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

Oh, yeah, of course. I, in fact, I've given them out as like at events. But their headline doesn't make sense. It's 'sensory essentials that bring delight to everyday moments of care.' I... Is that

Well, thank you. Thank you for plugging Shopify.

I have a, you know, one of the cool... So we have 2 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, you know, this is going to sound pejorative but 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 Pencil Z app. Have you guys seen this? Anyways, so Dyson, the guy, the man, the founder, he actually did this press conference. It's on YouTube now. I just checked.

I think it's even less than that. It's like 5 minutes, but exactly. But there's like millions of views on this demo for a [ __ ] vacuum cleaner. And actually what I thought about it like one, he's been... 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 bet a bunch of people are actually going to buy their first Dyson product because of this video than ever did before.

Amazing. But you could sort of look across a bunch of different... I'm having my coffee now like my Ember mug, right? This idea of adding a small heater to a mug I think seems kind of boring. Ember's a great Shopify store. So, I've been following them since pretty much day one. I mean, that's a huge company now both in wholesale and in consumer.

I'm not going to do anything like that. But what I will say is, you know, actually let me show you. Give me one second. You guys know my best friend David Siegel? I think you've had him on the show. Standard of David's Tea. He took his company public for many hundred millions of dollars. Him and I have this tea business on the side we started during the pandemic called Firebelly Tea. Anyways, we tinker like you guys do on weekends. We have this idea. It's literally... I'm showing you a prototype right here. You kind of see it. It is literally our way and we think that Duraflame needs to be disrupted.

So we had this idea in 2020 and actually now David and I have a working prototype. It's actually you can read it. It's literally made from Canadian softwood. It's 100% kiln dried. 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 a 10x version of it. I like... my wife's really into, she would hate me saying this, she's really into karaoke. Have you ever gone and tried to buy a karaoke machine? There are companies that will rent them to you because they're so big and clunky. Like, right, someone should go and disrupt the karaoke machine business. That to me is such a brilliant idea. Or you know, 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're clunky and they don't look good. There's actually a couple beautifully designed, almost like the Touchland 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, what is the... there's a pie and I'm going to take a bigger piece of the pie.

Yeah, it's very much like zero sum. And funny enough, you know, Sequoia has said this publicly, so I think I can say it now, but the reason Sequoia didn't invest in Shopify 15, 16 years ago was they looked at the TAM of retail SMBs on the planet and they effectively forecasted if Shopify would have a meaningful percentage of that market, how big of a company we could be. What they missed was that we're actually growing the pie itself, right? This positive sum. Someone who's starting... you know, I don't know the person behind Touchland, Shawn, but presumably this person didn't necessarily... what she wasn't in or he wasn't in this industry previously. Maybe it wasn't even an entrepreneur.

No, of course you can't. That's the... you almost cannot do it. You actually have to almost imagine, you know, let's just use Flint for a second. By the way, this is not for sale yet. 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 are the products in the market? The biggest one is Duraflame. How much does Duraflame sell a year?'

You know, I think it's something... I think last time we checked it 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, 'Why are these not sold in convenience stores?' Right? Why do I have to go to Home Depot for it? What if I'm picking up my weekend beer at a bodega or a 7-Eleven, I should also pick up my Flint as well. So, what you have to do as an entrepreneur is you really have to kind of broaden the horizon of what is the potential. And Kat Cole and I were just speaking last week. Kat Cole, who's the CEO of AG1, they're doing $600 million a year with AG1. With one single SKU. There is no way Chris, who's the founder of AG1, there's no way that Chris thought about that like, you know, 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.

I mean, I have... like you look at just shop or you look at Ritual, Ritual Vitamins or Seed which is probiotics. There's a company that I think is really cool. They're called Prose, 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 is recurring customers. So you basically send them a follicle of hair, they analyze it and they send you a shampoo specific for what you need. I think that personalization stuff for shampoo... even I, obviously, I don't know if you guys take supplements. I take like eight a day. I wish, you know, I could basically just take one pill that has exactly what I need specifically fit for me.

It's a little bit of, you know, 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, you know, red wine 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 5% or 10%, I'll do it. I also do every year for my birthday I do something called PreNuo. Do you guys know PreNuo?

Yeah, I love PreNuo. I've been doing it for the last six years. Every year my birthday is in November.

One year. You got to be careful with that.

I would get rid of the billionaire. I think, if you forget the billionaire thing for a second because I don't think you need to be a billionaire to do that. I think you can do it.

