Snowboards, software, and scaling (with Shopify CEO)

Transcript

[Music] welcome to web 3 with a16z a show about building the next generation of the internet from the team at a16z crypto today's episode features Tobias lutka CEO and co-founder of the e-commerce platform Shopify speaking with a16z co-founder Ben Horwitz at our second annual founder Summit in November they discussed what it takes to build a breakout startup in a crowded category the change ing face of retail how to affect change in the workplace and how to handle individual emotions and corporate culture including dealing with calls for activism as well as the value of embracing negativity they also touch on the moral imperative behind creating

quality software the symbiosis between Ai and crypto and more as a reminder none of the following should be taken as business legal tax or investment advice please see az.com disclosures for more more important information including a link to a list of our [Music] investments all right so for those of you who don't know Toby which you probably should know Toby you can look him up as well but uh he um started a snowboarding company in 2004 called snow devil and he parlayed that into Shopify which now serves um millions of

merchants in a 175 countries around the world how many countries are there like in total I think that's most of them there 200 think 200 yeah it changes around imagins more sens you'll get them all at some point and then he was also interesting for for this crowd um he was one of the first adopters of coinbase Commerce so Toby's been kind of big on crypto for a while now um but let's get started so you started as a as a snowboard company um and and I always find that funny because of all the CEOs that I know you're probably the least snowboard Kickback like let's hit the powder dude so H how did that happen

like why' you start out that way yeah um uh you know when you talk to governments they they always uh you know CH is doing a lot about entrepreneurship but I was you know I I love entrepreneurship and um it's it's a such a brilliant institution I know everyone here is a c caring member of Entrepreneurship is good club um but politicians usually are they're sort of v on it but they say like they want to pass um uh government programs and policies to cause more entrepreneurship which I always think is exactly the wrong way around but um there's actually so um the funny story is um that uh so I was in Canada at this point I came from Germany uh living in

Canada um 200434 and um um I found out I cannot actually get a job I I was trying to be hired as a computer programmer locally but I found out I did not have a work permit I didn't know what a work permit was so um uh turns out that uh you are in Canada allowed to start a company even without a work permit so there's one government program it actually has led to more companies being created well that's like the best government program ever just like the payoff on shopified paid for itself a million times and it turns out Canada is very cold so I was doing snowboarding so I knew something about it and I start an online store for snowboarding kind of a pretty simple story like this that's amazing hey so basically the the key to your whole

career was not being able to work yes in fact you know most of my mind too is like I I I was sort of disillusioned with co- programming in this time it was like sort of a Java mode kind of was kind of very oppressive um um um and um I wanted to reclaim it as a hobby so I was like cool if I sell snowboots online I can make money wild snowboarding and I get to do more fun stuff it's been extremely uh um unsuccessful as a strategy I I basically never had time to snowboard again after I [Applause] started there the the end of your snowboarding career was the start of your snowboarding business that's that's pretty remarkable maybe I would project more late back at this point if things would have gone in a counterfactual way

yeah yeah now the other thing that really strikes me about chifi is that you know and I hate to say this as a venture capitalist who some people think is a smart person but um we we probably would have never invested in in Shopify when you started it because it was probably the most overc competed category in the world like everybody had some kind of e-commerce platform um I there was just so so many of them uh Magento this that the other so did you did you go oh no no no like I'm going to build this thing it's going to dominate everything then I'm going to have a network effect and I'm going to build you know like one of

the biggest things that anybody's ever seen like how did you like get all the way to where you are like what was that path yeah um no there was no plan like this um just a like um I think for every entrepreneur it's a useful thing to think about what is your energy source right like what is actually driving you um and sometimes it's NV you know like like the of negative emotions um channeled into building are actually the most powerful energy sources I I I had this um you're right like I mean Netscape IPO but um like you have to explain every platform in terms of an old platform and uh you

know online hosted CS catalog with buy buttons was like kind of a way you and Mark described even uh what the internet would be used for right like so e-commerce was like right there from the beginning I thought there would be lots of software that I could use and I didn't find anything I I I was actually really upset with the quality of the software and so like I channeled that into building something and um that was my energy source and I just love love the building that's actually by the way one of the best entrepreneurial ideas there is is which is this stuff sucks so bad I'm so mad about having to use it that I'm going to build my own totally I I I honestly it fuels me to do this day I I'm just I I I still think it's ridiculous what um people have

