Shopify

“There's nudges for people, like for people have, like, if people don't have one-on-ones for a long time, they're getting a nudge about it, right? Like, and suddenly you can universally have one-on-ones much better than having a policy with rights of you know, …”

“I think I actually learned most about building businesses from playing StarCraft.”

“I had term sheets by all the dream venture capitalists that sort of however stipulated that I would have to relocate the company to, you know, Silicon Valley or a place like this, which I then walked away from.”

“Long before this was a name, like we I locked her into our server farm and turned random servers off, right? Because I just wanted to make sure that we are not relying on, Memcached being up, you know, for, and this is, we did that in production”

“What Shopify allows People to do is like have, you know, for 29 dollars a month get something that gets them pretty close to having all the things that Jeff had to build for himself when he started Amazon, right?”

“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…”

“You know, I've, I can directly measure the quality of a meeting with how different people spend their lives up to the point of arriving at the meeting. So the more diverse, the better.”

“Everyone wants to do the right thing. It's just we ask people to Use to have to invest their willpower into doing the right thing. And that's not right. Like, I mean, it's, I mean, you can try to do it, but I want the maximum amount of people's willpower that …”

“One thing that happened with Shopify which made actually, made making Shopify actually really hard, is that we did not really have competent competitors. It's really almost, it's really, really, really hard to build a company if you don't have an obvious enemy…”

“After I hired my first CFO, I, every single spreadsheet I got from him looked really, really complicated, and was far beyond my Excel skill set, but I learned how to use the craziest Excel lookups, because I need, like, I just rebuilt the same spreadsheets fro…”

“It's just a mental model for how to think about the relationship between people, right? It's you know, it's something that actually exists, but is rarely documented. People sort of think about trust as almost an on off kind of thing. Like I trust my mother. I …”

“I spent a good deal of time with my direct team and sort of the leadership team of Shopify. Like, it's probably a third or 40% of my schedule. I actually have full reports on this. My assistant called, we called my expansion pack here at Shopify to keep the vi…”

“And if we bring in experts in, in, in topics that are important, like when we built a payment gateway, we really needed people who understood the payment, payments industry. They're not the people who run the group. They are the people who support those people…”

“I had to make a copy of my passport and fax it to American Fork Utah to get a merchant account. That process took two and a half months. Of course, after you sign up in Shopify, you just have a merchant account, and therefore you can take credit cards and thes…”

“You change the environment to make it so that people just, their common sense compels them to do the right thing. Like, the shortest way of stating that is, like, water will always follow the easiest path down any kind of mountain, right? Obviously. So you can…”

“Shopify is kind of the counterforce to this centralization, at least in the world of world of commerce. We want to make it so simple to partake in entrepreneurship, to like add your own voice to sort of what's going on in, in, in the world. And so, so we want …”

“I want Shopify to be a company where people have an enormous amount of personal autonomy. But it's not possible to just bestow that on everyone. So, like, because like, you, like, trust needs to be earned. And so, when you have a concept like this, where you c…”

“Toby, Toby, Toby Lutke. I think Toby's really, really exceptional. He . He's world class on the level of those two. My gosh.”

“Part of what is so great about just this exercise is it is almost impossible for a room of people to like, everyone in a room can talk about the same thing and mean completely different things, but if you're writing, like, a systems diagram on a whiteboard, af…”

“The bottleneck on potential for Shopify for like a good year and a half period in which I just dragged my feet making this call.”

“These switch to a very simple system where everyone gets a number. This is what you make every year. And so everyone agrees what, like, the ground truth is of compensation. And then you can say, we want this in cache. Do you want this in store options?”

“Hire smart people and then get out of their way. I think that's a waste of everyone's time. It's not even good for the, like, it's a nice story, but it's, like, dumb. It's, like, one of those would be nice if that would work, but doesn't.”

“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…”

“The only reason why we create roles and recs is because they are, like, lures to great people. The interview process is not a process of thinking, can you do this role? Can we slot you into this role? It is, will the job fair be better for you being here?”

“Shopify's stock price is like this crazy function over time based on, again, sentiment, market value. So tying everyone's lifetime earnings, really, but like to this other thing, which is like wildly swinging compared to the thing that we are all working on. F…”

“There's very few very, very important things that can be done by individuals anymore on, on, just, we, we've almost mined the entire value space. Like all, basically all the minerals that are, like on the surface have been mined out, right? Like, so, Oh, like,…”

“No one in a company works on the stock if things are going well. I think if people start working on stock, things are actually, like, that should be a sign that things are going pretty poorly in the company.”

