The Era of the Entrepreneur — Tobi Lütke (Shopify) & Lulu Cheng Meservey (Rostra)

We're just gonna have a fun conversation about anything. We should probably be on our best behavior because, you know, it's like a very discerning crowd here and they would not want us to say anything controversial.

Oh, really going for it. My stated preference would be something like orange. My revealed preference is always a very big difference these days. My mom just showed me a picture of my room at home and it was painted black. And there was purple and teal accents. So I guess I had the cyberpunk theme nailed when I was eight.

Color of money, you know, seems appropriate. We started with shopping and we wanted to simplify it and made a green logo and that's Shopify. So easy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Look, I think you got to nail the big decisions early and then be super flexible on the small ones. I started it not for Shopify. I started for snow, you know, selling snowboards really. It all sounds like a made-up story, but it's actually true and I don't feel like I need to editorialize it. I kind of went into this looking to just make money, right? I knew computers. I knew how they work. The internet was useful. I tried buying snowboards from the internet, wasn't possible. Felt this was something I could do. Also couldn't work because in Canada I didn't have a work permit. So no one could employ me while I was in Canada and therefore I started my own business which worked out. So you take one step at a time and the point was I did it because I needed to make money and I needed to learn. I was young, right? I wanted to cultivate some skills. The thing I knew about myself very well from early days from school is like I am unable to learn the solutions to any problem that I've never had. Which sounds really dumb, but it's actually, at least for myself, and I imagine there's other people like me, is actually a pretty profound insight you can have at some point because it's very actionable. You can just trick yourself into having basically all problems at which point you can learn everything if that's what your goal is. And so, I think as it comes to entrepreneurship, it's just the most beautiful way to expose yourself to literally all the problems anyone's ever had, right? Because now you have to deal with just trying to stay ahead of the needs of a business, you have to learn about all of finance, leading people, public speaking and all these kind of things. So I was on this path and then just went from there. On the wife thing, it is actually a remarkable thing. The early joke around Shopify, remember again we started in Ottawa, Canada. The early joke was the Shopify benefits package was marry a government worker and go on bears because that's exactly what all of us did. So that scaled until about 10 people.

I don't think it's harder necessarily, but it's harder for completely different reasons than it was, right? It was super hard because it wasn't something you did, starting companies really. There's no support network. There's literally you could walk into a bookstore, there was no book on it. I think Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters was also not about entrepreneurship but accidentally talked about entrepreneurship in a very real way that came out in I don't know, I would want to say 2006 maybe a little bit earlier. So there was basically a complete information asymmetry there. I only heard the term entrepreneur probably like three, four years into running a company, right? And so that's what we've been doing, right? Like now this seems crazy because especially because not only was I an entrepreneur, I've already caused other people to be entrepreneurs and didn't know the term, right? I mean this is partly potentially about me.

I just like you started a company, right? I guess. And then the whole thing became, I mean the thing that pissed me off most was when I started talking to venture capitalists and they sort of described my company as a lifestyle business because it was making money and apparently that makes you not a business in their minds. They had to rename us. And I pointed out, you know, I'm of European descent. We have started companies for 6,000 years. You don't get to rename companies into lifestyle businesses here suddenly. So anyway, so venture, but then I figured out we were actually probably not a lifestyle business and I guess they were right all along.

I think that's clearly going on a bit but I don't think it matters. I feel like it's very good to normalize making this easy. It used to be like you introduce yourself as entrepreneur and everyone heard unemployed, right? So that was also not great. And it still kind of is. Mom, he's an entrepreneur. I love him. Okay, he's unemployed. So I think, look, I think entrepreneurship is an enormous act of bravery. You're putting yourself out there, you're building something, you're making something for other people, right? Society is as rich as how many members it has that are adding something to the common mission of society, right? Like every country is a project. The core of a project is its economy. Its economy throws wealth of which then can be gainfully reinvested in social programs and all these other kind of things. But it's the economy which is the engine of the entire thing. And so your society becomes richer by more people contributing positive and novel ideas or goods or services to the commons. And so the only way how services or goods are being added net is through entrepreneurship. And so it's a glorious act that we should celebrate vastly more than we are and it also needs to be made as simple as possible and as convenient as possible because I think it's really hard enough. You're talking about sort of early days the difficulty was obscurity, information asymmetry and all these kind of things that were truly hard and like no one told you how to pay people, no one told you how to, like we didn't incorporate until someone told us you should probably incorporate, right? And then we incorporated with two shares, one for me, one for my co-founder, right? And we still have the incorporation document with a stamp and everything, it's hilarious. So two shares. And so you know, then we had to change that.

