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Tobi Lütke is still captivated by internet commerce, 20 years later · Cheeky Pint

• Tobi (00:00:00): The best gift in life is finding a beautiful problem that you can never solve. And even if you accidentally solve it, if you're so unfortunate to solve it, hopefully it has plenty of enlightened problem children. Consumerism is like a thing that is being thrown around, but where does it come from? But they throw away things because they hate the things they have. The thing that solves consumerism is quality product, personalized ads is a wonderful thing. I am scrolling past something that's monetizing the free application that I appreciate using. John (00:00:31): You should tell the EU this. Tobi (00:00:32): Yes, well, I do actually. Some people fall in love with solutions. Some people fall in love with problems and I just like fundamentally, I'm a person who appreciates some people who fall in love with problems. But it's very hard to know who is who because well, if you don't change anything, they look exactly the same. What's the point? You only have half an Irish pub? John (00:00:51): This set? Well, this is our MVP when we weren't even sure that this would be a thing. Tobias Lütke launched Shopify in 2006. We've been working closely with them for over a decade and I always enjoy getting together with Tobi and I always learn a lot. Cheers. Tobi Cheers. John Okay. Many places I could start. What's the size of the code base, in as much as vendor stuff, whatever…? Tobi (00:01:16): I think the core part of Shopify, minus stuff like the identity system and these kind of things, it's like 20 million lines of code. And then the TypeScript written admin interface is another I think 8, 9, 10. It's apparently one of the largest TypeScript applications and definitely have the largest Ruby applications. So we pushed it into pretty uncharted territories for our tech stacks. It does so much, it's like a full fintech business in there with capital and these kinds of things and all of what we are doing together. And my company adopts the complexity, the real life messy complexities of the commerce world into itself to then front it with approachable interfaces, things that don't… Just making all the pieces fit together. And so that requires a lot of work. So there's like thousands of projects going on at any given time. So going through all of them is work, but we have a good system. We have a product operations team that prepares for it. We have an internal system that's just for the reviews, which is actually kind of cool. John What does the system do? Tobi So I'm fascinated with companies. I think companies aren't appreciated for that… we don't think of that generally. It's like companies are technology themselves. They are technology by which you create, part of what they create is social acceptance for people, maybe tens of people, hundreds of people, thousands, tens of thousands of people depending, to spend all their day pursuing a mission together. It's really just like universities exist giving you time that you can use for hopefully intellectual inquiry into some topic. And everyone's cool with that, although if you try to do the same thing just with your laptop on the internet all day long, has not nearly the same social acceptance, but may also be valuable. And then companies are ones that allow people, a lot of people together to try to make a, pursue a mission or create something, hopefully world-class. So I think companies are understudied, and also this sort of incentive system behind companies tends to be that there's no absolute need for perfecting them. There's just like you've got to be better than everyone else and at some point, in many industries, if you get ahead it's really, really hard for others to catch up. And so, there's sort of a point equilibrium at which point you just— John (00:03:46): Because you're good enough and so there isn't pressure to get better beyond some point. Tobi (00:03:49): Yeah, I mean, take an example: I talked with some executives in the gold mining space. It's just really sort of interesting. Because I’m like, “What is your day like?” The same question. It's much more interesting. John (00:04:00): What is a gold mining executive’s day like? Tobi (00:04:03): I mean my conclusion, which wasn't maybe what he was trying to guide me to was, essentially government relations or investor relations, if you know how much is in the ground, it's a capital play. But somehow if the investors like you better, then you get a higher multiple at which point it behooves you to purchase all the other gold mines really quickly. So I imagine it involves playing golf, because that’s probably the technology there. John (00:04:31): So isn't one of the conundrums for you, as someone who thinks about companies and organizations a lot, the lack of measurability of R&D, which is probably half of what Shopify spends its money on is R&D. And so if you're running a factory, it's pretty easy to measure the inputs and outputs and how many widgets are reproducing per hour and what's the labor efficiency and everything like that. It's very measurable. Whereas when you're building software it's like, “I don’t know, we put a bunch of engineers on it and hopefully in six months they have a great product out there in the market.” But the intermediate measure is yeah, you can measure pull requests per engineer per day or whatever and everyone knows that's a very broken proxy. Tobi (00:05:08): And lots of thoughts on this specifically. I would love to actually know how you think about this too. So traditionally when you look back in business history about when people got a little bit scientific about business or actually started to improve them, clearly it all started as sort of a vibe space. Then Frederick Taylor came up and brought the wonderful new technology of stopwatch to the production line and timed the various steps, and of course produced I think Bethlehem Steel, at the end of the 1800s and drove massive efficiency gains. And so that's like the hero's journey of business books. John (00:05:41): And that’s still so much of the corporate culture today. It's how org charts tend to be structured. It's how the financial statements are, the kind of business that financial statements are optimized for is kind of a factory. Tobi (00:05:51): In a world where almost no company was terribly conscientious and no company metabolized all the value available to them. Someone starting to hill climb some source of efficiency gains, or just becoming a better company, was a breathtaking change. Once someone starts hill climbing, everyone has to or gets left behind. So that became the story and it's remarkable to think that that was probably good enough for probably 80 years or 90 years from this point on. Right, it's— John (00:06:27): It's a lean basically, which is kind of the 2.0 of that. Tobi (00:06:29): Exactly. So you said a car industry with exactly Toyota and so on, some new ideas came on but they were all around the drive for efficiency. The downside of a drive to efficiency is that it requires you to act on quantifiables. You can only measure what you can measure thematically. So that's not the entire space of how to make better companies. There's a huge amount of things that are unquantifiable— taste, quality is hard to quantify. John (00:07:04): Well not only that, because those are the obvious examples of unquantifiables, but the big one is… I'm curious, there's team at Shopify that's doing a great job of their product and there's a team that's lost and has kind of a wooly direction and actually their dev tools suck and so it's very hard for them to make forward progress and they're thrashing with lots of “keep the lights on” work. Just how do you distinguish between the team that's struggling and the team that's executing really well? Tobi (00:07:27): Yeah, I mean this is why my answer is…here's what I've found works: have rituals by which we talk at the latest every eight weeks, and so let the teams talk about the progress against the goal. We have an internal system called GSD— getting shit done. It's for the central register clearinghouse, it's our wiki, it's our feeds and stuff like this. But it also has every project in it. And so it's built around teams updating everyone else registering, “Here's something we learned.” And so that was step number one. Let's get the actual state of a business into a legible internal system, by which you can reason about it. Where is every project, what are the deadlines, what has changed? And so this is what these reviews are about. his is what we have on the screen—they get a little tldraw that we can drag images and mockups and everything into, but that's their area. But all the metrics and all the things are on the screen right in front of everyone and we can talk about that and how many people are on a team and this kind of stuff. And giving everyone an opportunity to just talk to me, even if it's only quickly, is incredibly valuable. I just learned tons of things about it, and there's something that's in the calendar and I dunno, it's exhausting and a lot of work, but I don't know how to do it in any other way because that is the thing by which people can say, “Hey, it feels like progress is really well and here's what we are building and here's something we learn. What should we do about it?” John (00:09:11): Is it like people want to get into running? The couch to 5K program starts with:get off the couch, go walk down the block, go walk down two blocks and things like that. It turns out that from an organizational point of view, having a centralized source where you track all the projects and you list out your goals and you post updates…that sounds too simple to work in the same way that getting off the couch is too simple as a step to running a marathon. But it turns out both are true. Tobi (00:09:35): I think honestly it's not a complex idea and it's extremely valuable for 15 other reasons, other than it powering these reviews. But yeah, it's not terribly complex and it works. John (00:09:52): No, we took inspiration from GSD—your system—as we built out ours similarly. Having a centralized internal source of truth for projects that are going on is surprisingly helpful and it feels like it shouldn't be. But it is. Tobi (00:10:07): Yeah, it's funny because… so again, it's an internal system. Shopify has a culture of building internal software. I mean I tend to point out Shopify itself started out as internal software to power my snowboard store, so it'd be funny to not do this. And so I think fundamentally companies are all pretty bad. All the companies of today are pretty bad compared to the companies we will have in the future. And I don't know how I would possibly run Shopify without having GSD and I think there's going to be some productization 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 did we build software before we had it? And I try to have Shopify live in that particular state a little bit earlier. John (00:11:06): Has your proclivity for developing internal software ever led in just a really hilariously overbuilding internal software direction? Tobi (00:11:13): Oh yeah, absolutely. All the time. John (00:11:13): What's the most ridiculous internally developed piece of software? Tobi (00:11:17): You have static sort of internal GeoCities. It's static site hosting, which is, it's the most incredible… Yeah, it's like a nineties web of all pros and cons. Yeah, it sent us down wrong paths. It's very often I say it internally towards culture. This is actually a little bit of a dangerous statement. I shouldn't make it as such. We have a very strong appreciation of good software and good in the context of we have to use it. Some software is really good. Shopify is really, really, really good software if you are running a D2C business or with products. Some people try to stretch it to subscription-based grocery stores, something… maybe that even works. But I clearly didn't build it with that in mind and I actually, I appreciate all my customers. I'd rather not anyone use the software if it's bad for them, because that's like I built Shopify to avoid people having to use shitty software, not to add to the pile. So sometimes this means giving us scale and our minimum quality part that we have to build it ourselves. And in those cases we do that. Sometimes we build it where we have no business doing it and that's where things go sometimes wrong. John (00:12:34): Well, what I think is interesting is you think it's important to build your own HR software and you