Tobi Lütke, Shopify

One of the things I admire most about you is that you've been running your company for 21 years, something like that. I love people to do things for a long time. People that chase excellence that try to be great. My entire life is founders, right? So during the day, I read biographies of history's greatest founders, I read like 410 of them. And then at night, I hang out with founders. I don't think I have a single friend that's not an entrepreneur. And then I'm always asking the founders, I'm most admire. Who are the founders? They most admire. And God damn name comes up over and over and over again. And what they talk about is that you have very unique ideas on company building and management. And they use the word singular a lot. So I want to kind of lay out how you think about building companies, building products, building technology, and then spreading the gospel of entrepreneurship. I want to start with one thing that you said. You said companies or technologies themselves, what do you mean by that? In a lot of ways, I mean, take the social angle, like a lot of companies are social technology in a sense that they allow us to go all in. The only time you are really allowed to spend, I'm going to say age because that's the right number to say, really like fucking 14 hours a day, right? Just singularly pursuing a thing is like, I mean, we want kids to spend this time in school and that's okay. The university dedicate yourself, I want to bet, like you can't just not have a job, but just be like really into interface, socially not acceptable. So like company building turns out to be a perfect excuse. Once you call it a company, it's not like tinkering around any more of your ideas. And you get to explore things. Well, a company fundamentally allows you to do this, like just run the counterfactual to the world you see around you, right? Like you get to try to build a thing, but you think ought to be there. And then you means test it against the market. And if a market agrees with you, but this thing needs to exist, it moves energy in the form of money back to you. So you can do more of the thing that you were pursuing all along. And normally that, it's like self-science thing. Like if you find out, like again, I started a company that you didn't think was going to be like half its very big market, and a longer way, it just like the market pulled Shopify out of the project I started, essentially. You know, that's an incredible intelligence to tap into. So you put all these things together and you say like, well, look, companies, the concept of companies, not at all. It's like we're on a 500 year run and sort of extracted from things called companies which were actually more like quasi-governments like we used India company. And so the moral company is not that old. I find that if you take that mindset that like companies are just sort of a path-dependent solution to social and somewhat legal problems, they allow thousands of people to join your project. And it's called a job and therefore everyone accepts this. And obviously you can make money so it's a good deal. And then you can figure out if it's controversial if yours might be correct or needs updating along the way or any of these kind of things. And you could, at the end of the day, if you are lucky, you work with other people who are really all in and like inspiring and like taking it further than you ever think. And I just like the world thing is just like, I just like, I marvel at the institution of a company in a way, like because if it wouldn't exist for some reason and someone would propose or like, yeah, no, it would something say, like from first principles, none of this makes sense, really. Well, I heard you say something that was fascinating, really peaked my interest when you're like, we do not know how to build companies yet. All companies are terrible, including mine, which you said, and you know, that's hilarious when somebody's, you're running a 200 billion plus dollar company. And you think that in the next 20 years, we're going to look back at what we were doing at this point and be embarrassed by what we were doing. Why do you think that? Because it's like everything else. I'm sure when you listen to your first podcast, you're like, oh, please don't. But like, it's honestly, this should be seen as the most joyous of like moments. You should actually do it if you haven't done it. No, I do it all the time because what you, the difference between that and what you would do today is your progress. And as a computer programmer, I experienced this all the time. I looked at all the coordinates, I was like, what the hell? I was like, this is terrible. Why would you ever do this? It was way too abstract and complex. And then I made it better because I now have a skill to do so. And one of the saddest days of my life was when I opened all the coordinates, I was like, really impressed with how good it was. I was like, that's one of the saddest days of my life because I called it shit, the implication of this just hit me like a train, right? And then you weren't progressing in your life. Exactly. Because I was programming all day, I was like trying to build a company instead, which honestly, it's very, very similar. This is one of the things Daniel Eck told me about you. Yeah. Here's what I observed. Like you, I read a lot of books. I try to figure out, like, you know, I think someone, like if you don't read books, you will live a lifetime. If you read books, you'll live a thousand, right? So it's, I'm going to interrupt you real quick because I took notes on this podcast six years ago. This is the first time I came across you. And you said, books are the closest thing you ever come to finding cheat codes for real life. You can access the entire learning of someone else's career in a few hours. It tracks, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, I dedicate my life to this. Of course. Absolutely. I mean, I'm predisposed to agree with me, but like I really think we need to shout this more from a rooftop. So I'd like it's, you know, like the one weird trick seems to be just like, great books. Right? Like it's, and it kind of doesn't matter. It just makes a habit of reading books and like, ideally change jar, every three books or so, at least for one book and then that alone will give you a range that you can draw on for basically everything you'll ever do. So like look, I read lots of books, lots of them, you know, just like, you know, especially when I went from programmer to a business, like realizing after it's just learned business really quick, I got really dismayed with the quality of a business books pretty quickly because frankly, I think the business books are largely written by the people who have time. Why not the people who actually put companies, frankly, so you read between the lines as well, depends on like, if a person who started a company or person writing book is a salesperson, every problem can be solved with sales. If a person is a marketer, clearly every problem can be solved with a marketer. And I mean, at least that I can take away to, as a trap, to not fall into, right? So I was determined to not be the engineering type of founder who was going to see everything as an engineering problem because that would be called blindness and like, I would, that's what kept my capabilities. So I really tried everything and looking like, you know, just helped to, you know, build the team in such a way that I really get everything and I have my different business lines and, you know, arranged things, this is sort of after the IPO and I realized I have to be a very serious public company CEO. And so it almost killed the company, honestly, how did it almost kill the company? It was actually COVID that saved it at this point. Like, I had the inclinations that something was really, really going poorly. It was a time you didn't have a lot of competition, so which is also really, really hard for businesses. It's not a good thing at all because, again, you don't get, you don't have good rivalry and you can't, you can't sort of, like, even if something seems really good, you don't know because there's no one else to keep you honest about it. You have a distinction between a competitor and a rival, and you think rival competition is one thing. Rivalry is really good. I mean, it's the same, but it depends. It's a mindset change. It's like, I think if you, again, if you compete with another company, like there's a lot of, we need also a version of what they have, copying, like you do with Xerox strategy very quickly. Companies tend to get obsessed. Like, there's companies which have the most active channel in their slack is their competitive analysis channel, where people just bring everything everyone else is doing. And I think that whatever that has some merit, I think the problem is, it makes companies very reactionary. Right? Like, in the arts, part of anyone's art studies is, at least in finance, you probably believe a great piece is like you make copies of great books. Your next painting is not at the quality of a van Gogh, you just copy it. Right? So mimicry is actually not an excellent way of getting to excellence. And companies end up falling very much into this. Whereas if you treat someone like a company in your space as rivals, much easier to have a positive outcome bear, because rivalries inspire you to be best. Like Agassi could not have been Agassi with our samples being there, right? And he very, very clearly states this in his book. The samples that existed during the Agassi area, that Agassi like understood wasn't a real person. When you read San Francisco's biography, you just like tennis. Yeah. And Agassi hated it. Agassi hated it. And so the rivalry he created for himself created him, you know, in a way real way. In the last dance, which I loved, like Michael Jordan, like he admits that he might made up his light at some point, which to me is like one of the most profound moments. Sometimes I play the last dance in the background while it work. It's my favorite documentary, my second favorite one is The Defiant Ones, about the partnership between Dr. Dre and Jimmy Abin, the multi-decade partnership, that's the description. That's not what it's about. It's one of the best documentaries about entrepreneurship. It's like hip-hop rap history is incredibly entrepreneurial. So we just recorded with Jimmy Abin, who's the star of the documentary two days ago, or whatever the story is. You know what day it is. And that's exactly what he said. He's like, they understood the business of music before anybody else. That makes perfect sense. And totally tracks. You can see it from outside. Actually, if you see it from inside, like it was the first category of music that just like killed it on Shopify, it's like there's just like so, like opportunity is converted into products like that. And it's like they made different. It's really, really cool. Like, this is beautiful thing about Shopify, it's a front row seat to just seeing how high agency the different industries are and how quick, they absorb new ideas. And it's just like it's, anyway, it's like a different topic. But like, almost like in a video game, like a God-level view of entrepreneurship, because you, how many entrepreneurs on the shop on platform, it's like millions, right? And you're drawing like insights for your own work from the entrepreneurs on your platform. One of them, we'll talk a lot about today, it was like the importance of differentiation. But I want to come back to that. I want to go back to like, so you were thinking, okay, right after the IPO, I'm going to approach everything. This is like an engineering problem. Yeah. I'll be, I'll be a cosplay company, a public company CEO like 60 year old guy in a suit. Like, okay, legal background, right? Like, that's sort of what everyone emulates for whatever reason. And it just worked really poorly for me, from a product perspective, a company that is fine, right? All the way through, COVID happened well. And I'm like, okay, so what my company needs here for me is like five different things. One of them is, all plans are invalidators, fundamentally. Like everyone who has a plan, just please throw it out. We need to go and go for everything we're doing and really write it, because again, everything is based on a very long tree, like you start with axioms and when you make a huge amount of decisions on top and then you get to a conclusion and that means this is how you spend your day to day building this thing because of these things. If any variable along this way is invalidated, what you should be doing is redirect the entire thing on top, right? Like you should always prune back the decision tree all the way there and go forward. Instead of not being able to go out of their houses, it's one of those things. Like I don't think we all knew that was a core assumption we had that people could just freely move around in a world, but we got told that we can't do this anymore and it ended up being quite long doing COVID, at least in California and Canada and some places. So we need to redirect everything and that was kind of clear to me instead of what I, you know, that's how you structure a computer program, frankly. Eventually, the entire roadmap and what I figured out is first of all, that was really hard to get and people were fighting even like very much resisting talking about everything that's going on and I found out why because like there's just a lot of boondog that's going on. It's just like random projects by a brand of people that I would never found out about it. Why did you not know that it was going on your own computer? Because the company was like, I'd say like 45,000 people, you know, it sort of caused a disability. We had Toronto office and Montreal office and so on. And so it just turned out that like, you know, in Toronto office, there was a fairly big project to build the features to add to Shopify. So you could use it for running a supermarket because, you know, just they decided that the supermarket industry is very large and we should go and capture 1% of all of it like in the deliberate codex. And so, you know, and frankly, like I'm not saying those wrong decisions, the sort of really surprising thing about building a business or just in decision-making in general is that making the right decision is actually child play usually. Like it can make wrong calls which end up because of world changes end up being wrong call later and so on. That's a different thing. But like, most of the time, if you like the bad options in front of you, just prune themselves away. They just don't make sense. They're too expensive or like off-mission or whatever. The problem is, and I think school, unfortunately, accidentally drills this into people is that there's one right answer is sort of what people think. And once they find a right answer that could plausibly accomplish the goals that they set out, they go with it. And that's like, well, there's probably hundreds of great answers. And one of them is like far less work, far more, especially in an engineering project, like the best solutions are always modular and components. You build one thing and it will work with everything else you did. Lots of the bad software that people use is things which are just like hair boards inside. They're like none of the pieces fit together and a huge amount of code has to be written to extend the new thing, make it usable from everything else. And like, I'm not going to bore you with those kind of details. But if you look at the project brief, the team killed it, probably everyone made their bonus face, delivered the thing. It's like an island upon itself now that and after it's delivered, it nothing else in the product works. So you were looking at things as like cost playing a, like a CEO or a business person as opposed to an engineer. I was trustworthy. I was like saying, okay, cool, you seem passionate and you've seen to know what you're doing. I trust you to do the right thing. And when I hear, you know, obviously we're going to keep talking. You give me updates on things. People learn pretty quickly what are the projects that I'm interested in, talk to me about both and nothing else. People learn how to direct my attention to the things that we wanted to have my attention. So how did you fix that? For a moment, I went through absolutely every project I did myself to collect many, like 16-hour days. I canceled a product 60% of the projects and over a course of a year, I turned over everyone of executives. Like this is basically the consequence of this, because I just realized that in many cases the course skill was, well, I mean, I don't want to be unfair, but it's just that trust was broken in many cases. And in a real crisis like COVID, again COVID was hard, hard, hard, hard, hard. Hardest time of my life, for sure. And in a crisis, if everyone is a one before, some people go to zero in a crisis, some people go to 100. And I found it's almost unpredictable. In fact, if I would have been betting before COVID, about who's going to be contributing the most, I would have been wrong, I think entirely. Why do you think that is? I've been thinking about it for a long time, and I still haven't gotten a good answer. I don't think they would have known, this is a very interesting thing. I think a real crisis tests you in a way that nothing else does, and nothing prepares you right for it. I think at the end of the day, the thing that I have found is people who can adopt the fastest actually quite self-identify. Now I would be able to predict it, very simple, have you started a company before? So Shopify is by a founder, by founders, for founders, causing more founders, right? It's a celebration of entrepreneurship, we believe entrepreneurship is glorious, and people will reach for their heroes, and doing more than they heroic, go on a hero's journey with lots of naysayers, overcome