I think in a way people are somewhat overestimating the founders of companies and then they are really massively underestimating what you can do when the founder is still present and in charge. It's my best way to help the mission. Everyone gets to complain about the crazy founder, which is great. Do whatever venting you want and then you do very often some of the best work of your careers. You know, that's why people actually flock to these type of companies because you're surrounded by the other people that you can go on such crazy journeys with.
I am so excited to be here today with Toby, the CEO, founder of Shopify. Toby, before we start, I will say when I was running my company, Lattis, you were one of the founders that I sort of most looked up to and so many things about the way you operate, the way you've run your company, the changes you've made over time. It's the top of the top for me, and so I feel super lucky to be doing this with you. Before we get into AI and Shopify, I want to learn a little bit about you just and more like your psychology. You've been running Shopify for over 20 years and from what I see about you, it seems like you love what you do and it seems like you're as energized by it as ever. It seems like you are as passionate about the future as ever. And I think that's really hard. Like I think having a life's work is sort of like this romantic dream for a lot of people. And I just think it's very hard to do in practice because people either fall out of love with their work, they get bored, they get tired. And on top of that, I think being a founder CEO of a big company is not even the easiest type of thing to have as life work. You know, like my work now as a VC would be much easier to do for 30 years. So I guess I'm interested in how you are able to bring and seemingly grow sort of your love for what you're doing after two decades.
That's such a wonderful question. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast. I'm super excited to get to do this. Part of the reason why I wanted to start a company is because I have found before in my teens, but I have an extraordinarily hard time learning things that I don't have basically experienced the problem that they solve. Like it's just like the way in school how math was taught basically. Here's just sort of like the steps for to like I actually had to really go and like figure out okay well what exactly is trigonometry useful for? And I just had to like I started with tricking myself into finding a useful problem that involved trigonometry after which I felt I could learn it significantly faster than everyone else because I just was so motivated. Right? Like Kapoa said, one of the joys of life and one of the best things in life is like to find a beautiful problem that might occupy you all of your life trying to solve it. And if you're so unlucky to at some point do solve it that it will have plenty of delightful problem children that you can dig into. Right. First of all, I think that's a beautiful way of thinking about life's work. But also it just works specifically well for me because I love learning things. I love challenging myself. I find myself very, very interesting. I just like because almost my favorite thing is when I want to do something and I can't because it just like you kind of find the limits and then you can have this conversation with yourself about what you know because there's a very simple recipe to success. It's just that everyone I think sort of into it or knows but maybe not spend too enough time sort of following through on which is success is really, really simple. It's just you have to figure out what it costs and then you have to be willing to pay it, right? Like and very rarely is this comes in the form of money. It usually comes in the form of time commitment and discomfort and these kind of things. So like I seek problems. I love computers. Like to stay with the example trigonometry. Turns out the very early video games like Wolfenstein 3D are basically just trigonometry. Once you realize this and like play with these things they become delightful and you learn the next thing and the next thing. So I wanted to start a company because I was just like it's a right time of my life. I just moved to Canada from Germany. I didn't have a work permit so I couldn't work for anyone. I needed something to do. My wife needed lots of time for her degree and I'm like this is a good time to try it and it's probably not going to work but I will learn a lot and so this has been a powerful way for me to motivate.
I'm curious about as you think about this, you know, are there things that other people can do to more likely stick with and enjoy their life's work. I think there are a lot of people who enter a career, a profession, whatever, and they love what they're doing. And then as time goes on, barnacles kind of attach to the ship and cruft builds and responsibilities grow and your job evolves and you end up doing something that you didn't start doing. And so I think people sometimes don't know how to shed all of that weight. And obviously you as much as probably anybody in the world have the potential to have all of that around you. You're public company CEO. You've got, you know, tons of employees. You've got all these responsibilities. So, it's possible that you could be encumbered by all these things, but you somehow haven't been. So, I'm curious if there's learnings for everybody, no matter how many or few barnacles they have. Like, what can you do to keep loving what you do?