would recommend people at least think seriously about that. Maybe you can share the worldview there. Tobi (00:12:44): I’m not sure I exactly recommend it, but we have ideas about how to do HR, in terms of compensation and so on, that they're just different from what's normally implemented. This is most true in project management software, like again GSD. If you use software by others, you have to buy into their vision. Some vendors tell you the software can do absolutely everything and that should be— John (00:13:08): Softwares have a worldview. So you're adopting Workday's worldview when it comes to your HR, which may or may not be what you want to do. Tobi (00:13:14): That’s right. And I think that's important to realize and it's important to use to your advantage. And I think this is why it's really, really important to buy software. The people who buy the software are the people who should use the software in the end because they have a better view of what needs to be had. So in our case in HR, we had some things that were not doable with Workday and other systems and so we did it ourselves. I mean, this led to a journey that might have gone a little bit too far on, “How should this be done?” This is one of our areas where probably Shopify is the weirdest bit of software ever made, but like, it’s working for us. John (00:13:54): So the internal systems you use will subtly affect the decisions that you make. Everyone's probably been in meetings where it's like, “Oh well we can't do that because the system doesn't support it.” And so again, do you want to have a Workday designed compensation system? Probably not. You wouldn't frame it that way. Which is why again, it's important that people think about what is the vision they want and does this offer support. Tobi (00:14:19): I’m trying to make… true true. There were the kits in the LAN parties of the '90s that set up the internet sharing for everyone when that was still difficult. I'm a tool maker, infrastructure thinker in my entire life and I deeply believe in environments that cause people to accomplish bigger and better things than what they even imagined they could have done. Marshall McLuhansays first we make the tools and then they shape us, or something along those lines. I have a terrible memory for exact quotes, but the sentiment is right and so I think this is powerful and it's something I want to channel at every level. Again, I want the people who have a utilitarian problem of, “Hey, I need an online store” to accidentally catch Shopify because this is the go-to software. But then Shopify inspires them to build much bigger and better companies than they thought they did and elevate their own ambition and what they're building. Just like my ambition increased from building snowboard stores to helping millions of businesses be built. And so it's an environment that I think we have a lot more power over and it's the sort of missing ingredient people talk about… People talk about incentives shaping companies and then policies shaping companies. So both of the tend to be the two tools and I think then generally if people are really insightful, they talk about culture as well, but it's the environment that's even more powerful than all those things and it tends to be as a software company, especially if you feel like you have agency over the tools but you actually have more power over the tools and therefore the environment than you have over policies, because those can be moving forward by the speed of a deploy. A new change to the GSD software is immediately part of an environment, where a rollout of a new policy is going to be a consultative town hall and a lot of convincing. So in funny ways it actually acts as a fast and the most effective way of evolving a company forward. John (00:16:28): Having opinionated software that you use to tweak the environment. Tobi That’s right. John So the obvious question is: if software shapes us and shapes the actions of organizations and you should think about what the vision embedded in software is, what is the vision of Shopify for your merchants? You said one part, which is that they should be more ambitious for their business success and they can probably be more successful than they might realize. What else? Tobi (00:16:56): What I tend to visualize, it's like what are the things if you're sitting with a friend over drinks in an Irish pub… John (00:17:07): I’m with you so far. Tobi (00:17:10): And the question is like, “Hey, you've done an online store, you've done an e-commerce business, you've done a retail business for Shopify, would you do this again?” The answer to the question is hopefully “hell yes.” And then there comes a list of things that we would like to do. Amongst bosses, it just makes it easy. It allows me to build the business not feeling like I have—when you try to paint a painting and you have mittens on—this sort of, there's perfect vision in your mind but you can't get it out because the tools… John (00:17:44): We've all used software like that. Tobi (00:17:46): Exactly. So another thing is that it keeps me cutting edge. We are going through an enormous platform shift. Shopify predates smartphones like a software, so we have seen multiple platform shifts and usually what happens when you study any kind of industry upheaval or recession or anything, it's hardest on the small businesses, but really big businesses get bailed out anyway. And everyone in between has usually the line of credits or whatever capital to make it through. John (00:18:18): You're talking about an economic recession. Tobi (00:18:20): Economic recession. So, something happens in the world, small businesses are the ones who are wiped out. The failure rates during recessions is enormous, and that's a huge drag on economies because 60 to 80% of all people will work for small businesses. John (00:18:35): I think people felt this very viscerally in COVID with restaurants, which were obviously particularly hard hit by COVID. But I think people could see how shallow the balance sheets were because entire streets turned over with new storefronts. It was a very visual representation for people of how fragile a lot of the small businesses are. Tobi (00:18:56): Yeah, and I mean many, many places never recovered. It's a very organic process by which an area becomes sort of hypercritical mass of interesting stores that then has people come there and just like this builds up over very, very long periods of time. Entire city’s centers can shift in these times, and so it's a very precarious balance and they have very tight margins. There's so much that makes them fragile systematically that at least all their sales disappearing because suddenly most people purchase from their mobile phones, that just their website doesn't work on—it's not their job to stay current with these kinds of things. So just inoculating from all these kinds of shifts, it's a really important part of a business. John (00:19:47): So you're talking about some of the disadvantages that small businesses have. I was realizing recently it actually really hit me when I went to buy something from a very large, famous brand—name redacted to protect the guilty—but very big, very storied. I was going through the e-commerce experience and it was horrendous. It was so bad and I realized that thanks to Shopify, we are now—I don't think it's hyperbole to say—we're living in an inverted world, where very large retailers are worse off in their e-commerce experience. They have worse systems and lower converting websites than small businesses, which have these amazing, super snappy and they're just more technically performant if you measure the latency, if you measure the full funnel conversion and everything like that. On any metric, by which, if you went with your stopwatch and you went from Bethlehem Steel to the internet, and we're kind of measuring things with your stopwatch, the small businesses are better off. So one I think that was just interesting that in this case we have this inversion where on a very tangible technical level the rebel alliance is doing better than the large established companies. But then it made me wonder, there's kind of a question for Shopify, where you have succeeded on the small business side and I know that's probably anathema to you. It's like, “Oh no, we're just getting started, blah blah blah.” But you have a very significant fraction of the small business e-commerce market with a very successful product there. And so how do you think about Shopify expansion from here, where you can go international, you can go up market to large companies, you can go into new modalities like agentic commerce and there's many vectors of expansion. But it does feel like there's a take stock moment because step one is to deliver a great experience for small businesses. Tobi (00:21:24): Yeah, thank you. By the way, me too. I also have purchased from Nike. John (00:21:30): It wasn't Nike, but yeah, those kinds of people. Tobi (00:21:34): Yes, I love the obvious version because the inversion is super, this is one of the very few spaces where this is true. John Yes, exactly. Tobi And that is exactly what we set out to do. John And it's not true in access to the capital markets or all the other areas. Tobi Fundamental belief is people should use amazing software that really, really is perfectly fit to the problem there. John (00:21:58): You don't bloat. Tobi (00:22:00): Exactly, but we can go deeper and deeper and deeper into the space. So it's just really, really quick. It's really easy to underestimate the size. Everyone underestimates the size of the internet and everyone underestimates the size of retail. We sit at an intersection of both those things. It is my favorite status that the companies, the industry supplying wooden pallets to warehouses. It's a 60 billion dollar a year industry. That gives you sort of an idea for how large retail actually is, at least directionally. And so what we have done from a company perspective is we were very, very clear that our mission is to make entrepreneurship simpler. And that's where our heart is and many of our customers have gotten quite big. We ended up raising one of our customers to a billion dollars of revenue. And so some of our customers have—in the top 10 of largest customers—many of them have started on Shopify. The reason why they're still around is because we actually, again, we take this so seriously that we're actually building with them while they grow. And it turns out again, all these stories of software for a certain segment of a market are skills issues and that's exactly what they sounded like when I first heard about it. It's convenience to the company making the software to say we are focused on one segment and by the way we're all focused on the richest segment, funnily enough. And we just said, “No, we are starting with SMB and then some of them grow and hopefully we build good software and then we invite the others over.” The most common thing that people said with Shopify in the early days was always that this will never work in real life because in the real world, retailers are messy and just have all these business rules that we didn't implement. Our opinion there was always like, “Well, the real world sounds like a terrible place. We like ours better” and we just invite everyone over. John Well, isn't there also something where the real world is messy… But we find this with Stripe Billing, where people say, “Oh, everyone's billing system is different” and the dimensions of their billing that they want to encode and things like that. Therefore there's a certain size beyond which Stripe Billing will cap out and people need a custom system and our view is, absolutely. Billing is really messy and it's also hard to test because it involves time travel, right? It's like what happens if people do a mid-period adjustment that needs to be prorated, whatever. Therefore, do you want to be using your homegrown version of this, that was developed by some guy who'd never built an e-commerce or billing system before and has since left the company and now it's kind of poorly maintained. Or, do you want to buy it from people who have been thinking about this problem space and building a generally abstracted frame. Stripe Billing now has a time travel engine, where you can just move time around to test all these kind of different cases, because obviously you need that. And in Shopify's case similarly, “Yeah, we've been thinking about inventory management for a very long time and how you model inventory and all these kinds of things.” And so, I feel like it's funny that