Shopify

“Coach number four that we worked with. We hired him because he had been the coach at Shopify and the first coach at Shopify from when they went from 60 to 3000 people.”

“Most people who are eight players at really big companies and have been there for a long time are probably not a fit.”

“From the time that they started to the time they went public, they raised a hundred million dollars in total. And when they went public, They had ninety seven million dollars on their balance sheet. So the net cash to use in all that time was just three millio…”

“The absolute peak that Bessemer thought of at the time of the investment was that Shopify might, in the best of cases, become a four hundred million dollar company. And they assigned a three percent probability to that outcome.”

“It actually, he got a 1350 new businesses created on Shopify through this build a business competition. And that generated 3.5 million dollars in gross sales.”

“And about at this point, this is like 2007 or so they raise 250,000 dollars from an angel investor in Ottawa called John Phillips.”

“Yahoo stores first and foremost is like a search engine. EBay first and foremost is an auctions marketplace. They were both doing stores, but neither of them had the vision to become platform for commerce.”

“So now we're like end of 2009, they're doing 2.5 million dollars in revenue up from a million dollars the year before. And you know, they're a cashflow positive company.”

“And so a 100,000 dollars back then was all of the money that they had in their balance sheet. That was all the cash that they had. And they put it all on the line to launch this, build a business competition.”

“When I showed up in Ottawa, Toby told me that, hey, they had these amazing engineers and the team was by the way, like less than 50 people or barely 50 people. And he said, I took two of my best engineers and we're building a real time data warehouse.”

“Kind of agency that would help you with your website and say, look, if you build on Shopify, we'll give you 20% of the lifetime revenue of that account.”

“My intention was to build twenty-people company. That's what I wanted to do.”

“All of these ads, They actually don't really focus on the solution. They don't focus on why their product is so great. They focus on the pain point”

“This was all of the money that Shopify had in their bank balance and Toby goes for it.”

“The, probably the most proven way of building a great company is sustainable, consistent growth. You look at Nike, you look at Microsoft, you look at Shopify. These were businesses that what they actually did was they doubled and they doubled and they doubled …”

“1350 new businesses come on Shopify as a result. If you know their business model, they charge about a hundred dollars a month. Let's just round it out. A hundred dollars a month times 1350 new businesses means that they make 130,500 dollars on month one. That…”

“Why don't we solve that problem by rebuilding Shopify with the products and the distribution already built in? Because we already know the product set that a practitioner requires. And that's basically what we did.”

“And the thing you got to prioritize about all else, it's kind of like value is bigger than market size, like prioritize delivering value. And that tends to take care of itself”

“Lawyers could get this thing up and running, but they had no idea how to drive traffic to it. You know, they're kind of chasing this mirage of, and I'm sure Shopify has this issue too. They probably have tons of people setting up stores and no traffic going to…”

“Companies like Shopify, Square, Intuit have proven that you can build, like, hundred billion dollar plus companies if the numbers are working right, if you're medicine, not vitamin for a small business customer”

“You look at, you know, Shopify and Toby, and he actually is quoted Saying that his goal, like we're looking back at, you know, let's say 2005 ish, when he was starting, his goal was to build a 20 person super profitable business.”

“Klaviyo decided to be the go-to tool for Shopify when Shopify was eighty-five million in value, right? They were like a Series B or something, or Series A. It's probably Series B at the time. Maybe a Series A company. Shopify, as Klaviyo grew to IPO, grew to a…”

“Put it on Facebook, ran it to a Shopify audience, spent 5000 dollars and got 10 K monthly recurring revenue in week one.”

“Today we have companies like Shopify, Snowflake, Figma, many of the largest and fastest moving teams out there that that run their code review process and their outer loop on Graphite.”

“Having like All of Shopify's engineers, like, relying on, on Graphite Daily is, ah, it's really exciting to see.”

“The way you transact, the way you sell products when it comes to fish, seafood is fundamentally different when it comes to when you compare it to, like, selling t-shirts, right? So you sell things by the poundage. You need to be able to factor in perishability…”

“The only way is you have to pool thousands of merchants of inventory To then be able to forward deploy it and distribute it and offer every single one of them a service comparable to what Amazon offers, right?”

“Shopify is a very merchant-obsessed company. I actually never met a company as obsessed with customers and merchants specifically as Shopify is.”

“Shopify itself now is, I believe, 12% of all U.S. E-commerce, you know, just all the merchants on Shopify. It might be more or less, I don't remember the last number yet.”

“And it's not going to be an incremental improvement of Shopify's template, you know, like e-commerce architecture or Salesforce e-commerce platform. It is something you ought to go back and build from the ground up where you have a brain, it understands everyt…”