subjected to in terms of quality of software it's like it's it's a weird I probably did some like neurological like kind of rearrangement there but like to me this is almost a moral issue of like when when people like confused with software and they think about themselves as like being inadequate it's like how dare software make humans feel that way right like it's just not okay so um uh you want to make it more approachable but like I think the thing that people might have missed in in e-commerce or like it's it's not that I had a great Insight I just sort of organically got there is that um yes there was a lot of e-commerce software but was all built for already rich retailers who needed to move online and that was a phrase people used and um there was no one started software for um starting the

entrepreneurial process online like like like actually the the digital native what we call it now or like if if you like that FM um because there's a totally different set of requirements for people who are just starting out and um so that um that's what we did so this is the thing right like it's like you you um uh when you talk that's like I don't know 60 words per minute or something when you type fast it's like twice that um but like if you can do customer consultation in your own brain the brain runs at like terabytes per second bandwidth right like so if if you if you if you know the use case if you're building for yourself or your past experience or some kind of if you have a really good model of your customers uh or use cases in your mind

um you can do customer development at high bandwidth with low latency and you can just build something that you know is it needs exist yeah yeah no that's that's incredible so one of the things you know you're also kind of been um a uh kind of a a special kind of or a different kind of CEO than you know some of the ones you know that that that people read about a such in Adel or Bob Iger and that you have a reputation for being extremely Hands-On um including writing code you still have the fury that started the company uh how do you think about that in terms of you know you're not kind of paying attention to all parts of the company equally you're

clearly um doing certain things and not others how do you think about that as an effective kind of management style yeah um I I mean I imagine the people in my company would disagree with your assessment that an effective management style so um well it's worked pretty well so far it's working but that's like um uh it certainly doesn't proxy to what people sort of like like it's not a CEO job out of Central Casting that I'm trying to perform right um I I I tried that on and it didn't work for me at all I actually find um like I I I value being in all the details and I ask it from all the people were around me and report to me like almost everyone

especially after Co I turned over like um everyone but one of my Executives during those uh first um 10 months of Co yeah um and now almost everyone reports me it's actually a ex founder maybe someone be acquired or someone who start a company before coming to Shopify so because there's like this like I just want I find it actually really inefficient not understanding the details of what we're doing right because then well then you're guessing then you're guessing right like and and and you you're like well when something goes wrong now you not only have need to fix it you actually have the first cram for um like you you have to learn like three months before you can actually do a fix if you understand what's going on or what existing it's it's it's it's

much more it's much faster and you want to train people on a company Mission right like because there's a thing but you want to exist like you like even if you don't know exactly what it is like you you you know which direction you want people to go right and getting everyone align to go in this direction is only possible if you can paint picture of like how does this area actually sum together all the way to um helping the the mission overall and so um um and and this is sort of a sort of unique thing about our times right now is like the the the infrastructure keeps changing like here's crypto here's AI here's um I mean I started again almost like next year 20 years ago right so there was no mobile phone uh like that off quality that we

have now um right that's right you started before the mobile phone right so it's like that was one of the things that that just sort of happened and um you know SAS software even was was new at this time so you know the platform's capabilities change and you want to adopt them to like your mission to what is now possible and so you you have to be able to understand well in a in a coun of like ideally in your head um in the world where from I I take a very long-term View and my biggest fear that I have is that Shopify winds up being a fantastic solution to a problem that people no longer have yeah right or no longer solve this way so I'm trying to like need to keep it current and being able

to run with contactual about this is not possible this is what we're trying to accomplish but if this would have been possible from the beginning we would have built this entirely different thing so now our job is to get from here to there because again we want to keep it current and idea right you know that's such a great Insight because I think that you know when I work with um CEOs and and you think about the job so much of the job is making high quality decisions and setting the direction of the company and in some respects neither feels like work you know because you're working on something else like how does AI work what's possible in order to make decisions and set the direction but what you're doing seems actually removed from anything that the