people sometimes say, “Oh this will never work at the large end because our needs are super complex, therefore we should be using a piece of software that only has one user and is poorly maintained by one tiny corner of the company.” Tobi (00:25:16): Yeah, that's right. I think… Look, when I first started programming in my apprenticeship, my Meister taught me that in the software world you have about two years time, anytime you start an important piece of software to try to nail it, try to nail the problem domain. Because afterwards, it just magically—someone puts cement on the codebase and you're never going to change a thing. And that's the state of software in the nineties. And frankly, just a way the software works. Everything that got to scale was finished in the nineties with cement in it and then saw through the 2000s and in a lot of decision maker’s lives, that was the time when software adoption really started. And their priors are loaded up with software that corresponds to roughly what you back then were telling me. Now we've gotten a lot smarter about building software. We have CI and automated testing in general. We know how to build software in a way— we are by no means perfect, we don't even know how to measure it as we talked about earlier, but state of art has increased significantly and we make better software. And that's a completely different thing than what people are comparing it against, but it's hard to tell them. The first 80% of every e-commerce business are the same. It's like, you need a checkout, you need to take credit cards—and you're taking credit cards for us—and you need the hosting and a checkout and all these kinds of things and admin interface. So it's the last 20% that are actually quite unique and they exist in a particular, very predictable problem domain. What does the website look like? It's like what my brand looks like and also business rules. We have over time—just like your time traveling back test system—figured out where do we allow programming or programming enabled extensibility in the system so that these last 20% can uniquely be created for everyone who wants them. And I think that's what it means…I think that's a place you can only get to if people who work on the problem really care. Because you kind of have to fall in love with a problem to want to look at it from so many sides but at some point you understand it well enough to not solve the problems that people state, but build infrastructure in a form of primitives that can be composed to solve all the problems. And that's a completely different level, but it's what I deeply appreciate. I massively admire it every single time any category gets to this quality of decision making and infrastructure. John (00:27:51): Another thing I enjoy on the software quality side that both Shopify and Stripe sell on that's just a funny domain to pursue is, peak load. Where Stripe sells on— you can put a lot of transactions through the system at once. And obviously Shopify similarly, it feels to me that how you displace other e-commerce systems is, if you are getting very spiky sales, you can put a thousand requests per second through the system and that's totally fine, and most systems at a technical level can't do that. I guess I find it funny because, I think we grew up together expanding the requests per second at thresholds and you guys pushed us pretty well there. But, I'm curious, where did this come from in e-commerce culture? Because the marketers saying, “Everyone will come to the website and click ‘buy’ at the same time.” The engineers are like, “No, please do not! Stop encouraging that.” But it's become a real part of e-commerce culture, like the drops and things like that. Maybe you can fill me in on the drop history. Tobi (00:28:51): It's funny… John (00:28:52): You seem to have started it. Tobi (00:28:53): Yeah, it's really funny. I'm just as amused about this as you are— John (00:28:59): No engineer would ever suggest this. Tobi (00:29:00): Because it's a very, very strange thing, but it works as this fantastic business builder. The one that did it for us first, it's somewhere in 2010, was this business called TheCHIVEwhich was some, I mean it's a website, it's like some community. And it had some t-shirt with Bill Murray on it, and that thing, every single time it went on sale, it took Shopify on. It was just unbelievable. We actually couldn't, we didn't know the demand level because we just couldn't observe it. I was like upstream the routers could not send enough traffic. It's like first of all, who was TheCHIVE? We had to catch up very quickly. And so it was one of those things where there was a very specific decision moment where we realized this is obviously Shopify down is the worst possible thing. This is the entire company exists to never make it so that anyone's down, no less the entire thing. So we were like, well the traditional business thing is this is super expensive from our reputation, from money and we can't even in our business model may ever make money back from TheCHIVE given what amount of resource we consume. So we clearly need to fire a customer and decided no, absolutely not. We are using this as a gym and we're going to use them. We are going to build the system in such a way that we can deal with this because this is exactly what good engineering looks like. And that was fortuitous, because I think this sort of pattern ended up really sticking. It was like Supreme, which really drove us further in the street wear world. John (00:30:42): I remember Supreme and I remember Kylie Jenner, it was like lip kits… really that's embedded in my memory from 2013, 2014 Stripe. That was definitely, that was a board level topic. Tobi (00:30:55): Yes, we had board-level discussions on our side, too. It actually would be funny to know, we probably sweated exactly the same amounts on both sides. Because obviously, we have an incredibly longstanding, and I think at this point storied partnership, it's tremendously difficult to synthetically test all the pieces that go into commerce because it's just so complex with so many things. There's so many APIs, there so much we have to do—the chipping to of course payments, and payments is depending on the mix of bins, it's a different profile of on-lot. Kylie Jenner, the store had a lot more debit cards and that just kind of exercised different parts of the infrastructure. So anyway, these kind of things you find out, and on our side we just…no sin was forgiven. Every single sin was revealed and found us to be wanting very publicly. John (00:31:58): Is there anything particularly technically hard to scale? Tobi (00:32:01): Well, I mean so if you open a book on databases. Page—probably chapter—one is an example of how a transaction works. I mean taking either moving money on a ledger or moving an item out of inventory and into an order. John It's a textbook definition of transactionality. Tobi Two textbook definitions in a row. So you fundamentally have to serialize at those points. This is the lock contention moment. There's architectures which we employ that you can get around this. There's pools of products. We take our products out of an integer, into Stripe’s thing, and there's all sorts of things that do and then try to refill this as fast as possible. But the point is that you really deal with lock contention, and lock contention is difficult. It's very, very hard to scale if everyone at the same time wants to decrement an integer in the database. Then also, the transaction involves having to go to interchange and move money. John (00:33:06): I was reading some histories of Oracle recently, but I think it's kind of interesting because proprietary databases where the leading databases. The LAMP stack only really took over in the 2000s, but the 1990s if you were building a thing, you actually needed to go buy your database. And there were these proprietary database wars in the seventies. And I was wondering, are there lessons for us for the current AI wars and model wars from the database history? But it was striking talking about kind of the early feature wars of Oracle versus its competitors. And locking was such a big differentiator in those early versions and row-level locking— Tobi Row-level locking was a big thing. John But it came like Oracle 6 or something, you know what I mean? You would think it's like an Oracle 2 feature, but no, it took them a few revs to get there and row-level locking was like the bee's knees when they released it. Tobi (00:33:58): I’m very glad they did. I mean this is dot com, and predates Shopify a little bit, but yeah, dot com tech company creation works like, day one you send a million dollars to Larry to get your Oracle database. And I think, day 180 you went public or something—a very different time from today. John (00:34:21): Yes. I mean I guess we're kind of getting back to that a little bit in AI where step one: send 300 billion to Oracle for a data center. Tobi (00:34:31): You're a couple days past 180 on your journey to becoming a public company, I have to say, but— John (00:34:36): Yes. Yes. Anyway, moving on, I want to talk about agentic commerce. I had a really nice shopping experience recently where I wanted to buy an integrated travel adapter and power brick. And so I did some product research in ChatGPT and it was really nice. There were no ads getting in the way or anything like that. I actually found a product that I hadn't come across from Momax. It was really good. I think I was telling you. Tobi (00:35:04): Yeah, I have two. John (00:35:04): Okay. Yeah, and what’s the verdict? Tobi It's very good. John It's very good. Okay, perfect. Yeah, we'll put a link. And it kind of linked me out and I purchased obviously super easy one click with Shop Pay and everything like that and it felt very futuristic to me, both on the product discovery and the completion side of things. But it feels like filling out web forms is not a value add activity for people. When you travel, you probably don't directly book the hotel yourself on the website. You have an assistant who does it or something like that because choosing the hotel might be desirable for you, but actually filling out the web form is not a value add activity for you. And so, what is your vision for how agentic commerce happens specifically? It seems relevant to your interests. Tobi (00:35:48): It's relevant to my interest. I mean it will be extremely valuable and it will be something that will be done a lot and might even be a majority of commerce on the internet, I don't know. But I think my role in this is going to be largely into infrastructure providing. This is where our job is to keep all the millions of businesses on Shopify extremely current. And so what we want to do is make sure that everyone's plugged into the various chat systems and MCP connected to every Shopify store and a global catalog that's really nicely presented. We are building software specifically for the OpenAIs and the Claudes and the Perplexities to make it really, really easy for these products to show up and reason about them and so on, because we think it's really important that they can show up. So there's an infrastructure angle in it, but how is it being used? I think the best way to predict the future in most cases is just frankly look at what rich people buy for themselves. Uber is a wonderful company, its also extremely predictable because rich people had car service. And so it's figuring out a way to scale that in such a way, from cost basis so that everyone can use it. It's just like yes, that works. Personal shoppers, these are places where memory and understanding people and personalization are just like… pay so many dividends and they're so clearly also good. It's like, people have to make so much out of data and advertising. A personalized ad is a wonderful thing. If a personal ad that tells… I am scrolling past something that's monetizing the free application that I appreciate using and the fact— John (00:37:42): You should tell the EU this. Tobi (00:37:42): Yes. Well I do actually. And the fact that it's highly personalized to me means, at this moment where this platform monetizes because they're giving me a gift here that I get to use. Using this moment also that it's now not just a fucking Ford 150 truck or I don't even know if that's how you say that, but it's like I'm not market for trucks, so instead I see a travel adapter like the one you sent me. John (00:38:13): I'm your personal shopper in this case. Tobi (00:38:14): But the funny thing is, you send me the link and if I would put that link in ChatGPT, which