Yeah, look, I certainly collected barnacles around certain times in my career too where just like I sort of fell into the trap of like trying to live to like people had particular expectations not really like more like in the department of aesthetics like I can only call it an aesthetic because people say things like this is what CEOs are like this is like the behavior that a CEO should display. You're supposed to be a statesman. You should travel and kiss babies and not. I'm like, well, that sounds pretty inefficient from my perspective, but like I guess at some point, you know, you just sort of get riddled down and like you try all these kind of things. My life was miserable, too. Again, this is a sort of junk science a little bit. But like what I'm in pursuing here is trying to make a beautiful product. I just think like we need to create products that are just like joyful and like one of my favorite quotes is a quote by Kathy Sierra of like don't make better cameras make better photographers right like and it's just like very, very deep to my psyche I feel through beautiful tools and through beautiful you can just inspire people to be the best version of themselves actually become like induce more ambition induce more skill or at least induce more ambition for yourself to develop skill beyond what you otherwise would do. Okay. And so I think that I want this to exist and this is just like sort of my guiding post here and it throws off all these problem children which are interesting which then challenge me. You're talking a little bit about sort of calm like I'm not a terribly calm person either but I actually don't want to like dial down my calmness. I want to channel it into building something. And so I've just found that almost all the mediocre products in the world, they remind me of room temperature, right? It is like it's just like it's sort of middle temperature of like the sort of what you get then no one really cares. Yeah, exactly. It's a default setting of a thermostat. Almost every great product is forged in some kind of furnace and some kind of temperature and like you got to put up into every energy source to produce that kind of heat.
Do you think that that basically has to start from like love for the customer?
I don't know. I don't know because you seem to love your customer. I think the greatest gift people make great products like I think without that crutch. I think if you have it, it should be an incredible boon.
You think you can be a great CEO and not love your customer?
It depends on what great CEO like I don't know. I'm an engineer. I read lots and lots of books about how to make great software. And you know what? Like many of these books, it's really funny are like when you actually check what was a project that they all worked on when they figured out the design patterns of modern software. It's like the Pennsylvania payroll system, right? Like it's just like not the most inspiring project. And but like it turns out I think just work is what you make out of it. And I think you can like if you just default to like hey let's actually build something that's like really, really meaningful and we all learn a lot about I think it can be done in any event. I have a massive benefit and really one of the greatest things and I tell people this when you know in interviews when people are thinking about coming to Shopify I point this out it's like one of the greatest gifts that this company has is all of our customers are inspiring they are just like remarkable people on doing an incredibly courageous act of starting a company themselves. The people who flock to then come to work for Shopify, the people who actually have experience starting a company or have maybe a family member or at least a deep appreciation or in fact. Yeah, in many cases there's just something wonderful also about, you know, Shopify feels hopefully very, very fresh as a company and there's no like tree rings that you can sort of read about its age, but like it has been around and so therefore when we do our annual summit or so where we all get together in Toronto for a week, there's going to be people who work at Shopify who weren't born when I started the company like and it's just like oh yeah, this is like been like little like people are being kids are so capable at young ages of being productive.
Absolutely. Yeah. I think like finding the challenges like is useful and tapping into like I found like it doesn't work when I'm trying to be different. But what definitely works is if I take the energy of that that I have like by my deep dislike I have such a discontent with bad products and software and so on and I can like want to solve this problem. I want to like you worked for a long time on HR software. We build HR software inside of Shopify because then we can't find the one that we want to use and because we see ourselves as toolmakers and we solve these type of problems and so that comes like that also means I'm going to spend half a year learning everything there is about how to build this type of software so I can work with a small team on the side to make something better. And I imagine now able to do so much more of that with AI coding. And now it's like crazy. One last thing here that you know you talk about wanting to build great products but you've also spoken about like wanting to be original probably to a degree where I imagine you'd rather be original and good rather than mimicking and great.