incredible odds, and lots and lots and lots of headwinds. That conviction runs really deep, sometimes you buy companies, of course. Many of the people we purchased are still in Shopify. People don't stay for a very long time, because I think it's such a place for founders and for high-age into people. So I always had a Slack channel, or founders of our companies that we purchased. I did a founder off-site with them once a year, because I find their advice just to be so good. They all have been responsible for people's livelihood, and that changes you. So I went to the founders channel, I said, "Guys, I need help." I had this place, it's crazy here, had you already started turning over your executives? Yeah, once I realized that I was like, and it wasn't like one moment, it was just like, how did you know that instinct to go to the founders channel and ask for help? I think that at a moment of like, where the fuck do I go? Who do I have most in common with, and who can actually relate to the types of problems here? My relation to Shopify is different, right, like I started it, it's just like, it's different from everyone else, but the second best thing is talk to people who have had this type of relationship with the thing they created, you know, I asked a lot of the founders to become my executives. In some cases, I took people from individual contributors in an engineering team and put them in charge of a very large family, and you know what, it all, every one of us, they talked, and it was like really remarkable because it really fed into an iteration I had anyway, and what I found is, doing companies, the founders of the company were actually not doing well because they were like, similarly managed, they were like, irritants, what does that mean? They don't settle, they talk about absolutes, if something is shit, they say, so it doesn't matter if everyone has agreed to move on or something, it just, it melts on them in a way, that's deeper than this other thing, that's exactly what you have inside of you, exactly. And so I feel like this is, it's a very special thing, and it's, companies rejected, companies cocoon, sometimes they find, they give out skirts, like the skunk work team, it's like, just like, it's daycare for people who always tell you that your stuff, your shit doesn't smell, right, and shit doesn't smell. So once I'm like, no, you don't get to put them in like, founder daycare, I'm going to put them right in front of you, or like, in fact, in top of you, so, and so, you know, the defense that made to this business is in nuts. And so this is what I'm saying, COVID safe Shopify, because I needed to take a move where I was like, very much, okay, I built this company, I got to this point, it's important, it's actually maybe even more important doing COVID than before, because it was kind of like, for millions of small businesses, they're livelihood for this time, and only way to make livelihood. And I'm super proud of what we did, because I think the businesses that started in Shofan came early, like, actually grew and did better, do it again. Someone grew faster than you, you said somebody beat you guys to a billion there, which is the craziest thing, we're just businesses ever raised their customers, like that started on the platform for, it's, it's a greatest, I love this thing. And so, I mean, again, like, fantastic, they're heroes, they're glorious, they're wonderfully discontent. My founders, my customers, have the same irritation with my software, and like, they're telling me, it's like, it's perfect, right, it's exactly what I want. And so this was one of us moments saying, you know, what to be like, like, maybe you didn't purchase a completely by accident, and your intuition might have been actually helpful, and cross-playing someone else is probably not what you need to do. So at that point, you were running Shopify for how long? Uh, 15 years. Now, it's, yeah, about, so that you were 15 years, 15 years, this is very common biographies. I think it would be surprised people, like, oh, why do you think it's going to figure it out? It's like, no, it takes a long time to actually build the skills. And then the important thing about intuition has to be refined. Yeah. So it's like, maybe in 2005, you shouldn't have been trusting your intuition. Trust you've got to sometimes good advice, but it really depends on you've got. So it's like, no one, no one, uh, is born with intuition for building businesses. First of all, very business is a completely every decade is different. Like some problems are persistent, um, uh, like a laugh that I listened to, um, I think for an episode you did on Larry Ellison, you were describing his frustration with problems in his sales team, which literally I had to. Like, it's like, you know what, I, I didn't actually live, I have to live that horror. I could have actually, like, there would have read the right, if you read software or other strategies. And it's our listener founders. Yeah. Yeah, it's just like, like, that's, that's an amazing part. I'm glad you just, you picked it up because he's like, I'm fucking embarrassed. He's like, I'm 40 something years old. Yeah. I've been running this company forever. And I didn't understand the incentives with my sales team mattered and they almost destroyed his company. Yeah. They almost went out of business. I usually listen to podcasts, but I'm sitting in my, uh, racing simulator to practice for an X race. And, uh, like, it got to that poison. I had to, like, okay, I have to stop and just listen to this because I'm, I'm just feeling so much empathy for Larry, I listen to a lot of people, how funny is that? So anyway, thank you. Thank you for your question. Before you move on, because I love where you're going. I can't help myself because you know this. It's like, when I hear you're saying, I'm like, I'm getting really exactly as, I'm going to build an executive team of founders. That's not a new idea. Rockefeller was doing that 150 years ago. It's interesting how, uh, the building blocks that, uh, largely Rockefeller invented. Um, I mean, we call these things trusts because it was, you know, like that was a term, um, they, uh, first used there. Toby's relentless dedication to improving his company reminds me of my friend, Karim, who's the co-founder and CTO of ramp. Karim is one of the greatest technical minds working in finance. I spend a lot of time talking to Karim and every single conversation centers around his obsession with crafting a high quality product and using the latest technology to constantly create better experiences for his customers. Like Toby, Karim believes that nothing is ever good enough and it can always be improved. Karim is running one of the most talented technical teams in finance and they use rapid, relentless iteration to make their product better every day. So far this year, ramp has shipped over 300 new features. ramp is completely committed to using AI to make a better experience for their customers and to automate as much of your businesses finances as possible. In fact, Karim just wrote this, AI is all I think about these days. It is our duty to be first movers and push limits so we can make the greatest possible product experience for our customers. That sounds a lot like the approach Toby uses both Karim and Toby never rest on their laurels and use rapid iteration to invent new products for their customers. Many of the fastest growing and most innovative companies in the world are running their business on ramp, including Shopify. Make sure you go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money. Let AI chase your receipts and close your books so you can use your time and energy building great things for your customers because at the end of the day, that is what this is all about. Building a product or service that makes someone else's life better. That is what I'm trying to do. That is what Toby has dedicated his life to doing and that is what ramp has done to. Get started today by going to ramp.com. So now you have the executives you're going to in the most difficult part in your life. And you realize, oh, I'm cost playing. I'm going to go lean into my intuition. This is another thing why I think that decision you made six, seven years ago or however long it was, is why so many founders like study you, respect you, take pieces of your philosophy as well because you're like, God damn it. I'm just going to do this the way I want to do it. I was like, okay, I need to try something to defend you. You have to do things differently, axiomatically, obviously axiomatically, if you do the same thing, you get the same results, differentiation requires new ideas. You are instead of figuring out, like spending the next 10 years of my life figuring out how well I can cost play someone else, what would a company look like if it just like taps entirely into my intuition? Like in my biases, I'm doing literally the opposite now as I did before because this didn't work. So maybe opposite works. And worst case, I triangulate the midpoint between those things. So enabled by the very clear, fast and obvious success of asking people from the founders channel to step up and run companies with me. My real set of iterations here, again, intuition is your entire life's story rolled out for you to make a snap decision in a moment. What does my duration say about what the company actually should look like? Like, let's forget about the path to patents, let's go full tabular rather and go up from axiom. I've really, really, really nothing. Like I started a project on GitHub, literally, engineering tools, my iterations again. What is the first principle of a company? Like what are the inputs? What are our decisions? Like put in conflict files, what types of success? Like level success, how, you know, I asked for the sales, like a compensation data or the market data and put them into the repository. I turned them into machine readable files because they can't grab MSPDS and so on and so on. So I built a thing that then created, like at the end, I had all the information to create a model of the company. Like literally, this is Python code, which takes configuration files that we agreed on, things like how many people should report to a manager, all these bits and then computes them, uses something called a solver, like a sat solver specifically. And then with all these constraints, all these inputs, what should shop for a look like? What departments exist, what level exists, how many people are there in, in which group and everything. And of course, the first version, very utterly incorrect and then I realized, are you doing this on one? I started it and then I got like two or three other people in it to help me, this, the first and we've really, really got into it. And so this is called Shopify OS, this shop for operating system. It's really not very in part of Shopify now. What it did is it became irrefutable that we didn't know all the principles. We had like something, it was 8,000 people in a company and it was five and a half thousand different titles in a company. And it's like, so, I mean, some of them, I was just senior and senior staff, but in some groups, senior staff was lower than director and some above. And it's just like, it just, when I tried to make something software addressable and try to reproduce it, it showed every crazy, unviable choice in the company very, very easily. So there's a system in engineering, not actually a well understood part of it, but I think it should call desired state systems. And what desired state systems are is, it's a thing where you say, okay, here's what should be. You hold that up to what is, like you click on a website on a link and you react library behind it, what it does is it says, okay, I compute what it should be, I see what it is. And now I figure out what is the minimum amount of steps I take to get this to that. And that's what you see on the web browser. I need a desired state system for this company. So we have this model, we create it. And then we hold it up to the company and the job of HR is to be this reconciler. Like how do you take with minimum steps to get from here to there or change what we have in this system to approximate what we actually want. So this is very technical. Here's the effect of it. Think about how much politics this removes. Then Mike head of sales comes to me and says, hey, I need 15 new salespeople. I can put this now into the system and says, well, that means you have to either make these changes or you're going to lose some of your engineers or look, because the system based on our agreements, recomputes everything. So I have, we can always look at the counterfactual. And then it's not like, yes, boss agreed by playing golf to hire 50 more salespeople. And now someone has to carve, like, you have to find a pound of flesh somewhere in engineering team. And suddenly you don't actually work on innovation anymore because you never actually made the decision to not hire engineers because your budget doesn't allow anymore because, but you did make the decision to hire salespeople and maybe this is the right decision. But now we can actually look at the consequences of every one of those things. So that is hugely successful because it just created such a legibility for us and such simplicity. It also just told us that so much was undecided. Like for instance, we took the concept of in engineering, this was already around individual contributors is a really, really excellent career track, right? Like, you can make as much money in good companies as an individual contributor, as you can as a VP or manager or like the best paid people in many companies are now individual contributors at this point in history, especially in machine learning, like at least in the machine learning labs like OpenAI. But no other discipline really had that. You had to become a manager to, to, uh, progress in your career. And so I think one of the consequences was that, um, then I really looked at it's like, hey, I need more great engineers, the best place to recruit them from was my own management team. And like, that seems silly. And especially because we be, are they actually great managers? They're really well respected because they're good engineers. So maybe, but like, don't they want to code? Like, it's like, and, you know, so we created like this sort of mastery system. We call it where, you know, every job has, uh, this ability to stay, um, you, you can get these basically level upgrades frequently. And at any set of responsibilities, you can, if you're insanely good at it, you can make lots of money. And like, that just seems like, of course, you decided like this. Why would you not? Like, why? So they can stay individual. And, for example, in engineering, if you're in city, like if you're a hundred times better than other people in, in, in this discipline, usually, um, you can make more money than a, uh, than, than a vice president. Um, no, that depends on the value you can bring, but it is possible. And just like, I kind of hated the way we did, like, conversation in the, in the industry, right? Like, again, these are, these are boring topics. And you know, it's not, they're not boring to, to me, and to the people listening, why do you hate the way that they were doing competition in the industry? What I love about entrepreneurship is the, is, is the level of responsibility, responsibility people take. I said as much earlier than we talked about, uh, the founders who have been responsible for people's livelihoods. It changes you. It does, right? Like, so, like, I, I don't work myself well in an environment where sort of like, everything is pre-described. I, I don't like joining other people's games. I, uh, and so on. All this kind of things are my biases, and again, you're implementing my biases here. So, in COVID, like, this 2022, I think, or 2021, suddenly, Shopify went down 80% of stock value. I like, well, that's a, like, again, I didn't think there was a problem because, like, I think the stock market is basically like polymarket, it's sort of a betting market on the future value, right? Like, it's like, it's not, like, you guys, when you guys are wrong, when you just bet it, betting. Like, in fact, so I work on a real market value of a company, which you guys are betting on. But I don't know. So, like, there's such a discrepancy from where I see people that talk about stock price, and, uh, and how I, or have ever, or inside of companies is perceived. But what was going on in your head when it dropped by 80% though? Well, I'm like, well, my head, I believe because I'm like, you know, I, I mean, I've, I've, we have a stock loss. We believe. Yeah, of course. Because we didn't, of course. That's, I don't know. I was, like, I was not about to, like, raise money. I did, I had enough money in a bank, I'm, you know, German. So, like, I don't take that, like, much and so on. And it's like, so with the internal metrics, strong, they, you know, they didn't deserve, you didn't deserve it. The unit economics are amazing. However, like, um, at the, I don't, I don't want to say this right, but I honestly don't forget. The exact numbers. Like, at the high point of our stock price, I think we were trading at, beyond 50X off revenue and stuff like that, I'm like, yeah, that's not exactly value investing here. Right? Like, guys. And so, um, I get it. Like, we were worried about the fundamentals of the business. No, but like, what, when it is 50 times revenue, I see it as my obligation to do that. Okay. Right. Like, it's my, like, my job, my, my job is to build the best company I can. Um, the betting market says that I can deliver that kind of thing. And I'm like, yeah, maybe, but you go ahead and give me a moment here. Like, I need a moment here. Yeah, it's for doing this project. So, uh, every time I bring this up is because again, everything I talked to another entrepreneur and I just run it through this, whatever