company needs to do right now and I think so many people kind of neglect that kind of thing uh for that reason the other thing that that I always find is at any given point in time some things in the company are very important and very high leverage and some things are just not important for you to put your time into Y and people often get lost in that they they uh you know they think oh I've got to talk to this person and then that person and then the other person and so forth and it's like no no you don't you got to make good decisions you have to set the direction and if you don't do that nobody's doing that and then the company's going to fail so that's it's such an amazing way that you've gone about that if if you're in a

small team like for for new thing that your company needs to do and you're in a small team of people were like like you know like know all like fig out the shape of it early if it's actually as important it will itself have a gravity to change the way a company thinks about quality of sof shipping the way we architect things and um it's also after this comes up comes up as a as as a as a new thing you then have ability to like a type of legitimacy as a as a Founder you have an huge amount of legitimacy in a company already but like if you also are there with with with a new project that's important that needs to be resourced and say this is what we do you don't have to have all these conversations people love Clarity of

like this is what we do like it has a it has a gravity all to itself that's unlike anything you can accomplish by oneon-one consultation trying to talk everyone through the entire decision Matrix and so um under what is Toby doing over there oh that must be important yeah that's a that's exactly right um they're doing like J by side click now and like then I don't have to figure out like yes there's like 15 teams that are already doing AI stuff and they ought to be in some kind of constellation but now this AI assistant thing is going to run through and the company everyone wants to be a part of it and there just like all these problems kind of disappear it's like it's it's maybe not the most effective a magic trick yeah yeah yeah yeah um yeah actually I think I'm by the way like

everyone in this like everyone here has clearly read your books and if you haven't done do that um like I think thank you best books on leadership honestly like thank you so much for sharing all this um I think in at some some you describe that there's more only very few things ways to do change management one way of doing it is do something super super super surprising and then explain everyone what why you did it it's the fastest way to get a large company my shop F about 10,000 people much much much faster way to do change management than hand-to hand combat it's like shock therapy it's like what the was that oh well this was a that was okay got it very very very high retention on that so let's talk about

you know one of the things that uh has come up you know a lot over the years that you had probably you know maybe the best statement on I thought um is polit you know politics activism how that's kind of come into companies has taken over a lot of the activity of companies and um how do you I guess how do you think about that and then why' you say what you said and then how's that going and then how are you able to sustain it particularly as things get even hotter now with you know what's going on in the Middle East and so forth you know it's gotten even more intense than it was you know amazingly in 2020 that's a like it's a complex

topic I again here's the I mean there's a lot of convert um conflicting ideas about what people want companies to be and um you know I I think especially 2010 and maybe now again um a lot of people would like companies to play the role of some kind of phantom limb of um uh what I think the whole left over by the stories that people surrounded with like maybe governments or like like so on suddenly people want like I have gotten tons and tons of petitions um to for for Shopify to take stances on issues and I think everyone's feeling the same uh same thing this was weird to me but like initially but like I I found myself generally agreeing with what

people identify as for problems then when this happens Yeah but I found myself very rarely if ever really agreeing with the proposed solutions to those problems and I think um it's it's kind of important to say like hey unless we all aligned on this we're probably not doing this um because you know at the end of the day like companies ought to be thought of as a bit of a simpler thing uh it's you know real love entrepreneurship entrepreneurship is um you know liberal values kind of institution of uh you know your like reaching for um uh Independence reaching for to better yourself like building something like enlightened ideas of enlightened self-interest there is a bit of a political coding in this people at least think so and someone else might

take a totally different opinion about all these kind of things that's cool the cool thing is companies are themselves Explorations into a set of ideas sometimes incode in Miss sums by the founders and um if we make every company the same then we lose that that's actually like a weird form of diversity itself if you think about it so anyway um I I I went ahead and just like said look um we cause more entrepreneurship to exist and um sometimes there are social causes that are aligned with this um and and then then maybe we become active because of our mission but outside of that you know everyone makes money and you can do whatever you want in your after hours and that's just a simpler way of thinking about um uh the business of course that's not

universally loved But like after being very very clear about it and explaining it explaining you know we we we give everyone when we hire people a letter of like here are the reason like before you sign here's the reason why why you might not want to work for Shopify because like here's a set of ideas disagree with and um again that Clarity is wonderful we keep everything so neous I think I think the world of marketing and PR has just done a number of on on on us all to be so non-committal to everything yeah and the problem is if you're non-committal you leave a lot of vacuum and right and and that vacuum is going to be filled by someone and it's usually the people who want like who want to

