You do not have to be good at everything. You have to figure out as quickly as you possibly can, as early as you can in your career, what you're very, very good at and do that thing. I don't think there is—I think spiky objects are much more valuable than like well-rounded objects. And I think at a company like Shopify, we are very, very spiky. I know what I'm good at, which is storytelling. I should spend more time storytelling. And our CEO and founder is the greatest product mind on the planet. He knows what he's good at, and he's spending his time writing code and building product. That matters.
We have the man, the myth, the legend, Harley Finkelstein himself, the president of Shopify. We're at .dev in Toronto right now. Thank you very much for having me here. It's nice to join you again.
Do you remember the last time you and I hung out?
I do. It was in Las Vegas. We had you picking and packing orders for Our Place True Classic.
That's right. Yeah, I was picking and packing orders. Yeah, it was Our Place True Classic. It was BFCM. It was the night before BFCM, I think. We were about to light up the Sphere and you took me into the ShipBob warehouse. It was amazing to kind of watch what you guys had going on. It sort of feels like your warehouses are always busy, but like BFCM is kind of a next-level kind of thing.
That's our time to shine. The team reviewed your units-per-hour metrics and you're invited back.
Good. I don't think I did a very good job. I don't think I did a very good job. I think I was slow.
You did great. Yeah. So, we'll jump in. We got some quick lightning round. This is maybe—I don't know if this is the tougher question. I mean, you've got so many millions of amazing merchants that you guys have supported for 20 years now. What's the best purchase you've made under $100?
Under $100? Wow. Norda. Do you know Norda?
These amazing sneakers, like for hiking. They're not that expensive. I think they're about 100 bucks. They're not that expensive. Do you guys know Norda? Anyone in the crowd know—do you know Norda? Amazing. Most people don't know that company. Norda, I just bought a pair of sneakers. That's an amazing company. What else do I really love? There's, well, maybe this is too much information, but I think the MANMADE underwear guys. Do you know MANMADE?
You guys know MANMADE underwear? Any of you? Yeah, I think the MANMADE underwear guys are great. I'm trying to think now. I don't really want to talk more about my underwear regime, but there's a lot of great underwear companies actually on Shopify. What else have I bought recently? We should talk about—well, I know we're going to talk about GenAI tech, but I just bought my—I have a nine-year-old daughter, and I just bought her a Tin Can phone.
And the Tin Can phone, you know that company? It is a screenless phone for kids. You don't want them to have screens. Amazing purchase. And actually, that whole thing was done on GenAI tech. I'd never heard—their Shopify store—I'd never heard about Tin Can phone before. I did some research using ChatGPT, and I was like, "Hey, dad, seven-year-old, nine-year-old. I want them to have phones to communicate with us, but no screens. What do you recommend?" And what it probably would have showed me in sort of a pre-GenAI tech world would have been like Best Buy.
It showed me Tin Can phone, and it's an amazing product.
I love it. Yeah. Well, this pod might turn into, I guess, an underwear podcast because we also had Greg Taylor. He's the CEO and founder of Step One down in Australia.
He, I mean, took the company public fully bootstrapped down in Australia quite a few years ago.
Bootstrapped to IPO. He was living on, you know, his roommate's couch at the time, and then he was ringing the bell by himself down in Australia. So there we go. Yes, but bamboo underwear, there we go. You started DJing at a very early age.
We're going to DJing now. Well, you hosted Diplo last night.
I hosted Diplo last night.
And so we hear that he came in to learn from you a little bit. Were you any good at DJing?
I don't think I'm a very good technical DJ, but I'm really good at curation of music.
Like, I don't know, vibe matching, where I can look at a crowd and figure out within a split second what the crowd needs. And actually, last night—this is a weird flex—before Diplo went out to perform, I got a chance to talk to him a little bit, and I was like, "Hey, do you pre-mix? Do you have a set?" He's like, "No. There's no way to do that properly. You have to sort of look what the crowd is doing,"
"like where the energy level is, and then kind of build up to it." And he did—sort of mid-set, he played "Thunderstruck,"
AC/DC, which is not really a Diplo song. And so I looked at him and I was like, "Thunderstruck?" And he's like, "Read the crowd."
So that's I think that's what I was good at as a DJ. I was good at that, and actually on Thursday night, every—so, Shopify Summit every year, the last night of Summit, I get to DJ for the team. So, I'm DJing here Thursday night, which is true.
Have you peaked DJ, or is that in the future?
I definitely peaked. I peaked when I was 17 years old. I should not be DJing, but I don't know, I get to do it. People seem to like it. My wife thinks it's cringe.
Do the girls think it's cringe yet, or they don't know what's up?
My kids love it. I have a studio at the house, so they walk into my DJ studio, and they just mash keys and stuff. But not that this is an interview about DJing, but what's amazing is there are two major pieces of software in DJing right now: one's called Serato, and one's called rekordbox. In both cases, both of them have now embedded AI into it. So effectively, you have a recommendation engine. And it used to be where it would recommend similar beats per minute—so it could be like 152, you'd find another, or 132, you'd find another 132 song. Now it actually recommends based on the genre. So it'll give you beats per minute, genre, and I think you're going to see more people become quote-unquote "DJs" in the future, but they're just basically like Spotify conductors.
Yes, totally. Make their spouses think they're even more cringe. Firebelly Tea: what was the main driver to launch Firebelly?
You guys know Firebelly? Some of you? No, not really. All right, that's my little tea company. You all need to know Firebelly. If you're like me and you're high-anxiety and you cannot drink coffee after 2:00 p.m., green tea, in particular sencha, is amazing tea. But Firebelly started during the pandemic. I'm an extrovert, as you can probably tell. Probably at my lowest point in my life was during the pandemic. I was by myself. We were all working remote, stay-in-place orders. And my best friend is David Segal, who created DAVIDsTEA, probably the only billion-dollar tea company that's been created in the last 50 years. David would drop off green tea for me at my house, and he'd be like, "Hey, just try this and try this," because I felt like I couldn't drink coffee in the afternoon. And eventually, it became a thing that once a week David would drop off his private stash of tea. In 2021, Shopify, obviously, was crazy pandemic stuff. If you remember, we had Reunite then. We didn't have Unite, we had Reunite, which is sort of our digital version of Unite, which made us all sad.
Totally made everyone sad. It was nice to connect, but it was a reminder that we weren't all together.
And I wanted to start playing with more of the Shopify products. So I asked David if he wanted to just help me build a small little tea shop on Shopify, and we called it Firebelly because, like most good entrepreneurs, like all of you, you have that fire in your belly. And we launched it. Today, it does really well. It's a seven-figure business. We hired a full-time CEO to run it, guy Shawn Hoover. And it does a couple things: one is it allows me to go into my Shopify admin every day to see how it's going, because it's fun. I get to demo all the tools. I get to send the product teams a list of complaints of things I think they're not doing very well. And I just think people talk about merchant empathy and customer empathy. I think the best way for you to know how ShipBob is doing is for someone working inside of the warehouse to also be shipping their own products. And so that's what Firebelly has done. It's been really fun.
That's great. Selfish question: favorite place that you and your family have traveled recently?
Favorite place. Taking my daughters—I have a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old. Taking them to Paris is pretty special.
