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 49 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Lemkin: Gorgias AI replaces 50% of agents, but ACV rises only 50%
“When I look at Gorgias, which is, which dominates Shopify for the contact center, right? They're, they have, their average customers replaced 40 to 50% of their humans with AI, and their ACV is only up 50%.”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify's internal AI 'River' performs a ludicrous amount of engineering
“If you're building a large scale AI system like we have one, which they think what river, which lives in Slack and does some Ludicrous amount of Shopify's engineering now.”
Shopify CDO Carl Rivera bans slideshows and pre-reads in design reviews
“And so what I enforce with Teams is that I never want to see a presentation, a slideshow in any of the meetings. I never want to receive a pre-read. I don't want any of the storytelling at the start. I'm basically of the view that every abstraction, every inse…”
Nejatian: Shopify contains no custom 'if enterprise' code for large clients
“We don't build bespoke software. There's no if enterprise line anywhere in Shopify's code base.”
Nejatian: Shopify requires marketers to use GitHub and salespeople to write SQL
“We don't have that at Shopify. At Shopify, if a marketer wants to create a new landing page, they have to go into GitHub. They have to know how to write some code. They have, like, this is a real thing, and our, so our marketers learn how to write some code. L…”
Lemkin predicts Klaviyo will surpass Shopify in SaaS revenue in years
“They will cross, they will be doing more SaaS revenue than Shopify in a couple years.”
Tobi Lütke: 10 million people work daily on Shopify
“There's probably ten million people working day to day on Shopify.”
Lemkin: Shopify grew revenue 50% to $12B with zero net hiring
“And I think Shopify is on top of these things. It has the same number of employees it did three years ago. It has not added a single net headcount in three years and has grown 50% at twelve billion in revenue.”
Tobi Lütke reviews every Shopify project on a two-month cadence
“Shopify has a product review cadence that's very special and different in that Toby reviews actually all of the projects every month, or so every month he reviews half of them, and then the next month he reviews the other half, such that on a two-month rolling…”
Shopify dropped 'UX' from designer titles under Chief Design Officer Rivera
“I announced when I took on the chief design officer role in Shopify that we're dropping UX from the designer title, and we're only going to be designers working at Shopify.”
Lemkin: Kaz Nejatian left over $270M behind at Shopify to join Opendoor
“You know, leaving two hundred million behind at Shopify and another 70 something million in grants and what he might still get, you could only do that if you're post-economic, right?”
Lemkin: Shopify Cut Staff to 8,100 While Revenue Rose 91%
“From peak employee was 20, 22, 11,600 employees at Shopify. Since then, revenue has grown 91%. Pretty impressive for a company at eleven billion in revenue. And employees have gone down from 11,600 to 8100. Gone down while revenue's up 91%.”
Nejatian: Shopify calculates and displays the cost of every meeting
“We have this thing in Shopify where we calculate the cost of every meeting and put it in the meeting invite.”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify caps prototype projects at three people and six weeks
“In Shopify, like every project goes to multiple phases. There's a prototype phase, there's like there's a proposal phase before that. If proposal is accepted, you go to prototype phase, build, and then releasing. The prototype phase Is ideally time constraints…”
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.”
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: 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.”
Lemkin: Shopify generates only 25% of its revenue from software
“Shopify is only 25% of its revenue from software and going down, right?”
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…”
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.”
Coates: Shopify was first major SaaS platform to run secure third-party code
“And I, as far as I'm aware of Shopify was the first at scale SaaS platform to do that.”
Lemkin: Shopify ended 2022 with stronger numbers than it started
“Shopify at the end of 2022 was not the rocket ship. It was at peak COVID, but Shopify has stronger numbers at the end of 20 22 than it did at the start.”
Senkut: Felicis's $41M debut fund backed Rovio, Shopify, and Fitbit
“The very first fund we had was only forty one million, and we invested in Rovio in Finland from that. The whole round was bigger than our whole firm. Shopify's A round and Fitbit's B round”
Shopify starts all new employees with a 50% trust battery rating
“Everyone that comes to Shopify starts at a 50% trust battery.”
Shopify raised its 2010 Series A at a $25M post-money valuation
“He was in our Series A, first market in our Series A back in, in 20, 20, 10. It was actually, it was a seven million Series A, I think on a twenty-five million dollar post valuation.”
Shopify's platform powers two million merchant stores
“It's great that Shopify has two million stores.”
Shopify processes 10% of all e-commerce in the United States
“10% of all e-commerce in the United States is done via Shopify.”
Tisch: VCs selling Shopify at IPO missed 100x post-public upside
“If you had sold Shopify when they went public, you left like a hundred X on the table. So don't sell Shopify. If you own Shopify as a VC, when they go public that you missed the actual bigger set of upside in that company.”
Wilkinson: MetaLab designed Slack and worked with Shopify, Coinbase, and Pinterest
“Also worked with a lot of startups really early on, Shopify, Tumblr, Coinbase, Pinterest. We designed Slack.”
Finkelstein: Shopify warned IPO investors against expecting short-term revenue chasing
“In fact, if you read our Toby's letter to shareholders when we filed our IPO, we made it very clear that if you're looking for sort of quick wins, and you're looking for a company that is going to chase revenue, we're probably not the right company. To invest …”
Rovio became Shopify's top store out of 10,000 within a week
“In seven days, the Rovio store was up and running on Shopify. Instantly, it became the top store in Shopify among 10,000 stores. They sold out their whole inventory in a week”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify IPO'd at $1.67B valuation and grew 100x
“The point was we went out at, I believe, 1.67 billion dollar valuation. And I think, yeah, I mean, at various times, not right now, I think, but like, I don't know. I don't check. It's like a hundred times higher now.”
Tobi Lütke: The investment banker who led Shopify's IPO is now CFO
“In fact, the banker who took me in public as my CFO right now, so like 10 years later, which is really funny.”
Kaz Nejatian: Citron claimed Shopify wouldn't last two years when he joined
“Citron wrote in a short report the day I joined Shopify about how terrible business it was and how it wouldn't last two years.”
Lemkin: 70% of Shopify's revenue comes from payments, not SaaS
“I mean, 70% of Spotify, Shopify's revenue is from payments and merchant services, not from SaaS, 70%.”
Lemkin: Box, HubSpot, and Shopify IPO'd under $1B valuations
“Box IPO did eight hundred million. HubSpot IPO did eight hundred million valuation. Shopify IPO did a seven hundred and fifty million dollar valuation.”
Grimshaw: Tobi Lütke divested a Shopify acquisition within 18 months
“For Toby at Shopify to make an acquisition and then divest it With, I don't, I think within a year, maybe it was a year and a half, like not very long for an organization to say, to make a big move and say, nope, we made the wrong decision that fast and not ge…”
Salguero: ButcherBox is migrating its e-commerce platform to Shopify in 2023
“We're actually moving this year, we're moving to Shopify”
Levesque: Shopify embeds dedicated product and engineering teams inside its growth org
“We have a product org and an engineering org inside the Shopify growth org”
A new entrepreneur makes their first Shopify sale every 28 seconds
“Every 28 seconds, a new entrepreneur gets there for sale on Shopify.”
Tobi Lütke launched Shopify when his software outgrew his snowboard business
“By 2005, it became clear to him that the software behind the snowboard business was more valuable Than the snowboard business itself. And so he launched Shopify.”