fill it with that Faith uh takes um fulfill it so if you're just clear about it it it works sometimes um like this is something I might get into hot water with but like sometimes it's actually good to heighten the misalignment with the kind of people that you don't think should be working in a company like hey we work hard and it's kind of an yeah we have we have poor work life balance yeah yeah sorry yeah that's a good you are free to work elsewhere if it's true put it up like like light it up on a sign because every otherwise you're going to end up with the weirdest divisiveness in a company because like because of basically false advertising so I think I think it's better better to just be

clear so um um I mean what is it like there's a lot goes into this like again culture is unstable we know from the internet that um every community that anyone likes Reddit like like Hacker News if anyone actually likes this page um you know like it's it's it's a product of um unbelievably dedicated moderators who are keeping this the discourse well I think that's an idea um that I think companies have started adopting too like once you a couple thousand people your slack channel is the internet basically and you need to you need to apply similar rules you need to be able to take people to ass saying hey here's the thing you're causing when you're sending

a message to a Channel with 3,000 people in it that is basically the same as you spending a day typing individual me text message to any person in the channel and would you do that if no probably don't put in you know this kind of stuff yeah yeah know that that's really you know such a great Insight that you had that hey actually kind of agree with the intentions that people have on most of this just not with the ideas on how to achieve those attentions because that's that's where politics gets really dangerous and a and have a funny story about so my great uncle Harold my grandmother didn't speak for 20 years brother and sister and I asked my father you know a few years ago I said like what happened there why didn't they speak he's like oh well

because your great uncle Harold was a trist and I was like well what was grandma she was a stalinist they're two slightly different kinds of Communists and they didn't speak for 20 years and that's kind of what happens inside a company you know it's not like you're a good person you're a bad person this is a moral issue it's like well yeah we all want way fewer people to get killed in this current conflict but how you achieve that that gets very complicated very fast and so if you let people attack each other shut down conversations intimidate each other inside your company around that you know it's just all bad yeah the fighting gets the fiercest when the stakes are lowest yeah you know like when people almost

agree when then then they are become mortal enemies if right it's a very funny effect um um I mean you can right away the closer they are the the Clos are more yeah yeah yeah exactly it's it's it's not the way you would You' think I think at the end of the day basically what you have to avoid is divisiveness I I I um we have a we have a no ruin a company like most companies I think or many companies choose I think it's actually a valid OPP opinion to choose the opposite and like say we are perfectly fine with um uh brilliant jerks like that's that's actually a stable equilibrium you can Cho as well but like um you have to be all in on that um and uh you know I think it's actually useful to um reframe

like active divisiveness as like othering a part of the same company um as a Act of nasol and I think that just that actually kind of transcends a lot of these conversations because it it gets away from uh the issue it's never about the issue it's actually about the behavior by people around the issue that is the problem in the company right so so so just say make it if you manage to make it a norm to say this is just simply not what happens on company funded internet servers back yeah everything gets simpler take that outside outside the uh virtual maybe one last point one book that really really helped me figuring this out was uh uh Thomas so's conflict of Visions which is

an under appreciated book I thinken very very good even if you read the first three chapters suddenly you realize why everyone actually kind of right except comes from a different uh sort of philosophical uh prior yeah yeah no no no question um actually so let's uh you know you you were in to crypto very very early on um and uh why and then you know how do you think you know given kind of how things have unfolded how the technology is developed how the kind of regulatory uncertainty has played like how are you thinking about it now kind of in the context of of Shopify in the world yeah a couple of angles to that um I um first of all I make a habit

like so growing up in a very small town in Germany um uh not being like I I didn't know anyone was into computers or I was like until late in my teens and I when I moved away basically um I I think I built some skills around like outside observation um uh like just of monitor like I I I tried to figure out everything that's going on in you know um the silic and belly then I figured out that what that was but like I downloaded like the the Linux kernel source code and mailing lists back in most day used net like so I could study it all so I'm like it's weird because I'm clearly an Insider now but like I I I I've sort of lived and

built skills around outside observation so I make it a habit to like find the areas where there's the most passion and most um um yeah highest stakes and the most talent and like where people are just having a brainstorm about what the future is like I find that there this this is to me like watching television like um it's so great like so um crypto is such a a Wellspring of brilliant insight into um uh like like just like you know amazing Technologies and so on so because of that I studyed I find like consumer uh internet uh like uh mobile apps in China around 20 uh 2010 2015 so times like basically Pockets so um that was sort of my angle I I did make an