the hell's in my head from all those books. And when I hear you talk about that, I think of that the time when Amazon stock, he took Bayesville stocks off this in the shareholders and went from like something like, you know, 180 down to six or 120 down to six. And he's like, yeah, but they were, they were focused on something else. I saw the actual fundamentals of the business and I was like, this thing's going to work. So eventually, because I think, um, Buffett always repeats that thing where like, uh, in the short term, the stock market's a voting machine and the long term, it's a weighing machine. You just want to build a heavy ass company and he's like, and, and Jeff's like, I'm building a very heavy company. Amazon will be a heavy company. So I'm not worried about this, like, short term drop by 80 or 90 percent. That really tracks. And so, um, but like, one of the effects was, um, and this is right. Like, but people got stock options at, yeah, the level up there. They rightfully say, well, how about it, but like it's like, um, um, even if you say like, okay, well, I'm super game here to get us back there. Like this is going to be, it's going to take us doing, I realized the psychological problem with everyone being so underwater and having, you know, to spend years getting to basically the zero point fair, these stock options are both like even a penny again. And, um, of course, they were like, well, but that's, um, the company, like the company gave me both things at the time. It's like, I received them. I was, I was, I was pass it in this interaction. Therefore, the company has some kind of responsibility to kind of make a hole here. And I think that's actually, you know, I, I mean, I'd not necessarily see it this way, because like, the risk was there and like these kind of things. And like again, it's like other people voting that's causing this price. I didn't set it. However, I do receive a point that they had no agency in the process. It would be repelled our conversation system to completely work for a set of what everyone else is doing. We give people, here's your annual salary, here's an internal system you go in, you look at it. This is a number. Now you get sliders. You can, uh, say, how much do you want in stock? How many do you want in our sales? How much obviously one in shop cash actually, um, and how much do you want in cash? And you can change that every quarter. It's like you decide, like, like, how much money you want, um, and, um, you can even use a couple like a tool that's been to lock in the value of the stock you receive for three years. Like it's like, again, sometimes auto-doc C can come back on the table if you get there from good principles. Like you can actually join Shopify and get exactly the same stock option deal that companies get at other places, um, by using the tool we give you, but your full agency and you make this choice. The consequence of this conversation system is kind of beautiful because what happens is, first of all, it's super predictable, second, you know, if you go stock and the stock appreciates and you, you hold value, you make more money. If, uh, like the stock goes down, you will now get more stock options when, um, in your next quarter. So it, like, it's, it's rebalanced against the actual value of your every quarter. So it works really really well. It's very popular. It's what's kind of hard to do because doing this worldwide for people in many different countries was, like, kind of a leader nightmare or because, like, that's like, what sort of rules around how to change around changing of salaries, we figured it all out. So we have a blueprint of how people want to do it, books really well for us. But we're kind of proud of it because it's like, it's, it's just like, again, it's a point of differentiation and we believe it books much better. And again, I want people at the company to also feel like this is a company that is, like, never sleep walks into anything, right? We, we, we, we kind of be a deliberate about things. When you started this, I'm going to do it my way, I'm working with the founder executive team. You were in the process of that and the stock shopping. No, it was already there. Okay. So that was a 2020, early 2021 project I think, and then I think, I think the stock market and then that changed like 21 late. Some, it, it VCS are totally running together for me because it just was, I mean, there was no weekends, there was no, I can't tell, I can't remember who said this. I was talking to a much, I talked to a lot of older founders. I'm obsessed with like, people think I'm obsessed with old people. It's not that. It's like, this guy's got 50 years as a, yeah, as an entrepreneur experiences entrepreneur turns out they know some shit. They've seen some shit. Surprise. Yeah. And he's just like, man, you're going to remember the beginning of your company, you're going to remember the end and like so much in the middle is going to, he said exactly you said, it's just like glitters together. Yeah. So he's saying you should document it more. I totally agree. Um, lots, lots of years, uh, totally running together. I have a reasonable record keeping on this. So I, and, um, especially with all this AI, let, uh, agentech, like reprocessing of nodes and, for instance, so on, you can actually reconstruct these histories and timelines and I'm fascinated with this right now. But, um, so I'm understanding though, like you thought you're now looking at running a company as like an engineering project. That's right. So I'm like, let's engineer a company, be a company engineer. As I told my team, that applies for every single department in like, do you engineer marketing? Do you engineer everything? Okay. I require my, um, uh, executives to, um, I mean, at least tell me, but actually do it. Go to a podcast, some international conference and, and, and, and talk about how Shopify does the thing the conference is about differently and why that's better. Have you? If they don't have a good answer for how they were doing this right now, or how they're going to, that's, that's what I'm working on, but for them to, uh, crystallize that message. And, um, um, um, there's a couple of reasons why I do it this particular way, um, that you can get into, um, the part of psychological, but like it's also just like, into now, what's the psychological? I say a brain, a, quite a bit. And, you know, the main conclusion you get to, um, about the brain is really, um, but the brain is a, um, uh, retrospective narrative alignment mechanism, not, uh, it's, it's actually terrible record keeping, but it, it mostly attempts to, uh, take the most salient, uh, version of our self-identity and reconcile the history with it. And, um, it sort of rewards you for actions that are directly, uh, um, congruent with this identity. And, uh, this way you, um, from dissonance with your own identity, but you can actually, like, change your identity quite a bit. And that actually makes this world process work for you, um, significantly. What do you mean by change your identity? Like the way you view yourself? A really affirmations work, right? Like affirmations work, which is dumbest trick that, uh, that, that works. I'm so glad you're saying this because people from outside, like, this guy is, like, very logical engineering. Now it's like, and you're all about intuition and your type of affirmations, you're speaking to the choir just so you know, I'm a tool maker. Like, I always project very idealistic, but I'm actually not that idealistic. I'm super, um, I'm, I'm like a craft person, tool maker person. I, I, I, my entire life was making tools. I'm literally my pro, my pro, I chop by the tool, um, I make tools, pay often for tool makers. I might, my hobbies is making tools when engineers were people make tools, right? So like, it's, it's a frag, like my, my, my life's a fractal of tool making. It's all about tool making, uh, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, aesthetics. It's all about the craft behind it. But also, um, also not because of craft for its own sake, although I appreciate that too, but even that's not for idealistic reasons, because appreciating for craft behind the tool making happens to be pragmatically an excellent way to get really good at prune like everything is about outcomes. What's the affirmation part now? The affirmation that like you are, if you use tell yourself or write down a hundred times something about yourself, um, that writes it into the, you know, frontal cortex at such a deep level that your brain will start reconciling you to that. It just works. Um, I, I've used that very often to, uh, like I, you know, like I, I was terrified of public speaking until I just sat down for, uh, like a week and every day I spent, like, ten minutes just writing where I like public speaking. I love public speaking. You, you wrote that down. I, I know. Yes. And now you, you love it. Yeah. Like a week later and I knew it's not this works when you know what you're doing, right? Like you, you don't even, it's like it's not like a placebo. It's like it's actually like you just actively change your, you know, frontal cortex and this moment. So, um, I, I, I use this often, um, uh, I, I, I start writing to myself, message in the bottle, um, this kind of things. That's all of the different topic. Like it's, so the point is like I, what's the topic there? Hold on. You write messages to yourself. Yeah. Affirmations are just, no, it's just like, like generally when I feel like something is like, hey, there's something I've figured out that I really like. I know I have to write a scheduled message to myself, um, to remember it because like, I need space to repetition on, on, on the idea. What's an example of that? I mean, for instance, like we have a company, um, um, you know, to feel like kind of thing, like a company, uh, get together, summit once a year and for onto for a week. And so, um, usually I, uh, did a keynote there and like, Ben, I write a message in a bottle to myself. If what was going about the process, what was better about the process, what are to do next differently and all the topics I left in cutting board just so like, to get a head start. So, like, that's a random example of that. How did you learn this that you could change identity, that affirmations work, that writing these things to yourself? I think try an error, but like, I think the hints are like everywhere. Like, it's, I mean, affirmations are one of us things, but like, I mean, there's a reason why the like society caught, creates rituals, right? Because rituals end up being largely affirmations, uh, uh, uh, on, on, on repeat, right? So what do you think of visualization? Like, so matter of stations, kind of, like, uh, um, um, probably books too. I've, you know, what the funny thing, I think everything works, um, if, if you, if you just do it, the question is what's effective and quick. It sounded to me before, like, I started doing all, reading all these biographies. I was like this is some Willy Fufu nonsense. And then you see very smart, analytical, logical, many case inventors and engineers and it appears over and over again. People that know each other, they didn't, they worked in different industries, different times with different parts of the planet, and they all talk about doing this. And it's parallel construction. They all come to the same conclusions in different words. And so, yeah, I personally, I mean, in the, in the sort of department, I'm extremely taken of a story philosophy, control what's under what is under you control, know what is. And then do the best possible job. It's a job, it's the thing like the the world project in life is just try to become very, very good at something and ideally cut away some significant skill, create potentially service products and then share them with as many people. Like you do this because that's what you're on platter for, right? Like it's like do things that matter in the world that are under you control, but also sign yourself up from, like it's okay to sign yourself up for most interesting places. As long as you remember what your job is in within them. So in this way, like I love the current times and I love the technology industry. I have a role inside of it, which is like I'm taking care of my answer of entrepreneurs, it's more business that, you know, are trying to use the word of technology, use the word of retail, through their own work, then that actualize and that is a very cool job. And so like, you know, I comes out and like people are like, well, should I start an AI lab or whatever, or should I like don't you want to look at open AI. And it's like, I mean, everything would be interesting, but you know what, that's really cool, pursuing the same problem in a changing landscape. Like now I get to reinvent everything I've already done. How fun is that, right? Because I really care about these problems. Right. Back to the affirmations and sort of a brain, sort of self gymnastics, going to my team and just saying, look, you know, just tell me what you will talk about on stage is bad. It's like afterwards, you need to internalize this as something that you have committed to me as imagining I imagine that something that care about, they care about, very consoling and so maybe they have to do it. You know, because otherwise they, you know, said something untrue to me, right? And like they don't see themselves as someone who is face unto things. And therefore, you know, you can actually make reconciliation work for your own benefit in this kind of way. It also just means like it emphasizes like difference. Like difference is so important. It's so like orthodoxy just really needs to be offered table from the beginning of the project or like from the beginning of decision making. Have you ever said he James Dyson? No, if I, it only recommend one book ever. It's his first autobiography, but one of the, he has a, he has a crazy line about this. So this is also very common with great entrepreneurs. And you, you hit on other talks like, well, if you want to, I'm trying to chase excellence, trying to be the best in the world or make the best tools possible. Like, therefore, that demands difference, that path that mission on day. I can't do it. It literally can't be the best if it's the same. Just think about this. And so Edwin Land, who Steve Jobs here on the founder of Polaroid, he had a personal motto. He says, my personal motto is very personal and it may not work for you, but he says, don't do anything that somebody else can do. He just would not, he, I'm not making a me to product. But the reason I bring up Dyson, because now he owns one of the most valuable, probably held companies in the world, right? When he's writing that book, when the business was fine, but he had one product in like one or two markets, it was like 300 million year of revenue, not a bad business, but a very small business compared to the size that it compounded two over the next like four decades or three decades. And he says in that book, even at that time, he's like differentiation and retention of total control. And he goes, it, he goes, you make it different, different, even if it's worse. Yeah, that's one of the craziest sentences I've ever read. I totally agree with that. It has to be different, even if it's worse. I see it all the time, because again, it's gets back into the copying of a painting problem. Like you can make a seven out of 10 solution to everything by copying the seven out of 10 that already outside the market. But if you make from a couple of other actions, your own version of it, you have mastery over even if it's a thick lot of 10, you can iterate on this. You can take this past the seven afterwards. Like they often, especially in technology, the world belongs to the fast, the people we iterate, the people we would like adjust, the people who understand what's costly and what's unnecessary and will prove an array of arrest. And I've had actually probably net like pixel for pixel, the most inspiring picture that I think exists. But I've ever come across is the SpaceX Raptor rocket evolution. Like have you, do you know exactly? I use that as an image for the days and episode I made. Exactly, it's perfect, right? Like you, like you look at this and say, yeah, that's, that's today's Picasso, right? Like it's just like, this is, this is it. Like this is, we've been not at a point of time there of a great works and the masterpieces are being done by one person. They are done by teams. Very few teams can move forward by subtraction, but it's like does not exist in industry usually very, very rare. So it's beautiful in that way. You have to do things different. You have to make them your own and you have to have mastery over the over the first version if you want to take this far further. I mean, this is, we talked earlier about the podcast that do any side of a complex context. And it's about how to say, what, how did we make the decision? It's like everything around the decision is more interesting than the decision. Is this podcast constantly updated? So it's internal only for Spotify. God damn it. Only for shop. I mean, especially when we talk about podcasts, that makes sense. Well, they have, it's funny. I looked at my end of your rap on Spotify. And one of the podcasts I listened to the most, which was shocking to me, was they have the internal company history. Oh, yeah. It's called Spotify, a product story. And it's because, you know, everybody else, I think one of the reasons that we have a mutual friend obviously in Lulu, she's on your board. And the importance of telling your own story. Like this is the thing when I went to dinner tonight, I was like, Lulu, what I love about you is like you're repackaging old ideas, like Napoleon told us old story. Julie sees her story. Like, they all these people did. It's very value idea. And so everybody was trying to tell the company history outside of the company. You're