I mean no in fact what's even better is like be different because like again axiomatically if you are building the same thing other people build it can only be similarly good. It can't be actually much better. It can maybe make slightly look nicer but like you're bounded couple percentage points either direction. If you want to build something great or much better it has to be different. Now if it's so this has to be your starting position. If it then either converges on the same thing you have learned something potentially from first principles about why the solution is the one that everyone has converged on. If it gets worse, you actually learned something more important because now you know, hey, your theory here was wrong. You had an assumption which now has been validated. That learning is the thing from which you're going to pull so much value in every other realm now because like hey you now have a clearer idea about how things actually work. I think it's like the null results in science are massively underrated and so ideally then you don't ship it because the world needs better not worse right like so and I think that's actually we have tried to eliminate the term failure in Shopify and just call it the successful discovery of something that didn't work.
I'm curious if you've experienced this. You haven't lived I mean you obviously spent a lot of time in the Bay Area, but I wonder if it's different for you, you know, being in Canada, but for me over the last 13 or 14 years in, you know, the Bay Area, I have definitely felt a trend towards herd mentality. I think there was more originality in 2013 when I moved than there is now. I imagine there was more in 2003. I bet you there was more in 1995. Like I would feels like the trend line is professionalization of the industry and the mindset. I'm curious if you experience it the same way and I'm curious if there are things that people can cultivate to free themselves from the sort of mimicry shackles.
I mean like look you can't help but be affected by what you see around you and if like it's the best and the worst about the valley is that everyone's work on interesting things but of course that causes prior to be pre-installed when you start on a project. What's amazing is like and you see children interact with things like AI and they will use it so different from how you imagine like it's worth aspiring to having this like free mindset of like just like try to take orthodoxy or the obvious path off the table when you start because the forces of especially teamwork will always cause a convergence on the safest path right I think it is an advantage to be outside of the valley you just have fewer pre-arranged prior. In fact, a really funny effect was when I went to the valley as a visitor and met with people and for coffee and we were talking about I was trying to figure out how company should work and I ask questions and then I went home and like I had the entire flight to make my notes and like I again have sort of a bias towards do it differently. So I take what I hear and try to figure out okay well what would a Shopify version look like and what would be better of this system and sort of make it different because I felt that what you have to do but then I realized only very late in my career that like I never actually got the real story from everyone about how they work internally. I got everyone's ambition or highlight reel right like because that's what they really share. That plus the ability to then make edits to try to improve it further like meant that very often we actually found ourselves doing the things that we thought someone else invented actually they might not never actually have implemented it. Maybe that was just the thing that they just had the most previous meeting over and so I think that helps a little bit distance. I mean additionally I should say I think the word fundamentally Silicon Valley specifically has now for a decade and a bit declared war on any kind of distinction. All the talk about diversity was very much about eradicating kind of eccentricities and distinction and you know just like people are not allowed to be just quirky or funny with offcolor humor so I think the inverse that is a little bit more intact and you just kind of encounter characters and there's like often the more appreciation of like you know so and so is just like a little bit crazy and you know what that's really good I think that's coming back again a bit and so that's going to I think help a lot.