So you make every mistake along the way and you know there's something to this but it's really like now you're like increasing the amount of shares that your company have instead of work on your product. And so now it's hard because there's so much competition which is but that's usually that's not great for the people who are like it's obviously it's the nicest thing if you find a niche that no one has thought of and you have an instant monopoly and like or you're like Entropic and just add like Canada's GDP in a quarter to your revenue, right? Like all these things are amazing but that's not good for the consumers. Again, entrepreneurs get to play a game which is incredibly valuable and fun and full of learnings and all these kind of things. And what society gets from it is again goods and services that are novel that it then can vote on, right? It's like every single time someone purchases a product or consumes a service, comes to a venue like this, comes to an event like this, purchases an article of clothing, whatever it is, you cast a vote for not just that thing, but everything. You cast a vote for every single decision, every single meeting, every single idea that led to the event, the entire supply chain that caused the event to exist, you know, all the vendors setting the stages, the lighting, the sound, the booking, the tickets, everything. By being here today, everyone is voting for more of such events in this city by these people in the future. And so the world around us shapes by this sort of democratized collaborative multiplayer game we call the economy where the active players are the entrepreneurs. And I think that's really, really, really important for everyone to understand. By the way, just to make this a little bit more spicy and fun, you know, we all know this school is like a conspiracy to get everyone to be utterly confused about that, that's how it works, right? Like everyone's pretending that there's a fixed amount of wealth in a world that everyone else competes over and so it's just like even coming to the most basics understanding of how everything works and fits together is at this point like a gauntlet that everyone has to run when you're going through life and so that makes it doubly hard from a perspective of entrepreneurs. Of course you have all this competition now and like it's, you know, every niche is identified. Well, no, not everyone, you'd be surprised how much open terrain there still is. But there's a derivativeness. I think the people you talked about showing up, the people who are here because entrepreneurship is now sexy right now, they tend to go for the, this seems valuable. It's sort of a lean startup customer development that you usually see. It's like talking to a lot of potential buyers and figuring out their needs and then trying to fulfill their needs, which okay, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but this is how you create slightly incrementally better versions of things that already exist, right? And what we actually I think celebrate most is sort of the novel beautiful insight, right? Like the thing that no one asked for. In fact, the thing I feel like the best thing that can be done is for people to just fall in love with some kind of problem. This happened to me early and this is not my idea. This is, you know, Karl Popper writes about this and talks about this or talked about this I suppose. He talks like the best thing in life is to discover a beautiful problem early in life, like something you can fall in love with that you can then spend your career sort of toying with and playing with and acting in and trying to improve and solve. And it's the most unlucky of cases where you're so good at this that you might solve the problem because now you need a new problem to solve and the best you can hope for is that the problem has yielded beautiful problem children that you can now dig into. But like that's, you know, I think that's a beautiful idea and so I highly encourage people to just go and discover the problems that speak to them and then just go as deep as you can.

Yeah, I'm a little bit sus of a lightning bolt moment. I actually feel like there's a, I felt a gravitational pull to the combination of using technology to sell things and I know this sounds really trite here but like it just to me this was a beautiful thing, right? Like it just was like I always tried, as a teenager I bought things that my fellow classmates were really into in bulk and then sold it at a profit, right? Like it's just like, I mean again I'm a child of the 80s, early 90s so like one thing was, you remember these like magic eye books where you had to like screw up your eyes and you saw like a 3D object.

No, it's like it's just like it's like.

Like look it up. And like you know just like there was these books and they published them and it was like apparently really fun and I didn't quite get it but like I called the publisher and bought like hundred of them for like a dollar or two per thing and then sold them for eight and that was my and then I had enough money to buy new graphic cards.

I was a dealer. I was a dealer.

Yeah. Yeah.