like, no, you got all this other wrong. We're going to make it ourselves. And it's like, I think a 10 part podcast, but they originally, I think they built it for themselves. And then they, like, it didn't know about us. I love us. Actually, you should listen to it because it's narrated by Gustav, who was head of product, who's now co CEO. Yeah. And they take it in chronological order. And so like, if like Sean Parker played a big role at the very beginning. Right. He's obviously not there now. But he's on like episode one or two. And then they interview the people that made the decisions. And that's the whole point. Like we were making, they were all a crazy shift that you go from, you know, desktop, mobile, all the things that to deal with. Well, just go listen to what the company did at the time. Yeah, exactly. But not only what they did, why they did it. And why is so much more interesting. Like one of a tour, like the tourney of Toby set. It's real inside of Shopify. Right. Like, it's like. People just throw these things around. Like, well, Toby said, be doing it this way. Right. Like, and I, I just like tried to get people to like always ask when, when I said exactly change your mind all the time. Yeah. And this is not even I learned about this because something is like really, really odd and like really odd decisions. Like, it was easier ways available. Like, how did we get to bear? And it's like, well, it's like, everyone said that you wanted it this way. And it's like, I'm like on a rich context. When did I say this? Like, clearly, we've never talked about this. So it's like, it's a very common thing. So what's the typical episode? Is you explaining the thinking of what's going on currently? Yeah. Yeah. It's like taking people back to major decisions. Are these short episodes? No, like, initially, it went for phases. There was a sort of for a first, maybe 50 episodes. We said, like, we had a, we have to mix it down to 23 minutes because we calculated that that was average commute in Shopify. Like, so we checked where everyone lived compared to offices, ran the data and there was 23 minutes. And so we made a 24 minutes because that seemed like as good, like, we needed a reason. And you like designing a trade. So you don't know exactly. So, so, you know, just like, well, I also just don't like picking 20 minutes because it sounds good. Like, I want, like, I need a better reason. So I might say, I want something to be like 20 minutes sounds right, but let's find an actual good reason why it's 20 minutes. And then we found 23 minutes reason. So sometimes you're allowed to, like, just parallel construct the thing you want to do anyway. Then at some point, we abandoned it because it's just like, you know, with nice things with podcasts, it's like, people can skate, move. It doesn't matter. Like, you can just keep going for hours and hours. And do you have anyone that are, like, long? I think there's one which we had to cut over a couple of episodes that ran, like, I mean, if you run it for five hours, it's like, what was that one about? That was like, the philosophy of engineering with a bunch of our distinguished engineers, like, like, how, how? You know, it's, like, you would not believe how immature engineering is as a discipline. It's just like, there's so many good ideas and so many bad ideas. And it's so hard for people to sort through them in a way that's like way harder than any other industry. Because it has a weird property, like software has a weird property. I mean, the best thing and by the business model of software, so insane is because of zero marginal copying of software is free, right? Like, it's like, you can, you know, you build Shopify, first person signs up, you make money, second person signs up uses exactly the same thing. And it's like, you know, the second instance of it is not the same piece of software. And so, hence, the margins of software are incredible. The same thing causes a lot of problems for the creation of software because you just don't know how much bad weight is in the system. If you compare this with electrical engineering, there's a very clear cost of manufacturing, right? Like the bill of materials is like the thing that dominates the success of a product because it dominates when the cost which then dominates the product market fit. It also manufacturability is a huge component in electrical engineering. It's like, it's a board laid out in such a way that it's prone to defects that you choose overwrite components. Like, it's like one chip get really hard next to a soldering thing, but like, you know, I remember the original Xbox, he sold it itself. If you just played certain games too long. So, you know, there's real constraints like this. So excellence is obvious in a way. It's like in the numbers and everything. Everyone's trained on costing waste into the system. Software engineering just throws away so much of a capability of these incredibly powerful machines. Partly because it just doesn't cost anything. However, out of certain scale, it starts costing. But at this point, it's being fixed by operations teams getting more servers, rather than engineering teams going back to fixing those things. So the consequences of bad decisions in software engineering are next tonality that doesn't crew back to the engineers who cost it in almost all instances. So it's like a little bit like a factory is polluting the environment. It's just like it doesn't cost back to them. And so, anyway, so therefore, it's a very tricky industry to move forward. It actually quite often moves backwards significantly. Computers got much faster and be through a huge amount of capabilities away, making like these very, very heavy client side JavaScript applications that took over everything. It just got awfully slow and very error prone and took forever too long, especially in e-commerce where people visit sites really. Some of our customers went out of business because they talked themselves into their own stack. They had a CTO brought in their own team. They used a set of technologies that they wanted to use because they are currently the in thing that has the most interesting conferences and the most interesting places. Then they deploy it and, you know, like it sort of works and in their most, but the problem is when you're going to website for the first time, you have to load it all and you don't have an up-to-date MacBook, perfect hardware with much memory like everyone has who spoke on engineering teams. You might have an Android device and you might be on a train right now. You're sitting there the minute and a half of this thing for this audience though to load. I guess what the conversion rate of that online store is zero. I'm quite annoyed by this, although that was a real, real, real problem in 2023 especially. Like I think a bunch of frankly, as you know, older engineers had to like take the kids to decide and just like have a good conversation. That was the context of the episode of context. At least that's what led to this particular thing. I don't know if he actually succeeded there, but I think we didn't need to because I think we'll just change. Like moment zero, zero interest rate phenomena where they're gone. People actually wrote better, quote, out of certain. Like it's like amazing how much, like how consequential, like zero interest rate, absence of zero percent interest rates actually ended up being you could feel it in the engineering team being less prone to accepting random waste into best acts. That's interesting. I don't know if I've heard anywhere else make that point. I think this idea of hearing directly from the founder in an audio way is underutilized. I did this episode on the founder of kinkos. He was dyslexic. Yeah, so it's on my, yeah, I heard which surprised me. So he actually a lot of great founders are dyslexic. It's very common. So he's like, I can't read your goddamn email. And I'm not, he was also, I think he said he had like 80 HD so he couldn't sit down at desk. So his job was like, what do I like to do best? And he's like, I just go around and all the kinkos at the time were owned by individual people. So it wasn't like one cohesive corporate structure. And so therefore there's a lot of experimentation going around. So he would just travel the country. And then he'd spend all his days in the stores and he'd be finding because of all these people during different trial and error, good ideas. And so he would do this is back in the day. He would call into a corporate voicemail. And so he at the end of the day, he'd give like a three minute update about all the good ideas that he saw. And then you'd come in as a kinko employee the next morning and you could play Paul's voicemail. And then this is an interesting thing that you might agree with though. After doing this while he's like, you're resurfacing all these great ideas, right? This guy in Memphis found the best way to do X. Why don't you mandate that everybody in the company does X. This guy's way he goes, because if I do that, that's the best way it will ever be, which kind of relates to what you just said. There's probably a hundred different good ideas or right ideas. And if I stop here and don't keep tinkering, going right to that word that you like, then that's the best it will ever be. If you need something, you tell people what to do, you might get it or you probably will get it. If you don't tell them what to do, you might get something you cannot possibly imagine if you have good people. And so this is like actually a really, really important thing. It's much more important to create the environment in which people can be the most excellent self. The bad is to prescribe, he has precise moves to do. So how do you create an environment that people can be the best version of the X and version of themselves? Or do you say, is this related to your idea? You're like, you said something that made me chuckle. You're like, I don't do corporate baby proofing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, exactly. Absolutely. It's the same idea. The baby proofing thing is real. What is internal policies? What are the processes? What are they? They are like, do this thing different from the way your intuition tells you to? Okay. Why are you wanting people to behave differently from the intuition? Like, let's look at our higher order bits there. It's like, what are our opportunities to have? Well, you could change the environment in such a way that doing the right thing is intuitive. That's very good because now you don't have to pose to policy. You could also, you know, hire people whose iteration is better home. They often policies and processes are downside protection. You're trying to make hard to make to avoid the people who do things wrong to be off causing so much damage. That's like the downside protection. But you're also really limiting what best people can do. Right. So I think in creating like an environment almost as a box for people like here's the space. And I want you to follow like inside of the space is this problem. I need you to solve. Right now, my word in comments word is attempting to figure out what a genetic commerce is, how it works, how the companies are broken together, like how the research labs work with everyone else, how to expose product catalogues from entrepreneurs, how to make sure that transactions can be met, what the large language models need in terms of information to, you know, do a fantastic job as a when people ask them to be their personal shoppers. You know, that's a box like inside of this somewhere somewhere in it. It's all dark is the most beautiful solution. What tools do we have to explore this box is like dark like I don't know. I can take a stab at it. I can paint a picture of what I think is good. And that's just like sending people into the room with a couple of tools afterwards. They need to make their own decisions and I want one to do this. I'm not there. I don't want to like control a decision company makes millions of decisions every day, right? Like in a building like this, right. But when I can make a decision of like this, like, help them really want to be on this journey, help them fall in love with a problem and see the potential. And I can make sure it's a right team and everyone has the right skills and I can make sure that they know what they have decision power over and like how to, at some point, because, you know, people are only willing to take so much risk. How to transfer that risk to, to me, ideally, or to a company, right? In a form of our projects work in phases, a prototype phase is what I just described, where you explore the problem. You think of, like, when you've learned what you need to learn and think you have something that you can build, you make a proposal and you transition out of a prototyping phase, that's a meeting, right? Like, that's a, you know, that's what we call, like, it's a phase transition in our, in our project system, there's software that manages all this kind of thing. And he was in AI to preview what the transition will like, be like, because it's trained on all the other reviews have ever done. So we can sort of mock do it and figure out what I will probably say, but saving a lot of time. And you have an actual meeting and, you know, then they tell me what we're planning to do, what we've learned that helps me a lot, and then I say, OK, OK, to transition. There's some engineering leads, design leads, give OK one, I give OK two, and then they are in a build phase, and then a new phase starts at the new box, they have agency to make decisions in there at this point, I assume, the risk, this is, it's like a trade of accountability for autonomy. So that's how we found we can almost operationalize this system, because what I'm finding is like, I mean, all the biographies you read, what you find is ensure is that the moment of insight, often the product that made that started all over artworks that are defining the careers. They were not really coming out of an office building environment, where someone had OKR's, but of a precise metric to hit, and then, like, the eventually probably did not have one visuvian man as an OKR, given to him, right, like, it's like, you kind of have to create like a box for them, sometimes a physical space as well. Like he was in an attic that just ended up being where he did most of his creative work, I believe, and so you try to figure out what is this sort of environment, which were excellence and creativity can come together. And then collapse it to saying, OK, now company needs what it needs, because we need to make resource allocation decisions, I mean more people onto a project at this point as a couple of sort of things that need to be decided, and then autonomy is regained until the next phase is releasing at which point we do that review. Sometimes we say, OK, we're not ready to transition because we need some things need to do differently, but that's the way shop for orchestrates now, these are all things that exist today based on the days to encode where I reviewed every project. And like, well, what should I be able to do if I would be like, if I would be a competent CEO, what would I have put in place, so I could do this thing I need to do here in the beginning of COVID very, very quickly, given that I wasn't. And now I aspire to be what needs to be created. And so like, whatever the answer to that is, we worked hard on and I think we just discovered some extraordinarily powerful systems mechanisms in this journey. That was the prompt, like, what would a competent CEO do in this situation? I love to take the view that like I'm a corporate reader and shop if I've been bankrupt and I bought it on a fire sale and I'm like marching in on day one here and previous management was crazy and we need to turn this place around. Right, like, that's my favorite, like, I love playing this game every, like, year, figure out what I would do differently and then like, it's like, let's go. Yeah, I have my, to do this and I asked a lot of teams to do this a lot, like I said, when we have systems that just don't work. One of the most powerful, you know, maybe through affirmations, may for experience, things you can do is just don't be prideful about the prior work too much. It's allowed you allowed to have pride in it, but like, you want to wake up better every day, right? And for that, you have to kind of downgrade what's there? Like, you can't, like the sun cross fallacy is so powerful. But how is that information? Like, how does that represent? Like, how do you, when you're actually talking to yourself or you're writing this down or just in your monologue? I literally write hit pieces on the past, right? It's just like hit piece. Yeah, like, I just like all the things that are wrong, but the thing I somehow am really proud of. You are so much like some of my favorite founders, Dyson's like this. My friend, Karim, who's one of my closest friends, he's the co founder and CTO of ramp. It's like, nothing's ever good. The way I describe him is it's like, no resting our laurels, no sleeping on lands, do something great and then do it again. Yeah, Steve Jobs said this. He's just like, well, what's the proper response when you make something wonderful? He's like, do it again. Yeah, let's go. I know that a lot of these great people, they don't really have very, very mirrors. They obviously learn from what they did, but they're not like, wow, look, look like trophy room. They don't think that way. Look, nostalgia was put on death certificates in the 1800s. Like, it's like it's people died off nostalgia in their minds. I mean, they really died off something else. It's like, we used to know that nostalgia is not a good thing. It's like, it was one of the bad indulgences. Now it's barely a vice. So I think nostalgia needs a little bit more scrutiny. Overcoming sun cross fallacy is one of those things that like any path that you can take to get