the reasons that, you know, you guys, I mean, remember Shopify went from something like, I don't know, maybe pre -COVID we were a $30 billion company.
I have your revenue.
I think in 2019, you were at $1 .6 billion and then in 2020, you were about $3 billion.
That's a big jump and it was a big jump in everything.
What happened during the pandemic was, I mean, e -commerce as a percentage of total retail was sitting at around 15 percent in the US.
So 15 percent of all retail was not online.
And then effectively, you had this pull forward during the pandemic where we jumped very quickly to 20 -something percent.
Sean, to answer your question, what was the hardest time in Shopify?
You know, we almost didn't make it.
We grew from 1 .5 to 3 billion.
That's when we doubled.
Can I finish my fucking story, guys?
Okay. So there was this manic period inside of Shopify.
All of a sudden, all this pull -forward, for example, everyone all of a sudden needed 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 2022 happened and like the market started going the other way and like 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 were not profitable.
So I think that sort of post COVID hangover was really tough for us and that's kind of where like I think you know you asked me about this different phases that's where I think the sort of the next phase came into play, which is okay like do we need to figure out what do we care about?
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, re -calibrated everything.
That was really hard. I wasn't sure.
I knew Shopify would make it.
I wasn't sure 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, post -IPO things, we went public 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 subscribing to this whole grow top line and also grow bottom line.
But pre pandemic, there were, sorry, pre IPO, they were, I mean, that was hard, right?
I mean, we were bootstrapped for a while.
There were times where we didn't know if we can cover payroll, but you know, I think you have to be a little bit, you know, crazy naive.
Sean and I, you know, my last company, we were gonna do about 20 or 17 million the year we sold but I sold early in the year.
Sean has a business that is in like, you know, he's got his hands at a bunch of things that are potentially in the similar range.
I don't want to speak for him, but I don't think either of us have experienced this like 50, $100 million 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 quits, I got to go do the work.
And so what I want to know is like, 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 magic number.
We all have this magic number early on as entrepreneurs, especially if you grew up the way that I know Sean, Sam, and I grew up, at the way that, like, we all had this number, and I remember when I get that, I can basically extrapolate my passive income from it, and that's gonna pay all my expenses, and I can do, and then you hit the number, and you're like, it's like, 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 at 7 ,000 people and $100 billion market cap are very different than what it had with 70 people.
Which problems do you enjoy more?
This is my favorite stage of Shopify because, going back to the whole spiky object, the way I can add the most value of 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 my life's work gets to be more amplified today than it did 10 years ago.
I remember you, you've always been lyrical and good at talking.
You are now much better.
You are always, you are always good.
Now you are like, really great.
Do you have like a, do you have like a writer?
Like is there someone who's gonna watch this and be like, this bit hit...
No, you guys asked me for notes, you guys asked me for notes this morning, I had to like literally sit down and write you notes myself.
No, there's no name up.
Yeah, I don't even think, I don't even know what I wrote to you.
Wait, what are you gonna say, Sean?
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 tend to be where the guests come in with you know These three or four bullet points.
I gave him some guidelines.
It's like, you know, I was like, no, I said I noticed you hadn't filled out the prep.
Doc we usually send a guest like a prep doc and they fill it out and then it gives us kind of like a You know some options of where you can go in the conversation.
He goes prep doc, dude Let's just hang and I was like, oh yeah.
Oh, I gotta be I gotta be cool.
Okay, my bad Yeah, so so I mean I had I have a team of people that helped me with things like what I'm preparing for But no. This is me.
There's no notes. No, dude.
You should. I actually heard a couple of stories recently that have really inspired me.
Okay, let me give you a little...
It's a framework that I think most people underestimate.
Okay. So, there's a story in sports that LeBron James spends a million dollars a year on his body.
The number is actually kind of irrelevant, but the idea is directionally correct.
Lebron James spends a lot of money on his body and he has certain treatments and coaches and protocols that he follows that the average athlete is not following.
In fact, we went to an NBA team and I said, Like how many of you guys have chefs and less than half of that team in the NBA raised their hand I was like this is insane.
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 you know it's playing and so LeBron does that in his field.
I then talk to somebody who knows Peter Thiel very well and I go you know it's weird because And Peter, he's not like a smooth talker, right?
He's actually like, he stutters a bunch, he stumbles.
But when Peter Thiel goes on tour, and he does it like every, you know, 7 to 10 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 his words, but he's very effective.