Of course.

Well, you're not... No, but Sean, it's [ __ ]. And this is... So if you didn't have the trainer come to the house, you'd be in way... I suspect you'd be way worse off than you are now.

You know, when I had my first child, Bailey is now my daughter's eight. So when I had my first child, Dave Siegel, again, bringing up again, Dave's a couple years older than me, he 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 it as 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. I was, you know, Shopify was already publicly traded. I work 70 hours a week. He's like, just if you can afford a nanny, you should do this. And I didn't really know what he meant by the whole it's a marriage saver. In hindsight, I now do because some of the stresses that I think some people have, they just 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.

Yeah, that sounds that seems super. I mean, and to his credit, because he is so self-aware, he truly is incredibly self-aware, he knows what he's really good at. And that's if you think about Shopify, I think I said this to Sam when we were meeting, but you think of the phases of companies. At the beginning of the first phase of a company, everyone needs to be a Swiss Army knife. Everyone does everything. And then the second phase, it's more like what I call a triple threat phase, where like...

Yeah, I would say for us it was zero to I don't know. Dunbar's number, you know that concept, Dunbar's number?

Yeah, he said 150 or something like that, which comes from tribal times where that's how many people any human can remember at any one given time. So, I would say zero to 150 or so, it's like that, you know, Swiss Army knife. In those days at Shopify, I did BD, I did sales, support, partnership, built the app store and partnerships program. I was also the lawyer. I mean, I was the general counsel. I wasn't really a good lawyer. I'd only practiced for a few months, but

Yeah, I didn't have a CFO at the time or anything like that. So, it's like Swiss Army knife time. And then I think eventually, you can almost market for us around the series A or series B, where now more people can sort of slot into the right roles. Meaning you don't do one thing, but you do a couple things quite well. Now I was chief operating officer, and so I looked after a couple big organizations. We built a sales organization. We began to think about different areas of product. Post pandemic, so like 2021, 22, a couple 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 businesses that were not the right business for us to be in. One of them was shipping and fulfillment. We ended up selling it to Flexport. So, we began to think about 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 sort of in this new phase of Shopify is these spiky objects. And what that really meant was we basically brought in a new leadership team. And part of that process was Tobi and I sort of thinking about what are the things that we truly should be spending our time on, meaning the highest value for Shopify. And that meant that we kind of rearranged the company not necessarily around these traditional roles of you do this and that, but rather based on our strengths. And as part of that, you know, Tobi's not on the earnings calls anymore because 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 at those earnings calls. I'm going to focus on that. And Tobi 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 Tobi'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.

Refers to me as the lead singer of the band. 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 increased it by adding more entrepreneurs to Shopify who otherwise were aspiring previously.

Well, actually the best part is we end up hiring mostly entrepreneurs. People that have had 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 '50s, Hungary got really bad, the 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 farmers market his whole life. That egg stall is called Le Capitaine and still stands today. It's like 5 km 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 when I moved... 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 a 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 Tobi comes to it in a very different way. He's an immigrant. He lives in Germany, meets 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 eventually become Shopify.

There are a couple things that I think define his leadership really well at Shopify. One fundamentally is that he spends a lot of his time using all the newest tech constantly. He's constantly reading the newest white paper on a new LLM that just came out. I don't think that's uncommon. I think you'd see that with Patrick or Zuck, but there is a category of these super technical founders that did not exist historically. At least if they did, they weren't running 100 billion-dollar or trillion-dollar companies. Tobi's in this group of people that are super technical that know more about the code base than anyone else on the planet. The other thing that I think is important is one of the things he does every year is basically, during Christmas break, he spends his time running 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 what are we going to build this year. And it's not based on necessarily a survey, it's based on his deep intuition of how the product needs to evolve. In some cases, Shopify runs some of the largest flash sales on the planet like for Supreme or Taylor Swift or these massive, crazy throughput 30,000 transactions a minute type stuff. So, sometimes it's like we have to be able to have this type of throughput. And other times it's look, the future of retail is not going to be just online, it's going to be everywhere. And Shopify has to make it super easy to sell across every surface area. I announced 2 weeks ago what we're doing with Roblox inside the Roblox universe, that now we're embedding commerce in there as well. Tobi didn't say go do 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 in something like Roblox, I forget what the DAUs are, but it's ridiculous. I think there's like 700 million monthly users in the metaverse. I think the largest chunk of those are in Roblox. It's like a hundred billion dollar industry today. It's going to be like 930 billion by 2030, I think. So, that's the type of stuff that he does. He doesn't necessarily... I know some CEOs will go and talk to customers. He does that also. But ultimately, what he's 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 unobvious people, and he gives them the room to do their very best work. And that ability to completely ignore an org chart and rather focus on impact and like, 'Hey, that person I saw that, he's in GitHub. He's looking at their commit.' And he's like, 'I like the way they wrote that. I'm actually going to elevate that person and let them do something much bigger, much more creative.' And then probably the last one I would say that 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 I even see for me. I see a pretty good version for me. I've always been someone who's somewhat fairly confident in my ability to get better at stuff. But he basically always shows me that there's a new gear for me. And he's like, 'You don't even know that gear exists yet, but you think you're in the fourth gear. There's a fifth gear.' 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 doesn't put more pressure on anyone else than he puts on himself. I think that is an amazing thing.