Ruby implementation in 2012 of a blockchain paper of of satoshi's paper so like it's been on my mind and just because I also love decentralization of I mean just like giving people power but entrepreneurships Shopify is just like give people it's actually the true power to the people is decentralization exactly the false the false one is communism by the way so there's hundreds of hundreds of ways have that drawn me into this which my personal ones what I was hoping for is like something more practical because my favorite thing is of people that I things that I find super interesting end up like coming sort of in the vicinity of Commerce at which point I get to play with like like I can do it from bday rather than in the

evening so um so so you know I I I I love from technology perspective I love it from a um um sort of philosophical um perspective you know obviously at some point people like like want to use it for for for clearing uh like buying products and so on WE we've supported this in any way we qu it for as long as you could have um the demand has been low for using it for physical products because you know there's from mer perspective there's some advantage credit cards but like it is crazy to me that at this point the the internet just doesn't have native currency we we will get there I think people in this room hopefully will um play leading role um in this I um you

know again from a personal philosophical perspective I you know I was on the internet in the 90s and and and and of course used Netscape and it came along Mosaic actually before that there's just this incredible experience of like in the future like everyone will be able to contribute and and and and and um this is going to distribute power uh in a way that is like unanticipated and not understood um Shopify itself is a little bit like stuck in this sort of 90s view of Internet like it's I know it's so hosted software so it doesn't conform directly to everyone has their own server but like you have your own website it's like something you can own like you can own a

domain you can own you know um uh the design of your system um you can retra the pends is important and then um I think this is like people have like my my one criticism to a previous sort of wave of of crypto has been that this idea of decentralization is too technical like it's like I I know people in the community here but like no one else cares about that definition of um like what we need to figure out like like crypto needs friends and and the best angle to find friends is to find the fellow Travelers who are trying to move um uh um Power to individuals again so that people can just like are not relying on like a central Marketplace

for instance Al so somewhere which just uh has its own gatekeeper rules or where the fees move to to exactly what your margin is and uh eradicate your ability to actually uh have a sustainable business and um so that's really really attracted me to it yeah so you it almost needs a campaign like kick the ass of the tech overlords like we're going to give the power we're going to give the technology back to the people we're going to take it from well yeah inle and meta and Amazon and Etc yeah yeah yeah I think what started with everyone start your own web server um everyone write your own HTML is actually aive and well if you just change the framing away from the exact technical implementation right

and and so that's a better I think more larger group you can you can build a you can you can build a movement around that you can't build a movement around it must be uh using the um Yak me. JS right like it's like that's not this is not how you start a movement excellent point um one last question then we'll we'll we'll go to audience questions um so you've been doing a lot of kind of experimentation now with AI uh and then interestingly you know kind of as with crypto there's this huge push to regulate AI um you know what do you think that means for kind of the industry and the world and uh is it a

good idea bad idea I I think I think regulating AI at this point is a bad idea um I think regulation around crypto I might not be quite so like I I I think regulative Clarity is what we should want um I don't think you can get that by having no regulation because it's just a regulated field but it should be extremely uh permissive and for experimentation um I think we found out some of the things that the financial system had are things that are deeply desirable in um like in crypto as well one way another I'm sure sure there like everyone can take a different position on this but like um that's fair in a AI case man like I just like you got to like you can regulate institutions or

like ground rules for markets but regulating technology is like that seems like a crazy position to take like suddenly floating points are like illegal that's after you do too many of them it's it is so weird you know you I had a conversation with a policy maker and I was like so if this was nuclear you want regulate nukes you'd regulate physics that's your idea like physics is now illegal yeah it's I guess throw away those textbooks immediately please yeah so so um I again I think maybe even some of the um things that people have identified as potential problems in the future um I I guess we could agree with but like again the the proposed

solutions to this are crazy because we get into these say places where like cool maybe analog Computing is actually better for for training new Nets so that is not floating Point operations anymore like you be doing that now because of regulations instead of because of uh pragmatism or you know it just I don't know it it's it just seems too early um and it um I think that it's a very very bad idea right now for any governments to um Set uh ceilings and rules that are especially honorous for startups because I think all you're going to get out out of that is just um it like you're going to get the place where it's going to be all behind 4 pay apis that are going to be all controlled by they few I mean