And look, you know, if you remember, he did one where it was universities are a bubble.
And he went on a whole tour with that, and then he launched the Thiel Fellowship underneath it.
And he did one which was, competition is for losers.
And he has these slogans, almost like marketing slogans, a competition is for losers then you launch zero to one, his book that was all about how to build a monopoly.
And he did one with, when Trump first ran and he was like, and for founders, we wanted flying cars but all we got was 140 characters.
Now, Peter did not write that line.
In fact, what my friend told me is that Peter actually kinda 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 politician's speechwriters would, and they actually craft the message, and they write it out, and they basically get him prepped for me.
He's not showing up and just winging it, and because maybe he's not that great at winging it.
David Rubinstein does the same thing.
I know David, so David actually has even a larger team, because he does the show, the TV show, when he's obviously with Carla and stuff.
So, I don't necessarily have a writer per se.
I do have people that kind of remind me of like, hey, remember that this is kind of the direction.
I'll give you the best example.
Earnings calls. I meet with my Jeff Hoffmeister, amazing CFO. I met with Jeff and our IR team.
And I'm like, all right, what are the three or four things that we want to say?
And then I basically take it and I hardly arise it, I make it sound like me.
So can you give an example?
So an example is like, we want to be on Roblox or something.
On the Roblox thing, it's really about the fact that Shopify is no longer 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, wanna sell in Roblox if you're selling hand sanitizer, but if you're selling another product and your audience spends time in Roblox or in some sort of metaverse, you may wanna 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.
We're also on Pinterest and Instagram, there's literally a Shopify for Spotify channel where you can actually, 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 profile.
And rumors are you're going to be on Chachipatie.
That's rumors, yeah.
We're not going to go there today, but exactly.
We want to be wherever you affectively have consumers.
So earnings was three weeks ago.
And I love earnings.
I go, I do my earnings call, I then do my analyst calls, then I do my media tour.
In this case I did, I did TBTN, which I think those guys are killing it, I did CNBC, I did some Bloomberg stuff.
I noticed that there were a bunch of other companies that, because I listened to earnings calls, a couple days before and a couple 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, is it Klarna or something?
He basically came out, I think it was Sebastian, and he said, hey, after his earnings call, the whole thing was done by AI.
That actually was, it wasn't even him, It was basically an AI emulating his voice and that's who did his earnings call and it made a splash There were a couple articles about it.
And so I listened to it I was like, yeah like That's like a five out of ten and maybe you can say it's a six hundred or seven at ten because he saved a lot of time and so is 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 of a professional executives that did their earnings calls like the PNG guys for example or the folks over at Best Buy and I listened to their earnings calls, and I'm like, yeah, they sound like they're reading a script.
If you go back, you don't have to do this, but you go back and listen to Shopify'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 going to repeat it again because it's really important.
And I'll use voice inflection and I'll use repetition and it doesn't, and what I've, and what I hear back from, 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 in my voice for we give a shit about this stuff, too.
And so, I think that 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, 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 so, 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 negotiating it into the call Right, I like that.
She 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 the others others know people I mean Banning offs fantastic at it Do you so Toby came out with this like memo that was like hey, it is a baseline expectation He didn't come out with it.
It was leaked. But yes.
Yeah, it was leaked something like that I always assumed those are like intentionally leaked I would have intentionally leaked that if I was him.
I think in hindsight, some of those things, when they do get leaked, you're like, you know, for better or for worse kind of thing, but yes.
But the point is in it, he was basically like, yo AI is an expectation, a baseline expectation.
You got to learn these tools.
The way to, the way to get good at them is to use them a bunch and you got to start solving problems using this was it was 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 personally in your personal life?
Two things. One is, I mean, I use chat GBT.
I really like the fact that now I like the history side of it.
So for example, like back to sort of longevity every time I get a blood test, I uploaded to chat GBT in a folder called a 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 a new one.
I said, compare this to my last one.
And it compared it to one from three, like a long time ago.
And I was able to spot it.
So it's not a hundred percent but I like using that quite a bit, too.
I gave a keynote at summit last week.
I literally fed my entire keynote script into Chat DBT and I said, hey, what parts of these do you think are confusing, if any, where am I losing the thread here?
So, I think that I use Chat DBT in particularly O3.
The O3 model on a daily basis, sort of like, I have two screens here, so based on my screen next to me, I always have that open.
I really like CLOD for other projects.
So for investing, for example, my wife and I do a little bit of investing.