You know, I think a lot of people end up starting companies and spending their lives working with people that they probably would have been friends with in high school. Tobi and I are totally different. I'm very 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 company... my t-shirt business that I had in college at McGill here in Montreal had become a pretty good deep t-shirt business. I was able to pay for my tuition and my rent and help my mom and my two sisters who were going to private school that I was helping to pay 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 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'll learn how to critical reason, how to write better, how to think better, how to articulate yourself better.' So, I moved to Ottawa, had no friends, and had 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 Tobi 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.

Yeah, I remember him saying, for example, one of the things that payments should have been built into browsers. I'm like, 'What?' He's like, 'Yes. The people that made browsers completely [ __ ] this up. Payments should be natively integrated, not through a third party, but natively built into the browser.' That makes total sense. 'Identity should be built into the browser entirely.' So, he was thinking about all of 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 as someone that prays at the altar of entrepreneurship was at that point there were a couple companies doing e-commerce. There was a company called Magento, which ended up getting acquired by Adobe. There was a company called Demandware, that ended up getting acquired by Salesforce. There 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 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 we now have a trillion dollars transacted on Shopify. And yes, we have some very large stores, but the majority of that GMB is the long tail of small businesses and those homegrown success stories, companies like Fashion Nova or Gymshark or all of these companies that started at their mom's kitchen table that grew super large. So, those are a couple of the things in the early days that completely changed my perspective on how to think about building, but remember also my only 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 Ireland. 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.'

Yeah, so he's... because it sounds amazing.

Okay. So, the Enneagram is this sort of... there's a lot of these personality things. The Enneagram is the only one frankly that I think is worth any review. But, so he is an...

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. 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, me being an achiever, he is really tough. I mean, when I bring him an idea, he will beat the [ __ ] 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. That is why he should be, you know, I will work at the company as long as they'll have me and as long as he's there. Because I believe he's 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 talk to my peers at other companies, they're like, 'Yeah, you know, there is 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, but it's just that's not what we're trying to achieve.

Everybody sold.

If you look at the history of IPOs, particularly in tech, you will notice that Shopify, from a market cap perspective, went 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 want to get into that headspace, that line of thinking. That wasn't what we were interested in. We wanted to build a 100-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 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 advertently start a process in your mind of beginning to think about what if. What if this number is right? What if the terms are good? What if they have a space for me at this company where I can, you know, the pitch that a lot of these companies make, these 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 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 was 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, you know, Andrew, who's founder of Klaviyo went public last year and then Fidji who was at the time CEO of Instacart is on our board went public as well. So you've had a couple IPOs lately. Generally companies are, and in the case of 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 we just didn't want to get acquired. We wanted to be independent.

No. There truly 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.

Money is so. You know, I mentioned my dad wasn't around when I got to college. 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. Some weeks we had and some weeks we didn't. We never, you know, we always had food on the table, but there were times where I remember as a kid often my mom would come and sit me down and say, 'Hey, we're going to have to tighten our belts this month.' And that tightening of the belt happened a lot during my childhood. And so when we went public, for the first time I had real money. I was able to, I was on a 10b5-1 which we in Canada 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 and 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 going to have to tighten our belts. And that's not a flex. That truly makes me feel I'm able to do better work because I know that I have a nest egg that is protected.

Oof. COVID was really, really hard. Maybe not for the reasons that you guys, I mean, remember Shopify went from something like, I don't know, maybe pre-COVID we were a $30 company. We like overnight

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 around 15% in the US. So, 15% of all retail was not online. And then effectively had this pull forward during the pandemic where we jumped very quickly to 20-something percent.

