The Ledger, every show

“What you see right now is not AI layoffs. It's also just like the companies that are really slow that like overhired just like everyone else doing it now.”

“60% of people, more than 60, I think the numbers have gone up since, and people think that the United States is the largest risk to Canada, like, much larger than, like, Russia or China would be.”

“AI has so many naysayers, like, we are gonna tell kids they can't use AI. Kids will not stop using AI. What they will do is they will download Chinese models, and you will never, ever, ever get another high school essay about Tiananmen Square as a consequence …”

“It's a fair deal over 50%.”

“I don't even think it's going to end up mattering because AI is going to solve all technical debt.”

“I don't even believe in AI unemployment from, to begin with. It's not how things work. But if you were worried about it, F-One is kind of proving that we can just make up completely incredible pursuits, especially with AI and robotics, we can make it cheaper, …”

“Europe's dependence on Russia for natural gas pipelines plus the act of aggression by Russia may actually cause climate change to be solved, which is, like, an unbelievable story when you're looking at this.”

“Hey, the future's fantastic, and we'll probably become immortal relatively soon, and all these kind of things and maybe not us, but our children definitely will.”

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

“What you will see is like AI is going to be blamed for absolutely everything, right? Like, because it's like, it's the perfect scapegoat.”

“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.”

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

“The moment I went through absolutely every project I did myself, took like many, like, 16 hour days, I canceled probably 60% of the projects, and over the course of the year, I turned over every one of my executives.”

“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 thing. And you know what? At all, every one of those things worked.”

“Some of our customers went out of business because they got talked, they talked themselves into their own stack. They hired a CTO who brought in their own team. They used a set of technologies that they wanted to use because they are currently the in thing tha…”

“It has in the ground basically as much, like, it's number one, two, or three on every single resource that is of value in, in the in, in the next manufacturing buildup age”

“We're not so cool on this right now, but soon we are gonna be cool again, because this is the way humanity works, and then we get to build, and there's some really, really good technology underneath it all, which is quite ready.”

“What you get back everywhere in the world is, like, I'm doing great. Everyone's anxiety is based on their understanding of everyone else. Which everyone else literally disagrees with. Like, so, we all think everyone else is doing bad, and everything else is ge…”

“I think Shopify All In, like, over the next 10 years, we would be a very diminished company for not giving our best feature, like, to everyone to make it, like, a fundamental, like You know, like, flag in the ground about, hey, you come to Shopify because we w…”

“Entrepreneurship is actually tanking across North America.”

“When you go through the list of the richest people on planet earth, all of them have built something.”

“There's something about this context engineering, which I had a hand in popularizing term of I think that will become more recognizably a, like a role in companies that will potentially subsume a bunch of other more specialized roles right now.”

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

“So we are, we're going in a world where I think less of the airwaves will be dominated by the bored people who act in bad faith, because I think the other side has ability to push back.”

“The best paid people in, Many companies are now individual contributors at this point in in history especially in machine learning, like at least in the, at the machine learning labs, like OpenAI.”

“I think I mean, there's a well-documented effect of when companies build monuments to themselves, they usually decline right after, right?”

“In fact, like everything in our offices is from Shopify stores, right? Because again, like if anything we are doing is not mission aligned, we just didn't align to the mission, axiomatically.”

“Year 21 is like, this is gonna be the most interesting year in our, in, in, in this complex history, probably in everyone, little, I think literally everyone's career.”

“It's a 16% conversion increase by it being robbed, right?”

“Like if it's like where I live in Ontario, it's like the grid is entirely clean. It's like the Bruce nuclear power plant, which are constantly built more reactors for, which is like, Every time under budget and before schedule, like six, seven gigawatts now, a…”

“What we have determined is that every single time we make a complex thing simpler. It is actually that more businesses will exist on a platform.”

“We survey people that, like, successful stores tend to, like, I think with 85% answer that you had someone who would return a text in 24 hours with a question about starting a business. It's massive predictor of success.”

“I think in a 102 hundred years from now, when we talk about human history like, these books that, like, Hackers by Stephen Levy, and The Dream Machine, and like, Code by Petzold, and, you know, all these kind of, these books are actually going to be referenced…”

“And so I think humans assisted by technology are probably the thing that we should be going for instead of trying to replace people so much. And I think we will see that effect significantly more.”

“I think you know, products will get enormously cheap or purchasing power is going to go up like crazy.”

“It's a brilliant start, and that is going to be true in 10 years too, and 10 years after that.”

“We had like something that was 8000 people in a company, and there was five and a half thousand different titles in a company.”

“We got like within a week of running out of money so many times, and sometimes we were bailed out. Many times it was like, just like the clearance of the one-time try hurdles that shop went through was like millimeters at times”

“I think making things will be much simpler in the world of just in time manufacturing and three D printing and additive and resin printing and obviously like products, just humanoid robotics, dreadnought, lights off factories, making anything on demand and thr…”

“I think the sort of core part of Shopify with all the like, minor stuff like the identity system and all these kind of things is like, 20 million lines of code, and then the TypeScript written admin interface is like another, I think eight, nine, 10 every reas…”

“And I think there's going to be some productizations of GSD that'll be available to everyone. That's probably going to be renamed 15 times or whatever, become a category of software that's going to exist. And then everyone's going to be wondering how the hell …”

“First versions on top of the line graphics cards, on your own machine you can execute this, right, this open source. You could make an image in 15 seconds. I think we're down to three. And, like, with no hardware changes”

“I spent a year and a half being out of money and asking my father-in-law, who I was living with me and my wife for checks to meet payroll, and I don't, I never will figure out why he actually gave those checks to us, but, like, we were essentially dead on life…”

“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.”

“Like, it was the first category of music that just, like, killed it on Shopify.”

“Like at the high point of our stock price, I think we were trading at beyond 50 x of revenue and stuff like this.”

“When Shopify IPO'd We had one member of executive team who ever worked for a public company. That's it. We had no one who took a company public. We had no one who was an executive at a public company. We had one executive who worked at a public company once.”