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 Chat GPT is much better for reaching out into the public sphere, like the web, and bringing things in together.
Those are the two I use the most. And then back to sort of the earnings calls.
One of the things we did was We basically made all of Shopify legible and we built like about a dozen 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, Shopify Capital.
Let's say I want to talk to, like, we launch it in the UK, so let's say I want to go, I want to talk about that on the earnings call.
I'll go to the capital leader and say, hey, give me a couple of 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, the capital program, because everything is legible.
I was able to pull most of the data on on my own.
The personal jury's still out whether or not I'm missed, because when I talk to the leader of Capitol, I get some of the nuances and I'm like, oh you just said this sort of thing and like, actually I'm gonna take that and run with that, even though it wasn't, you didn't intentionally mean to leak it to me or tell it to me.
Whereas, using basically like the Shopify vault, which is where I'm able to access all this data through the MCPs, I find that I'm basically getting a lot of headline stuff.
But, I do wanna make one point.
One of the things 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 AI 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 make it a sort of, I have a project and now I'm working on my own, oh, you know what, I should also use AI and see what I can get from ChatGBT, or Clot, or Anthropic, or something like that, or Complexity.
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 new friction which is, before you can go and hire someone on your team, you first have to substantiate to Shopify, 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 friction of saying, 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 in most companies, which is let's just use AI as part of our, 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 reflective is sort of what we're trying to do.
I like that a lot. That's cool.
That's a great little nuance and sort of tactic.
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, with 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 3%, nobody gets to keep their job in Congress.
That's right. Watch. Watch what happens.
I mean, you get to do that at companies, I mean, back to like the phase of the company.
At the phase or size and scale of our company, we get to do stuff at this crazy scale.
So simply by adding a simple friction on hiring that says first substantiate it, you actually see incredible results, then you can evaluate.
You can literally say like, okay, well how how is hiring change since that that that emo was leaked?
How is hiring change since we added that friction thing?
It's very difficult to actually see the efficacy of all these things when you're ten people So you guys know this but I have a company called Hampton join Hampton comm it's a vetted community for founders and CEOs Well, we have this member named Levan and Levan saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem within Hampton which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a PDF.
It's tedious, it's annoying, and it's a waste of time.
And so Lavon, like any great entrepreneur, he built a solution.
That solution is called Moku.
Moku uses AI to automatically transfer data from any document into a PDF.
So if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote, or move info from an application into a contract, you just put a file into Moku and it autofills the output PDF in seconds.
And a little backstory for all the tech nerds out there.
Slavon built the entire web app without using a line of code.
He used something called Bubble .io.
They've added AI tools that can generate an entire app from one prompt.
It's pretty amazing and it means you can build tools like Molkoo very fast without knowing how to code.
And so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you, check out molkoo .ai.
M -O -L -K -U -dot -A -I. All right.
Back to the pod. Well, you look really healthy and you have a lot of energy.
I'm curious, 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 are you doing?
That's maybe 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 divided into two buckets, which is like I'm going to die of one of two ways.
I'm going to either die because of cancer or I'm going to die because of heart attack.
And so the cancer thing, it's not easy, but Prenova does a lot of that heavy lifting for me or at least, I'm 41 now.
So I'm now getting to the point where I'm taking it a lot more seriously.
So once a year, I mean, here's, Prenova is not the only one.
I like it a lot. I like it so much that I actually invested in the company.
My wife and I invested in the company a couple of years ago.
I think the way they do it, I think the way the technology is moving, the fact that, here's a very simple thing, a lot of people don't like going into these full body MRIs because they get claustrophobic.
So a small, you know, I guess, part of the product of Prinnova is you put on these glasses that have these mirrors and the mirrors go backwards into a screen.
And I watched, like, the most fun -loving light show that I can find for me that's Seinfeld.
So I'm also someone–I'm not claustrophobic, but I don't wanna 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've watched, but I never did.
I just watched the original Top Gun.
So I did the–I'm like, I do not want to be stressed out.
I don't wanna be scared.
I watched the Zodiac Killer documentary on Netflix, it was great.
I mean, that speaks volumes about both your personalities.
I watched like, Seinfeld.
Yeah, that's the personality test. So that sort of takes you around the cancer side.
On the cardiovascular stuff, I just did 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 liver, is a growing year -over -year now at least I can monitor that stuff too.
