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Optimal minimal.
Think this is altitude, I can run flat out
for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Can I also put some questions?
Now I just see an appropriate time.
What if I can be out?
I must have a nettyp organism.
Let me show you a metal hand to scale it.
Lead to Paris show.
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs.
This is Tim Ferris.
Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show
where it is my job to interview and deconstruct
world-class performers.
How do they do what they do?
My guest today is Reed Hastings, R-E-E-D.
Reed Hastings became executive chairman
of Netflix in 2023 after 25 years as CEO.
He co-founded Netflix in 1997.
In 1991, Reed founded Pure Software,
which made tools for software developers.
After a 1995 IPO in several acquisitions,
Pure was acquired by Rational Software in 1997.
Reed is an active educational philanthropist
and served on the California State Board of Education
from 2000 to 2004.
He is currently on the board of several educational organizations
including Kip and Pajara.
Reed is also a board member of city fund and Bloomberg.
He received a BA from Bowdoin College in 1983
and an MSCS in Artificial Intelligence
from Stanford University in 1988.
Between Bowdoin and Stanford,
Reed served in the Peace Corps
as a high school math teacher.
And you can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn
as Reed Hastings, easy to find.
In this conversation, we cover a lot of critical decisions,
critical mistakes, lessons learned,
first principles behind many of the important decisions made.
Culture decks, we talk about farming descent and much more.
It is a very strategic, very tactical, practical conversation.
So without further ado,
please enjoy a wide-ranging conversation with Reed Hastings.
Tim, so exciting to be here.
I'm excited to have you.
And here we are in Utah,
but I'm gonna start with someone who is not in Utah.
Maybe was never in Utah, Alfred Lee Luma's.
Yeah, wow, that's my great, great grandfather.
That's right.
And so long ago, one of the books that inspired me
and was a biography of Alfred Lee Luma's title,
Tuxedo Park.
So if you would indulge me in the audience,
would you be willing to share just a brief sketch?
My mom's paternal grandfather was Alfred Lee Luma's
and during World War II,
he played a role in developing Loran,
the Alice, supposedly Luma's,
but actually it was long range,
but he was like an early Bill Gates type,
I mean, not a successful,
but like sponsoring his own science and lab.
It was sort of the gentleman scientist, Ira,
in the 1940s, but I never met him.
And he also, this is just,
add a little color to the early part of this conversation.
Effectively, my understanding is predicted
or anticipated the 1929 stock market crash.
And that's part of what gave him the funding
to then bring these scientists together.
You know, it's like the guy who did big short,
and you know, those kinds of things.
If you guess right on a big movement of the stock market,
it's a great benefit.
All right, we're gonna hop a little further forward
to after college.
We're gonna bounce around,
this is sort of the memento style of my brain.
Awesome.
So I apologize in advance,
but I believe you found yourself in Africa,
and you can certainly flesh this out,
and ended up hitchhiking quite a bit
with very little money.
And the meta question is,
I'd love for you to say just a bit about that experience
and how you ended up there.
But I'm wondering how you have thought about risk,
just evaluating risk.
That word gets thrown around a lot.
People sometimes don't define it very well for themselves,
but you seem to perhaps frame it differently
than some folks.
I'd just be curious how you would speak to them.
I think I've always been pretty risk tolerant,
you know, spend a bunch of college hopping freight trains
and traveling around.
I spent a couple years as a math teacher in Africa
and then hitchhiking around on every vacation.
So that's always been very comfortable with me,
and I've been lucky that nothing bad has happened.
So my stays in jail have been short.
And I think all of that very much contributed
to my entrepreneurial success
once getting into business and tech
because I wasn't afraid to fail.
Why weren't you afraid to fail?
I think a lot of it is random genetics.
You either have a propensity to be cautious
or a propensity to take risk.
So I don't think it's any great character thing I developed.
You know, it's more like some people are very risk tolerant
and I think it's wired randomly into our DNA.
So the reason I asked about risk is that
there must be some genetics stock component.
I agree.
People have high vertical jump.
Other people have different mental attributes
or cognitive attributes.
But it seems like you've also been very good
at distinguishing between, and you'll see the tie-in,
good process and bad process.
And I'd love for you to speak to that
because it seems like part of that
is recognizing reversible versus irreversible
or non-reversible decisions
in the way that, say, at Bezos,
might think about one way, doors versus two-way doors.
Could you just expand on good processes
versus bad processes?
For me, free solo is bad process
because the mistake is the end of your life.
So there are some people a lot more risk tolerant than me.
And I try to take a lot of risks
on things that are recoverable.
So as you mentioned, Bezos calls them one way doors.
If there's one way doors,
then they evaluate them very carefully.
If it's a two-way door,
they're willing to get in and experiment and try.
And I think that's a great business philosophy.
I share it.
So generally, good process tries to help you
get more done.
For example, a weekly meeting where everyone shares context
and moves forward,
as opposed to just randomly getting together.
And bad process is the stuff that tries to prevent error.
Let's check everything
because it just gets in the way of creativity.
And in most fields, so not in medicine
and not in airplanes, but in most fields,
you want to move fast and some things don't work
and you fix them fast.
The interview that I listened to recently
between you and another Reed Reed Hoffman,
well known for a Greylock LinkedIn before that PayPal,
brought up pretty early in the conversation.