Sean, but to answer your question, what was the hardest time at Shopify, you know, we almost didn't make it. We grew from 1.5 to 3 billion.

Can I finish my [ __ ] story, guys? So, there was this manic period inside of Shopify. All of a sudden all these pull forward, for example. Like 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 [ __ ] done. And then 2022 happened. And the market started going the other way. And 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 I think, you asked me about these different phases, that's where I think the next phase came into play, which is, okay, we need to figure out what 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 recalibration of everything. That was really hard. I wasn't sure I knew Shopify would make it. I wasn't sure I was going to make it.

Pre-IPO for sure. I mean post-IPO things, you know, 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, pre-IPO, there were times where we didn't know if we could cover payroll. But you know, I think you have to be a little bit crazy naive.

Sean and I, you know, my last company we were going to 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 in 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 hundred million dollar range where I'm like oh, then I could just 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 [ __ ] hard.

No. No, it doesn't. But actually 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 you, Sean, Sam, and I grew up. We all had this number and I'm like when I get that I can basically extrapolate my passive income from it and that's going to pay all my expenses. And then you hit the number and you're like, it's complete [ __ ]. There is no magic number just like there is no stage of a company whereby you are cruising. It's just different problems, right? So the problems that I have with 7,000 people and a hundred billion dollar market cap are very different than what I had with 70 people.

This is my favorite stage of Shopify because going back to the whole spiky object, the thing that I think I can add the most value to Shopify is through storytelling. And I believe now the microphone that I have because of Shopify's 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.

No, you guys asked me for notes this morning. I had to literally sit down and write you notes myself. No, there's

Yeah, so I have a team of people that help me with things that I'm preparing for. But no, this is me. There's no notes.

I know David, so David actually has an even larger team because he does the show and he does the TV show and he 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, hey, remember that this is kind of the direction. I'll give you a best example, earnings calls. I meet with my Jeff Hofmeister, our amazing CFO. I meet with Jeff and our IR team, and I'm like, all right, what are the three or four things that we want to say. And then I basically take it and I make it sound like me.

On the Roblox thing, it's really about the fact that Shopify is no longer just an e-commerce company, we're the commerce everywhere company.

Right? And that's what's important. So, I'm using Roblox as effectively a proxy for explaining that you may not necessarily want to sell on 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 want to access it. By being on Shopify, you are default selling everywhere.

Pinterest and Instagram. There's literally a Spotify, a Shopify for Spotify channel where you can actually if you're Beyoncé and you have an artist profile like the size of Beyoncé, you can sell Sacred, which is our cosmetic line on Shopify inside of her artist profile.

That's rumors, yeah. We're not going to go there today. But exactly, we want to be wherever you effectively have consumers. So, earnings was 3 weeks ago. And I love earnings. I do my earnings call, I then do my analyst calls, and then I do my media tour. In this case, I did TVTN, 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 I listen to earnings calls a couple days before and a couple days after just to hear the tonality of the reporters and the journalists, but also of the executives. And Sebastian from 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 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, that's a five out of 10. And maybe you can say it's a six or seven out of 10 because he saved a lot of time, and so it was effective.' But there was zero personality to it. And then I watched a bunch of other professional executives that did their earnings calls like the P&G guys, for example, or the folks over at Best Buy, and I listened to their earnings calls, and I'm like, 'Yeah, they sound like they're reading a script.' If 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'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, that we give a [ __ ] about this stuff, too. And so I think there is a right balance where you have people around you that are giving you the macro things, but 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. 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 find my own way of negotiating it into the call.

There are people that I mean Benioff's fantastic at it.

He didn't come out with it. It was leaked, but yes, yeah.

Someone leaked it. I always assume those were intentionally leaked. I would have intentionally leaked that if I was him.

But the point is in it he was basically like, 'Yo, AI is a baseline expectation. You got to learn these tools. The way to get good at them is to use them a bunch.' And you got to start solving problems using this. That was the general ethos. I'm curious, you personally Harley, day-to-day, what's your AI usage? Are you like a lot, a little, just ChatGPT, other tools? Like what are you actually personally using either professionally or personally?

