Shopify

“I'm spending a lot of time with, you know, Shopify you know, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express you know, Intuit, the companies that actually deal with these small businesses and saying, how can we bring together the tools in order to make sure that th…”

“So it's testing whether agents can complete the most important user journeys. So if you think about a user journey, maybe it's a Shopify store, you know, you want to buy a hoodie. If it's a, you know, consulting company, it's booking a consult. If it's an insu…”

“He is the only person at the intersection of like CEO of a large company and extremely accurate detailed on the cutting edge feedback.”

“The cost of creating digital things is going to zero. There's no friction there. Actually making something physical a brand that you can just like build over time. I think that, I think that's a smart thing to do.”

“Entrepreneurship is going to be the last bastion of human economic value. If they take everything from us, we will always have entrepreneurship. So, Shopify is sort of like a hedge against every job being taken because they can't take from us our agency and ou…”

“River, the current system that they have for you. Employing agents to do work and open PRs and everything. Like, everyone is working towards that. Shopify is already there”

“Say it now. Like the second you know something, say it. Say it about the thing, not the person. Always say this sucks, not you suck. And say it until you've been heard.”

“First of all, I don't think remote works. Generally, it only works for Shopify, and that's because we built more software to make remote work than anyone reasonably thought we could. And I think the jury has fully come back on this topic, that companies that a…”

“You're not going to vibe code Shopify, no matter how good you are. The business stack is too hard.”

“And so Wix and Shopify and BigCommerce and commerce tools on the platform side have all adopted the protocol.”

“The twenty-twenty-one buying boom didn't end until Q one or Q two of twenty-twenty-two, but that's because they're a lag. If you go back and look, for example, at Shopify data and Shopify was very public. Shopify said in the summer of twenty-twenty, this is ov…”

“It feels like e-commerce will see agentic shopping happening. We're getting closer. Computer use is getting better. APIs are there. MCP servers and Shopify has a bunch of tools for this stuff.”

“If you have 14,483 software companies, they're all trying to gain the attention of the same 2000 brands on Shopify.”

“Toby Lutke at Shopify CEO, he's been great thinking about like how to be an AI native organization.”

“Toast and Shopify is, if they were just software, they're pretty mediocre businesses, but they figured out how to add merchant services and payments and payrolls, and all the vertical SaaS companies are doing that.”

“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…”

“Even if you make the choice yourself to embark in entrepreneurship, kind of everyone around you is coming onto the trip. There's a lot of people who end up mattering a lot and I clearly was naive about it.”

“I think that's what makes you an entrepreneur. Like, the first time you sell something, or first time someone hires you for, when the phone rings, or something like this. Because until then, you're just someone who builds something, which is already great, but…”

“And I'm not that different from other people. Like, if I needed this at some point, there's gonna be at least a couple thousand people who also need this.”

“It was Scott's idea. It was we talked about what we wanted it, and putting shop and simplify together was pretty straightforward, and then we went to I think on GoDaddy and registered with .com.”

“By the time we launched in 2006, I think we had four or 5000 emails, so it's not, but that seemed like a lot.”

“And, frankly, there are still business running on Shopify. That, that actually started on that day, which is remarkable.”

“And the model was, I think we charged like three and a half or 3.75% per, per sale. It was a complete failure of a business model because what basically everyone who didn't expect to have sales thought it was amazing and people who expect to sell a lot would T…”

“We luckily met an angel investor who ended up putting, I think, 400,000 dollars around 2007, and that saved us as an individual by the name of John Phillips.”

“But all the offers were always conditional on moving the company to Silicon Valley.”

“So basically, I got this around this time, notice that term sheets will no longer be honored, because everyone needs to tighten bells, and so on.”

“We thought the numbers would fall off a cliff, and what they actually did is they started climbing and accelerating.”

“In 2009, the company now hit first time sort of cash flow neutral.”

“At this point, I intentionally slowed down the growth of the company a little bit just because I needed it to be manageable for me.”

“Like, up till this point, it was really just, you know, money from John Phillips, from my family, and then for the last year, from my father-in-law, who gave me Money for, to meet payroll.”

“10 months after the Series A, Jeremy and Trevor from Bessemer came to me and said, you are still massively constrained by money. How about, instead of you spending a bunch of months on fundraising, we'll just Quadruple the valuation of the company and put much…”

“Our job is to make our merchants look good. Like, this is why we exist. So, we wouldn't put Shopify on the merchant stores.”

“Every 52 seconds, someone has that experience of getting a first sale.”

“Like, this is not a kind of company that could have been started even two years later, right? It needed to be started right then, and it needed to be ready and good by the time the opportunity around the financial crisis came around.”

“Socks, mainly. It's my best seller.”

“I really think that the model for now is going to be a super agent, like one agent for the entire company.”

“Shopify destroyed them all. There's no reason to use. This is another category where the low end was destroyed by Shopify, who amazingly went up market and down market successfully at the same time. And there's just, it's not worth it. You can't save enough mo…”

“Until you get something live and get people using it and see how fast it grows and see where it plateaus, I think it's going to be really hard to try to answer all these questions because there's just not publicly available data on this topic.”

“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…”

“Shopify is remarkably high on aids because I really seek them. I fundamentally like this kind of discussion.”

“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.”

“In fact, the banker who took me in public as my CFO right now, so like 10 years later, which is really funny.”

“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.”

“My real hope is seven and a half to 8000, right? Like at a hundred x productivity level, right?”

“I think my most public mistake was going into Full on logistics and physical warehouse building just before AI got really good and not like, and we didn't have the ability to you know, do both of those things at the same time. So we actually had to like abando…”

“It's very hard to forge anything new at room temperature. So like, I think great leaders must be exothermic and must be a heat source for the company. It's very different opinion than the custodial idea of leadership, which is also a valid position to take.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's a fair deal over 50%.”

“Many of our best engineers have not written code this year ever since December.”

“There's probably ten million people working day to day on Shopify.”

“In fact, Shopify famously works in teams of five. They say the best teams are all five. And so they have like a 3300, I believe R and D research and development group. And even in there, they have teams of five inside of the 3300.”

“Just even yesterday, Andrej Karpathy was famous in tweeting about, oh, there's some ways that you can organize your agents to store the data and then look up the data so that you don't have to research or lose context every time. And a little bit tongue-in-che…”

“So you could see that it approaches really a hundred percent by now. It's hard not to do your job now without interacting deeply, at least with one tool.”

“The other thing I would claim you could see is that CLI-based tools and tools that don't require you to look at the code becoming more popular, and you could see, yeah, various versions of Cloud Code and Codex and Pi and internal development tools taking off e…”

“And we effectively fund unlimited tokens for everybody. We do try to control the models that people use, but from the bottom, not from top. Like we basically say, hey, please don't use anything less than Opus.”

“And I would claim the super interesting part here is that you could see that the distribution becoming more and more skewed. The top percentiles grow faster. So that means the people in the top 10 percentile, they, their consumption grows faster than 75 and so…”

“I haven't found a good PR review tool that, that does what I think should be done”

“It actually, in terms of the overall time to deploy, it's total time savings if you spend more time on a longer model, like, thinking for an hour, because then you don't have to spend all that time During testing and rolling, you know, rolling back the deploym…”