The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 198 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 8 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Levesque: Public speaking and social media presence do not correlate with growth ability
“The social media halo or public speaking halo does not correlate with ability. So I've seen people make hires for people that are, you know, on the stage often and great speakers and great evangelists that doesn't always translate to somebody who's, who's grea…”
Finkelstein: Tobi Lütke is the greatest product mind on Earth
“I mean, Toby, I think is probably the greatest product mind on the planet.”
Shopify Remains One of Stripe's Largest Customers Instead of Building In-House
“They're certainly one of Stripe's largest customers, if not the largest, and yet it's a great relationship. And at any point, of course, Shopify could have brought that in house.”
Finkelstein: Modern tech companies are geographically agnostic
“I think business today, in particular technology companies, are geographically agnostic. I don't think it matters where you're based.”
Chernin: Enterprise AI adoption will explode once evaluation cold-start issues resolve
“And I think we'll see a lot of explosive growth in enterprises, in the digital, including like in the cloud companies, in the cloud native companies like Revolut, Shopify, Prosus. Booking.com. When they solve this cold start problem, they build the system, how…”
Tobi Lütke: Being an untrusted public company is worse than private
“There's nothing better in the world than being a trusted public company. I mean, the second best thing is being a trusted private company. It's much worse to be an untrusted public company than an untrusted private company.”
Tobi Lütke: Stock tickers reflect external market trades, not company building
“The ticker has nothing to do with the company I'm building. The ticker is a is guessing at the fair market value of a company. I work on a fair market value of a company. I like the ticker is just other people's game to make trades based on their assumptions o…”
Tobi Lütke claims he hasn't checked Shopify's stock price in 23 days
“I have not looked at the ticker in April. Like, I can, I know this for a fact. So it's probably much longer than that, but I definitely know I haven't looked in the last 23 days when we record this.”
Tobi Lütke actively seeks out Enneagram Type Eight executives at Shopify
“Shopify is remarkably high on aids because I really seek them. I fundamentally like this kind of discussion.”
Tobi Lütke: Fear-based motivation creates a limiting short-term focus
“People who fear of losing and people who fear of winning clearly going to look at things much more short term. It's like, it's the next iteration matters the most. And I find that this a kind of, I think that's a limiting thing in a lot of cases, especially wi…”
Rajaram: Underestimating Shopify was his biggest market-size misread
“I remember seeing Shopify at a billion and I was like, how many, E-commerce merchants out there really. And that, or maybe even before, but in one of the early rounds, Tam felt really concerned. I think what I missed was that Shopify was not just selling e-com…”
Green: Holding Shopify IPO Allocation Would Have Returned Fund 2X
“We also got two million dollars in the Shopify IPO, because we knew the founders. And that would have returned our second fund, like, two X, had we just not sold stock. Like, didn't have to do anything.”
Lemkin: 80% of Klaviyo's revenue is generated through the Shopify ecosystem
“80% of Klaviyo's revenue is off Shopify”
Lemkin: Shopify grew over 40% while keeping headcount flat for 3 years
“Shopify has held headcount flat for three years and grown 40 something percent in that time.”
Rivera: Design-forward companies should maximize execution quality over novelty
“The goal of a design forward company is to think of each of the things that you want to achieve as an app, as an experience, and dial it up to a 10.”
Rivera: The Shop app operates as a digital mall, not a marketplace
“We think of ourselves much more like a mall. You know, when you go into a mall there's a certain kind of managed experience. The mall Smells a certain way. The temperature is dialed in. It's like they're catered a little bit of like what you see. But when you …”
Rivera: Shopify employs 10,000 people operating as semi-autonomous sub-companies
“Shopify is 10,000 people, and so we are actually not a company, we're many different companies that are kind of combined into one, that are driving towards different objectives, that have different maturity levels, and need different things.”
Rivera: Shopify does not promote competing brands within merchant storefronts
“So, for example, if you browse Gymshark and you browse a Gymshark store inside a shop, we're pretty hardcore about not promoting other competing brands, any other brands on that surface.”
Rivera: Tobi Lütke effectively acts as Chief Product Officer at Shopify
“It's not even a question of whether we agree with it or not. This is as close to a fact as we can possibly get on anything.”
Rivera: Founder-led incumbents like Shopify and Stripe are not sleeping
“I think we've like for years have been trained to know an incumbent as a shit company that's large. That's basically like the definition. And I just don't know that that's the case right now because you have a bunch of companies that came up in an era of moder…”
Ferriss: Selling Shopify shares immediately after IPO lockup cost him $150 million
“Shopify could have been just as big, but I sold a lot of my Shopify as soon as lockup expired because I had no experience with public markets. Yeah, you're holding your face. I mean, that would have been, that was a hundred and fifty million dollar mistake or …”
Ferriss became an advisor to Shopify when it had roughly 12 employees
“I talked to a couple of people who were doing advising, and I figured out how to begin stepping into advising, and ultimately, with Shopify becoming an advisor when they had whatever it was, 10 or 12 employees, and then becoming an advisor at Uber.”
Lemkin: Shopify generates only 25% of its revenue from software
“Shopify is only 25% of its revenue from software and going down, right?”
Deeter: Bessemer owned 28% of Shopify and Twilio at IPO
“We own 28% of Shopify and Twilio at IPO and we owned, you know, well less than that of Procore and Service Titan just because we, you know, included a lot of other investors downstream.”