And I believe, again, the phrasing, right, the culture deck.
And I was hoping to hone in on a few of them,
a few of the lines or the tenets in that,
and just to get your explanation of the Genesis story.
Like where are these from?
So the first is, and I'm paraphrasing here,
so you can give me the correct phrasing,
but the reward for adequate performance
is a generous severance package.
Like getting that right.
Big picture is, I'm in the camp
that culture eats strategy for lunch.
It's all about culture.
And whether it's my first company pure software,
whether it's a second one Netflix
or a third one powder mountain,
its culture runs through all of that.
How do you get human beings to work well together
and accomplish amazing things?
And one of the aspects of that is being around
other incredible performers.
So if you think about a sports team,
if you want to win a championship
and you've got 11 slots,
you know, you've got to have the very best player
you can get in any position
and they have to be a great team player,
work well with others.
So our model is built around that.
And so we said, adequate performance,
that you good enough, gets a generous severance package.
And the reason we wanted people to focus on that
is how different it was,
because normally adequate for work
is good enough to stay.
And we said, what if a place was filled
just with amazing people?
And you had that kind of talent density.
And that focus on culture
through these three very different organizations.
So my first company pure software
was Super Geeky software, Enterprise Sales.
Second one was film and television streaming
around the world and third is powder mountain.
You know, very different.
But what unifies them is this specialist approach.
Roughly speaking, team, not family around culture.
And how effective that can be in very different areas.
So I believe something like two out of three prospects
in the hiring process,
we get really excited after reading this document
or being exposed to this document.
But one out of three would bulk.
I'm wondering when you introduced
or when this was in the early days,
let's just say sub 100 employees at Netflix,
when did you expose people to the culture deck?
And we always had 50 hundred page slides
of what our culture was.
And it was used for employees.
And new employees would get exposed at it
at the new employee meeting.
And most of the time their managers had told them
all about it in the hiring process,
but occasionally they didn't.
And the new employee would be shocked, oh my God.
And so we realized we should really give it to all candidates.
But if you do that, it's pretty much public.
And of course, it quickly became public.
And at first, we were like, oh, but then it was great
because it was out in the open.
And those who loved it, who wanted a high performance team
were very into us.
And those who wanted job security
as their main focus were not into us.
So it really helped people self-select in a positive way.
What were some of the line items
that quickly helped people to select out
or put a different way?
Like what were some of the principles
that caused the strongest reaction and focus?
Well, I think you hit one with performance.
The other is probably team, not family.
And so family has been the primary organizational unit
for 10,000, 100,000 years.
All countries were organized around families, kingdoms.
It's only recently that we had democracies.
And certainly most companies have always been
family-based companies.
So family units are how we think.
And in a family, what we admire is incredible loyalty.
Your brother goes to jail and you stick by them, right?
Parents do anything when you maintain that love
and lack of judgment.
However, in a company, a family can be kind of dysfunctional
think of, I don't know, the Ozark.
So that's one crazy family.
I would say we were one of the early ones
to just point this out and confront it directly
by saying team, not family, an impeaching family
and saying that loyalty is good as a bridge,
like over temporary either company performance
or individual performance.
But ultimately, we were about performance.
Just like a championship or wanting to be
champion chip sports team.
This is going to seem like a very, it is.
I suppose a very tactical question.
But the generous severance that we just talked about
a second ago, my understanding is that's four month minimum
and you did that in Netflix from the very early days.
Could you explain why that makes sense?
Well, the people who were on our team
were trying really hard and they may not make it
but they'd done nothing wrong.
So we wanted to make sure that they could land
on their feet and have a generous severance package.
And of course, that's US standards there.
So they're higher in Europe because to be generous
in Europe is higher than in the US.
But think of it as we want people to feel like
I'm trying really hard and I'm going to give my all
and if it doesn't work out, I've got a parachute.
And does it also sort of not absolve
but minimize the guilt that managers feel
so you get a more accurate read rather than say putting
employees on a performance plan or something like that
and then that takes four to six months or however long.
Anyway.
Yeah, it's a great insight.
I mean, managers generally are people.
They like people and it's hard for them
to hurt people and it does hurt to let someone go.
So the fact that there's a big severance package
makes it easier for the manager to cut that person
and try to find someone else
who will be a rock star in that role.
So I'd love for you to say a little bit about pure software
and some of the lessons learned.
It seems like one of the lessons learned
and I'd love for you to expand on this
was that too much process can paralyze on some level
cause all sorts of issues.
And that harkens back to what we were discussing earlier
about the good process versus bad process.
And you've spoken about and written about
managing on the edge of chaos.
And so I suppose I'm wondering
how you find the sweet spot between those two.
So I would imagine also at Netflix
there are certain processes in place as a company scales.
But could you start with pure software?
In pure, I imagined it as a big semiconductor plant
where you're doing process innovation and yield management.
And every time we did something wrong
we put a process in place so that that error
wouldn't happen again.
And we did execute very well in one narrow market
but we lost the sort of creative inspiration.
And so when Java came along,
then the company was much weaker
and we weren't the leader in that.
And I realized, oh, we were micro efficient
at the current business.
But the real risks to most businesses, the market shifting.
And so we should optimize, if we want to
optimize for the market shifting,
we had to be to manage on the edge of chaos,
to be super creative without tipping into chaos.
