On the day I became a billionaire the clouds did not part. The trumpets did not play. Nothing is different. I never set out to be rich. I have very cheap hobbies. As long as I have a gaming PC and a good laptop to do my work on that is all I need. [0:39]
What is different about the way you think that allows you to build world-class product? I don’t know if I do anything terribly different from what most people do...I follow my interests fairly wide. I find businesses super interesting. I find finance interesting. I just have questions about the world. And I like exploring those questions.[3:21]
In the case of Shopify, it required building a company. Initially, I built a snowboard store and wondered why is it so damn hard to build an internet company? Didn’t we invent the Internet so everyone could do their own thing on it? [3:53]
Building a business is one of the most pure forms of self-expression. [4:16]
For the past 15 years, I have been completely obsessed with how to build software that makes it easier for people who aren’t technical to start Internet companies. It has been all-consuming. [6:26]
Shopify is a collaborative inquiry into “What would the world look like if entrepreneurship would be easy and common?” My hypothesis is that it would be a cooler version of the world than exists right now. [6:48]
I really believe in the self-expression of starting a business. It is very pure and it is very important. [7:14]
The question Tobi asks himself on a daily basis: What sucks about starting an online business? The answer to that is the next thing we should be working on. If you are not working on that you probably didn’t get the prioritization right [9:25]
By default, most people think things happen linearly. The world doesn’t work at all like that. The world works in systems. The good news is we know this in engineering but most of the world doesn’t know this in company building yet. [13:20]
What is a business? This is such an interesting question. We talk about this like “Apple did this” and “Google did this”. There is no such thing. There is no monolithic Google. Google doesn’t make decisions. There are 150,000 people at Google. [When Tobi said this my mind went to this interview with Steve Jobs from 1985. When asked how Apple planned to sell to businesses instead of consumers he said, “Our approach is to think of them not as businesses but as collections of people.”] [15:30]
There is 5,000 people at Shopify. So how does Shopify get better? We have to. The Shopify of 2012 could not solve the challenges of Shopify of 2020. So how does a company get better? It is not just by getting more people. That wouldn’t lead to exponential growth. That would lead to linear growth. The existing people at Shopify have to get better. You have to requalify for your job every year. How do you do that? A lot of this is culture. A lot of this is systems. [16:06]
We have a fairly sizable coaching staff in the organization. It is called Talent Acceleration. This is my point. What is a company? A company is a collection of people. If you want to become better as a company [you need to]help your people have their breakthroughs. [17:12]
[The results of Talent Acceleration] It is not just that they [the people in your company] made this one choice better—that person will make every choice they encounter better. How many billions of choices happen at a company in a calendar year? [17:56]
Really good feedback Tobi received in the early days of Shopify: Everyone I am meeting in this company is some version of you. You really have to figure out how to hire people that are different than you. That was really good feedback. [23:27]
Why would you build a company that is exactly like the other ones? What you should do is build one that is different. As different as possible. To do this you need to figure out your own set of things that you think matter. [31:09]
We have a developer acceleration team. It makes way more sense to invest in developer efficiency because you get massive leverage when compared to giving people inefficient tools and then having more people. It makes perfect sense from an investment perspective. [39:36]
I would absolutely self identify as the kind of person who had to start their own company. Therefore I did. There is a certain percentage of people who are the kind of people who really, really have to start their own companies. I don’t think this is as rare as we make it out to be. [42:38]
New company formation is trending downwards. The opportunities for new business formation has actually been reduced. The Internet is just one big village. There is a Walmart in the Internet space and it wants to own all retail. I’m talking about Amazon. They want an empire. Shopify exists to arm the rebels. We want lots of people to go and compete with Amazon. I think that is really good for the Internet.[49:04]
When I start to feel comfortable, when I think I got a handle on what Shopify needs from me, that is when I get really suspicious. That means I need to go back and look broader, to read some far-field books, to try and get some ideas to figure out where my next growth comes from. Ideally, I need to get twice as good by next year to stay in my job. To requalify. [53:04]
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