has lots of my history and ask, “Is that the kind of product that I would appreciate?” it would just return “Yes.” Right? Because it solves a problem in its entirety. It's like a travel adapter for any country, to any plug, to any other all sorts of stuff, good product, right? I want that. John (00:38:38): Okay, so we're getting down the road here. I mean it feels like step one is that's going to happen with agentic commerce is… I feel like existing aggregators, if just aggregation is their raison d’etre, then they're going to have a lot of questions that they need to answer, because ChatGPT and the AI apps end up as a new aggregation point. And so it seems to very much benefit the tail. It benefits all the Shopify merchants, just like we had a new set of content creators emerge on YouTube that effectively compete with TV. They're both just entertainment and the tail becomes much more powerful when you're over the top distribution through YouTube. Similarly, it feels like once you've over the top distribution through AI apps, it becomes… you have a much more powerful position as a tail merchant because Momax is a tiny brand, but they can just get recommended as the best product. So that's step one that I think happens. Tobi (00:39:36): I think a slight modification about that I’ll just make, I don't think the tail part matters. I think merit matters. It's kind of an important point because often when you talk a lot about commerce and products at some point just because of prior discussions, people are like, “Yeah, but aren't you just feeding consumerism?” So this is sort of the negative take and again, consumerism is a thing that is being thrown around, but where does it come from? It comes from people throwing away a lot of things that they probably shouldn't. But they throw away things because they hate the things they have. These things don't work, they fall apart, they don't do the thing, they're cheap plasticy, this kind of thing. The thing that solves consumerism is quality products which you want to keep using. You want to be excited about this and you want this travel adapter to last forever and solve…. you literally never have to Google, “What plug is used in Singapore?” You just know that the thing that you have can deal with everything to everything, so problem solved. And so I think that's an important modification on the point. John (00:40:50): Yeah, I guess implicit in my view is that there's good stuff in the tail, whereas the head has distributional advantages and so it is more meritocratic to bubble more stuff up from the tail. That is I think the reconciliation of those two world views. So that's kind of step one that happens. I think you're getting to step two, which is it feels like there's a lot of changes potentially that can happen around personalization about agents actually acting for you. And maybe one thing I'm curious about is if you have thoughts on. It just seems like a lot of search and e-commerce is really bad, where it's keyword-based search still and you can't do things like, “Let me know if this becomes available in gray” or, “What other products do you have like this?” And you want some kind of embedding space that thinks about similarity between the products and no one can do this. So, when are we getting better at personalizing and search? I just want really good search of the products that are out there. Tobi (00:41:42): Totally. I remember obsessing about this now and we should have been— John (00:41:46): Tell the secret Shopify roadmap. Tobi (00:41:49): Shopify should have solved this earlier and hasn’t and I am pretty mopey about this. John (00:41:56): You guys are doing ok. Tobi (00:41:56): I think we will solve this now. So the thing is really fascinating. I really deeply appreciated as a field, it’s so different. It has its own law. Everything is interesting is my fundamental opinion. And search has been a wonderful area to actually learn a lot more about the history now. And the fundamental thing is there is a generic bias in search and a text is king and frankly the people who worked in search are much more interested, we're fundamentally more interested in searching through papers than through products. And so, there's very few of the best people in search in the world, where people who know most have actually ended up working specifically on product search, which is really should be seen as its own completely different domain that just sort of looks like it, but it's really clearly deeper with lots and lots of complex features and so on. So, I got to build up over the last year a really, really, really, really great search team and exactly look at the embeddings and these kind of things. The amount of improvements that's just unexplored is just staggering there. John (00:43:15): Shouldn’t you do o search across… I mean I find it interesting when Shopify does things broader than the Shopify universe. Because the Shop app can track packages not bought from Shopify merchants, right? Yeah. And so, shouldn’t you do the search thing across the whole web and not just Shopify? Tobi (00:43:33): I don’t know, should we? John (00:43:34): I think so, because the thing that feels like the big opportunity to me is clustering was always so hard to do because all the features were developed manually. And so, you had to go say that the dress is red and everything like that. And it feels like, have you ever used LLM as just a recommender engine where I like feeding in, “These are all the books that I've read recently . Give me a narrative nonfiction book that someone who's read all these books might like,” and it does extremely well. But you're kind of using the LLM to access its world model and it feels like now you can have an interesting product world model and access it. But for the people using it, whether a merchant is on Shopify or not is probably an incidental detail they don't care about. Tobi (00:44:15): Yeah, I totally agree. And you're talking about “how,” but the “what” is the really important thing. I want the LLM to be proactive and just tell me, “Hey, this outfit would look good on you and here's a preview. And t here's the full cost” and you want it. It's the personal shopper outreach kind of component, which I think is just really valuable. And this is not going to be some kind of, you'll get this from everyone because it's really easy to put together. It's hard to get the data and embeddings and the sort of understanding about. We have to figure out… It's funny, the most important thing again in the AI space is also about unquantifiables. It's the vibes, people call them. It seems like Midjourney specifically is one company that managed to actually scale taste because— John (00:45:02): They're a very distinct aesthetic in the images they produce. Tobi (00:45:04): And maybe this is because they drove towards a particular aesthetic t they felt they just sort of had ownership over, but it's one that's clearly appreciated. John (00:45:12): But David is also a deep founder mode type in how he operates the company. Tobi (00:45:17): Yeah, exactly. And so when something outperforms, it's usually a product of a place that doesn't make decisions by consensus, as we know. So we need to figure out taste in this product sense and we'll figure this out. Someone's going to figure it out. Maybe everyone's going to figure it out, maybe it's already figured out in the neurons and we just don't give enough information for it to reason around taste. Tobi (00:45:46): And so putting, I think it'll be very, very vague with personal shopper. The thing that I think the aggregators still— to just get back to your point on the aggregation side—there's many reasons why people buy things. Lots of things are input purchases. It's like the things next to the checkout counter in the supermarket. I don't think people are going to use ChatGBT to buy Mars bars or something like candy. John (00:46:16): They just don't do so online. Tobi (00:46:17): Right, exactly. John (00:46:18): But is there an online impulse purchase that is not suited to happening in an AI app? Tobi (00:46:25): Interesting question. Nothing comes to mind immediately. John (00:46:27): Yeah, I mean I guess online impulse purchases are things where you're scrolling through Instagram and it's like, all the COVID stuff, it's the sharpest knife ever developed. Tobi (00:46:35): I wonder if an— John (00:46:37): Umbrella that changes color in the rain. Tobi (00:46:39): I wonder if what's a truly impulse purchase? I mean they sort of feel like input purchases, but they tend to be very few people part with money unless they are like, “Holy shit, this is the thing I always wanted.” John (00:46:49): It's just tapping into demand that's been there for a long time. Tobi (00:46:51): It's sometimes a little bit the opinion…when you look at log files, you're going to get a very incorrect view of the world. It's very often the longest consideration phases. For years, I wanted a travel adapter that can deal with everything through everything. It goes in a chat from you or in an Instagram ad. Doesn't matter. I'll Insta purchase it at this point. John (00:47:14): Okay, you were just trying to do that. My other purchase I made recently that I really liked is I was going on a long day hike. And if you read the accident reports, there's often people day hiking who get into trouble because people who are going out on a multi-day hike, they have their tent with them and they're prepared. You know what I mean? And then people go— Tobi (00:47:31): It's a problem with bicycle helmets, too. Same issue. John (00:47:33): It's a short journey, to the store that gets people in trouble. So day hikers, they get in trouble because they think they don't need any preparedness and then they end up out after dark and a rescue party and everything like that. And so it was like, it's called bivy, a little sleeping bag for emergency purposes and it's made out of reflective foil. And so again, if you end up stuck, you have an emergency foil sleeping bag just so you don't die of exposure, but it folds up to it's like that size and so you can just stick it in a day pack and now you are somehow more prepared for the elements than you were before. I dunno, do you have a favorite recent purchase? Tobi (00:48:11): I just really like these… I mean someone going just to ridiculously further and to almost products that just celebrate craftsmanship in a way, even in places where it's just like no one else does. Real example: I take all these vitamins in the morning and I've bought these CVS vitamin pillowcases at some point just for travel. And then I found on Shopify this Japanese perfectly sealed, unbelievably beautiful pillowcases. The entire website is just a love letter to— John (00:48:50): The most beautiful pillo cases— Tobi (00:48:51): To precision engineered, tolerances— John (00:48:56): What's it made of? Tobi (00:48:57): Metal, which is absolute, it feels so… Whatever. I'm really excited about it. John (00:49:08): You can put a link in. Tobi (00:49:08): I forgot the name, sadly. And now I gift those things because they're just beautiful. John (00:49:15): No, that's cool. How’s Shop Pay doing? We referenced it there. Tobi (00:49:21): Shop Pay is awesome. It started out its life as a feature called Remember Me, which is literally the name of what was on the table. John (00:49:31): We also had a thing that was called “Remember Me.” That's like the original name for Link. Tobi (00:49:33): No way. John (00:49:35): Yeah. Tobi (00:49:37): That's trippy. John (00:49:42): That's very funny. It makes sense. They're kind of the same thing. I mean Shop Pay is much broader, but they're similar things. Tobi (00:49:46): Yeah, actually Shop Pay feels more narrow. It's on commerce specifically. John (00:49:51): Well, you guys do all the shipping tracking. Tobi (00:49:52): Yeah, that's right. And so yeah, Shop is Shopify's brand for buyers. So, Shopify is what you use to be on Shop. And at least this is how we think about it. So there's a Shop app and Shop Pay. So I mean, it started because it is a ridiculous thing that we asked anyone to fill out their address with their thumbs when you purchase something that is insane. This was meant to never be a thing because, I don't know when they came up with HTTP, but there's the 402 error code: payment required. It's built into the HTTP standard and no one ever implemented it. And so moving money around was supposed to be built into the platform and wasn’t, and then credit card forms were hilariously insecure over normal web. And when we came up with HTTPS and made it reasonable, I suppose, and then it