The chaos really doesn't feel good
where the products don't work, the customers aren't built.
I mean, you all kinds of bad things there.
And so if you're going to run loose but not be chaotic,
then you have to have really high performance people.
That's why that becomes the key part.
People who get the overall context of what's going on
and don't need a lot of rigidity to get good results.
Okay, so you mentioned a word that I'm going to hit on
in two questions, which is context.
So we'll come back to that.
But I wanted to ask you about sourcing high performers
because I have heard you say that
you can effectively kick the tires and view,
say, hiring as a reversible decision.
You can do that.
But ideally, you would also be increasingly likelihood
of somebody sticking as a high performer within your culture.
And I've heard you speak about doing references well,
which means number one, you're sort of cold sourcing
those references.
Could you speak to that and also how you do reference checks
because it seems like at least when I've done
very little hiring compared to you.
But people are very afraid in a litigious society
of getting themselves into trouble.
So how do you navigate doing a reference call
and how do you navigate that?
Well, generally start on LinkedIn and look
for mutual connections.
And the key is that the reference has to be closer
to me or someone I know than to the subject.
Otherwise, if they're closer,
if it's the subject brother,
I'm not going to get the depth of reference.
And most of the time, I'm able to find a couple people
that worked with them at such and such a time.
And then most of the time, I'll try to do a short zoom.
And when someone's on zoom,
they're much less likely to lie to me.
And I can ask you a couple questions
and they don't feel like it's being recorded.
And so it has creates an appropriate intimacy,
but also a sort of semi-animity.
So that's one aspect, but it's just really important
and hard and then we'll, again, use lots of different ways
to try to find people that worked with a person before
and get to them directly.
Context.
So context versus control, let's just say.
And maybe you could use, you could certainly use Netflix,
but you could also use Powder Mountain.
How do you set context?
What does that mean for someone who's heard the word?
Obviously, they know that.
Yeah, sure.
Well, in other places.
The typical metaphor we have for companies
is industrial companies, right?
We've had 200 years of the industrial revolution, factories,
you make things, boss tells everybody what to do,
and you're really trying to drive consistency and process.
And that's how we have a million doses of antibiotics
that are good and airplanes that are mostly good
and that kind of thing.
But creative companies, again, like Powder,
trying to create an experience of wonder for our guests,
what we want to do is really empower people.
And so we set context.
We say, what are we trying to do?
We're sparking wonder.
That's our core thing.
How are we going to do that?
Create this unique place with mountain recreation,
and art, and beauty.
So we're setting context in that way.
As opposed to telling employees, when you see a guest smile
like this and say these words, I don't know,
something very reductionist in that way,
we try to motivate and educate our employees
that it's all about that joyous feeling of wonder
and how do we spark it.
And so again, that's an example of setting context
versus control.
And letting them make the sort of day to day week to week
decisions about how they implement.
Then they're both empowered, and they use great judgment
about things because they understand
how we're trying to change the guest experience.
Skying has gotten so crowded over the last 20 years.
It's less joyous.
And we are the distinctly uncrowded mountain.
That's our counter positioning.
And that's why that context is important.
I can second that having just come off of President's
a week and having been at Bouter was wide open.
And you know, it's really just that we don't take
the big passes, the epic icon passes.
And that's what keeps it on the edge.
That is a huge, huge advantage.
I wanted to talk about something that applies,
I mean, certainly to business that applies
in a lot of different areas.
And that is, I suppose we would call radical candor
or transparency.
And is it true that at least some iteration of that
came from marriage counseling?
Paddy and I have been married 34 years.
So we're very fortunate.
Early in our relationship, we had a bunch
of marriage counseling.
And the counselor was very good at getting me
to see that I was a systemic liar.
And I would say things like, you know, families,
the most important thing, whatever the phrases are.
And then I would stay at work late.
And he's like, okay, here's the situation.
You're going home for dinner.
This employee walks in with this crisis.
What do you do?
And I'm like, that's easy.
I deal with the employee crisis.
And okay, so it's like pretty clear
that you're not doing families the most important thing.
And so as I hit the crisis, once he helped me see that,
a, I could modify my behavior at work
where it had to be a very severe crisis and very rare.
And I was less of a hypocrite for Paddy
and a little more easy to tolerate
because I wasn't saying things like families
the most important than I'm not showing up.
So that's an example of, I think we humans
in order to get along in very dense societies
have learned to be polite and to say conventional things
without thinking much about, is that really true?
And that misalignment with how we act
and what we say can be very hurtful.
And so since then, I've been really committed
to trying to reflect and say the honest thing.
And then for example, the team not family
or adequate performance as an example.
Few follow up questions.
So with let's just say on the personal side,
the work crisis versus family time.
A lot of people listening, certainly,
will have experience with some degree of tension
between work and personal life.
What type of guardrails did you set up or conditions
so that you wouldn't continue to make that mistake?
One of the best things I learned from John Dorb
was setting a budget.
So so many nights a week, I would have dinners.
So it varied to different phases.
But let's say in one phase it was 11 nights.
So I had an 11 night budget.
And then if Tim Ferris calls, I might say,
okay, I'm gonna use one of my 11 slots or not.
But I would really stick to the 11 slots.