Two things. One is I use ChatGPT. I really like the fact that now it has the history side of it. So for example, back to longevity, every time I get a blood test I upload it to ChatGPT in a folder called longevity and health. And so now I can ask questions. Although I do find if I say I had a blood test last week, I uploaded my new one, I said compare this to my last one and it compared it to one from a long time ago and I was able to spot it. So it's not 100% but I like using it quite a bit. I gave a keynote at Summit last week. I literally fed my entire keynote script into ChatGPT and I said, 'Hey, what parts of these do you think are confusing if any? Like where am I losing the thread here?' So I think that I use ChatGPT and particularly the 03 model on a daily basis. I have two screens here, so based on my screen next to me I always have that open. I really like Claude for other projects. So for investing, for example, my wife Lindsay 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 ChatGPT 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 the earnings calls, one of the things we did was we basically made all of Shopify legible and we built 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 Shopify capital. I'll go to the capital leader and say, 'Hey, give me a couple of the highlights for UK. It's a new one for us. I want to talk about how it's going.' This time I just went to the vault and literally went into the capital program because everything is legible. I was able to pull most of the data on my own. The personal jury's still out whether or not I miss because when I talk to the leader of capital, I get some of the nuances and I'm like, 'Oh, you just said this sort of thing and I'm going to take that and run with that even though you didn't intentionally mean to leak it to me.' Whereas using the Shopify vault, I find that I'm basically getting a lot of headline stuff. But I do want to make one point. One of the things that got missed on Tobi's memo 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 sort of make it a project and then use AI, this idea of making it reflexively part of our day-to-day work is really what he's 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 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 going to use AI to help with that. This idea of it being reflexive is what we're trying to do.

So, I sort of divide into two buckets, which is 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 Prenuvo does a lot of that heavy lifting for me. I'm 41 now, so I'm now getting to the point where I'm taking a lot more seriously. So, once a year, and Prenuvo's 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, the way the technology is moving, the fact that here's a very simple thing. A lot of people don't like going to these full body MRIs because they get claustrophobic. So, a small part of the product of Prenuvo is you put on these glasses that have mirrors and the mirrors go backwards into a screen and I watch the most fun-loving light show that I can find. For me, that's Seinfeld. So, I'm not claustrophobic, but I don't want to stay in something like that for a long time. On the cardiovascular stuff, I just do 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 where am I at right now. The reason I like Prenuvo each year is because I can look over time how things are changing. If I have a benign cyst on my liver, is it growing year over year? Now, at least I can monitor that stuff. So, those are the two main buckets. And then I just try to do these misojis, one thing every year that scares the [ __ ] out of me. And the thing I really like right now is called 29029. Jesse Itzler's thing. Jesse'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 Colorado, in my case I do it in Quebec, Mont Tremblant. You can do it in Vermont. They created this incredible thing that allows you not to have to travel to Everest and you actually can do it. So I've been doing this, this is 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 are much better because I'm so scared of failing at this 29029 thing.

134.

Rounded down by 20 billion dollars, just wanted to

For sure. No, it's wild. Let me one more call it for if you were listening to this and you were a company that actually, you know, 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 an incredible journey for us. It makes us a better company. It allows, I think the people that use Shopify find more confident. I mean now we have companies like Hunter Douglas and Mattel and Birkenstocks using Shopify. I think one of the things they love about it as a product is that being publicly traded provides some sense of stability.

No, I mean you know me personally. I think I said this at the beginning, right? I was guest 118 on your podcast.

We are the same.

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 5 years I take about 20% of whatever my profits are out of my Shopify store and I just buy Shopify stock.

I think it has compounded every bit as good or better as my actual e-commerce brand, because now my earnings are growing, whereas if I just reinvested in the business, and not every business you can reinvest 100% of your profits back into. So, just that one little habit has been very helpful for me.

That means a lot to me. It's actually really neat. I get to, we're doing this thing called Shopify Milestones. Basically, it's our version of the Emmys or the Oscars for actors or the Grammys for musicians. We give these milestone awards. You guys have probably seen them around. This is the 10,000 ones. We give them out for 10,000 orders, 100,000, and a million orders.

They are heavy. We had to ship them out and stuff. There's a lot of people. But anyways, so I get to go deliver these milestones in person.

So, you need to get to a million first, and I'll deliver your million one, Shawn. But I meet these people when I deliver them, and often what I hear is, not only obviously they built their business on Shopify, but many of them are also shareholders, which I think is an unbelievable endorsement. It's one thing to use the product and build your business on it, but then also to invest your hard-earned money into

You made it sound way less romantic than I just tried to make it sound.

Dude, this is great. You guys are the best.