there is going to be enormously beneficial. Well, I think playing the game of corporate raiders agree with exactly. So when you develop tools for separate yourself, that was your decision, you might be like, oh, well, I feel a little sensitive about that. No, no, that was somebody else's. This is a new company now. So one of the things that is unpopular when I do it inside of a company is like, I really shit top a past, especially if I did it, you know, like, you know, it's still like systems that I built inside of the system. So I like, you should talk to the past public. I trash, like, like, I make fun of all the ways in this is hilariously wrong in funny ways. And I, I need to remind myself, especially when I do this in an area I didn't look on that, like, I got to provide, I have to provide it or like, I have, I need these, like, corporate raider, like, I'm collecting these now. I need to help people not think that what I'm doing is a passing judgment on their prior work because I'm not. We are all to, like, expect. Well, you are passing judgment on the prior work and not just passing judgment on them as a person. This is a rig Ruben talks about in his book all the time, but it's not based anymore once it's out there. Right? Like, this is the thing. Like, I can say more about that. What they need to disconnect from like, the work is collected is the moment the public rest is accepted or the OK to is accepted. You've converted like your craft into something for company. It's like, it's, it's in a company's commons. It's a company is a collaborative project where everyone contributes. And there's a process by which it's contributed at which point the company accepts it as being on quality. And says, like, this is now part of, you know, like, my, like, the company's embodiment, essentially, so the product. You have contributed it. You can, you deserve the credit for this and, and so on. But the company could have had someone improve it at any point of time. Right? It's not yours. It's like, we don't love people to use word ownership over parts of the court base or so. We, we only allow stewardship as a work, like, just as a, as a proxy term, because sometimes you need to be able to talk about it. In this way, it, the shopper, if I think so, if it's at more like an open source project, you're contributing into the commons. People talk about Wikipedia, not about particular editor of the Wikipedia page. You know what I'm saying? I have a selfish question before you move on. Yeah. So you're looking at all past work. You have, there's this guy named David Olgovy, who is one of the greatest advertising agency founders. And he says that we have a divine discontent with our work. It's a perfect anecdote to smugness. Yeah. Right? Cause he's like, you don't want to rest during your laurels. Yeah. I talked to James Lison about this, though, because he has a very interesting organizing principle. So we're going to take this cup right here. This is a product. He goes, this is, it organizes this entire life. He's been an inventor and engineer for 55 years now. And he's just like, I see his product and I say, ask myself, how can this product be better? Yeah. Then I make it better. And then I put it down. And then I, short time after I pick it back up, how can this product be better? I make it better. I put it back down. And he goes, I just, he goes, I see the bad and everything. Yes. But the interesting part is he's intellectually and emotionally mature enough. He goes, you have to understand. It doesn't, like, I'm not a miserable person. Yeah, I just look at it as like, this is a problem. That problem is an opportunity and I want to work on that. What is your inner monologue when you're critiquing your past work? I get excited by finding problems. Like, I just like, I love, like, I mean, look at this point. I'm such a long term veteran of tech company building. I love figuring out what's your bad at stuff. Because like, yeah, I have a pretty good thing going on. Like, like, all about intense and focuses. This thing is working. And, you know, when I figured out what, like, we're actually bad at something. I'm like, holy shit, like, I'm an obvious proofread for now. How do you come about a company now, which is like actually my job, I craft, right? Like, this is all opportunities. Things go into comments. They are being hopefully judged by everyone. I get grumpy when things that are shitty are not identified as such and improved and then make people go do it. And sometimes I do it by trying to create energy by just like roasting the things current state about just like I want, I want people to feel no difference to it. I don't want people to respect the piece of code that exists and got a system that I want them to improve. And I want people to, you know, find their sort of energy source. Because what I'm asking them is like, go into a particular box that contains this problem and do the best possible, like, better than anything I could possibly ask you right now for solving it because I expect people to be highly agentic and, you know, fond of problems and just like find better solutions than what, you know, industry usually produces and so on, right? That's the entire point. It's unpopular when people aren't in the right headspace for it. And it's incredibly effective if they are. So the difference very often is just a couple of words and a bit of framing. And I just find that's like that's one of the most powerful sort of tools you pick up, I think along, you know, along the journey is like the five words to say the beginning of the sentence would change everything. And my co-founder actually gave me one of us very early, but like probably why I tuned into this kind of thinking and this collecting these kind of things, because what did you mean by the five words you say at the beginning of the sentence? I used to go, again, engineer, that's always like an interesting experience for the engineers working for me and like I stay pretty current. But with engineering, I still do not a ton of production, production engineering, but like I do, I sometimes start new projects with people like and the first 20, 30, 40 progress or commits in many repositories for things that we use come from me. I like doing this, it's part fun, part, I sometimes need to help in my craft. Anyway, so that's a surprising thing for people, of course. So my intuition was always like, okay, well, this is not the right architecture for this kind of thing and I know this for a fact because I've built this thing before, so let me go to a right whiteboard and just like we architect this like. At some point, and that like now, you know, Dale, my co-founder, like explain to me, well, look, you get pretty defensive then because they just came to show you basically, you know, what was objectively bad best work because you represented it to you and that matters to them. So, and then you just like it doesn't matter if you go and make a much better system here, out of the top of the head, they are like, if I truly ever did this. They're going to be defensive and try to say face, so. Just put for example, in front of every sentence, and I like it, what do you mean? And now, like, I tried this and books perfectly, so instead of just telling them, hey, you know, instead of doing this, like here's. Architecture, but should you just say, like. I could think of doing this a couple of other ways, maybe it was something you want to consider, for example, what about this and then just do it. No, you're on the same side, you know, you're on a team, we all are working together on the same problem, I'm just, I'm adding input. Now, like everything is the same, it's five words or so in the beginning, I just found the magic of these five words. It's not this specifically, it's like things like this, like just frame things slightly different and life's easier. I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night, and as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high quality decisions, and you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality sleep for years is eight sleep. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of eight sleep Mateo, and we live in the same city. A few months after I started using eight sleep, I randomly ran into Mateo at a restaurant, and I was with some friends, so I go over and say hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me who was I talking to, and I said that's Mateo, the founder of eight sleep, and my friend replied, he looks like he gets good sleep. Mateo is living and breathing his product. I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an eight sleep. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my eight sleep ice cold. It's cold before I get into bed, so I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is where 10 times the price. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and I believe eight sleep is one of them. That is why elite founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use eight sleep. I would recommend getting the pod five, which is the newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place on top of your existing mattress, and it is next level sleep tech. It automatically regulates your body temperature throughout the night, independently for each side of the bed. The result is you get up to a full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no-brainer investment in your sleep by going to eight sleep dot com forward slash senra, and use the code senra to get $350 off. You can try it for 30 days at home and return it if you don't like it, but I'm confident you will love it. I will never let anyone take my eight sleep from me. Make sure you get yours at eight sleep dot com forward slash senra. One of the things that Daniel from Spotify almost had Shopify now for him. They have Spotify told me. He's like, you should ask him what were some of the advantages of starting with him. I think that's just too much cross coordination. You kind of have to simple companies towards like entropy creates equilibrium. And so you end up like the companies just being very recognisably similar to each other. And the activation energy for being very different is super high because that means people come with wrong ideas into your company, behave incorrectly, and you have to like tell them to behave differently. Where if you're outside of a place for like so many people just move along between companies. I mean, first of all, especially early, I traveled to Silicon Valley a few times a year, but I tried to just take it all in and learn as much as I could. But of course, what I got from everyone was not actually the answers to my questions about how to do things. I was getting the aspirations, usually, of a highlight reel. People wanted to seem smart, but like, so they gave me the best version of what they think the answer should be or where the company ought to be doing. And so, which is great because then I took that back home with me free flights and sort of took the ideas that are relevant. I tried to always put like a shopper spin on it, like I don't like taking ideas as you clearly can tell and never did. Sort of like just like figure out how to localize them to our problems and ideally try to do something better. And so only very many years later, I did I realize I was always like always for my career was comparing my and our average to everyone else's aspirations and highlight reel. Just like that alone is a really, really good thing. And if you've been trying to do better than that, you know, sometimes just ignorance is an incredible way of actually just doing better. And so best that helps the process of having to translate being able to translate things like we had no one like when shop for IPO. We had one member of executive team who ever worked for a public company. We had no one who took a company public with no one was executive at a public company. We had one executive who worked at a public company once. I think that's cool, right? Like it's like that's I've had a real sense of accomplishment about that because like it meant we could became our own thing. Our entire motto becoming a public company was we are not going public. We are creating a public version of shopify. And so that was like, what's the difference between that? Between the shoes just again becoming something else. Like we don't want to like a lot of people avoid me because then when when they're a public company, we're going to be different because like people sort of expect public companies to be a certain way, at least the people who work to shopify that I felt it was important to be different and do things differently. I think that we will appreciate this is, you know, we looked at the requirements. We talked about Formula One, Formula One's fun. Sorry, it's a little bit of a veer. But like Formula One, I love because it's like there's a rule book. It's the opposite of every other rule book on cloud of people read it so that they can comply. But Formula One rule book is a rule book that is read so that you figure out how to beat it. There's no engineer in Formula One has anything to do with the central casting engineers and casting engineers are actually really want to get requirements and then comply to them. So like the people going to Formula One and the people who are going to beat the system, right, like this is very important to them. So I calm myself as of the archetype of the latter, like the group of like I would have liked being an engineer Formula One, I like beating the systems, but I'm a people tell me to abide by. I heard a story one time that somebody had hacked your competition system to get more money than, you know, essentially they just stayed the rule book, found this new poll and you're like, good for that person. And then you'll fix the loophole or whatever the case is, but like that's exactly the kind of person I'm working for. Exactly. I mean, yeah, especially if it's, I mean, there's a way, I mean, what happens next ends up mattering, right? So this goes on, like at some point this becomes, well, you're just exploiting a weakness fully. I mean, I don't want to give too many provisers, but generally, like people who are like looking around to figure out, like I never begrudge anyone being an intelligent actor in the local incentive system, that's just like everyone's allowed. That's pretty much my morality at this point, like it's like, or at least big part of it, you're allowed to do this. I own the incentive program system. It's not, you get too much out of incentive system or if it says system tells you to behave in a way that it's not congruent with the company, the company's goals, but it's my skills issue in designing a conversation, not, not, not, you're not there for taking advantage of it, but really appreciate if you give me a heads up. You're still the same team here, so maybe you raised your hand at some point saying this is fine. Not like 10 years later. So back to the IPO, we just looked for ways how to, like within the, they constrained rules by the SEC, where do we have agency, where we can do different things? We sort of honed in on the IPO roadshow video, like a horrible video player, the IPO roadshow website, like, and, and the other IPO we could find was just, you know, CEO standing in front of a screen camcorder and just sort of going through the same slides. We're like, there's no rule for that. That's really fucking documentary here. Like, let's, let's, let's go through the history of why this company exists and why it's important. And you said, like, what video can be put onto this space when no one expects it, but will somehow hope people end to full screen the video within the first 20 seconds and actually watch the entire thing. And we heard so much about this on the road, like so many people were like, I was looking forward to meeting you. What you guys did with this video was insane. I didn't even know you could do this. Every every, every after this was like our way. So consider like a nice little moment of putting a bit of like agency at the process, which was pretty. I heard this story one time. I think it was just like the founder of series XM, I forgot who the person is, but they're like, well, how do you make annual reports? And there's like no rules around there. You have to present certain information. So they made a book and like the book would be illustrated and just like no one said we couldn't do it. It's like we're just going to do it our own way. Let me ask you a question though, because I think I heard you say this as well. You were getting what you felt was bad advice or incomplete advice or maybe advice not from first principles about like whether to go public or not. But advice was always like don't right? Like it's like, who's on you? Other founders? Yeah. Founders. I've spoken very autotoxy definitely is to avoid it. And I don't know. I can tell you the story of my meditation, but like it's just like basically is like, I mean, I suppose I'm predisposed also then everyone agrees with something to take the kind of factual just to hold it up to see if I potentially like it. I just find plan B usually is a better one. Everyone puts some plan B, like I think for many, many, many people in bad earth, always doing their plan B would lead to a better experience. Right. Just like plan B gets ambitious one. But if this event happens in my life, fuck it. I'm just going to be a company is like such a common plan B. That might be what you actually want, but you're lying yourself or you're scared or whatever. Yeah. And also again, you are a human being before you have. You come, your firmware comes pre-loaded with a problem called the sun cost fallacy. We just do. It's like this. You got to operate that auto itself a little bit. You've got to be able to like discount. What has happened more to make good choices because otherwise you just chase bad with good money all the time or chase that plan