And by having a strict budget that you stuck with,
it was easier for this spouse
because it wasn't an unlimited thing.
And it was easier for me because then,
you know, I pick and choose and not say yes to a bunch
of other things would bite him in nice,
but weren't essential.
And again, different people's budget
will be different amounts.
But by having that explicit agreement,
I think it's pretty helpful.
You don't strike me as someone who has trouble saying no.
Maybe you are.
But would you then, let's just say number 12 comes in.
Invite number 12.
And you say no.
Would you state your policy in the sense that I have a budget
for 11, sorry, I'm out of slots and that's that.
Would you just say no?
Not generally, I would, yes.
Good luck.
I just can't make it as if I had a big conflict
with some other meeting.
The reason I'm asking about this is it does seem like
focus is a strength of yours.
And you've been able to institutionalize that
in a number of different settings.
For instance, to give credit,
or credit is due with Reed Hoffman and his classfully
blitz scaling when you had that conversation.
And he's like, yeah, I reached out to read
this read setting in front of me.
And I think he asked you to be on a board or something
and you're like starting a focused on education.
How do you phrase those declines?
Not to get too much in the weeds,
but I am curious,
because this is something people struggle.
I mean, I've always thought the people
who really focus on a few things will get the most done.
The problems of society are ones
that our parents and grandparents couldn't fix.
So they're like all very hard.
And if you make some material contribution
in one or two areas, that's remarkable.
And I think what can happen is people
get drawn into 20 different things,
and then they don't make much of an impact in any of them.
And once in a while you get an Elon Musk
who can do magically wide number of things,
but that's very rare and it's not me.
And so to answer question of how do you say no,
I say really, I just honest about it.
I really can't do that because I want to focus,
let's say, on education or powder mountain
or whatever the thing is.
Coming back to the radical candor or the transparency,
there are a few people I imagine
in the interview process we're gonna say,
you know, I actually prefer to be quietly deceptive
in a harmless way, like they're all on paper, they'll agree.
And my question is how do you,
I think this is a term you've used, farm for dissent?
Like how do you actually help encourage that transparency?
During the hiring process, I think we try to just listen
and be intuitive and try to figure out which people
to give a shot at.
Then when you're in a company,
and especially if you're a leader,
it's important to farm for dissent
because it's not normal to disagree with your boss, right?
Normal, we learn deference.
My job is to please my boss, you know,
as opposed to we want people to feel my job
as to help powder or Netflix or pure software grow.
Sometimes if to help them grow,
I've got to be willing to argue with my manager
and that's okay.
And so because it's difficult emotionally
in most companies to disagree with your manager,
we call it farming for dissent.
And we have managers do things like,
what are three things you would do differently
if you were in my job?
I would regularly, you know, every 18 months or so do that
with, you know, 50 top executives
and have them write down,
what would be different?
We would be in games, out of games.
We would be in porn, out of porn.
We'd be in sports, out of sports.
100 different business decisions,
what would they do different?
And that was an example of farming for dissent.
When you were going head to head with blockbuster,
back in the day.
Chippin mailing DVDs.
That's right.
So they come out and they decide to launch their attack
and then my understanding is,
and I've read and listened to different versions of this,
but there were a number of things launched
in sort of counter attack that ranged from banner ads
or advertising to selling used DVDs.
And then, I don't know if it was several months later
or a year later, and in retrospect,
none of those things really contributed
to the success that you had,
the victory that you had of a blockbuster.
How did you take that learning, meaning,
if we just doubled down on our core competency,
we would have probably beaten blockbuster sooner.
How do you, this is not quite the right word,
but institutionalize it.
Put it into the organizational memory
so that you don't make the same mistake again,
or you lessen the likelihood.
When I was a kid, there was a dishwasher,
so crystal maybe, and supposedly a clean better
because it had green crystals in it.
And it's an example in human behavior
of assigning meaning or causality to something.
It wasn't very effective, just say we're a great soap.
I had to say we're a great soap
because of the green crystals.
We're the only one that has these green crystals
spread throughout the dishwasher.
So when you've got a big competitive battle,
and all your employees and investors are wondering,
why are you going to win?
How are you going to win?
We say, well, we've got to talk about the green crystals.
Now we didn't understand it at first,
but we would do various things
that were kind of irrelevant like selling used DVDs.
And in hindsight, it's because we ourselves
needed to believe in the green crystals, okay?
And so there's a temptation in all management teams
to like focus on shiny objects in that way,
as opposed to just focus on we have great soap
in that case.
So in hindsight, what we did is wow,
we really got to, we spent 20% of our effort, not 80%,
but 20% of our effort on green crystals.
And we could have done better
if we had had the discipline and confidence
to just execute on the core better.
So that would be DVD shipping time,
producing DVD breakage, better envelopes,
making the core work better.
And I think this is on the Netflix website.
My team sent this to me because I was asking
a number of follow up questions on the culture deck.
And I believe it's very explicitly stated
if you are being disloyal to Netflix,
if you disagree with someone
and you do not voice that disagreement
or if you disagree with your boss,
it's very, very explicit.
To disagree silently is disloyal.
Yeah, okay, there we go.
In the early days, let's just say sub 100.
Maybe it's sub 50.
Which of the principles in that culture docked
do you think were most valuable
to have permeate the smaller organization?
