All right. All right. So, we're going to get into a lot of things today. Before we do that, because I have the microphone, I can do whatever I want. I want to throw it back for a few minutes. I know you're not a nostalgic person the way I am necessarily. But again, I have the microphone, so I can do whatever I want. All right, first and foremost, raise your hand.
Anyway, like, by the way, nice shot. Good start on that with like the meeting Harley and Tobi in a coffee shop.
Pretty good, right? That was our first site really in Ottawa, Canada. Which is by the way, like you made that sound like this super woo thing. Like the trick was the moment you said that you never had to have that meeting because no one wanted to come to Ottawa. Exactly. And now look, we have 2,000 of them here.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Tobi, I think it worked. Can't believe it, but I think it worked. Okay, show of hands right now if this is your very first partner event ever. Wow. Thank you for being here. Raise your hand if you've been to a Unite event. Okay, I got some OGs here. Yeah, of course you were there. All right, raise your hand if you were at the very first Unite event 10 years ago. All right, that's amazing. Now, here's one more. Raise your hand if you were at the legendary garden party of 2017. Look at this.
I think you have to give some context to that.
But like I remember so it's like so okay I'm not sure if you have a bit on this because you know you go ahead you're the boss. You do whatever you want. But like so this was actually was one of my favorite things in the entire Shopify history actually. Because so we had our first Unite day we did in San Francisco. And it was actually I think a phenomenal event at least you know just like I think it like all came together. Pretty sure we talked about Remember Me on stage, which then eventually got renamed to Chat. So, that's doing pretty well, I think. Yeah, keep that going. It's it's has a good run so far. Yeah, it's yeah, it'll make it. So garden party. So, second day we woke up elevator and elevator didn't work and you know, just like the entire city of San Francisco did not have power. Correct. If I remember right at least because some kind of suicidal squirrel jumped in a transformer somewhere and like which was very funny because you know from us building tech companies in a you know far reaches of the you know world here like in Canada at this moment being in San Francisco is like you know this is this bit of pilgrimage for people in tech and there we are in a you know high castle of the technology industry with no socket in the entire district yielding any kind of electrons. So anyway, like so what we had to do is like pivot the team like I think we were opening we couldn't go into the building because the fire marshals told us that they were not sure that the sprinklers work because I mean I don't know why the sprinklers need electricity but because that seems like a bad idea to begin with but somehow we couldn't use the buildings and we pivoted like the entire team just like said hey like let's move it in a parking lot and we did impromptu things people found generators and battery packs and you know portable PAs and stuff like this. And so, we I think we had to kill the conference.
We killed it. What was amazing was I found out later why are we dwelling on this because I like just I think because it's like this is such a Shopify thing, right? Like it's because I'm pretty sure day two was better than it would have been with original planning and it would have been a great event any like even there. So like there's just something absolutely amazing by you know we have like thriving on change as a core value ever from day one and you know just there was no better example than that pivot in like a couple of hours making a better event you know out of that situation. So I found out also that there were three other major tech conferences happening that day. So there were four conferences in total including ours. Three were cancelled. Shopify and this community got together and we created the world's greatest garden party. That that exemplifies this community. I love that.
Do you remember what the first app store looks like? I do. That was it.
Wow. Can you talk about that? Are you what do you think when you see that? Mapify. Mapify allows you to view all your customers instantly in a beautiful map, a static map.
Yeah. I wrote all of those.
Yeah, my test apps for... Thank god you hired me shortly thereafter. Yeah. That's a new one. It looks way, way better.
Do you know I don't if you know this, but did anyone yell it out if you know? Do you know what the longest running partner app is in the Shopify app store? Any guesses? No. It's Fetch app. 2013 they launched and they're still kicking butt. So, awesome.
It's pretty amazing. Yeah. More importantly, does anyone remember Tobi's hat phase? Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you're bringing it back today again. I have the microphone. I can do whatever I want. Yeah. I mean, you you've aged, but but me on the other hand, look how great I still look the same. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. That's it.