Yeah. I mean there was a big moment there all tech leaders had to sort of go through the sort of political back and forth and sort of what are we talking about at work and are we focused on work are we focused on other things that was not easy for anybody I think it was easy for employees. It was hard for everybody. It was hard because everyone like literally everyone wanted to do the right thing and we generally all agreed even on the sort of identified problems but just not the solutions that they added were just like they just caused distraction and or also erosion of this thing. I'm a company I think should resemble like an island of misfit toys much more than sort of a convergence on one sort of pre-ordained truth. I think it's totally worth exploring any alternative on this idea on the spectrum and then I think the results will just tell us what works best. I just didn't like when people were saying hey we are deciding for you if we can have distinction in this company and that didn't work for you've gone through another sort of like employee mindset change in the last couple years with AI from at least what I recall you were one of the first sort of CEOs to sort of say everybody we need to like however hard you think you're adapting like triple it quadruple it I'm curious like that journey how did that go is it still going on like do you have it where it needs to be is there an end to how AI-pled we should be
I'm actually really proud of where Shopify is with this I think this booked extremely well I made a choice is there's a type of situation that you get in running companies and large like I think any large group where something becomes clearly true and then you need to make a decision on like are you first of all are you do you act on it and sometimes people are just like failing bad right like in fact very often people fail the figure out what's true part you know like I'm sure Blackberry thought they were doing really, really I think they had the best year of sales ever than the year iPhone was released and thought they were pretty safe. So, I mean, and sometimes it's not that people are just not smart enough to see it. Sometimes they don't want to believe it or want to see it. Exactly. They know the implications are they're not predisposed for it and they kind of maybe for no fault of their own created an organization that like sort of every layer inside of a conversation like just sort of prioritizes kind lies over hard truths often because people just sometimes because there's a culture of everyone being nice to each other. There's also when you have a big enough organization, you talked about this with sort of like teams, you know, make originality difficult. I also think big groups of people, it's hard to get everybody to agree to go through an uncomfortable change. I think in a way like people are somewhat overestimating the founders of companies and then they are really massively underestimating what you can do when the founder is still present and in charge. It's not so much about the individual as in about the almost the piece of infrastructure the slot of having the founder slot filled and it's a reward distinction but it's actually as the founder you get so much social credit as having start the company that like you can just invest it's a bank and it's just like every time someone onboards they hear how the company was created and that just deposits a little bit of credibility tokens I suppose into a virtual bank account that is hard to reason about but sort of virtually exist and then I get to cash that in for you can spend it on big important changes and change management right like it's like that's one of the best ways I can speed up something that would take years of small culture change or like internal training with sometimes a memo and so in this case like I find I take that really seriously it's like not the easiest thing for it just like leads to you know just like I mean more work or sometimes unpleasantness I just find that is what that I owe the company, right? Like it's my best way to help the mission. And so when something like the AI thing becomes true and we saying, 'Hey, we have like two people. They're both equally good programmers 15 minutes ago, but one of them like is just like completely onto the AI train and just like has sort of back when I wrote this is really hard to actually get real value out of AI. It was more like the premise of AI was like what do we do in performance reviews?' And we just like the moment we said like it's like we can't we it's impacting it's called like net impact reviews they caught with Shopify. So like what's your net impact on the company and the mission and so like it's just like very demonstrably true that one of the people was more of more impact and the moment that is said it is feels like an incredibly unkind to not tell people. So just like hey let's write it out and send it to everyone. It's like unfair if you're like this person has skeleton on and I'm not going to point out hey that exoskeleton thing can be yeah if we act on this thing we should tell people and so we did and like I included a bunch of other things that are true like I've invested lots in making sure that everyone has everything they need they have an unlimited token policy that I'm sure your brother is thrilled with. Yeah, exactly. And so and so you know like we want people to tinker, we want people to play with this, we want people to use it much and it's super good. It skyrocketed the second this message came along but what Shopify did with this. The speed of the fusion of this tooth was like remarkable and I think Shopify is like predisposed for this. We have thriving on change is one of our core values and we really mean it.
It's good that you talked about like you know net impact. I think one of the sort of blunter instruments that's getting used a lot right now is just like tracking token consumption and people are like I want to see token consumption go up 20% a month. You know there's I think there's founders that say that which is it's not an obvious terrible idea in the same way that you know judging people by lines of code like we could debate is there anything to it like probably something but
I think it's fine. I mean at some point we like had a leaderboard and so on like of token. Yeah. Yeah. And then of course that leads to immediately bad like effects. And then when and we don't have that like on void is our internal system like of internet. It's probably not a term that anyone's ever heard but like it's so it's our internal wiki and everything. And on your profile it shows you how what your token usage and which percent you are in your department and group and so on just like because that's interesting. I think again also because we are tracking it, we have to be because we have to actually I mean at some point we have to allocate finances to opex and whatnot and so just therefore we show it to people so that I know
This is probably different numbers cuz you're at such scale but there are private companies whose token spend as a percentage of revenue is going into pretty wild places right now. I kind of think that's fine if you're an earlier stage company and you're just trying to win the market at all costs, but I am curious how this might play out. I'm sure even you're seeing token spend at numbers that are probably not a huge deal relative to your revenue, but are
It's a huge deal compared to revenue. It's like it's unbelievable. It's like many percentage points kind of thing. It's extremely high. It's many tens of percentage points for some of these private companies. And so I am a little curious. You know, right now we're in that part of the journey with AI coding where it's just so valuable that people are just like, I have no choice but to spend because it's too productive. I do think that that won't we can't spend 70% of revenue on AI tokens forever and have valuable companies. So, how do you think this might go? It's complex in a way that like I'm very, very grateful for the stage Shopify at because we are a profitable public trusted company and right now it's just like we really, really, really like the tokens we're buying. It's they're incredibly valuable and we are doing incredible things with them. It accelerates us in road map and therefore ambition and all. I think it just causes so many leverage on your spend. It's just like it's a no-brainer. I have very, very high opinion of markets. Markets are extremely good. They will figure out what the correct clearing price for these tokens is and right now there's few providers and maybe there'll be more in the future and there's all sorts of interesting moves around distillation and so on. Like I think companies will know how to wield these tools within their budgets and we actually doing a good deal of this kind of thing as well but we are still just like charging ahead because frankly we like the tokens we're buying. It's like it's that simple.