And it could be one of the main elements.
And it could be one of the main elements.
Team Not Family, because if you've got that,
that is the energy driver
because everyone around you is amazing.
You learn so much, you attract other amazing people.
So kind of talent farming in that way.
And specifically the density of talent.
Almost every organization has some fantastic people.
It's an incredible feeling when everybody is amazing.
So part of that is hiring, part of that is firing.
I mean, there's a lot of between.
But how did the keeper test?
What is the keeper test and how did that come to be?
When I was maybe seven or eight years old,
I caught a large fish.
And my dad said, that's a keeper read.
So I always remembered that.
And when thinking about this test,
so the test is if someone's thinking about quitting
and going to a different firm,
would we try to change their mind to keep them?
Or would we say, bummer, but go ahead?
And so we wanted to fill the company
with people that we would fight to keep.
And so that's the keeper test.
And what we say is, if we wouldn't fight to keep someone,
we should proactively give them a generous severance package
and try to find someone that we might well fight to keep.
So we're going to ask maybe a mundane question, but well, few.
One is how frequently was that done as an exercise
for the managers in the company?
And secondly, would you fire someone
and then find a replacement or get the search going for replacement
and then fire the person?
And I know it might seem like a really kind of nitpicky question.
Generally, we would let people go and then do the search
because you want the search to be open.
And we want to treat the person with respect.
They're trying hard.
And think of it as we wanted to let people go in the way
that we would want to be let go if we're on the other side,
which is difficult, but let's be direct and thoughtful
and supportive on it.
And then it's up to managers how often they might think
about it once a quarter, what I really
fight to keep that person.
And then it's a degrees of, oh my god, I pull out all the stops.
I'd be like, that person is the most incredible too.
Yeah, I think I'd fight to keep them some,
and that's fine.
Versus the big one that done covers is,
no, if the person left had to be fine.
And we want to make sure that that manager gives that person
a severance package.
I've read at least in two places, maybe three,
about your fondness for beyond entrepreneurship, Jim Collins.
But specifically, the first 80 pages, I think,
and the ability to go back every year
and reread these 80 pages.
So I've had Jim on the show twice, I think,
and he's amazing.
And I've read quite a bit of his work.
I've never read that one.
What are some of the things that really stick out to you
in those first 80 pages?
And that's where he really does the role of self-discipline,
sort of rinsing the cottage cheese for Natalie
and the important.
What does that mean?
Yeah, it's someone who's so manic about their diet,
that they rinse the cottage cheese, something, you know,
the milk way, I don't know.
So for me, this was when I was 32, it came out.
And it was the first management book that made me feel
like I could succeed, because it wasn't, you know,
like Larry Ellison, or these huge personalities, you know,
he pointed out of how many people had great success
of sort of quiet determination and discipline,
and how much caring about the organization first
over yourself made a difference.
So a lot of fundamental precepts, which
gave me permission to be myself and not try to be Mr.
charisma, flamboyant, which is kind of the CEOs
that you read about.
So I think that's why it was so impactful.
What are, I'm sure there are, the other handful of books
that you have recommended the most are gifted the most
to people who are, would be entrepreneurs
or entrepreneurs slash founders.
Probably the Jim Collins oriented stuff
is good, Patrick Lensione's five defunctions of a team,
the advantage, those are excellent.
So those are ones.
And then, you know, on the more human side,
sapiens, you've all Harares book of sort of the meaning
of life and understanding the big picture,
you know, is extraordinary.
Do you read much fiction?
I know you read the, and like the over story.
I believe.
But no, I don't read that much.
I tend to do fiction on film and series,
and then I'll do biography.
Although I'll watch, I'll watch the Helen Ready
biography, I am woman.
So, you know, I like a lot of nonfiction,
both in reading and in film and in film.
Any standouts in recent memory?
Well, I get in two days ago, I watched a five-year-old
biopic of Helen Ready, Australian woman
who broke through in New York, in LA.
You know, an incredible number of hits in the 70s and 80s,
including I am woman.
So it's a super well done biopic.
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors,
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So we could talk about it, and certainly I'm open to it.
But you've had a lot of big wins.
You've had a lot of highlights.
I'm wondering if you have any favorite failures
and I'll put that in quotation marks
from Netflix stays or before.
In I say favorite failures, meaning something
that really did not go as you had hoped,
but that actually somehow set the stage
for larger successes later in some fashion.
I get a little bit of irony in favorite failure.
I would say our Quickster episode at Netflix.
So we were growing in DVD and streaming since 2011.
And we realized the future was streaming.
The customers currently were doing DVDs.
And we decided to split into two companies,
one called Quickster, to do the DVDs
and the other Netflix to do the streaming.
It was roughly the right idea, but five years too early.
The customers were screaming mad
because they mostly used DVD.
Streaming at that point, you couldn't get to the television.
So it was really just like streaming to a laptop.
So it wasn't like a very great solution.
We didn't have that much content.
And what I learned about it was
sometimes you can be so strategic in long term
that you don't bring along the customers with you.
Then I made it worse by trying to do a YouTube video
of an apology.
And the head is very odd, teal shirt.
And it was just like everything was wrong.
I take it there a lot of comments.
Teal shirt.
Which four years later we burned it as ceremony.