that's strictly better when it doesn't exist granted but like clearly we need open source look look at everything that happened just now um after you know AI became available first and then thanks to meta and releasing amaz amazing llama models we know so much more about what neurons do we know so more about what um how how to accelerate this you need to rescue these things sometimes from the Ivory Towers and and and you have to give them to the tinkerers and the people will remember how to um memory align things and what you know how to get the most out of a hardware like that's a different crowd than with people who are writing uh python um uh neurot topologies and it's um we need

everyone on this and then we're going to get the best out outcome because it is foundational for a future yeah so we need to figure out how to make crypto closer aligned with AI because it's it's a natural way for how to um pay for micro payments and tokens and so on and and this is really really important now well and solve so many I mean it's interesting crypto solve so many AI problems and AI solves so many crypto problems they're these should be symbiotic and just the signways of a of an excitement of these two areas just happen to be dissonant right now and we need to make them harmonious partly because of the bad big companies sorry um well that's great so uh we uh are ready to take questions any

questions you may have um yes sir back there if crypto plays out in exactly um it's it's like I think um very naturally the browser will just like be able to move value around and you will want to your value um in a way that can be addressed by the browser this is like you can get pretty close uh to that but you would have to squint and you have to deal with like poor uix and you have to deal with hard on on Rams I I think I I I don't think anything kind of magical happens other than that um people will have need more utilitarian ability to like use use money again I think if you run the counterfactual and

say open AI just for whatever reason couldn't work for stripe and and and just decided to I don't know like use some level two blockchain and and and to Mo to pay for tokens as a initial like MVP um people would now move incredible amounts of money around and and and and and build startups that might have these kind of ideas that Sam talked about on stage about people um uh you know sharing value of creating gpts and like like all of the you know the blockchain like if if you look at the open AI Dev days um especially the last 20 minutes and um you open at the same time vs code um to to an ethereum contract you can basically write it out while he's talking it's like so the behalf is

incredible infrastructure but we can't can't use it partly because of fees partly because of speeds because like we got to solve the infrastructure problems which I know we doing like this is people are building through this particular winter in a way that is like seems utterly ideal to from from my perspective so that's great um um there is we we we need to bring killer use cases we need to find like we need to have people want to use this um unfortunately there is like like the the progress on these kind of things especially once you need culture and and social things is annoyingly not linear and that's really trips everyone up it's like it's nothing nothing nothing nothing everything and um we we we have

to get we have to like toil in obscurity um uh to to to build up the infrastructure until it can support the kind of way that um people want to use it and then we need to catch lightning in a bottle yes uh thanks dby um I had a question so Shopify works with a lot of merchants and brands that uh might not be as techsavvy or might not understand uh everything that's going on in like AI or crypto um how does Shopify think about messaging to those merchants and saying hey this is the future this is these are things that you should be using yeah I think I think people actually hire us cor um for helping them be ideal for whatever the internet is and for for for whatever however their

buyers like like they they want to continue buying like again we we start before mobile phones and so like just just making sure that everyone's store was available on on like just some mobile phones back in those days responsive whatever just helped uh tremendously because there their colleagues who didn't have that like just like started doing poor and poor as as as as money moved to uh to to to the small form factors um and they started out competing their peers in the industry so like guess this is a super old and probably dumb example but like what I'm saying is like the demand has to come up like the the Merchant's offering like you you can't solve this problem just simply by a bring the supply side up the demand side needs to go up the buyers should should want to spend um on the blockchain now that

is here's Beauty you have um 3% to work with here like the credit card fees are high right like there's a lot of interesting incentive systems that you can do but what I found was the most amazing thing about sort of when I came back to crypto paid paid more attention smart contracts ethereum is um that I and I actually think even the practitioners in the crypto space are under appreciating this um as a talent is um there's never been a field of such applied widely distributed and high quality thought um applied Game Theory right like it's the the the amount of the constructions and the incentive systems that are being built um in this community are are like tremendous like