became good enough. There was always efforts—Apple Pay. I think actually PayPal was around, but that sort of didn't do anything. So there's so many people doing this and it’s just like, okay, well clearly this is going to be solved soon, but we might as well just put a “Remember Me” thing in there so we can solve this now for the future of the internet. And then no one did. I mean, very few people did and it just sort of didn't happen. And now Shop Pay is incredible, super glad to have it, it’s the most converting thing we've ever done. John (00:51:30): Yeah, what seems interesting to me about it is I think it's a significant part—it's not the only part—but it's a significant part of the inversion where again now the small stores are significantly better off than the large stores online and that's just a striking— Tobi (00:51:45): It's striking and it's 16% conversion increase by it being around. So it's a remarkable product now partly because again, it's part of branding. It's purple always and people learn to trust it and associate it with a store that's actually recent and cared for. They know before they get to checkout they will not have to type in the address with their thumbs like some kind of heathen from the nineties. John (00:52:15): You mentioned personalized advertising and being a big fan of it. It seems to me that there's a real symbiotic relationship between Instagram, where people are kind of scrolling in an aesthetic mood, looking at nice things, and then Shopify stores where they need customers. And so, especially during the pandemic, there was this huge growth of direct to consumer brands who really cracked the Instagram CAC to LTV math and they were able to grow in a big way there. Then of course, the Apple ATT changes happened where for a brief period it got harder. It seems like Meta has mostly solved that. But anyway, I'm just curious what's the current state of, is this worldview half true that there's a lot of Shopify merchants that have been able to really scale up thanks to personalized direct advertising? Tobi (00:53:06): Yeah, a hundred percent. It's a main growth channel—advertising on the platform. The meta platform specifically is just so incredible for this. I think the Meta/Shopify alley-oop has created more businesses than any government policy in history. I mean, if you just compare it to television and consumer packaged goods before, the television channel required broadcast. And so the only things you could really advertise were like mass market high margin products that could afford the advertising— John (00:53:43): Washing powder and all that stuff. Tobi (00:53:44): Exactly. Laundry detergent and toothpaste. And so the Instagram/ Shopify is the precise version of this. It's highly meritocratic for products. John (00:53:57): It's the first time you can advertise niche products. Tobi (00:53:58): Exactly. And the niche products are actually doing better. That's the crazy thing. Advertising directly snowboards is impossible there because— John (00:54:08): You can't take out a billboard for snowboards. Tobi (00:54:10): The brands Halo or Burton means you can't compete with that. If there's intersections, snowboards only for powder snow on the US West Coast and in certain environments with, this is not the best example, but usually there's three different intersections of something. And it goes back to what Kevin Kelly wrote about this in the early 2000s. He wrote an essay about “a thousand true fans” and the internet is about finding your “thousand true fans” and everything else will happen. And restoring that idea, or bringing this idea into retail, has done a lot of good things. It just created better products and Meta allowing you to discover one of those people who has a potential to be one of those “thousand true fans” is an incredibly powerful thing that just again, led to enormous good and employment and all these kind of things. So it's a very, very powerful combination. There's all sorts of other ways people grow, but this is a very, very large part of everyone's strategy. John (00:55:18): You're saying this enables 4K for commerce. There's this higher resolution, more specialization as opposed to the blurry generic products. Tobi (00:55:26): Yeah, it's exactly. Find the people we're really interested in who appreciate the products. John (00:55:32): How is the stablecoin rollout going on Shopify? So we're obviously doing lots of stablecoin stuff with lots of people, including you guys, but I feel like you guys are one of the biggest bets on stablecoin pays. Everyone should just be able to use stablecoin as a payment method that we've seen. And so how's that going? Tobi (00:55:52): I'm obviously like you, a huge fan of the concept of stablecoins. I love the work you're doing there and congrats on the launch of Tempo. The internet just needs its own currencies. I think it's important, at least it needs its own infrastructure to move things by internet speeds. And I'm excited for it. I think a valid criticism of crypto in the past, as exciting as it is, has been that the utilitarian difference between a real US dollar and a US dollar crypto coin, is that the US dollar crypto coin is mostly, a sort of like a gift certificate for scams. There's not that many things you can actually purchase with it that are of high utility value. Obviously this is I think— John (00:56:43): Why the economy was too circular. Tobi (00:56:44): Exactly. Most of it was like you purchase other coins, then you might have, I mean hopefully you diamond hand it into some kind of upswing, but it's like that's not usually what happened. And I think that's valuable criticism, but I think the most important thing to happen there is we need to expand what can be purchased with stablecoins to the things people want to purchase outside of just the insular crypto fintech. But yeah, we are working hard on getting all Shopify stores to just take stablecoins. John (00:57:19): How does the merchant response mean? Tobi (00:57:21): Very positive. Again, because through the work that Bridge is doing, we can settle into US dollars directly. So the merchants, they've just gained a new ability without having to make a strategic choice, without having to go into a new industry. If there's demand for being able to spend stable coins and they can now sell to everyone who wants to particularly do that. And so it's totally transparent and that's a beautiful thing, amortizing R&D over millions of businesses with us centrally because we can just build it up the system and everyone gets benefit of it. And so obviously it's in testing, the conversion rates have to not be negatively affected by its presence, so we have to make absolutely sure this is the case. An overabundance of caution on everyone that goes in the checkout because it's probably, I mean it's in the busiest checkout on the internet basically, so we might not want to reduce conversion rates ever. John (00:58:24): Yeah, I think it'll also be interesting to watch the consumer training aspect of it, where QR codes is always my example of this, where the tech has existed since what the nineties, but it was really only during the pandemic when we installed the software in people's brains to understand how QR codes work. But there was a moment and now they're everywhere for everything and obviously they're in Asia before they're in the US and everything like that. I think there'll be something similar with stablecoins where they'll be offered at the point of checkout way before people become super familiar with them, but we're probably only a small number of years away from some mass markets familiarity. Tobi (00:58:59): I think it's going to be very, very natural for people but also in a way that we just not think about it. It's a normal thing. It doesn't matter. It's going to be so well tooled up to bridge between these things that it's using crypto rails while using the internet and until you need it out of the internet you don't have to bridge anything. John (00:59:24): So you've referenced a few times the stuff Stripe and Shopify are doing together and we've caught up at various points and you even talked at the meta level about the Stripe/Shopify relationship where there's some, I don’t know, is it like Apple TSMC or something? Where it's deep intertwined building in a stable way, but also expanding over time and no confusion as to who's ultimately the one building the end product, versus who's providing some of the underlying infrastructure. But I'm curious what you think has worked well because yeah, a lot of corporate relationships do not last. I mean I guess if you dated 2012, which I think is accurate, maybe 2011, 2012, like 13 years, it's certainly more tenured than some. Tobi (01:00:08): Yeah, and I think it's almost more impressive when you think about it as market cap expansion. John (01:00:15): People get greedy. Tobi (01:00:17): Well also, I mean we have had a highly functioning excellent symbiotic partnership and probably there's like how many more digits on the market cap above companies? We've expanded many, many, many times here, many out of magnitude and that's pretty rare because again, partnerships especially in tech… Tech is extraordinarily bad at partnerships and I mean it's always treated as a prisoner's dilemma that at some point someone, a company realizes defecting gives you five points on the mouth and that sounds really, really good. The short-term focus, so everyone mistrust each other and so it's fairly rare and I think it's cool that we pulled it off and I appreciate the partnership. It's been really, really fantastic being able to just focus on my space instead of having to duplicate things that Stripe would always have done better. I think a lot about main quests and side quests and I have such good, I guess founder market fit with commerce. I really care about this and I can spend my entire, like, Karl Popper calls it, “Finding the best gift in life is finding a beautiful problem that you can never solve.” And even if you accidentally solve it, if you're so unfortunate to solve it, hopefully it has plenty of enlightened problem children that you can then tackle. And so finding one of us is good and not having to meander into some complete adjacency to support it is actually wonderful. John (01:01:59): Yeah, I think there's also something about when you talk about this idea of focus, I think second acts are kind of a bit over valorized in Silicon Valley somehow, where everyone talks about, “Oh, we want to do a new AWS is kind of the coolest thing ever” where you do a second thing that is completely unrelated to the first thing. Versus NVIDIA, the largest company in the world, and they just started making GPUs in the nineties and it turns out a lot of people want GPUs. And I mean they did obviously lots of incremental expansion from there. Calling them GPUs is doing a disservice, but it's in a very hill climbing expansion way. Tobi (01:02:36): They went vertical. I think it said horizontal business books tell you to go horizontal because again, the chief competency of most businesses ended up being having a stopwatch. It was sort of a management system world, but we are actually in a different world now. It's like this business commoditized, it's easy to access and probably GPT-5 is better at it than most managers and it's now actually like, well what problem do you understand better than what's in the training tokens for GPT-5? And what do you care more about, which is a human capacity specifically. And so Jensen just cared more about GPUs and saw more potential in that. John (01:03:15): Isn't there a bit of MBA-ism here too? Where if one was trying to—when Shopify was a thousand times smaller—raise money for Shopify, it would just sound ludicrous to say, “We're just going to do e-commerce software and it turns out that's a really big market and here's our current projection and here's when it's a thousand times larger.” It's like, “Get out of here, come on.” Whereas if you say, “Oh, we'll expand to do this and we'll expand to do that and we'll build a CRM” or whatever, it's easier to justify expanding into other TAMS. Tobi (01:03:42): I got rejected from plenty of VCs in 2008 when I went around and some of them said they would invest and when they did it was usually terrible terms with ratchets or multiples and I had to move a company to Silicon Valley, which again I would've if I wouldn't have told me to. Once you tell me to do something, I don't want it anymore. But anyway, so I caught up with many of the partners later. In one case, a really interesting conversation just like you asked