I agree and my instinct is that you know it should go down but there are possible worlds where it goes up or price goes up.
Yeah. Honestly, I don't no one knows. It really no one knows. We are certainly I think we are 10xing the amount of tokens we want every year right now and I'm sure that's going to go up and we are 3xing the amount of GPUs that we are putting into the world. So that like is those lines are not converging anywhere good at price savings. So given that AI coding is dominating so much, what are the biggest changes to like team design like you know there used to be this EPD triad and it worked a certain way and there were you know certain ways that you know road maps were built and reviews happened and you know people would go out and talk to the customers and bring that back and what is it now like what is sort of like the most fundamental molecule. Yeah, I think the small team is my bet. Like it's like the three, four, five people team. Which actually is like funnily enough has always been Shopify's bias. This is quite gratifying to like the reason why we had to very often go past it now is because you just need a lot of specialized skills at least for certain moments on the teams. Your example is a great one. Talk to the customers. It's just like having someone who's like actually like does the customer research and just like talks with people or like what we always did is like collocated people from the support or we're looking at we routed them all the tickets and put them on the teams which was an amazing way to do it. Now just like the sort of agentic harness around our teams, it's actually routing like really, really good summarizations of what our customers say automatically basically back and so that's now available to everyone and then everyone can do more skill like again we everyone is a seven out of 10 on every scale now. So that's like really, really helpful because it allows to make teams smaller. The thing that we are working the most and thinking the most around at Shopify is that I'm big on pace like pace has to be induced otherwise it's received. Parkinson's law is one of my most recommended books and I have a 1970s 60s copy of it that I give to everyone my executives I own many of them of the original run because it's like so meaningful. And the law is basically time work expands to the time allocated to it. The book is 60 pages and full of these kind of wisdoms. This is the most important part. This is basically one of the most important functions of a leader is to just compress time windows. Yeah. To the plasma. It's not that you just give any deadline and anything happens. But like if this is why it's really, really helpful to be very technical and understand all the like sort of tasks and skills, you can ask for something that has like a 50% percentile chance of being the right ship date. Then everyone gets to complain about you know the crazy founder which is like great. It's like do whatever venting you want and then you do very often some of the best work of your careers. And you know that's why people I think flock to these type of companies because you're surrounded by the other people that you can go on such crazy journeys with. The main point here is like I run the company by the six week review cycle where we go for all the projects and spend with time with engineers and champions and PMs that existed to set a pace ceiling I suppose floor of a six week cycle which was faster than we instituted it because if you don't do it you are run by a quarter sometimes you see like the moment like the moment you see in a powerpoint first of all first flag Second flag is someone uses the word H2 or H1 which means you know first second half you're actually you really have to do something drastic. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So you do this. And now I think actually six week view is actually way too limiting. It's just like we can do so much more and we're trying to figure out how to like what is replacing this.