the the the like um you know the the artists that have done really really well for nfts uh like like such a good example this is the first I I know this is like like but man this was the first business model of of Arts that we've gotten since patronage times right like this is a huge breakthrough and we'll we'll make a come back this thought this quality of thought has to be applied I think to to all sorts of other areas and then in in different ways and we can use the infrastructure that's been built to um do something way better than cash back credit cards like with those extra 3% now it needs to also be meet the world where it is it we require some

kind of escrow systems for charge back there is real distribution there needs to be like it not everything has to be trustless we should bring trust progress into the systems like it's called a wallet which I think is a good name but in my wallet is I I I don't think I have cash my wallet it's all cards it's like licenses it's like driver license and so on right like it's attestations that I'm uh who I say I am and um uh bringing in trust Brokers into the system uh through the perimeters we have now and saying yeah that person is um who they say they are yes that person can be shipped to like if you write this thing on a uh package destination FedEx now is hard to uncloak this into an

actual destination address we have to build this with the industry and then at some point um uh like we're going to just have a much better uh environment for Commerce and much like it's it's it's not slightly better than using credit it can actually be 10 times better people move around more since Co right like how often have you like gotten a package to some other address that you're no longer there like this it would be wonderful to make addresses pointers that can be updated in the background and so on so on so on so um like work with actual infrastructure of the world and modernize it on these new systems and so that all the advantage acre um uh to to people who want to take out want like

who actually live in in a real world and not just like behind sub synonymous uh you know abstraction I think I think that's that's absolutely doable but man do we have to get fees down and this is like it's never going to happen if if you go back to $50 a transaction yeah yeah we've got for one more question um yes right in the front row since I saw you first so Shopify has a really successful partner program where Engineers are building themes and plugins and apps could you talk a bit more about some of the challenges starting that system up and then also as you see more and more people speak the language of nfts and the evm how that can evolve as we get more interoperability this is definitely like

I you're sort of hinting at how cool would it have been how to have these pieces of infrastructure Primitives and we could have govern the entire partner system on a token economy right like that's that's totally true um I it would have been I I think this is I I really hope someone is going to explore how to how to build systems like the shop for ecosystem because there's a lot of uh uh sh like sharing and a lot of um uh you know multiwallet transactions which we are all doing the fledges in the background boting it up like any boting up any two sell Marketplace is tricky you you have to overcome a chicken neck problems uh it's it's it it's It's Tricky but if you imagine to do it this is also really really self sustaining afterwards um we have uh you know one of

the greatest things is like we have we have about uh five different customers who have Merchants Who start on Shopify we now IPO and our public companies um um we now have uh one who is built an app like on the shop app with their own private company clayo sorry public company Clay is now and they're very very successful which is awesome um again this is a wonderful thing of what you like what you can do like companies um are estimated to produce about six times more value than they cap capture um uh like to the world like the you know enlightened self-interest noris um the the the constrainted vision in so's um terms is real um and uh there's so many

ways to build like like so many businesses lend themselves to being turned into platforms later the problem is everyone tries to build a platform first and that's really really really hard it's much better to extract a platform out of a working um like a working piece of software people are already using and so that helped us like people were already trading themes um as zip files um and we like okay well we can help with that and um people are already building things for themselves on the apis for you know integrating their own EOP systems and then building this to the point there you know you could list this ER connector and build it like our sdks made it so that it's um can be in many stores by default we we give you a right like we we we hinted

people and help them into the right direction and and all these kind of things ended up being incredibly valuable for the community and and uh I mean it's it's it's definitely one of the coolest aspects uh to to build but again it's what at the end of the day what all of this is is um you build really good software that solves real problems very very quickly and when you build a bit of a game thetical uh uh system on top in which people being um selfish about want wanting to build something um acrew a huge amount of value to the like like the community to Shopify to the merchants and uh and so on and I mean I I feel like the most sophisticated F along most lines on

Shopify is a fairly amateur uh sort of baby's first incentive system compared to some of the things that were built on uh you know a Fe and uh like the blockchains um in terms of sophistication except everything in in in in the word of crypto was so pointed at financialization and finances but I think people might have missed what could be done if you if you think more about products rather than financial products and I think that's hopefully going to be um next wave crypto is going to be more products and and then solving real problems with people I'm that amazing Insight I would love to please join me in thanking Kobe [Music] w

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