me, what did we miss back then? Just like, well, the reason why you didn't invest is like you said, “There's 40,000 online stores in the world right now in 2008 and well, you can get half of them, but that's not actually that big of a business.” And they missed isShopify itself was a solution to that problem. The reason why no one was building online stores is because the friction was so high and so it's a little bit of that, right? Yes. It's not an interesting business plan. The pitch isn't very good. John (01:04:47): This…but more. Tobi (01:04:47): Yeah, yeah, coming from me is probably especially bad, but it's also kind of man, the best products in the world come from people just really, really, really, really being deep on something. In the programming world, we are using Cursor, which is basically VS Code, which is Erich Gamma’s fourth editor. It's like he spent his entire life making these things— John (01:05:09): To craftsmanship. Tobi (01:05:10): Yeah, it's like he wrote the design patterns book that many of us read at some point literally about programming text. So it's like, yeah, sometimes you just need to dedicate a career to a field and get deeper into it than anyone else and celebrate craftsmanship along the way and try to build the best thing. John (01:05:33): But again, it's hard for people to give credit to that idea in a model or people are not capable of being sufficiently optimistic about a business that really works. It blows through all their projections. Tobi (01:05:45): Yeah. The question is also, we've seen the story so many times that some step function changes. At some point, maybe the shop pay and all these kind of things with Shopify, somehow it became something very different than what you would've visualized. And I mean, this is in no area more true than in NVIDIA’S case, where I mean these CUDA cores, the tensor cores were around, they were on these cards, which everyone, they're part of a bomb. And very little used by any of engines like CarMax new engine probably used them for something useful, but they were just there and CUDA was not even… that was around for 10 years before AlexNet got trained. It's an incredible vision to just doggedly pursue this because in the future there will be value if you do this and it makes you wonder. I think that's probably true for almost every space. I think every space driven to that level could become so big. John (01:06:45): Isn't there something here where more founders should be willing to follow their nose of what's just a good product? Because again, I think that what can happen as companies scale i,s founders get successful by building good products. Then they hire a bunch of people and finance people and run the planning process and everything like that. And it's like, okay, “Well what's the revenue projection for this?” and things like that. Whereas actually, when we built Stripe Atlas for incorporation, there was no amazing projections behind that, that one day this will be a giant business. And it's not a giant business for us by any kind of revenue metric, but we think it's very valuable because people start their business on Stripe and we help them with something foundational of incorporating the company and get it off the ground. And it all kind of ties together in this very immeasurable, nebulous way and kind of like you're saying with CUDA, that was hard to justify at that moment in time, but it seemed like the right technical decision and there's something maybe where founders should be a bit more willing to follow their noses on what is right for the product and right for the user and it'll all come out in the wash in years down the line. Tobi (01:07:54): Yeah, I'm a great believer that if you build things that are of value, then people will figure that out. It's very, very hard to keep people away from things that make their lives significantly easier, better, or more joyful. And I mean, I get the front row seat to this on my platform. It's crazy how fast some success stories. One of my favorite things we do is we started making these really sort of nice awards for people. Then they hit certain sales milestones and some of those when I go travel, I check out who's just got them and just sometimes deliver them. And Harley does this much more than me and it's such a cool thing. John That's awesome Tobi To talk with them and man, some of these businesses that hit a hundred thousand or million sales are like 18 months old. It just cracked the code or something. And talk about a thousand true fans, it's like millions. It's like an army created because people are just so staffed for this authentic, unabashed… Something needed to be done, something was wrong in world, it involved a product not existing, and that product not existing was such a bother to someone that they made it their mission to create it. aThen they went through trials and tribulations, usually often documenting the journey, allowing other people to ride shotgun to over time try on their vision of the world. Which again, is not to change the world, but to add the thing that was missing. Which makes things 1% better, not like everything's new. And they just agree with that, and they love the authenticity of it. They love that someone that they now have a little bit of a relationship with kind of pursuit this thing that they think it was worth doing. And then the product comes out and they tell everyone and then more people buy it and it's just like, there's so much good that comes out of this and there was value there for everyone to take. Every product that sells well was a discovery. It was sort of invented but also kind of discovered, but it's that person that did it and they deserve the economic value that comes to them. Everything about this, it's the best parts of capitalism all rolled up for everyone to inspect and review. And we get to have a front row seat from data and front row seat sometimes with giving these celebration artifacts. And anyway, the greatest thing is just the people who were using the platforms are actually really inspiring people. John (01:10:44): Well, I feel like it must be particularly satisfying for you all these edge case failure modes of capitalism, of rent extraction or oligopoly or regulatory capture, everything like that. And you just have a front row seat to the pure competitive differentiation, people succeeding on the merits and it's a very pure form. Tobi (01:11:05): I feel like you have that too and it's like we should write postcards to the rest of the world. This “real world” thing. The one everyone says your product wouldn't work in, which sounds so dystopian. It does really sound quite dystopian, so I don't want to have anything to do with it. I'd just much rather like, hey, just build this whatever world, whatever that is and invite everyone over. And if it's good it works, then people will join. It's actually that simple. I think it's better to live in a world with not people going direct, people communicating direct, people being real people. There's very, very rarely a PR department or even there's probably a marketing strategy, but the marketing strategy works based on just new ideas and organically,with very few people being highly enabled building products that they care about. John (01:12:08): We had Mackenzie from Ambrook on here, which is SaaS for financial infrastructure for farms. But she was saying one of the big trends in agriculture right now is direct to consumer stuff where you're actually transacting directly with your farmer. I'm sure a lot of them are running on Shopify as well. What have you learned on the Coinbase board? Tobi (01:12:30): I never had another job, really. In my apprenticeship I mostly learned what not to do as a company, and then sort of had the opportunity to start Shopify just trying literally the opposite and that's basically what operations I've been running on. It's been amazingly successful, so thank you Siemens. But it's so hard, especially building it in Canada—in Ottawa and Toronto. It's funny, I always had this effect of, I came to a valley a lot when I had time and money. I had office meetings and then talked with people and they described to me how “real companies” do these things and then I went home and tried to implement it. And only years later did I realize very few of the companies describing what they're doing actually did the things that they told me. Everyone gave me sort of an idealized highlight reel and I compared that to my average and then I implemented how I think you could do a better job on the stuff that described and sometimes ended up with good things and I was very, very happy with this. And then now obviously I'm describing when this goes really right and just as often this went really wrong. So Shopify ended up being this sort of lopsided thing that is probably ludicrously over-engineered, but advanced at certain things, and then incredibly primitive at things that no one fails usually. Because in a more liquid labor market where more people build companies, the information is just more readily available. What was awesome was joining Coinbase as a board, because it's like here's another founder run company by an incredible entrepreneur that's put together again, not by committee, but by a clear desire to build an important company and important institution. And just holding it up and seeing what they were incredibly strong at compared to it gave me, I learned so much about my own company and I could have a reference point. It's quite a gift. I don't know when it's the right time for a successful entrepreneur to join another company. I wouldn't do it too early, but it eventually becomes quite valuable and so Coinbase is such a remarkable company. You had Brian on, he's such an incredible entrepreneur. John …very first principles. Tobi And that was a company under brutal attack by regulators in a way that very few companies of all time have ever faced. That's through the government, wanted them dead and pretty much said so. I learned so much about the posture that Brian took to it. He'll never get enough credit for the courage and the intestinal fortitude he’s shown there because many of the details are internal to the company and the board, but goddamn it, he's like good. I do not think I could have navigated my company through a similar barrage. John (01:15:28): Yeah. Brian strikes me as someone who is very hard to manage up to. That's always the risk for CEOs is that people are trying to construct some Potemkin village and he was describing the policy work that they were doing and he was saying, well, the company's meant to be the good cop and the trade group will be the bad cop and then he'd be the trade group and it's like, “Wait, these are also the good cops.” And so he was saying, “Okay, here's our new bad cop plan.” But again, he was just kind of refusing to go along with the things that everyone was serving up to him as the plan. Tobi (01:15:57): I think great entrepreneurs are ungovernable and it's the problems that often arise when people somehow manage to figure out how to… yeah. I think studying failed companies is actually often more useful than— John Totally agree. Tobi You agree. What you find invariably is that the company knew exactly the stuff that was the problem. It's just like somehow CEOs got disconnected from that. John (01:16:23): Yeah. It's not so much that I want to study failures, it's that I really want to avoid making the same mistakes that other people have well intentionally made and found, “Oh yeah, no, that's a blind canyon up there.” We should at least be able to make new exciting mistakes. Rob the guy here who runs Corp Dev, he is very experienced in it and he is done hundreds of acquisitions previously, but it makes him way better as a Corp Dev leader. Because it turns out that there's lots of ways for deals to go sideways and if you just have seen a lot of them before, you can keep tabs on them and be finding ways to steer away from them, things like that. And I think just avoiding the well-trodden mistakes, and if you're going to make mistakes, at least make new mistakes that haven't been discovered yet is kind of underrated as a strategy. Tobi (01:17:09): It's totally underrated, but completely vital because you die to a thousand paper cuts as a company. So you kind of have to first avoid it becoming a thousand and then second you will make mistakes, make them original so there's alpha in it so that you accrue some additional knowledge that’s now it's unique to you. John (01:17:28): How do you like to be ungovernable? How do you like to avoid being managed up to. Probably