I want to talk about sort of your customers and what AI means for them. You know, we were talking a little bit earlier about how like there's a lot of young people right now who have sort of fears of permanent underclass and how I think basically the idea being like you're just entering the workforce. You don't have any like accumulated skills or you know credibility yet and now you've got you know this AI thing which in some ways is empowering in some ways seems scary. The net is that there's become this meme of, you know, people are afraid of, you know, ascending through sort of the career and financial heights that they want to. And you sort of talked about how like that's not necessarily the experience that your customers are feeling.
No, I and again our customers are wonderful and they are entrepreneurs. They're courageous people who are putting this out there. They build businesses. They create employment and it's like in one way it's like a it's clearly like a particular slice of people who would do this but like it's actually much more bigger than people think. First of all, it's incredibly diverse. It's just like Shopify's customers go exactly with a population map. It's like great businesses in the most in the smallest communities. It's like well it's I mean it's a point of sales doors in the town center of tiny tiny tiny little townships as well as Alo Yoga and so it's incredibly different and it's cosmopolitan it's big business billion dollars business it's the people who are trying to build a thing in the lunch breaks to make ends meet or actually because they have an ambition that they want to become entrepreneurs so what's so funny with the way the AI the conversation is projected or how it's reported and sort of what you see on social media and so on is like it just doesn't like we can't access it anywhere like in anywhere we look you're saying Shopify's data and experience absolutely doesn't what we hear from everyone is like hey you guys fix computers it's like they like you techies talked about computers being these incredible things that can do anything and just like and it was so complicated and so and then we try this and they like I don't know what you guys just sound unhinged and now we have we can talk to it and it just does the thing and it's incredible. It's like just works with me and it's like I've expanded my business and I've hired all these people now like and so I mean it fits into Shopify's vision because we want lots and lots and lots of small companies and by the way 60 70 80% depending on country of people in the economy work for small businesses they are incredibly precious and important.
So what should AI mean? If you're a small business owner, you're starting a new small company, logically what should the change be as a result of AI from 2023 versus 2029, what's the fundamental change?
I think you should sign up for more, like you should follow your ambition further. I think our customers, like if you would, Paul, I think they believe in a permanent upper class. I think we're going to get to a point where just many, many more people can self-actualize. There's two pieces of data that I just find incredibly meaningful. One is like every 36 seconds someone gets their first sale, which I just think is incredible. While we're talking here, think about what that means for how many people just became entrepreneurs. The other one is more of a higher-level observation that every single time we ship something where we know it meaningfully changes something about the early journey—the sign-up, the kind of complexities, the questions, the friction in the business—each of them can be best thought of as a hurdle that someone has to jump over. And every single time we manage to make the hurdle slightly less high because we made something just vastly better—we now let you register domains or whatever, or easily transfer them, or in fact these days have an AI that you can share your browser tab and it helps you set up—every single time you do this, more actual business comes out of it, which then provides employment and so on. People turn out early in the process if something happens that ends up being a governor for them, and then they null out, they give up, and they stop, and then the entire business doesn't exist. AI is just—never has there been such a thing that can take people so far.
It occurs to me that last year on this podcast I asked somebody this question that, you know, they were a fine person to ask, but you're probably like the number one person in the world to ask this to. And it's something that I've been thinking a lot about, which is what has to be true for us to be in a place where you can like prompt, 'build me a business.' Like how far are we from, 'Hey, I made this widget, please go make me a million dollars, thanks'?
I mean, it's my favorite replacement idea as a replacement for a Turing test, which of course we sailed past without, oddly, very little notice. I think it is crazy. I think acting in the real world, starting a business that people find meaningful enough to vote for to the tune of a million dollars, marketing it correctly, getting the right sources, knowing what things to prioritize, the shipping matter—I think we are actually getting there. Ironically, through a provider role, like you can obviously use Shopify without having products. We help you find manufacturers if that's what you want. We help you—there's an entire thing called Collective where manufacturers offer their products that you can then use in your Shopify store. So if your particular skill set is the marketing, you can come to Shopify and try your hand at entrepreneurship. And again, very often, I think about half of Shopify stores end up being created by people who have done an online store or at least a business before. So people just try and build things. People should have a product that the world wants. Ideally, come up with some unique take on something, and there's so much white space out there.