with. You're always in the day. I think you're flexibly scared of change. They'd rather be in a board boring or like even miserable environment than actually change because the fear of change is so great. People are telling you, so don't go private long. Like being private is better like friends of mine, like, you know, try it. Running this extreme, like they've imaged what they put off in terms of figuring out how to stay private for such a long time as they're actually remarkable. I just think they spend a lot of time figuring out how to stay private. I don't think that's the most valuable way to spend time. You went public in 2050. What were the arguments for staying private longer in 2013-2014 when you were having these discussions? We were tiny. We had about 800 people, a Canadian, so they're saying you're too small. I mean, when Shopify's first trades happened, I think $1.5 billion on a valuation, right? So it's pretty wild that the public market almost got venture, could have got venture. If you bought Shopify, you had venture returns in the public market. Every once in a while, someone puts together a list of best stock market returns over the last 10 years or whatever. Like, yeah, I own that list. Just because I decided to take Shopify, I did the old school thing. That was normal. That's what everyone did. People went public fast. And by the way, this is kind of important. Public market needs to have growth because where else is prosperity coming from for people who don't have? These obviously, credit investors, credit investors laws and stuff like this. All they do is make it so that when you reach, you can invest in private companies stock, and then you're not, you can't. Well, we're returns, like, of course, there's such a fucking conspiracy to keep everyone private because that just like sequests us all the growth exposure to institutional and investors and people are already accredited. And so I just really dislike that whole thing. I think like, man, like, again, it's about building things and sharing what you figured out. And people buying a ticket to write the Shopify because they like what they're building is like, please, that's clearly what we want. So I just think the situation of public companies is good. I mean, my beef is with the whole notion of influence over companies. Again, path dependence, like one vote wants, like, one one stop on vote is like, yeah, but like, no, like everyone studies content, like, like decision making knows that you want to move towards, like, people who has the most context should make a decision. That's like, doesn't save a leadership of a company. This is literally what I'm talking about creating space for creativity because I want the decisions to be made locally on the ground. So were the arguments for staying private back then, just mimetic, they were just, they were just repeating what everybody was saying. Some people are generally right. It just doesn't, it washes out. But like, again, people have problems with the concepts of like, very often, a new idea is dismissed because someone can formulate an idea, like a reason against it. Somehow that dismisses the entire thing, right? Like, we live fundamentally, most of people spend their entire life sadly in a, in a, in a vitocracy, right? Like where you need everyone to agree to do something, but you're only one person to vote against it, to not do something. And again, good companies overcome this in an important voice. And so similarly, one good argument dismisses the entire idea is a very common way to evaluate options. But people very, very often don't do is reformulate all the arguments against the status quo, right? Like the thing you're doing right now also is flawed. We just, we really understand the upsides and downsides, the new thing might have way higher upsides, or actually, maybe not, maybe the upsides are obscure, but like, or hard to know for sure, but the downsides are clear, and we can be formulated. But the usual default position is not do it. So that is, I think it's incredibly undisciplined because you need to think in, you know, propensities, you need to think in chances, like, and sometimes you need to, like, really, really load up a decision for all the pros and cons that can be articulated and make it, make it a little bit like in your mind, like, look at where the scale comes out for a company that's trying to sell like the e-commerce platform for everyone, especially from the many American companies. Being a Canadian private company that's tiny and it's not, it's not ideal. So, you know, like, people don't usually go public because of a marketing or name recognition, but, you know, super valuable. We put it on the pros side and then put everything else on the pros side too. We might get better people working for us because some people really want liquid stock to, like, and so, you know, so on, so on, so on, and in the end, it's like not even close, just, you know, the downsides been, like, a couple of annoying phone calls I have to do a couple of quarters, at least for the first 10 years as well. And I thought, actually, most of the process was actually quite valuable, like, like, I learned a lot about my own business having to explain each other exactly. There's been a few previous guests on the show, Brad Jacobs, John Mackie, Daniel, obviously running public companies in Brad Jacobs and John Mackie's case, they both said, like, Jacob speaks that point. Well, one, he thinks it's like, wonderful, free marketing and advertising, two, you have now have a current, like, you have a currency. Mackie said the same thing, like, it benefited Whole Foods being public fast because then he used that currency to acquire a bunch of other competitors and accelerated his growth. But Brad Jacobs point was just like, he likes the pressure of that check-in, where it's like, this is what I'm trying to do in the company is where I'm saying new the company, and this is our results. And I want somebody to say, oh, like, there's a big disconnect here. And I want the pressure to, like, to actually perform in, like, and have some of these expectations externally. We talked about the environment that you're building at Shopify. I'm curious about the, how you think about the talent that's inside the environment. Yeah, of course. I mean, ultimately, I really, really believe in the sort of story, maybe Adlerian idea of separation of tasks. What have I control over? And what I don't. I always love the particular formulation about thinking about how other people think about you. Like, again, you need to make yourself a person, for me, of being liked. If someone then dislikes you, that's up to them. It's not that it's not your job to make people like you. It's your job to be likable. And if they make for category mistakes, it's their own fucking problem. So it's a really, really freeing way to think about it, but tell it. My job is to make a company worthy for the best and brightest work for. Like, this is a part of what skips everyone's like, oh, we need to hire a better recruiting team. Well, maybe you need to also just like be worthy of a kind of talent that you would like to have. So, I mean, this goes from like office space, if you have any to a company. Like, I want bullshit people have to deal with to how much, you know, bullshit politics can be subtract from a world thing. And can you large company feel like a small company with lots of resources and lots of impact? You know, it's more fun to ship software to millions of people that you really respect. Then to a few people who you're when try to make a sale for at some point or like it's just like impact matters. In a way, this is likely going to be misquoted, but I think the talent eventually takes care of itself. They're not that many good companies to work for. They're not meant companies, but that many good companies that deserve the attention of people who can be of. But I've been the most capable people because they have a lot to start a very interesting idea. There's actually not that many great companies. It's your job to make one of your companies, one of those companies that the best people in the world will want. What do these people look like though? The reason why I didn't move to Silicon Valley is because I knew how to create geographical consensus in the eastern sea broad. That Shopify is the best company to work for. I just knew I had the ability to do it because I knew how to build a company that I would want to work for. I think given that I estimated I will need somewhere between a thousand people or something like this back in those days. I'm like, I'm going to find another thousand people that think like me about how good a company needs to be to work for. I can dislodge all of them. If I go to Silicon Valley, I can't pay what Google pays potentially or someone else makes up for their skills issue. By just overcompensating. It's called compensation because you kind of have to compensate people for this shit. You have to ask them to do it. If there's a lot of shit, you have to compensate people for it. But you have enormous amount of resources you can make up for skills issues by money. In the East Coast, which was much more hedge fundy and much more high-fiance. For the kinds of hackers I wanted, I knew how to do this. But wait, I'm going to pause there. I love this idea. I'm going to build a company that I would want to work for. That's on one of the instructions, which is great. You also had this thought experiment that I heard you say before, which is one of the worst things that could happen on the other instructions. You wake up ten years from now and you build a company you don't want to work at. And then you have this green line I want to pull. That's dystopian. There's so many companies I wouldn't want to work for. Why did I use my life to build a company to build another one that I wouldn't want to work for? You just should build a company that's worth working for. Again, you should take pride in your work, in the inputs and how you. Did you accomplish your things you set out for in the archivage? Be easy on the path, but the outcome does should matter to you. And man, I just shake my head sometimes with how people overcomplicate these things. It's just like it's kind of. Man, people know what they're looking for. And I'm talking about very, very fortunate people here. Like people who have a lot of choices, who have incredible competency and in some of the rarest skills and combining this with enormous drive. Like there's a couple of different attributes that all have to come together to be one of those people that can command hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. A conversation package that you can make in this industry, but partly because you're worth it. But like you're contributing more than that to a mission, like a person, therefore you can command this kind of conversation. And that's like the way it is all fits together. I think of everyone as an entrepreneur, really. Your capabilities, you are the entrepreneur of your own work output. Your product is what you can do and what you can accomplish. Your market is for companies that exist. And you are selling an exclusive subscription in a. That's the institution of employment, right? It's a two-sided marked opt-in relationship. Whenever people come to me and say, "Hey, how do I earn more money?" It's like, "Well, be too good to ignore when we increase compensation." You know, be better. You're making this amount. You would like to make this amount. In which way have you become so good that you can add that amount of increase to, you know, just like the collaborative project we all work on? And so I think that's just sort of clarified and simplifies things, right? So I mean, all this said, I don't want to make it sound like it's inevitable, but if you just do all the right things, you end up. There's always a information gap and a reputation lag. And I'm out there recruiting and telling people about the company a lot. What helps me a lot is people are curious about the company and I've heard about the company and so on now. But that is because of things that were under my control. I tell people that it's an unshared attention company that's no part-time jobs. You will have to put a lot into it. You're going to get even more out of it. You will make great money, but we attempt to never be the highest compensation bit. Because we have found that the people who optimize for that above all else actually don't do well at the company. Because shop buys a mission driven company. Exactly. And the thing I promise is like, in terms of your own skill set, partly by demand, partly by us Moses and partly by us don't culture that's around you, you will advance vastly faster at Shopify, building capabilities, skills and correct ways of thinking and managing models and these kinds of things. Then I think at any other place, therefore the compound return to your career is going to be vastly higher here than anywhere else. Because you get to a potentially higher compensation level earlier in your career because you love it. The entrepreneurial story is very fractal in Shopify. It's just like, what is your product? What's the market and doesn't fit? It's just a clarifier that I think is worth talking about. I'm going to quote David Ogreby again because I think it's interesting. He says talent is most likely to be found amongst non-conformist dissenters and rebels. So when I asked the question about like, hey, we know the environment. We have a description of the environment. What are the people in the environment? There is two ideas I got from two separate entrepreneurs. I mentioned both of them already, but because they use the same terminology when they're looking for talented people to hire in their company, Daniel from Spotify and Kareem from Ram, and they both said the same thing to me. They hire for spikes. So a lot of people got a big corporations. They want you like well-rounded. No, this guy might be a bipolar alcoholist or this guy, but you don't have some other, not shower. I feel like Steve Jobs, he was hired at Atari. He was like, Nolan Bush, no one ever found Atari like you can't hire this guy. He stinks and he wants to sleep at the office. And Nolan's like, yeah, he's really talented. So he's going to sleep at the office and you just got to hold your nose when he's around. Do you agree with the idea? 100%. It's like exactly, it's like, we never look at the credentials and stuff like this. Again, in my high school shop around, it would be like Rich, if I would start making everyone want to have PhD. The path by which we do it is we go for a life story. We ask you like, hey, give us your story. And it's a very important ingredient in our hiring process. And frankly, what we're looking for is like agency experience. We look at something that's wrong in real story at some point. Well, now let's zoom in. How do you react? Give me a minute by minute. This is what we're not going to know, right? Because a lot of us are entrepreneurs. Even every one, I talked about the founders of Confucius. Most of the people just in general are entrepreneurs. Many started Shopify stores, build a business, and then fell off a company and applied for a job. And got a million dollars. So this is a huge amount of building, company building background. And we want to be surrounded by people via Maya. That's I think the biggest product any company can deliver to where employees is. So it's that every day they're surrounded by people they deeply admire and learn from. So it's a very important part of this. So lots of entrepreneurship, lots of entrepreneurial impulses. And then so we look for this high agency behavior. And then obviously did you drive particular craft that you were applying for to excellence? How do you think about this kind of thing? Can you just sort of talk about the excellence or actually perform it? And then, you know, this is really what we fill our buildings with. And you know, just like, again, create the space then and that would be creative. And this is how it all works. And it's it's worked really, really well. We couldn't do anything other than this in the beginning, right? Like in the beginning, you had no money. No, really zero. And take a salary for four, four, yes. And I heard your father-in-law coverage or payroll when you couldn't make it. That's right. So yeah, we were living with my parents-in-law. My wife's all the time at the bedroom. From a butcher I also added. I put a key at the desk and I build a large shop if I'm from there. And you know, like, I mean, just kept cost low. But that was the main thing. Make every dollar count is something that's I'm so glad. Like, this is what I worry. Sometimes for obvious really, really big seed rounds. Like money, the main thing money does is it gets you, I mean, sometimes they do reels. But usually it just like makes you get a whole lot more of what you got before. And people did raise early probably because they were not tight with money. Then you get a whole lot more tight, not tight with moneyness at a lot of scale. And it gets really, really bad. You're making my heart sing because I feel like I'm like on an island by myself about this. Because I've spent 10 years reading 410 of these biographies. All of them control their costs are crazy. They'll tell you when they're organ constraints to your best friend. Yeah. And then I talk to these young founders. I usually don't meet certain founders because I'm not an investor. But good friend of mine's like, hey, meet this kid, meet this young kid. I met him. And one of the things he was talking about is like, yeah, let me show you pictures of like this beautiful office that you're looking into and you're showing me everything. And I was like, this is stupid. Like you haven't done anything. You don't deserve this. Yeah. And I go, look at like, where did Apple start? Look at Microsoft. Microsoft started in a strip mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You know, right. And you need a triplex and so how? Like, what are you talking about? And the question I, the point is I was like, okay, how does this make your product better for your customers? Right. And his answer was, well, I'll be able to recruit better talent because office is nicer. Then you don't have a mission. It can work, but like, I feel like you are. You build a $200 billion company in your wife's childhood bedroom. That's where you started. Yeah. Like, maybe we should repeat that over and over again. Like, just go look at where these companies were. Yeah. But you mentioned the Larry Ellison episode I did earlier. Like, they were in a shady office building. Yeah. Like, I think they had three, like three separate rooms. Oracle. That's where Oracle started. I think, I mean, there's a well-documented effect of when companies build monuments to themselves, they're usually decline right after. So that's that has a long running history and business history. I do think there's an art. I do think that companies under invested into office space for a very long time and it actually was a mistake. I think space around us is actually extremely important, but it doesn't need to be expensive. Like, that's probably enough side, but like. Oh, let's go down there. What does that mean? It's just like. So again, we didn't have a lot of money, but we wanted nice office spaces. This was the decades where there was a lot of open concept versus own room office spaces. So I'd like, was sort of a kind of fight. My co-founder is a Danny Wainan. He's a polymorph. He didn't programming when I asked him whether I needed some help with programming and just, like, was good. He lived. It was annoying as hell. And before, he was our designer and just, like, literally, a thing else too. Now, a DJ and before, but he won poker tournaments. So it's like, it's like, it's like he's going. It's like one of these. It's actually really, really helpful to have someone like Daniel as a childhood friend because he really, really. This leads you about human capabilities. This is just you buddy who does stuff like this. Anyway, he at some point, like, he really, really tapped into this. No one can be more creative than the space around them. And no one can care more than the person they look for. But that's the way he, like, sort of created this philosophy around this. I told him, look, here's Max budget and we are getting, like, B office space. That's, like, kind of cool. And you need to figure out how to create spaces that are, like, a 10 out of 10 on doing world-class work because inexpensively. But you'd need to figure out this chief, right? So, man, I mean, we built a bunch of offices in a row. And there I was insanely good at this. How many years into Shopify? This is, like, 2010 was the first one. There's six, six years and four years after Shopify launched. We went out of, like, sort of above a coffee shop. It was, like, really nothing to our first office. So how do you do this? Like, he said, like, first of all, the economy is wrong. It's not between open office and, like, like, closed office spaces. There's, like, perfect midpoint. Because, and it has to come from your strategy of those projects. Shopify loves the five-person team. We increase to eight sometimes, but we think the best team sizes one, because, like, a single offer can do things that is impossible to do for teams and hit high notes that are unreachable. But I think Plader has rather played the field of what can be done as solo projects. Actually, it's changing again, because I bet, like, which is exciting to it. But, like, most projects we're doing need to be done in teams. Then there's a magic number at five. This is sort of what the military ends up, like, figuring out two. Like, they test these things and come to the same conclusions. You can, sort of, temporary go up, but then at some point you have to split teams and pass a lot of the tasks. Each of these gradations is, like, a figure 10x loss of productivity. So Shopify is, like, of our engine. Like, our D team is, I think, three and a half thousand people. It's really lots and lots and lots and lots of small teams. And this is also why we need this legibility coordination layer that they talked about earlier. Okay, so pods. They figured out how to make pods that are, like, exactly. They are private enough while being open enough. They never make for office field dead, but they also draw you around. It's, like, what's a pod? What does that mean? It's just like a, it's a room that just, like, sets up to, like, when you put the seventh person in, you, it's uncomfortable. Like, it's like, again, think about how much policy you don't have to post. And if the environment just makes you do the obvious thing, you can play the uncomfortable too many people in this area. Like, when you know what you're doing, now you don't need to post the policy about how many people you want in a pod. And people self-organize into five people teams because that's the most comfortable thing to put in a pod. So not meeting rooms, meeting rooms go in the middle on our limited floor space because we don't want people to spend all day in meetings and then get out of the dark rooms. We put, like, everyone sits around the windows in pods and they're, like, structured in such a way that, you know, it's our works. The coffee area is on the other side to create an deputy. We cut through every floor eventually to create stairs that move teams in such a way that certain teams that have to work together but work on infrastructure, separate them out in floors so that they, going to each other, would run into other people who are using their infrastructure to, you know, and so on and so on and so on. So design being super conscientious about this is really important. We, I think we open sourced the floor plans and I think lots of, lots of more. This is not interesting anymore when you look at what we look like because I think that work has gotten up so often to the tech industry as a right midpoint. And, but many, many people cargo-culted. Like they just copy, Xeox copy it essentially instead of understanding so they make pots to bake or whatever. You know, these kind of things. You talked about cargo holding a few times. You observed that behavior in other companies. I'm curious what internally you have caught your own company, cargo holding. Oh, we actually, we're in a Toronto office here. The Toronto office actually has a few floors that are clearly mimicry of these ideas that they are figured out, but are not. They don't understand where these come from. Like, again, pots too big. So like more, the nice meeting room is right on the window. It has lots of light. You know, just like, again, maybe that's okay to have a few. But like, I went with the teams through it because we then changed some of the floor plans. After I moved here and realized, like, oh shit, this is like, oh, norm and doors everywhere. Fuck, that's the craziest thing. I fundamentally alerted to norm and doors. What's that? Doors that you push, then you can't tell. You can't tell, you can't tell. Yes, yeah. This is most like the most fundamental design error that you can possibly make is like, create a finances on a product that make people predictably do the wrong thing. Like, this is such a, like, like, literally everyone who's ever involved in a process of designing a norm and door should, you know, work with a design license like I'm being facetious, obviously, that isn't a thing. But like, it's like, it's just like, man, like, yeah, skills issues as a door is like very common occurrence. I think in places that I'm conscientiously designed and like all of us do a separate place very fast. Well, like, I mean, funny thing is you can usually turn a norm and door into a non-norm and door by cutting things away and like putting a push plate somewhere, you know. So that helps. So I make a big deal out of these kind of things. Like, it's just like this needs to look, I cannot surround people with things that are underperforming, the quality of engineering we want to do. And that's down to the detail of the doors in the office. Yes. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, because product is not a thing. Product is an abstraction. Product is a name that, like, a handle that you put on some, on some totality of a body of work. From perspective of people creating product, product doesn't exist. It's what other people call your work. A product is just details. It's very, very little details that are appreciated if they're composed, right? And make a bloody mess if they don't, right? So, from the inside perspective, you have to sweat all the details. So where you do anything is how you do everything. And that is absolutely down to the floor plans and, you know, the ambient noise levels and so on. It's like, you're going to room it's like that. Like silent. It's like, it's just like you, you notice when you're talking while going to a meeting room, at least on the floor as we fixed, based on previous specs. It's kind of uncomfortable to talk in a hallway because so I agree. And you walk in a meeting room and a merely like, it's just a different noise level because it's just like the fuse. We have enormous amounts of like, in fact, we actually worked with companies on Shopify to create the products of sound dampening, but are now really, really like supply all companies, tech companies. It's a little fun. And so, in fact, like, everything in our offices is from Shopify first to us, right? Because again, like, if anything we're doing is not mission aligned, we just didn't align to a mission axiomatically. So, you know, just you can go pretty far in these kind of things. When you need something for office spaces and it's not on Shopify, we usually put a call out for someone to start that thing. So it's on Shopify and we help them get started and build the thing and then we can maintain our 100% Shopify record. So, it's also fun. That's incredible. We did at least one enterprise sale with a supplier because we really wanted their floorboards. And for something they were really like, look great. And we're at the right price level. And like, yeah, but we can't place for order unless you come to our process. So sometimes we have maybe cheating. That's actually a good way to get a customer. Yeah, it's also a funny way of doing enterprise sets. I want this thing, but you just need a migrate or write our platform first. Yeah. All of the founders and extreme winners that I have studied have this one trait in common. They have excessively high energy levels. If you're going to be the best at what you do, you need to maximize your energy and output. And that's why I've partnered with function. I signed up for function long before. They were a sponsor of this podcast. And when you sign up, they ask you what your health goals are. And my response in all capital letters was maximum energy. Function provides access to comprehensive blood tests and other lab testing to help you improve your health so you can perform at your highest level. Function has made it easy for me to monitor and improve my internal health markers so that I feel am I absolute strongest. As a member of function, you get access to test over 100 plus biomarkers from hormones to toxins to markers for heart health, inflammation and stress. Function gives you a straightforward analysis of all your results along with advice from expert doctors on how to improve things like your testosterone, your stress hormones, how to reduce toxins in your body and much more. 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He's even more like a video game. What's the factory? Yes. Okay. So that's the example he gave me. I haven't played the game. Can you elaborate on this? I completely agree. So again, this is like, man, the world has such a weird way of somehow changing itself around me to make this stuff that I thought was irrelevant relevant. It's late in life. It's like absolutely amazing. It's just like, okay, so video games. Video games are best thought. I mean, this depends on very much on the video game. But in the aggregate, very often, the good video games are simulations. They are worth upon itself and you're a high-agent reactor and you modify things. You perform actions. You make decisions and then the game rearranges themselves, giving you a feedback loop of usually a very quick feedback loop because of us unfun. But you learn about consequences of your action. So like competitive multiplayer games are very obvious there and starcraft and strategy games. They're not that popular as a category of games anymore. But when I was going from my teens in the 90s, starcraft was the biggest game. And I loved it because it was really, really hard. It was easy to learn how to master, which is exactly a hallmark of everything that we're doing for motorsports, for kiteboarding for my hobbies, tennis, or all these things are like this. But like, it specifically is like, honest in a way that like, there's like two people on the map, mirrored. Everyone has the same potential every single game. And one person went, it's like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's unditionally, it's a game of imperfect information. It's not like chess. You don't see more rules. You see only some information that you like, in fact, you have to invest. You have to use one of the things that could get you resources instead to go to enemy base to figure out what he's building and then you interpret this. So all these kind of things is like, what you're learning this game is information is everything. There is no right decision. There's only context in which decisions turn out to be correct. While resource management is extremely important, you have to understand that resource management is not just quantifiable. It's not just minerals and best paying gas that you have to manage, which allows you to build units. It's also your attention. And frankly, attacking other people's attention is much more profitable, very often in a game of Starcraft than it is to actually attack their base because if you overtax their ability to pay attention to things, they will make mistakes. How do you overtax their ability to pay attention to things? You can do an early attack. You can do only any number of things, especially if you play against the same person. When you get a very high level, you will play with the same people over and over again, and maybe in a sense for how you play. So at that moment, there's always been the people who are just incredibly prepared. Like they're just like, they're perfected playing a single way, which my play was obviously different, chess, Starcraft, or the same. Like I disrupt other persons play. Like I do moves that aren't in books, which are not in books because they're not good. But other people can't deal with it because they need their preparation. That's like their skill set is their ability to play chess is the crystallized intelligence, not fluid intelligence to roll over the punches. And so, you know, I learned a lot about myself doing this, but I also learned a lot about, you know, how do you, like, you know, just like how to approach a game. Like how do you, how do you get better? How do you, how do you get more out of every game you play? Because like I never, ever in my life had as much time as some other people could to invest in something like this. So I always had to like, how can I get more skill progress units out of out of the time I have and other people out of less constrained. I can't, that's right. I'm talking very fondly of Starcraft. It might just have been an odd leave a right teacher from here at that moment and the student was ready. And so I could have maybe learned the same lessons from any number of things, but I think it was specifically good because of it being a simulation. You start a new game, it has skill-based matchmaking, so you should play against other people off your skill set based on, you know, elo rating. And so you had a very, very clear sense of we started winning more games when you lost, that means you were progressing where if you started losing more games, if you were progressing in an absolute scale compared to all our players in the world. And I think that was a perfect little sandbox to explore how to, you know, think about when it's time to build infrastructure, when it's time to invest in resources, when it's time to prepare, when it's time to reveal your hand, when it's not time to reveal your hand. I think it was perfect for a perfect place to spend time for me in my teenagers years, getting what I did afterwards. So back to you, I question, I just find that looking at AI agents, especially like, I mean, we are recording this, this is like week three of 2026. If we would have recorded this in week 52 of 2025, it would even be different, but like I might not even make this analogy so strongly, but that's how much is happening, that the world changes every three weeks right now. We figured out some new harnesses for our genetic loops that are much more autonomous and frankly supported by models, which didn't exist at the beginning of December, even that can perform at this level. And so I look at my computer and I have like six different agents going all coordinating between them. They send emails to each other, which I think is hilarious. And so, you know, just like, man, this like is starting to really look like start, my attention is paid like this one is currently working on and what you are for, but I really, really need. So I'm zooming in paying attention, doing a little bit of micro giving a little bit of extra double check sort of the output of the critic, which looks at all of them all the time to figure out if they're still on task. It's the exact same thing, right? Like it's like, it is a fascinating time. It's just like I can't describe how fast progress is right now. I just like, you know what I