can't share all your secrets… Tobi (01:17:35): I just think going direct a lot inside of a company too is just like— John (01:17:40): The journey of the org chart and information flowing up, being polished at each step. Tobi (01:17:43): Yeah, I don't think up and down is sort of not the right mental model. It's in and out is good. Certain decisions are best made at the outskirts of a company closest to the customers, but I'm a big believer that many decisions have to be brought inwards as well. This is why product reviews are very centralized. It's a way of efficiently moving information completely in the bend of org charts. I'm a fan of functionally organized companies, the trade-off is it’s significantly harder for executives. It's very unpopular with executives because obviously they just don't own the entire shebang that they can make all the decisions in and that requires a lot more collaboration, which feels wrong and feels slow. But you make vastly better products in functional organizations, at least for Shopify and that helps. I just know a lot about the company being in so many details. I try to be in AI stuff first so that I always see it as a gift when something new happens, because I am very good at quickly figuring out stuff. hen I sit there with knowledge and I can now look at, okay, who else gets there fast and those are my future leaders. That's a very implicit test. John (01:19:09): Oh that's interesting. You're testing some adaptability or something like that. Tobi (01:19:11): Yeah. The biggest difference between people inside of any company or just in general in industry is some people fall in love with solutions. Some people fall in love with problems. And I just fundamentally a person who appreciates the people who fall in love with problems, it's very hard to distinguish during fairly stable times, right? It's very hard to know who is who because well if you don't change anything they look exactly the same. I like inducing change in general to assess this out. John (01:19:38): How do you induce change? That sounds euphemistic. Tobi (01:19:41): I don't know. Just literally like that— do stuff. I think reorgs are a standard way. All reorgs work because reorging is valuable. It doesn't matter what your organization structure is afterwards. Well I mean it does, but there's some benefits to any organization structure. John (01:19:57): But it shakes things out of the stasis— Tobi (01:19:59): Well, and the advantages of any organization structure accrue immediately. They have disadvantages that only appear over time. So if you change a lot, you do multiple things, you are also, I think heightening your misalignment with the people you don't want in your company is an enormously important thing. So if you— John (01:20:15): Back to Brian Armstrong. Tobi (01:20:16): Yeah, exactly. So if you reorg a lot, you end up the people that select out who don't like that. Which is probably the position to take, even if a company thrives under a lot of change and is exposing itself to a lot of change, then it's important that you're clear about that. I think you try to make your company as different from every other company as possible, which is actually I think the opposite of what most companies most CEOs optimize for. John (01:20:41): And probably most professional management. Tobi (01:20:44): Right. I think a lot of people want to make their company as similar as possible to all other companies, but to me that's a lack of diversity, right? There should be diversity in companies, because there is diversity in people and people need to fit/find a product. John (01:20:59): In what ways is Shopify most different from other companies? Tobi (01:21:02): I mean this sort of internal tool culture is an example of this. It's quite clearly R&D run in a way that quite a few companies are, but they don't acknowledge. We actually say it and celebrate it, and say we actually are of the opinion at this point that everyone should be able to code at least since vibe coding is around. This is clearly this has gone from a have to spend all of your teenage years in a dark room cultivating a rare skill to spending a couple of weekends with YouTube. Let's go. This is not a problem anymore. John (01:21:36): Speaking of teenage years, I'm always very interested in the on-ramp to entrepreneurship and the on-ramps to programming. And I'm curious, some people decry that programming has gotten harder to on-ramp into where the first stuff I built was like, janky PHP webpages. But obviously PHP is actually very nice. You're just writing code directly in the webpage and you refresh and that's the execution environment. Tobi It's a high watermark of our industry. John And so have we made programming too hard to get into? Tobi (01:22:06): Yes, totally. Okay to tell my wonderful board member, David Heinemeier Hansson, the high watermark of the world of programming, at least web programming, was clearly when the FTP to PHP file went up and it was instantaneously deployed. How long does it take code to deploy these days? This is all choices now, right? I mean we've made some choices which are worth making. Maybe we'll do it again, but there was an immediacy and a visceralness to programming and that clearly has been lost. Lots of things have gotten incredibly amazing and I always said, we used to say that after two years it's like someone puts a man into a codebase, no one changes anything. We figured out how to avoid those horrors. I think we have a very mature discipline. We are, as programmers, I'm an engineer, too. We've always had an identity crisis. We always wanted to be someone else. We have significant science envy, we even attempt to call it computer science. There are some people who do computer science in the machine learning world. So it's a real thing, but clearly that's not, it's a vocational art. John (01:23:17): It's not most computer science degrees. Tobi (01:23:19): And this is also how we eliminated things like aesthetics and beauty and stuff. From our codebases or from talking about it, they are beautiful codebases, beautiful code. It's this code that tells a story and clearly communicates what it's there for to everyone who reads it. Ideally, its an artwork of sorts. And so yes, I think we have progressed. I think we have also advanced, but I think we don't have a clear vision to drive simplicity and I think I personally really deeply appreciate and have always prioritized hiring electrical engineers into programming worlds. Just because they just have a better idea for the costs of inefficiency, waste really. You put too many chips on a thing, it's too expensive to manufacture, you will just never sell it. It's not a good product where the zero marginal cost of copying software just means all sins are forgiven. John (01:24:21): You really have to fit the whole system in your head as an electrical engineer. Tobi (01:24:23): That's right. So anyway, I think we are immature. We don't know what great is. We leave a lot of this up to people and therefore the outcomes are so different depending on who's on the project. I mean again, we are all getting more conscientious about it and I think we are in a counter swing to the sort of horrors of architecture astronauts that have caused a lot of damage to our industry over the last, especially in the 2010s. So we are getting in a better spot. And then I don't know what AI it was, but the interesting thing is, I don't even think it's going to end up mattering because AI is going to solve all technical depth. So it's like maybe— John (01:25:04): To the same question about on-ramps to entrepreneurship. As a kid you were selling things to your classmates. What I observe is a lot of entrepreneurs have the same origin stories, where they were entrepreneurial early, either something like that where they had some business in school. A super common one is Patrick, I did web development and when you're a kid getting paid thousands of euros to build a website, it is like infinite money. I didn't know such large amounts of money existed and obviously to a small business they're like, “Wow, I'm totally taking advantage of this kid for a mere few thousand euros.” And then another common one seems to be drop shipping arbitrage, this whole thing of buying on Ali Express and selling on eBay or something like that. But you maybe have a window into this with Shopify or something. Do you have a sense of what the right, like if a 13, 14-year-old is listening to this and interested in making money, what are the areas where you think are good to pursue today? Tobi (01:26:01): Yeah, I think t these are the important thing. The mechanisms change and entrepreneurship clubs are really using Shopify a lot and I love that. And this is one of those areas I would love to go much deeper on just because it would be so fun to really, really build directly for them. The super important thing is just go through life understanding that everything around you is built. One of my favorite tweets of all time, probably actually maybe a higher watermark on X on this topic John (01:26:34): A museum of passion projects. Tobi (01:26:35): That's right. And I love that because if you can teach that to students, it's worth more than most of the entire curriculums of subjects. And so I think the commonality behind entrepreneurs is that very early in life, somehow something happened that told them that the world is dynamic and it changes. Some of us. I had the enormous advantage of living exactly at the time when we went with computers to no computers in homes. I had one early and lots of my neighbors. So I had the counterfactual there of and being just absolutely fascinated with them. And then networks came in my teens and internet, so I had a front row seat to the world around me in a small sleepy town in Germany was irreconcilable with what was becoming possible. It was so clear that so much would change. And so I think that dissuades me of sleepwalking through the world. It just made me like this. Okay, that's fun. I am sitting on a piece of information that everyone around me doesn't believe yet, but it's clearly true and I'm going to bet on it. I'm going to take reps looking at things around me and figuring out how it could be done better. And that process is I think the most valuable process to cultivate as a young adult or teenager. John (01:28:04): So the meta process is more important than the actual domain you choose. Tobi (01:28:07): I agree. Yeah, absolutely. I think if you spot opportunities, see what you can do with it, it's a really important thing. I think we overemphasize those stories and deemphasize the process that causes this. It's building the habit of looking at things and thinking about A) do I know how to make a better vision of this? Which you should do anyway. And then we definitely underestimate and under celebrate and under-lionize— John (01:28:36): The Beatles’ Hamburg days. Tobi (01:28:37): Going to and acting on this impulse would mean I'm going to spend the next five years of my life doing this and I'm willing to pay what that costs. John (01:28:47): And for you is that just doing a lot of programming as a teenager? Tobi (01:28:50): Programming is how I just made things different. I went to these classical language schools. I was bad at Latin. We started with Latin, I only got English in eighth grade, hence my accent. John (01:29:05): But your Latin accent is excellent. Tobi (01:29:06): Yeah, I imagine. Well no, because no one knows how that actually sounds and it's definitely not German. Anyway, I just hated doing the vocabulary tests. I was bad at it at, so at some point I wrote software for teaching myself basically similar to I suppose what's called space repetition now. And it's like there's little basic shell script and it's stupid, but something about making this and then using it made it interesting enough that I did it. And so, it is a very clear moment where I went from— I think I got a D on a test, which was starting to be problematic— to just As for the rest of my life. That is a crazy experience. This is a thing that didn't exist that fits me personally. Maybe my first internal tool. So it changes you. John (01:29:54): Exactly. It made you passionate about building your own software. Tobi (01:29:56): Yes. John (01:29:56): You mentioned space repetition. The other interesting educational topic dujour is mastery learning and the Bloom 2 sigma effect. How do you put that into practice? Do you with your own kids? Tobi (01:30:08): Yeah, so my kids, I have three boys, 15, 13, and 11. They go to a school, a boys school, which we are quite fond of. And