But you think AI could do everything else?
I think AI should then do absolutely everything else. In fact, it's actually literally what our product's ambition is to be—like maybe the vessel for AI being the brain or the exoskeleton around the model—to basically conspire to just do absolutely everything so that if you show up with a product, you can start a business.
Just to extend the idea a little bit more, not to go into like too crazy of a sci-fi place. Is it possible that it could also make a product? Like let's say I wanted to say, 'Hey, just go make me a million dollars.'
I think the—I mean, anything in digital products. Make me some ebooks. Exactly. You know, actually books, there's print on demand for books, for t-shirts. Like honestly, additive manufacturing is getting extraordinarily good now. And there's lots and lots of great contract manufacturers for this kind of thing, like CNC and 3D printing. And then we're looking at humanoid robotics, which kind of—there's a lot of tailwinds here to the fact that making the products is going to become lots more tractable. This will probably be 10 years till I'm asking this, but the prompt like 'build me a house' and then the robots just go dig up what they need and then put it all together. I think I don't see how it couldn't get there, right? And I just think this is what's so—but what I dislike about the doomer conversation or the permanent underclass or whatever people want—how are we not headed to a world of abundance? Exactly. And frankly, that then goes into this sort of 'we eliminated all the jobs.' It's like, you know how good we are at making up jobs. Yeah. You know, like there's so many examples of things that are just delightful. Like I have friends who—OpenClaw came around, which we didn't think we needed, and then it ended up being one of the most compelling things. And one thing led to another, and now they have a warehouse full of 3D printers and things because it just suddenly—you have a Jarvis that you can say, 'I would like to do this project and I bought this crazy 3D scanner from Facebook Marketplace and I just put it—I don't even have software for it. Just go hack it and figure out how to help me.' And it's just like—I know. Holy crap.
I asked Kyle Vogt from Bot Company, I was like, 'Will we get to a place where I can just text my robot to order Instacart, get the steak prepared, serve it, slice it up, clean it all up?' He's like, 'Yeah, that'll happen.' At Benchmark, I spend probably three-quarters of my time in software land. But sometimes I do step back and I think, okay, to actually—this is maybe a little easier for me when I'm not in San Francisco and I'm touching grass in some other city or something. I'm like, okay, what's actually going to raise the standard of living for everybody in the world? It's things like we need more and better houses, better transportation, better food, better healthcare, good education. It's all these things that aren't software. And then sometimes I think about some alien watching us all and we're just sitting behind our little boxes typing. Everything's going better in typing land and it's all bopping along in software land, but we do really need it to get into the physical world because the standard of living—it is all on some level physical.
Absolutely. It completely is, and I think this is actually the missing ingredient, right? Because people talk about the incredible infrastructure we used to build in the 60s, or just even before that—there's the Hoover Dam, this kind of stuff. Lots of individual stories about these infrastructure projects, how quickly we built subways, and now it takes forever. There is an observed degradation of a lot of these kind of projects, and it's multifactorial—there's not one reason behind it. But one of them that really is true is because we are building the modern wonders that are no less impressive entirely in software. Like the web browser, Linux—all these kind of things are projects at a scale beyond what the permits are, and so easily and without compulsion and just by volunteers, sometimes people who have never met each other in the open source world or at companies building these. I mean, something like Google or the social networks—they're incredibly, incredibly impressive pieces. If they would have physical manifestations, they would be the most impressive. You would—again, you go to something like a refinery and you see the pipes and so on, it's so impressive. It's not even in basis points territory in terms of complexity compared to a browser. Exactly. And we don't appreciate that, and neither—that's not our problem.
I don't think I appreciate a browser is near the top of complexity.
I would put it under—it's one of the wonders of the world. I mean, for so many reasons, like it could never ever be introduced today.
Can you give a small flavor? I'm sure it's hard to even explain why it's so complicated, but what can you give a flavor of what makes it such an unbelievable thing?