tell my team, it's like, you know, 21 years now. Starting from is really, really hard, right? So, so first years, let's just like, that's interesting and everything's urgent because like you're getting to a margin, I've got like within a week of running out of money so many times. And sometimes you build out many times, it was like just like, like the clearance of the one time tri hurdle such a friend through was like millimeters at times. Like, so like, I bet you, if you will run the first six years simulation, 10,000 times, we would not succeed in most of them, right? So like in a way, like luck is a big component timing of these kind of things, people luck, especially. After that, you know, IPO, you think that's probably the most interesting thing in a period of the company. I think it was hard. And maybe not terribly interesting whether it's financing and then the end of the day, maybe with some some aspects of interesting, like figuring it, but like they have aspects of how we make it our own as a process like that. But that probably this is why I did it is why we made changes off to the process or why we wanted to have our own stamp on it because I didn't want to join someone else's process I wanted to have in my own. Then, Miss Corbett, which was very, very hard, definitely not interesting, actually fucking annoying mostly. And so I'm like trying to figure out like trying to try to expand. That is going to be hard and interesting. Those are the things you're most attracted to hard and interesting year 21 is like this is going to be more interesting. Yeah, you know, in this company's history, probably in everyone, I think literally everyone's career, just everything is lined up. It's like doesn't matter what you've got, like everyone's going to be measured against how well did you prepare yourself, like what your skill set, how quickly can you react to everything that's happening, how quickly can you read just how quickly can you read over everything. You put out this internal memo where you're just like, I think it's effort, you know the language better than I do, but it's basically it's a company expectation that you the first thing you have a problem you reflexively try to use AI. When did you put that that out a year ago? Yeah, maybe not quite, but like something along with it. And people were just like this is ridiculous. There was like some pushback. And now to your point about how fast everything moving like of course you would. Yeah, exactly. People will look at that memo in three years, and it's just like, he didn't say anything. Like saying this guy's blue. Yeah, exactly. But to say to you, what's it like? Oh, yeah, man, I love that. This is what I'm here for. Like it's just like, if I wouldn't have happened, I don't think I would run a top fight anymore. It's just like too, like it's much better lead us if in times like. Whoa, what if times this stable? Yeah, but I thought you were in love with this problem. Yeah, I'm like a problem. So you'd still work on where you wouldn't be running it. What do you mean? I mean, I think I would be, no, I probably might try my hand at a different aspect of having people self-actualized. Like I mean, my personal mission is to cause more entrepreneurship, like that's like I'm going to judge my own career. But have I the thing I discovered that was meaningful to me? Have I helped the maximum amount of other people do this thing? When did you realize that was your mission? So I know exactly because it was like preparing for one of our internal events, summer talks, which I was like, it's obviously a bit of a like soul. Like I do a lot of this like message in a bottle reading and like self-interspection. And it was like it was 2014. I was preparing for my summer talk and I'm like, my biggest struggle was with my own identity. Again, I was, I think I was mentally preparing for the cosplay period, which I, again, which I wouldn't. But like, I was like, but I like engineering. I really, I want to spend my day hacking on stuff and building things, not, not managing. And so I, again, I used my trick, partly, to give a talk on something that I was sort of come to realization, but maybe not fully internalized. So basically, I said, I loved engineering because it turns out that was the way how I as a kid when I started doing it, could build things. What I actually love doing is building things. And specifically, I love building things that share a thing that like I have experience, this is a moment of becoming an entrepreneur, getting your first sale. And so I made a talk of what mining was to things and just saying like, my mission in life, my craft is actually building things in general. I built, I started with products like code, I then create products and now I create companies that create products. And I engineer those. And that caused more of this kind of thing. So I kind of wrote about as a personal mission for me and said, like, I will attempt to run Shopify and try to be the best CEO. I can be until someone taps down the shoulder and say, I will be better for this company as long as it's a cohesion with my personal mission. But I'm also like, I'm perfectly fatalistic about this kind of thing. I don't, I don't do the job for money like it's like I do it because I feel like I can contribute a lot. I love this idea that you view entrepreneurship as a way to get self-actualized. Oh, yeah. I mean, what's more honest, but it's also your form of entrepreneurship. I was reading, I never read comments of podcasts and YouTube, it is highly recommend to get that. People are saying, like, this is like one of the good entrepreneurs. It's like, what you're building and the other entrepreneurs you're trying to, to enable. It's not like the crony capitalistic. There's like a lot of like dirty part. I'm just a capitalist as they come. So I understood what that, that comment. Out of every single note that I took from all the talks that I've seen you give before, the one that was at the top of my list is exactly how I feel about what I'm trying to do. And you said, focus on craft and giving a shit. And you said, it doesn't matter that a bunch of this stuff isn't quantifiable. It's exactly how I feel. It's such a basic thing, but it's like why, like, it's so simple, but just not easy, right? Like in any which way, like companies hate that quantifiable. It's like, it's amazing to see it. Like, man, you're higher than first team together. And like, if you get to talk about building a company on podcasts, that means you're successful. So the first team clearly did this. And therefore, the first team was very good. And first team, you hired the person you got. You just knew these were people you needed. You make mistakes, but you correct. And that's not just sort of like judgment, taste, maybe even bias. Like, I think we need to move nostalgia into the bad category of words and bias into the good category of words, because bias is actually perfectly fine. It's like it's like without bias, you actually have no convictions. Like you should try your convictions. That's really what I learned for the thing. So you make the first team as a pure play. This is the best I know how to make decisions and ban everything one everyone wants you to write it down. And it happens that you write it down. Like, here's the things that you are looking for. Here's the thing. Wow. The people who read it are the people who are very, very good at following lists. So the people that you probably describe, not the people who go look for the cheat sheet. The people you are trying to avoid hiring are the people who study the cheat sheet very well. So you just gave everyone a, like a way of performatively doing the thing that you want to see without being intrinsically like this, right? And so you end up like very quickly losing your company. What's your system? It's things. However, everyone is telling you to do it. There's a giant conspiracy against these things, taste, quality. If it can't be put in numbers or can't be written as a list, companies hate it. Yet almost everything you have to do to play the great company is other things, but these things. And you shouldn't write down actively, avoiding to write something down is sometimes the most important thing you can possibly do. Do you think it's also related to the way you brought up some costs a bunch of times? Yeah. Where it's like, well, I wrote this down, right? Change my mind, but there's some kind of human element where it's like, I don't want to contradict this because it's in writing. Yeah, exactly. Again, people like to be consistent over time. I just don't find that important. I found the cheat code to always being right. It's just like change your opinion every time you get better information. Because as you get closer to a point where you have to make a decision, that means you will wind up the for right one. If you do not stop at some point to incorporate new information, even if you're wrong, if I figure it out, again, what do you do? You have one more materially chance to steer your concern to the best possible outcome. Are you going to take it? Or are you going to be a person who just like leans into a comfort of somehow character consistency? Why? What's the job you want to do? Are you going to look good or be good? You're going to just change. It needs to be okay to change your mind when better information comes along. And again, here's a crazy thing. I think if you go through the transcript of this podcast, you will find or just ask me how to do it. It will probably point out various contradictions inside of what I'm saying, like what do you do? In this, I'm probably on multiple sides. The reason is actually visited on the most important thing. It's everything comes in layers. It's like just so many different, like what's operating the optimal operating system in some frame of reference is often contradictory and the opposite of a larger frame for reference. Because I like this talk about boxes because inside of a box, it is, after a while, you can have a map of it, you can eliminate all the corners and you understand what's there. You may decide where isn't the right box to pursue, maybe you need to figure out, maybe you need to bend it and say, okay, actually the problem is actually an aspect of another problem. And maybe if you put a larger box, we saw that and this problem doesn't even need to be so that happens. But this is exactly what I mean. As you zoom out, you actually need to completely change the way you problem solve because you're starting to work much more on, with much longer timelines. You need to actually make bets at the high level that you shouldn't make bets with like infrastructure because you can, like in engineering again, you can run benchmarks, figure out if something is fast enough and it'll be a yes or no. You don't need to bet on the trajectory of databases are growing faster at a certain thing. You don't need to, you can measure. So there, you want to be super quantifiable. When you try to figure out which market to go into, like you need to figure out, well, right now you have to figure out how is I going to change that market. Right, like it's because you need to figure out if you join market or you is that market going to be a temporary, unnecessary aspect of something else we are already doing and will be absorbed into a different category of products. And this is the value for you to do and so on. And, you know, what are humanoid robotics going to do to a world of logistics and, you know, you got a work of trend lights mostly, right, which is not important in many other decision making. So I think there's probably like four or five different levels by which you have to look at a problem. And that is actually a lot of the skill of a good executive is to be able to meet the team where they are and like help them. Talk about the outside world, quote unquote, like here is how their work relates to all the other friends of reference or the other abstraction and how it like sits as a part in the larger company and everyone should be able to connect what their day to work back to the mission. Like it's not like you work on customer support. Well, you're helping people, literally not giving up on being on the products like this. Like it's, it's, it's not even subtle. It's actually easy exercise to do for people when you ask them to do it. But it's just stressing in how many companies it's actually kind of unstated. The company mission is some kind of set of platitudes or something that aren't actionable. Those are unforced arrows. And I think things go better than when you get them right. Hey, real quick, I need a favor from you right now. I'm conducting a survey to better understand the listeners of this show. So the survey is entirely anonymous. It's going to ask you things like what your position is at your company, what your household income is, things like that. This information is going to help me both keep and attract the best possible sponsors for the show, which then in turn allows me to create the best possible conversations for you. Now, I don't want to just ask for something without giving you something. So as a thank you for completing the survey, I'm going to host a live stream on YouTube where I talk about some of the most important things I've learned from spending hours with the guests on the show and some of the best ideas that they have shared with me after our conversation. So please, do me a huge favor and complete the survey takes just five minutes, probably less than five minutes for you, but after you complete the survey, I'll email you a link to the live stream. A link for the survey is in the show notes of this episode and is also available on davidscentra.com. I love the idea of tying everything back to the mission. I do hope people go through the transcript of this conversation. I think it's going to be incredible. I've printed out some of them and I'm sure people are going to tell me about all the contradictions. I think this is the fun bit, fun bit. You know, I find contradictions in my belief systems all the time because we are like bots of contradictions. I'll get messages. I'm like, I'm listening to this episode you did in 2019 and you said this and on the new one you said this, I'm like, I've read 250 of these things since then. Like, what do you think I'm doing this to stay the same? That's the point. I had high expectations of this conversation. Toby, you exceeded them. I hope we do this at least once a year. And I think the next time we do this, we design with constraints which you like and we just we just evangelize entrepreneurship. And the fact that, you know, it's one of the most important things in the world. And I think you're creating a lot more entrepreneurs and I'm trying to create a lot more entrepreneurs. I'll tell you one thing. I'm not sure if I maybe I've shared this publicly, but like I think you're going to get more mileage over to anyone else. Then we did surveys with our customers about like because we wanted to like, I mean, we need to identify where our customers what they do, whatever we eat, these kind of things. But if we have found this is long time ago before your podcast existed, it was like almost 80% of 70% of the people check the box saying they have someone who if they sent a entrepreneurial question to would respond to the email in 24 hours. I initially thought that was insanely cool how many people have such a resource. So I like it in the general population. Right. And eventually I clued in. I think it was probably on Wikipedia. I read about survivor bias. Survivorship bias. I'm like, you realize the reason why they are my customers is because they have someone who responds to these questions in 24 hours. It's the other way around. It's causal. And the concept of entrepreneurship is so under exposed and under explained. It's sort of got better in the 10 years, 15 years since the service. But I think I love what you're doing because you're just bringing this concept like you're you're you're rolling without for people to introspect like an entire life story of entrepreneurship. Giving people the thing that is implied by the question is like do you have any exposure to the word of entrepreneurship in some way that you actually know what you're what you're signing up for because the people who don't know it exists. If you have no relation to it or people who don't happen to have someone a family of friends who have at some point started anything. Well, I just want to try it's not part of their toolbox and just making putting this part into people more people's toolbox is going to be so lot bearing because I think actually in this world of AI is going to be disruption. And so many more people believe have a plan to be with entrepreneurship. And I think we can I think making things will be much simpler in the world of just in time manufacturing and 3D printing and additive in raising printing and obviously products just human or robotics dread not lights of factories making anything on demand and 3D printers in every home. Well, at least they were commonly in homes now. You know, in that world more people will realize and working with AI's about learning the skills of figuring out how to make the better cup. And how to design a better version and not having a normal door is capitalism the best parts and I think it would be much more common and much more exciting and I just like it's so fun to work on. And like in that way like you know, the same project, which I think is super, super cool, right? Like it's like because the information gap is getting the stories out telling people that possible and it's so important for people to then try and hopefully even the idea of Shopify and then hopefully we can push on behind. I love that. I appreciate you saying it. Appreciate the time. Thank you so much. Awesome, man. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade. I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.