So the reason it's the favorite failure is
because you can go from a string of amazing successes
to arrogance.
And that's kind of what happened.
And so it's ever since that we've done a lot more
kind of ground to checking.
So just a follow up related to that.
Internally, how is that decision made?
And can you kind of spot the train wreck
in the making if you look at it in hindsight?
And then related to that is
how do you, I suppose, buy some insurance
with better process in the future.
That's the right way.
Exactly the right way.
We didn't do much farming for descent in those days.
So I was a messianic convinced
this is the right move, looking around the corner.
And it turned out that lots of people had severe doubts.
But they didn't know the other executives had doubts.
So the thing we instituted is on big decisions.
We make everyone say 10 to negative 10
whether they think it's a smart idea.
And so if we had done that at the time,
we would have seen a whole tons of negative 7s,
negative 6, negative 8s.
And then that would have been shocking.
And so establishing a clear input mechanism
on big decisions, and we'd have the top 50 or 100 people
weigh in on it is a very positive step.
Are there any CEOs or leaders who stand up?
Let's keep the CEOs or founders who stand out to you
as being courageous in talking about the uncomfortable things.
Jeff Bezos, I think, is probably a great standout in that.
And has always been very clear about being customer centric
and they have various controversies at times.
But he's very clear about what they stand for.
So I think he might be the standout example.
Paragon, one of the Paragons for sure.
So customer obsession, certainly Jeff has written about that
since he's a shareholder level one.
Yeah.
And you've said that you have two religions,
a customer satisfaction and operating income.
Could you hit both of those and just expand on what you mean by both?
Well, I think customer satisfaction is clear,
but it's probably incomplete because customers would love
to have everything for free.
So the challenge is to have great customer satisfaction
and to charge them enough to have growing operating income.
And that constraint is what makes business challenging fun, exciting.
So I lean into that.
Well, we're some of the greatest insights
or decisions that have allowed you to find that Goldilocks medium
that contains both.
You know, I think the main thing is back to setting context.
So whether it's powder mountain Netflix or pure before that,
not saying we're only about customers.
I guess just naive, right?
We are about customers and growing operating income.
And so I think that really back to the honesty theme that you talked about.
You know, it may not be a sexy,
but it's more complete context for our employees and shareholders
about why we're making certain decisions.
Let's talk about powder mountain.
Yeah.
Why powder mountain?
I've been a small skier, you know, because of intense work most of my life.
And we've had a place in Park City for a long time
and loved raising the kids, you know, here skiing.
But it got super crowded.
And when you look around skiing all around the United States
because of the growth of the epic and icon passes has gotten very crowded.
And so powder mountain is counter-positioned as the uncrowded mountain.
And that creates, you know, some constraints on what we do.
But it's an incredible opportunity.
Paddy and I had a house there.
And we've enjoyed it.
But just really been homeowners and nothing more.
And then after Netflix retirement, I was like,
oh, here's a project.
Why don't we figure out private skiing?
So about 20% of US golf courses are private.
And they have, you know, better T times, nicer clubhouse.
You know, the people, you know, that kind of thing.
And that's what private skiing is.
So we've introduced private skiing on about half of the powder territory.
And so that's skiing just for the homeowners.
And then you know, the people on the left, the powder is untracked, you know,
because there's only a few hundred families there.
It's pretty amazing.
There's a couple other private skiing places,
wasouch peaks, yellow stone, but they're all super expensive.
And we're relatively affordable.
So we think it's just a great opportunity, again, in reaction to all the super crowding
that everybody's feeling in Tahoe and Colorado and Utah.
So for a lot of people listening, though, I think of project is making a canoe with their kids.
But you're taking on this huge.
10,000 acres.
10,000 acre skiing territory drive.
I've spent a lot of time there.
The skiing's fantastic.
You have lots of untracked powder, as you would hope given the name.
Amazing cat skiing.
And it doesn't seem like a minor project, I guess, is what I'm saying.
So at least to mere mortals.
Now, we've invested over $100 million in it in this first year.
We got three new public lifts and one private lift going in this summer.
So it's definitely a big project.
But also a big opportunity to build a community that's very adventurous, artistic, creative,
outdoorsy.
I mean, it's an amazing place that we hope to spend a lot of time over the next 30 years.
So you're in a position, I have to imagine, where the menu of options is pretty long,
in terms of how you could spend your time.
I'm sure you have plenty of offers and then bound to things are interesting.
And then that doesn't even take into account the number of things you might be interested in.
Of all the things out there, why this?
Like, what do you personally get from this experience?
Helping to nurture a place of beauty with a warm community.
So I do Netflix, millions of people, but I don't know most of them who are customers.
And then I do a lot of philanthropy.
And it's education, other things.
And again, it affects, hopefully, in a positive way, millions of people.
But I don't particularly know them.
Power mountains, very intimate.
It's this close little community.
I, where everyone has coffee together in the morning.
So it's doing sky-lodge.
It's amazing.
It's been upgraded since you were last there.
Services cool.
So it's something I can touch and feel.
And so I think it resonates in a very deep way because it's personal connection.
So Utah's famous for champagne powder.
Light fluffy powder.
For people who do not have any familiarity with Utah, where is powder?
About an hour from Salt Lake City Airport.
What's the name of the closest town?
Eden.
Yes, yes.
