Please welcome to the stage Harley Finkelstein.
Hello everyone. How you guys feeling? Today's been good. For those of you that have been in this community for frankly more than a second, you know that this community, this ecosystem, it means a great deal to me. One of my professional prides and joys is helping to cultivate this amazing thing we've created over the last, I don't know, 15 years or so. And I just wanna say, first of all, thank you for those of you that have traveled from all over the world. Walking around here, seeing new friends and old friends, the energy has been completely insane. So thank you for that. On Tuesday you probably have noticed, but across the street from here at Enter Care Center, we've been hosting Shopify Summit. We've brought together the entire company and I gave the keynote on Tuesday and I talked about for Shopify to be a hundred year company, what we really need is more energy. We need these constant interventions of momentum, changing energy. Anything that's stale, we have to speed up anything that's not moving fast enough. We need to interject ourselves. And it's true that one of the things that has made this particular community so incredible over the years is the energy you all have. And for us to be a hundred year company, there's no way we could do that without all of you. The coolest part, I think, is that this ecosystem, this community is still growing, not just in size, but the types of partners that are coming to Shopify that are joining us in this amazing mission to make commerce better for everyone, to help entrepreneurs all over the world. And one of the things that I noticed this morning, just walking around and talking to some of you over coffee is that some of you are building products, features, functionality shops, apps, themes for new entrepreneurs, people that are just starting out, people at their mom's kitchen table, and some of you are working with some of the largest companies on the planet, these global Fortune five hundreds. The other thing that was so incredible to me was that we're still seeing new developers break out all the time. And now with so much happening with AI, we're seeing all of you, or many of you, I should say, leverage AI to make things even better, create more opportunities for merchants. Two call outs I wanna make. I dunno if Andrea from Next Tools is here. Andrea, are you here in the room? Yeah. Stand up please. Andrea has made an app that, in fact he uses AI to generate Shopify functions. Thank you. And also I believe you won Shop Tank earlier today. Yeah. Is that right dude? Congratulations. Thank you. Love having you here. Is Dove here from Buno? Dove, you here? Somewhere here. I dunno if you guys know, this particular Buno actually creates product images and generates these amazing videos and ads using AI. The reason I wanna bring up these two businesses, these two apps in particular, is because these applications, this type of functionality, could never have existed even 18 months ago. That is the innovation we are seeing in this ecosystem, and that's the energy that I'm referring to. And the numbers speak for themselves. We currently have over 16,000 apps in the Shopify app store from over 11,000 app developers. We have 256 themes and partners in over 175 countries. And last year alone Shopify paid out more than a billion dollars to our ecosystem. So as we grow, we are growing together and I think that's the best part of this community we've developed. Now it's safe to say we have a lot to celebrate, and that is why last year we created the Build Awards to recognize the incredible people, the incredible things that this community is building. So let's get right into it. And I wanna welcome someone who I think, I think I speak for all of us when I say it's the heart and soul of this community. Please welcome my friend, Liam Griffin.