“People actually are performance mashed out, euphemism to if they don't take risks. So it's actually for your career, a job fair is actually more risky to not aim high.”

“I actually think even concepts like roadmaps and just generally plans are actually overrated. I think like a road, the best possible roadmap is have a very clear guide view of what matters to your merchants. Have a super strong model of your own capabilities a…”

“I, if Shopify would turn under my watch into that, I think someone else could do my job better.”

“And I think we ended up Stopping to work on canceling or not yetting. 60% of the things we were working on which I think everyone was ready for because it was very obvious in first half of twenty-twenty-two that we are going into very different times, right?”

“Shopify hires through ah, we talk about just your life story a lot, and I feel like we can find a lot of predictive artifacts in, in a life story about which kind of type of pursuit you're on.”

“This is why one of the books I give to my, ah, executives is, like, is, is Parkinson's Law, which is a wonderful eighty-page read on, like, how silly companies end up being”

“A one person operation at their mom's kitchen table right now on Shopify, who needs to write a product description, who needs to do product photography. I suspect that today they can have a higher converting, a higher, a highly optimized or higher optimized. P…”

“The expectation is before you go and try to hire another person for your team, you ask yourself and you test whether or not some sort of AI tool can actually do it better for you. And if it can, that's what you should be doing.”

“Lulu is on our board. It was amazing. Probably one of the greatest comms geniuses on the planet talks about this go direct.”

“This idea that even the way that I treat earnings, it's not an earnings call for me. It's a storytelling opportunity.”

“Shopify basically runs about 12% of all U.S. E-commerce. So if you were to think about, like, just in terms of size-wise, like, we're like the second largest checkout on the internet in the U.S. At least”

“I really think that most companies end up looking at a buffet of their leaders and looking at the slots that are available and just go like, go here, go there. And I think it takes a very thoughtful and very often a founder CEO or founder leader like Toby, som…”

“On our team that whatever, whatever the thing you're responsible for, you are going to try to be the very, very best in the world at that particular thing. Product design, sales, storytelling, finance, legal, whatever that might be. That's the commitment. And …”

“Every person that works at Shopify should be able to go to their Industry conference, whatever their category, whatever area they're in business, and they should give the keynote about how they're doing their job, completely different than everybody in the cro…”

“He is the greatest product person I've ever met in my life. He's this incredible tech visionary, especially when it comes to commerce.”

“I'm fairly compulsive about auditing my calendar once a quarter. And I do that with my team here at Shopify. I also do it with Lindsay with my wife.”

“I think generally I do not have an abundance mindset about the things in my life. Some of that may be, I don't know, this is going deep in the first minute, but some of them might just be like multi-generational trauma, which I actually believe in. I think I c…”

“Most people need someone else to help them pull up to the next level, and if you find someone like that, and you sort of Mutually commit to one another. I mean, that's real partnership that makes for, that's how you build a hundred billion dollar company, I th…”

“I try to kind of bundle my meeting days on certain days, usually Monday, Wednesday, Fridays, and then more of my, like, my maker days, Tuesdays and Thursdays, where I can have long form blocks of time to do thinking, to do writing”

“Make sure the app adds a lot of value, and then the first five people that installed it, like, call them and ask them how you can make it better, and if you've made it better and they're happy, ask them to write a review”

“The way that I think I had the most amount of value to Shopify is the same thing that I want to be well-classed at, which is I want to be a great storyteller.”

“Sundays here at Shopify. We have something called builder Sundays. So we open up the offices. It's done in Montreal and Toronto. So anyone in the city that's an entrepreneur can come in and work from here.”

“Like if we'd have been smart, like Toby was, we had to sell subscriptions to our little platform and maybe could have been Shopify, but instead we just like bought motorcycles and sold them on eBay motors and Actually through live car auctions, our own website…”

“Jess and her very strong team have decided that they're going to fight it every single time, and in the short term, super expensive, huge Huge pain. Again, you take the pain up front so that you don't have to live with chronic pain for the rest of your life. Y…”

“I don't know if he realizes it, but he probably single-handedly changed The number of people speaking out in Canada on the election, because he started having an opinion, having a voice, and that, that sort of made it safe for other people to have an opinion, …”

“Think of Shopify for micro school, or for schools, right? That's what time back is going to be, and it's going to explode it.”

“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…”