There's Eden and Paradise and Liberty, also great townmates.
But we're on a mountain top in Eden, Utah.
And again, it's really an extraordinary ski experience because of being uncrowded.
And so the powder lasts for days.
Last for a really long time.
I've been there for its last a deal week plus.
That's what I want.
Everyone to feel.
I could do even better than you said.
What do you think, and I'm sure you have thought about this, like what are the biggest challenges?
For powder.
For powder.
It's been poorly managed for a decade.
They just didn't have really good people, but didn't have any money.
And so then I get to take it over in Walton and then invest, you know, again over 100 million so far.
And it's relatively easy transformation because people want uncrowded skiing.
So it's hitting a market opportunity, you know, in a significant way.
And then it's just very joyous because we get to like skiing in the morning and then new meetings in the afternoon.
And so it creates a great team feeling.
Do you think you have the hardwiring to ever retire?
Retire in a capacity without an enormous product?
Unlikely.
I do like being engaged and making a contribution.
So I hope to be able to do that for a long time.
What is one or two of the best investments you ever made?
It doesn't need to be financial.
Could be an investment of time.
You know Warren Buff talks about the al-Karnegee public speaking courses.
I mean, it's a bit of the Yashuk's grandpa thing that he's got going.
But do any particular investments of time, energy, money come to mind as like real and such?
Well, if you mean financial investments, the little few times I've done investing, I've lost my shirt.
And I realize I'm just so optimistic.
I'm like, anybody who's got a good idea, I'm like, sure.
You know, so I think it's a different DNA that investors have that are differentially good investors.
So I'm a pure index fund investor.
I'm Netflix plus index fund.
So if we broaden the definition of investment to think about time and energy,
I put a lot of work into charter schools and I've done that over the last 25, 30 years.
Because I see a real opportunity for these nonprofit public schools to create great learning environments and great teaching environments.
And so I've been on the board of Kip Academy, one of them for 20 years.
I've been on the board of many of the other related charter organizations.
And they're somewhat controversial because they're not the same as the district schools.
But I think it's a very healthy kind of creative tension.
And the cities that have high charters, percentage of charters like Denver and Washington,
NDC and Indianapolis have done much better than other cities.
So it really is a positive effect, you know, on kids.
And on the profession of teaching where again, you can start your own public school.
I'd like to chat some more about this.
So starting with my first book, even before that,
but 2007 became involved with DonorsChoose.org where I was an advisor.
And then Questbridge, which seemed to do a lot of really good work.
And at least from my perspective, I was deeply interested in education
because I recognize how my trajectory differed from a lot of my friends growing up
because of educational opportunities.
And it seems like an excellent way to try to maybe level the playing field
is to a strange statement.
But when you see a movie like Waiting for Superman, I'm not sure.
I did.
I don't know the documentary.
But you can leave the theater or after watching this movie, feel quite demoralized.
Like low performing teachers can't be fired.
And next Wednesday that there are all these challenges inside the US public school system.
What are some of the changes that you would like to see that you think can be catalyzed in some meaning?
The fundamental problem in the US public education is our school boards turnover pretty quickly,
especially in large urban districts, which makes the superintendents or the CEOs turnover quickly.
So the average superintendent tenure in Dallas and Denver and Atlanta and Boston and L.A. is three years.
So superintendents come in.
They last for a little bit of time.
The school board changes.
And then the superintendent is changed.
And so why is that because the school board members run on change?
That's how they got elected.
And these are big prizes running big organizations and big budgets.
And then you go on to city council and state representative and all those things.
So we've got a system that because the superintendent changes constantly, the organization is kind of chaotic.
You know, it's not some well run nonprofit like the Red Cross or Sutter Health,
or it's not certainly a for profit.
But the main issue is that turnover. And so shifting to nonprofits running public education,
it will be a big positive from where we are now.
And that's what charter schools are.
Again, in subsidies like Washington, you know, it's about half of the kids.
Go to one of the charter schools, one of the nonprofit schools in Atlanta.
It's about a quarter, Denver, it's about a quarter, Indianapolis, it's about a half.
So we're making a lot of New Orleans. It's 100% of the kids.
So for just for clarity for people listening, almost everybody will have heard the term charter school.
But that means it's not dependent on taxpayer dollars. It's dependent on fundraising or how does it work?
It's just a public school. So now it gets full tax dollars.
But it's run by a nonprofit instead of the school district, a government entity.
So that's the big difference.
What are the, and maybe this isn't the objective, but what are the biggest challenges to scaling charter schools in the United States?
Usually it's the political climate. So it's difficult in blue states.
The unions generally oppose charter schools because then they would have to organize many different nonprofits as opposed to one big school district.
So that's more expensive for them.
But in red states, which are relatively low, union charters are growing very quickly because if parents want choice, they teachers want a climate that's innovative.
And they work in a nonprofit. It can be very stable and have great leadership for a long time because it's got a stable boarded directors.
So that's the big difference is a governance. So when you express the frustration that people at Donor's shoes or others feel,
it's because people have been trying to fix the school districts we have for a hundred years.
And they've made very little progress because they get a program in and then the superintendent changes on the program goes.
So all the work that Annemburg, Gates and others have done, you know, it gets deployed in some school districts for a couple years and then it gets unwound.