We going to Can I get back on topic? Yeah. Sorry. Back on topic. So, obviously, yesterday we did a ton of talks. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the talks yesterday, the breakout sessions. Yeah, I thought it was amazing. It was an amazing day. I thought Atley and Vanessa, the way you guys opened was fantastic. I love the breakout sessions. I really want to start obviously the major topic has been agentic and AI and stuff but because you and I spend so much time together I get a sneak peek into how you yourself in a very personal way use AI and I'd love to kind of you share with the group what you've been doing on your own with your own you call it your clankers what you do with your clankers and how you've been adopting AI yourself because I think it exemplifies Shopify but also Tobi.
Okay like I mean I my I found this the one weird trick to predicting the future is actually just like live in everyone else's relative future because then you don't actually have to predict anything. You just look around and solve the problems appropriately to the stuff you already sort of encounter, right? So, this is like, you know, like from day one, like I don't know, there grew up in the '90s and we were like when the internet came to town, at least in Germany, this is sort of a way we talked about it. And you know, you grow up in a as a teenager with like understanding like you're sitting on like an important truth. There was no way like the future wouldn't be completely different given what you know was possible and the fact that none of the adults around you seem to care about it didn't seem to be terribly relevant there you know like sometimes it's like it's funny to look back at these things I recently saw a list which I really enjoyed of all the movies that could own would be over in one in it if cell phones would have already been invented yet you know like so you know sometimes like the past looks really funny from a modern technology perspective but as it happens it's harder to predict so you know William Gibson said future's already here it's just not evenly distributed just immersing yourself in all the latest technologies is important obviously the first of all this is fun second of all this an amazing excuse to my wife for buying or everything so doing field research here and so then with AI I this is sort of supercharged, but you got to like sort of fine-tune this. Like what specifically?
You've had a couple moments I think that has just been you you're not someone who has their mind blown very easily. But you've had a couple moments. One is a...
I wake up right now and it's like, you know, it's like a cycle of you wake up, you see the craziest thing you have ever seen, you go back and do it again, right?
Do you want do you want to share what you showed me backstage? Because I thought that was you you did you're like, 'Hey, look at this casually.' And I was like, 'Dude, like that's kind of insane.'
Like I just like look I'm a I'm having so much fun with you know sort of open claw type of build. I think it's like I think if you haven't done this like it really is very very worthwhile to just like go through a trouble of setting up an open claw like a Hermes agent any of these kind of things. There's services that can do it for five bucks. It's it's a mess like a little bit but like it's a glorious mess. It's a mess that looks like the you know internet mess of the '90s. So like I'm getting all sort of warms and fuzzies there. Like this is the tech industry I fell in love with the but like so I'm a maximalist on this. I honestly think some of these experiences are some of the most profound and honestly compelling product experience I've had in my entire life. So I also went to the extreme of like basically giving access to literally everything like so I do it safely. I'm a perfect company CEO I was a technologist. I write my own filter gateways like this. So, but it's still first of all ever since last you know you all know this September last year of December really the models have gotten so good that they just constantly blow our minds, right? Like especially Claude is like Claude is a little hacker. If you if you tell Claude you want something, it'll do it and sometimes in the most dodgy way possible. It's like absolutely hilarious. So you know like maybe give you one example there like is then you know like I was sort of initially slow. I gave it access to more more things. At some point I needed my like I just had all sort of problems walking around in the house with like dropping my like Wi-Fi and blah blah blah. So I gave it an API key to just like access to my UniFi system, my Wi-Fi system and like said like go fix it and it fixed it which is incredible. But like the thing that was really really funny was like I you know I was talking about like medical thing. I came back from a sport event. I was like really really hurting. I'm like just like is it bad if these these parts hurt? And it like was like okay now it's just like it'll probably heal. So okay. So, and then so next morning I get a message from my my my open claw and he was doing a like workout that my professional trainer there we did a workout I got a message saying given that you know I had lower back pain after the workout that I'm clearly in right now I should really go in the sauna so it turned the sauna on.
But your sauna is not connected to anything.