So I, to me though those are the two main buckets and then I just try to these like these massage Jesus like one thing every year that scares the shit out of me and the thing I really like right now is called 29 -0 - 29 and Jesse Isler's thing.
Jesse's 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 Tremblant, you can do it in Vermont.
But they created this incredible thing that allows you not to have to travel to Everest, Mount Everest, and you actually can do it, and so I've been doing this for my second year doing it, and I like doing it, not just because of the high five, it's cool to emulate climbing Everest, but I like the idea of getting really scared that I'm going to 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 29 to 29 thing.
Dude, how many, uh, last question, how many companies in the world are bigger than Shopify?
You guys are worth, uh, it looks like 153 today, or some, or one, whatever, 130?
You've been as high as 134.
You just rounded down by 20 billion dollars, just one of them.
It's casual. Casual.
Dude, what's crazy is like, you're worth 134 .56 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 crazy.
It's crazy for sure.
No, it's wild. Let me, one more call out for, if you were listening to this and you are a company that actually like, you understand your business well, you see great growth potential.
This idea of avoiding the public markets is insanely silly to me.
It's been an incredible, 40 quarters in now.
It's been like an incredible journey for us.
It makes us a better company.
It allows, I think the people that use Shopify Find more confident me 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 That's the product is that like being publicly traded provide some sense of stability Well, what I was gonna say was I looked it up on chat Conflict.
So there are probably 120 companies in the world bigger than you Which means of all the companies that have ever been started?
of all the companies that are out there right now and probably in the history given that like today's companies are bigger than everyone else you are in like the top 150.
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 almost that's for our friends.
Fuck he's not one of us damn it and then I like see this and then I see the stats and I'm like he's so good at his job that he's tricked me into thinking that he's relatable.
You know me personally I I think I said this in the beginning, right?
I was guess 118 on your podcast. We are not the same, my friend.
We are not the same.
And now you've had over 750 of them and - We are not the same, but if there were a ratio of like, I feel like I could do whatever he's done to - Approachability to market cap ratio.
Yeah, you get the gold medal.
I think that's the sweetest thing you've ever said to me, Sam.
You know, what's one of the best things I did after that first podcast, is basically every year for the last five years, I take about 20 % of whatever my profits all out of my Shopify store and I just buy Shopify stock, and that alone I think has compounded as good or better as my actual ecom brand because now my earnings are growing.
Whereas like, if I just reinvested it in the business, not every business you can reinvest 100 % of your profits back into.
And so just that one little habit has been very, very helpful for me.
Well that means a lot to me.
It's actually incredibly neat.
We're doing this thing called chocolate milestones.
Like basically, it's our version of like the Emmys or the Oscars for for actors or the Grammys for musicians, we give these Milestone awards, you guys have probably seen them around, this is the 10 ,000 one, so we give it out for 10 ,000 orders, 100 ,000, and a million orders.
Dude, I got a bone to pick, y 'all are so slow, I got my Milestone, but I'm already on the next order of magnitude, like this, it's so slow, how the hell you guys send these out?
I mean, these are heavy, we had to like ship them out and stuff, there's a lot of people, but anyway, so I get to, I deliver them to these Milestones in person.
That's your excuse, they're heavy.
So, you need to get to a million first, and I'll deliver your million one, Sean, but I meet these people and I deliver them, And often what I hear is not only obviously they built their business on Shopify, but many of them, like, they're also shareholders.
Which I think is an unbelievable endorsement as like, it's one thing to use the product and build your business on it, but then also to invest your hard earned money into - To 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 want to get it back in a different way.
You made it sound way less romantic than I did.
Exactly, let's be real here.
Dude, thanks for coming on, man.
Dude, this is great.
Alright. So when my employees join Hampton, we have a whole bunch of onboarding stuff.
But the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing I made called CopyThat.
CopyThat is a thing that I made that teaches people how to write better.
And And the reason this is important is because at work or even just in life, we communicate mostly via text right now.
Whether we're emailing, slacking, blogging, texting, whatever.
Most of the ways that we're communicating is by the written word. And so I made this thing called CopyThat that's guaranteed to make you write better.
You can check it out, CopyThat .com.
I post every single person who leaves a review, whether it's good or bad, I post it on the website, and you're gonna see a trend, which is that this is a very, very, very simple exercise, something that's so simple that they laugh at.
They think, how is this going to actually impact us and make us write better?
But I promise you, it does.
You got to try it at copy that .com.
I guarantee it's going to change the way you write.
Again, copy that .com.