Whereas the charter schools are more very stable and continue to grow. They're not all perfect, but the parents have an ability to choose and the kids and the families.
And so if it's not a great charter school, you could move to another, but it is free like public schools.
If you were to teach a class, it could be a seminar, it could be one day, it could be a semester. Let's just say for the time being, that was an obligation.
Anywhere from fifth grade up to, you know, masters, what age range would you choose and what would the subject matter of the course be?
You know, because when I was 22, I was teaching my high school math. I think I jumped right back in there.
You know, it just brings excellent, many great memories of helping kids solve problems and gain confidence. So I don't know if that's the strategic answer of the highest impact, but in terms of the emotional payoff, it is the highest.
God, you know, I had one. This is not to turn this into a personal therapy session, but I was pretty good at math back in the day and I had a really abusive teacher in tenth grade and I just got turned off.
On the other side, my brother, same school had a fantastic tenth grade teacher and then he went on to get a PhD in statistics and so on and so forth. It's just wild.
That these little things.
Well, it's not horrible that that happened to you, but it happens again to kids all over and in particular in lower income, big cities where the average level of teaching is not that I.
So you have all of this involvement education. It's very deep involvement. Now powder mountain is your primary focus, is that fair to say?
Do you continue to do the education or do you have a conversation or send out emails to those people to set expectations that now you have shifted focus and therefore there's a firewall.
Here's your budget for certain things. How do you make that transition from one focus to over 25 years.
I was CEO of Netflix, which consumed a lot of my time and I did philanthropy a couple days a month and I do powder intensely and I do philanthropy a couple days a month.
I got it. So they go.
It hasn't really changed.
And then now I'm doing a bunch of work in Africa on economy and technology, sort of better cell phones, better coverage, solar, things that I hope will stimulate the economy.
So I'm in Africa once a quarter and you know some country doing some investment and trying to make a difference there.
So that's my kind of additional frontier that I didn't spend that much time on during Netflix, but I've got a little more time now.
Now is Africa in this case the chance beneficiary of you having been assigned to Africa way back in the day or could it just as easily have been someplace in Latin America or else?
I noticed that so most people are very strategic and for me, whatever order of my causes, education and Africa economy, basically because I was a Peace Corps volunteer manager.
So I think I'm just trying to relive my 22 year old self seems to be working out pretty well as far as I can tell.
What else are you doing at Patamount that is different or exactly the same as say what you did in Netflix.
In other words, what lessons have you carried over if any fundamentally on the culture we talk about being big-hearted champions that pick up the trash.
So the big-hearted is the warm and loving and caring, which we didn't have enough of it Netflix.
Okay, at least in the culture description.
The champion is someone who wants to win and is willing to go the extra mile to win.
And then the who picks up the trash is the self-responsible self-discipline self-learning, you know, does the right thing when no one's looking.
So I think about our, we actually with our employee phrase of big-hearted champions who pick up the trash, that's what we want to hire.
We actually are better than the old Netflix description, you know, that I've learned from because we're willing to be tighter, more memorable and more loving.
That's the big-hearted part.
It makes me also think of, if you mentioned Lencioni earlier, it makes me think of the advantage a little bit, the humble hungry and smart.
Absolutely, no, very, very impassable.
Does rhyme.
What would you metaphorically speaking put on a billboard, a message to get to millions or billions of billions?
I might say hope is everything.
I think the fundamental positive human force is hope, hope of better things in the future.
When we live in a very imperfect world, we always have, we are very imperfect creatures, we always, you know, have been and will be, and then we have hope of trying to do better.
And so when people lose hope, then, you know, it's a very tough situation.
How do you cultivate that in someone?
Let's say there's a parent listening and they have a kid who's, doesn't have any clinical psychiatric disorder, but maybe they see the glasses have empty.
They're barrage by negative news and headlines on social media and they're just kind of apathetic.
What would your advice be to that parent in terms of what they can do to help?
I would say, in that case, the kids are being withdrawn and protection from a world that confuses them or doesn't treat them well.
So it's trying to understand from the kid's perspective, why are they feeling that way?
And then certainly, you know, helping them understand that growing up is really tough and then by the time you get to 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 and 60, you start to know yourself better.
And it doesn't feel as bad, it feels better.
And there is hope of great happiness in the future for them.
Well, you're very, you were talking about high density of talent.
It's a very high density of clear actionable thoughts.
We've checked a lot of boxes. Read is there anything else that you would like to say or discuss before we land the plan?
I mean, I'm not in a rush. I've got so excited.
And you would be with it to him and hope we get to do this more often and love to have you and your listeners all come to Powder Mountain.
Check it out, folks. Powder for days.
What you read, is there any place you would like to point people as your website for Powder Mountain?
Powder Mountain, that's Google it.
Right on the nose.
Well, thank you very much. Read for the time. I really, really appreciate it.
It's nice to be looking out the window at snow as we're talking about Powder Mountain.
And for everybody listening, we will put everything discussed in the show notes as per usual.
I Timed up, blog slash podcast.
Until next time, just be a little kinder than it's necessary to others, but also to yourself.
And thank you for tuning in.
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Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out.
This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform that powers millions of businesses worldwide, including me.
What business you might ask? Well, one way I've scratched my own itch is by creating cockpunched coffee. It's a long story. All proceeds on my end go to my foundation,
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