So yeah, so I ended up having to go into logs to figure out how this happened. So like through the UniFi connection, it like figured out that there was there was a sauna. I mentioned sauna before at some point and so it actually found it on the network found that it's like you know has a local access figured out how to like talk to it and turn it on and I'm like dude honestly I I was actually really touched. It was like one of the nicest things, you know, like so, you know, so you just go to this incredible experience with these incredible events and so like I mean I have so many claw stories and but like yeah, it's just like again immerse yourself in the technology and sit with like the incredible things, you know, the biggest change in the world here with AI is really that like I think incredible things happen in the world when one of two things happens. Something that was currently like previously either really expensive or really hard becomes like you know 10 times cheaper or 10 times easier to do or if something that was previously impossible becomes possible. Those are the biggest shifts. And so I think we have seen all these three things happen at the same time here where like basically everything that was previously impossible is now just simply hard. A lot of what used to be very very hard is now actually easy and a lot of what was expensive is now quite cheap with maybe proviso that tokens are quite something. So hopefully that's temporary. We'll see. But you know that's like the most rich environment for innovation that is possibly imaginable, right? Like and so I think that's it but again it feels like I've had the privilege of seeing many many shifts in a industry. I've been there for again like just even the sort of initial contact internet. I've been there for you know the emergence of web 2.0 which is sort of not documented this way, but really is like I think then the technologists of us who were really really just incredibly interested in the web and its potential essentially raised our hands and said hey from an infrastructure level browsers broadband like and kind of sort of depth of our understanding of a medium. I think we are here and we know how to make great systems. And also you know maybe business model like with software service like that so all rolled in I think web 2.0 is underdocumented but over plays an important role there because it gave essentially this world of technology the business model that it didn't have during which caused automatically you know the dot com crash right the dot com crash was like all the promise was there literally every company it could launch was right Like every one of the business models made sense even no matter you can make fun of I know Pets.com all day but like pets.com was a totally sensible e-commerce store right like.
You became Chewy or something.
Yeah. Exactly. So you just needed like infrastructure that like if your first order of business is you know pay a million dollars to Larry Ellison for getting an Oracle database so you can start programming then he's probably you're probably not going to connect with your market at at the price levels that they want. So you know just but they were all right and so eventually this this started working and coming together and you know things that were previously impossible became possible like using credit cards securely became possible and so you know just this shift I think is worth tracking and then immersing yourself and just like playing be playful with it do shenanigans technology shenanigans are like like the toys of the the crap people do on a weekend are the multi-billion dollar companies of all, you know, and so it's like.
Crap people do on the weekends or multi-million dollar. It's totally true. Speaking of shenanigans, what you showed me on the way in here was you showed me you basically compared your schedule to your heart rate and showed me which meetings you have increase your heart rate versus others. I wasn't on the top 10 list.
So your our meetings are super chill. But that is amazing. But I want...
Exposure therapy for 15 years to one like.
So yeah like yeah yeah my my my clankers have access to my heart rate and you know like put it into a little DuckDB and warehouse because why not? I at some point destroyed it. I would like it to do it and since then it's been dutifully doing it. It's wonderful.
I mean the the amount of shenanigans that are running right now in the background while we are sitting here on the stage for you is absolutely mind-blowing.
I was with I was with Emily my wonderful assistant and I showed her that like she's number three over people I have a most highest heart rate.
Everyone wants to hear from the boss that their meeting raises the heart rate more than anybody else.
Was doing the opposite. So anyway.
I want to talk about I want to continue on this theme of sort of the pace of change because we have 2,000 people here. Our incredible partners, our community who have built their businesses alongside us. They've been, you know, shoulder-to-shoulder with us for almost two decades now. I want to start to talk about the double-edged sword for them in terms of how they, you know, they're watching Shopify move really quickly. They want to keep up and they love the innovation, but they also want to make sure that they continue. As you kind of, you know, putting yourself in their shoes right now, how would you sort of think about ensuring that they stay they keep pace with all this crazy stuff that is happening here?