Bessemer distributed Shopify stock to LPs rather than selling directly
“So importantly, we distributed early. We didn't necessarily sell. So what we did is we gave people the choice.”
Deeter: Adding Payments Doubled TAM and Market Caps for Vertical SaaS
“And as I think back on our vertical SaaS investments, you know, like a Shopify or a Service Titan or a Toast, when they added payments, it became that big Next Horizon unlock for them and really doubled the TAM and the market caps for these businesses.”
Jason Lemkin: Shopify handles 13% of commerce and 90% platform share
“13% of all commerce already goes through Shopify, right? And it has essentially 90% of the platform market share.”
Lemkin: Shopify Generates $1.3 Million in Revenue Per Employee
“Shopify is at 1.3 million in revenue per employee now.”
Halligan: Shopify is the only SaaS stock outperforming Oracle and SAP
“If you go from that date and you look at you look at Oracle and you look at SAP, they're both growing, like, 230%. The only SaaS company since August 22 It's growing faster. Shopify. They're growing 300%. So they're outpacing HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe Box, At…”
Lemkin: Only 25% of Shopify's revenue is enterprise
“Even today, Shopify is very enterprise. Only 25% of their revenue is, is an enterprise.”
Wang: Shopify is one of SCGE's biggest winning investments
“So Shopify is has been one of our biggest winners. It is also one of my bigger regrets in terms of post COVID.”
Nejatian: Software development is closer to woodwork than tech appreciates
“Software is a much more similar to woodwork than people appreciate. Like, it's much more about building something complete that someone can enjoy.”
Nejatian: My most frequent Slack phrase to Tobi Lütke was 'I disagree'
“I actually once looked at my Slack history with Toby. And the most common phrase I had told him was, I disagree.”
Nejatian: Shopify will reconsider Stripe partnership if strategic worldviews diverge
“If Stripe and Shopify ever get to a point where, like, we don't think about the world the same way, then we'll have a conversation.”
Nejatian: Shopify holds a higher product release quality bar than rivals
“Shopify has a quality bar that is higher than most other software companies. So the, we hold things back that almost everyone else would have shipped.”
Nejatian: Shopify is built to perform better during periods of dramatic change
“Most companies are built such that they do incredibly well in times where there are no change, right? That's what most companies are. Like, if there's change, most companies Are not handled, not built to handle it. Shopify is built, so it does better when ther…”
Nejatian: Tobi Lütke overruled my opposition to remote culture software
“We were starting to build internal software. Shopify is a remote company. We're starting to build software to manage our culture remotely. I thought this was just the nuttiest thing to do. Like, this is just, like, total waste of code. Like, this is a bad idea…”
Bialecki: Mailchimp's Exit From Shopify Was Not a Step-Change for Klaviyo
“I think that event, you know, we ran some analytics on this, I think, you know, a while, while ago, and there was definitely there was a bump, but I think people were surprised at how much there was kind of already these big, huge tailwinds and that, you know,…”
Lemieux: Tech leaders must hire 'full-stack debuggers' across all company layers
“That you need someone who, you know, has the, has like the ability to like see and address things that every layer Of your company, right? From the code to the emotions, and seeing that, like, you're basically hiring people who are full stack debuggers of thin…”
Lemieux: Dream job questions reveal how candidates act when unsupervised
“I've got so many jobs open. You could do anything here. What's your dream job at Atlassian, at Shopify? What is it? And could you know, could you talk to me about why that is for 10 minutes, right? So, so that question for me is like the ultimate snowboard tes…”
Lemieux: Software team relies on only one weekly meeting
“And we have one, a one hour meeting a week on Who's stuck? That's it. That's literally all we do, and we ship, and you write code, like, you just, you write your product, we ship it, we run builds”
Lemieux: New hires should start their first month in customer support
“I turned out to be an expert user of Shopify and I would recommend that everyone starting a new jobs would literally start on the phones.”
De Valk: WordPress powers over 40% of websites versus Shopify's 2-3%
“More than 40% of websites on the web are WordPress sites. And companies like Shopify, and I heard your podcast with Toby, which was awesome, but Shopify has like two, three percent of the market, if that.”
Tobi Lütke: Sunk cost fallacy is irrelevant if you continuously re-evaluate decisions
“And if you are interested in truth, it doesn't exist for a sunk cost fallacy because it's irrelevant. It's like, it's an input into your decision making process that you have been doing a certain thing, but you already knew this because you were doing whatever…”
Tobi Lütke: The best teams are 'greedy for constraints'
“This is, I think what the best teams do everywhere. They are greedy for constraints. They want to understand what is, like, how can we restrict our space so that we get to get started, develop something”
Tobi Lütke: Life's work is minimizing the gap between actual and potential self
“I know it sounds like super fortune cookie, but like I describe it like I you know, it's as if at the end of life you meet the person you could have become and the work of life is really try to minimize the diff between that person and the one that actually sh…”
Shopify's previous org structure required product escalations to go directly to CEO Tobi Lütke
“In the old org structure, the first point in the org chart where all those 14 teams actually, like, joined at the top was Tobii. So anytime someone has an escalation, the first point in the escalation tree was Toby”
Coates: Only progressive disclosure and app ecosystems let software scale from SMBs to enterprise
“The only two pieces of leverage you really have to allow that stretch is one is extremely good execution of progressive disclosure in the core product. So like features that appear at the right time only when you need them. A good example of this is something …”