I mean they’re my kids they're quite nerdy.I love them to bits, can't wait to go home. It's such a fun time. Everyone should have kids. The particular mechanisms by, I don't know. The most important principle of parenting principle I have is, everything's interesting. This is a saying you will hear a lot in our household. The kids say it. No one is allowed to say they're bad at something. They're only ever allowed to say they are not good at something yet. So that's basically the entire set of principles. John (01:30:57): Yes, we're not good at gross margins… yet. Tobi (01:30:59): Exactly. Yes. We choose not to. Yes. And making a joke is funny, too. I want them to have those things in their priors because it's really easy to say something is annoying. But it's much, much harder to figure out what you would have to do to make it interesting for yourself. And I think there just isn't anything that is not actually interesting. You spent a long time in banking. It doesn't sound terribly interesting to me initially, but I've learned enough about it. But I've read books about double entry accounting and the history thereof and it's just absolutely fascinating John (01:31:33): Did we recommend the Calomiris book to you? Fragile by Design, which is a history of various countries’ banking systems. Tobi (01:31:40): I'm literally just reading it. John (01:31:41): Oh, you are? Okay. So the Canada chapter is particularly good. It's like a history of the Canadian banking system. Tobi (01:31:46): Very fond of Canada right now. It's just like needs a new origin, I think. John (01:31:51): Yeah, yeah. Well I found it interesting how it kind of explains the path dependence of how each country gets to where it is. Speaking of Canada, what's your advice for Mark Carney? Tobi (01:31:59): Yeah, I mean it's funny. Our partnership is very, very storied and layered and some of your board members know my Prime Minister, so that's fun. Look, I love Canada. I live now more in Canada, than Germany, for longer. I think it's a beautiful project. It's a beautiful implementation of a different implementation from the United States or from Europe of classical liberalism. It's very much veered into socialism under Trudeau. He pushed that very, very hard. I am very much hoping that Mark is helping all of Canada to figure out that that's a successful discovery of something that doesn't work because obviously that kind of push socialism always leads to poverty. John (01:32:43): Problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money. Tobi (01:32:45): Exactly. And so it's just like, and it doesn't need it because it's such an incredibly, I mean I built Canada’s largest company at this point from my market cap as an immigrant. I think that advantage I had as an immigrant is I wasn't aware that we are supposed to make small plans. So I made big plans and held everyone accountable to that. And it turns out you can build world-class companies if you do that. And it doesn't need to be any kind of inferiority like there. And also just from first principles, I mean first of all, it is attached next door to the best consumer market on planet earth. Until 15 minutes ago we were good friends. It has new ground, basically it's number one, two or three on every single resource that is of value in the next manufacturing buildup age. So we should probably get on extracting some of those resources and do something. I think it can be the richest country in the world if it chooses so, and it just needs to make a decision that it wants that. And I am very optimistic about Mark pushing into that direction and I hope he's going to push very far because I think there's no advantage of waiting. John (01:34:07): So taking economic growth andGDP growth seriously, which has obviously plateaued somehow in Canada in recent years and then being willing to make the potentially controversial policy decisions and changes that are required to actually enable that. Tobi (01:34:19): Well, I mean the things that are controversial, policy decisions, controversial for policy decisions not for real. Canada has something crazy to tell people, but that has this incredible heartburn over pipelines, which are things that go underground next to highways and it's just like no one knows that there's a pipe. The only thing a pipeline does, you don't need diesel trucks. That's the only thing. And you can save a lot of diesel. It also changes the cost basis and Canada has obvious resources and they need to somehow get to ports. And so it just feels these tiny little implementation details, it's like as if computer manufacturers would somehow get down on copper cables. It's a weird thing. So depoliticizing just implementation details that professionals can do. It's odd because Canada for instance, doesn't have this on nuclear power. I live in Ontario, the grid is entirely clean. It's like the Bruce nuclear power plant, which we constantly built more reactors for, which is every time under budget and before schedule six, seven gigawatts now and just humming and then the rest is, it's the cleanest grid in the world. And so the funny thing is it doesn't even need it because it has all the other stuff too that it could just use, but we could have this too. So I think that's the blueprint is obvious, actually. So my main advice to him is always I want him to, in fact, ideally talk to you about the Shannon Economic Zone because I feel like it's like a blueprint for success in Canada. Because I think we can build data centers or space ports and stuff like this much faster. And my hope is that Canada can build up an economy and a merit for market and so on, which means it can get back to doing what Canada does best, which is to succeed by helping America succeed and just work together and let's go. John (01:36:17): Yeah, and as you say, energy could be a big part of that. As you mentioned nuclear, I was thinking about hydro where obviously Canada has a ton of hydro already, like you were saying the seven gigawatt nuclear power station, but I think La Grande River is a seven gigawatt project and could be a lot more. I think there's other phases that were not done. Tobi (01:36:33): It's absolutely massive on every single angle you look, every single time I learn about a new resource that we would probably need a lot of. John (01:36:44): Maybe last question. We have your Daytona car here. What is the draw of motor racing to you? Tobi (01:36:55): Yeah, I mean I just love it and it’s surprising to me.I love figuring out my own limitations or propensities. I think it's a game everyone is playing, I think to some degree, maybe less conscientiously. I try on every hobby that anyone I admire gets into because it's like maybe I'm interested in too, I wouldn't know. Again, everything's interesting. Motorsports was not really something I had a high likelihood or betting average on liking because I didn't even have a driver's license after coming to Canada after my German one expired. And so a couple of friends took me to a track and I went out and I just immediately fell in love with it. There's something just incredible and I love competing against myself I guess. I think that's a thing. I race in races and I don't even try to win. I'm still competing against myself and I see all the other obstacles. So there's just this beautiful thing about, it's technical and you connect it with this four \ playing cardsized patches of rubber to the ground and there's only so much grip to get out of them and trying to get to 99.9% of lateral acceleration or turning. Understanding the weight transits of the cars and all these kinds of things and trying to get to the best lab time you can. And the difference between bad lab time and the theoretical possible lab time is just the exact report card of all your inadequacies as a driver. nd next lab, you try to do it slightly better and better and better. And just hone this craft is the media immediacy and adrenal. It's just a brilliant thing, which I discovered for myself. So I started taking it more seriously over a couple of years and now did did Daytona this year and hopefully do the big 24 hour— John (01:39:06): The 24 hour relay race, right? Like you swap with other drivers. Tobi (01:39:09): Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's actually if you watch the Formula 1 movie that starts at that race, which was really fun to see. Like I've done the getting up in the middle of the night walk exactly down that first scene where Brad Pitt walks like down to the pits. Oddly our pit stall was even exactly the one he went to in the movie. And then you get in a car and you're very, very tired in the middle of night. John (01:39:37): I found out recently they sold sponsorships for the fake F1 teams in that movie and made a lot of money. An incredible bit of product placement. Tobi (01:39:46): I mean if you think about it Formula 1 itself is such a made up thing. John (01:39:50): Totally. Tobi (01:39:51): It's like we just decided to create a document which is a set of rules and somehow because that document existed, 20 teams move cars around planet Earth, which is also one of the world cases. I don't even believe in AI unemployment to begin with, it’s not how things work. John (01:40:08): But if you were worried about it, F1 is a good Tobi (01:40:11): F1 is kind of proving that we can just make up completely incredible pursuits, especially with AI and robotics.We can make it cheaper. And then let's go. John (01:40:19): Yeah, there's a great, I mean the history of F1 is super interesting. There was a great Colossus podcast on the history of F1 describing basically the Bernie Ecclestone era, which came with the emergence of TV obviously. And there's even things like the different race schedules were not standardized and there was multiple… Not every team would show up to every race or whatever. And so he really kind of harangued everyone into a standardized thing. But then it feels like the modern era, especially with Netflix, I think they're very successfully internalized that they're selling an entertainment product. And some people will watch every race every weekend, but I'm not going to watch every F1 race, but I will watch Drive to Survive. That is an appropriate short form amount of F1 for me. And so I think they've actually very savvily internalized that their F1 is an entertainment product and it needs to be kind of consumable in all the appropriate form factors. Tobi (01:41:12): And they just gave access to the intrigue politics and just characters behind it. Formula 1 drivers are crazy people, right? It is a nutty thing to basically drive a billboard around at 350 kilometers an hour. So the characters are larger, alive and absolutely driven by most zero sum competitors you can imagine. No one's there to just compete against themselves John (01:41:33): And part of how it works, I remember hearing Zak Brown, the McLaren team principal, talk about how Netflix is everywhere and the paddock and around and things like that. And he was saying, yes, you're aware that you've signed a thing that Netflix microphones will be everywhere, but they're really savvy where they'll have the, in a spy movie, they'll have the directional microphones trained on you from a super far away distance and you just end up forgetting that you're on a hot mic your entire day while trying to actually manage a race. John (01:41:58): And so I think they get authentic content because yeah, in theory people know that they're on camera and on a microphone all the time, but you actually just can't live your life that way. You just forget. And so they actually get kind of interesting content. Tobi (01:42:15): I completely agree. And it's like the season's long. They do many races. It's actually amazing what they do. Like a very fantastic athletes, they lose five, 10 pounds— John (01:42:24): The Singapore Night Race. Tobi (01:42:26): So it's pretty amazing and it is a fantastic sport. I actually love that, what Netflix did, because I mean Liberty Media is one of those companies, you kind of have to start. John Malone, I mean Cable Cowboy is already one of the best. John (01:42:38): It was a great book. Tobi (01:42:39): It's such a great book. John (01:42:41): He wrote a book, he's like, it's coming out imminently. Tobi (01:42:43): I did not know. John (01:42:44): It. Yeah, he has an autobiography, so— Tobi (01:42:46): That'll be firework’s. We’ll do a book club. John (01:42:47): Yeah, it'll be really good. I agree. (01:42:50): Thank you Tobi. Tobi This is fun. This is super fun. So it's really very fortuitous that an Irish pub just popped up in your office.