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SPEAKER_02: Hey everybody, welcome to This Week in Startups. We've got a huge treat for you. Toby from Shopify is back on the program. I'm not sure when you were last on the program, but I know we were up at your HQ in... In Ottawa. ...Ottawa, right.

SPEAKER_06: ...and this was 2000, I like 2013.

SPEAKER_02: 2013, I have it here, yeah.

SPEAKER_09: August of 2013, episode 375. You were not a public company. I don't know how many... What was the footprint of Shopify back in 2013?

SPEAKER_12: Oh, that's hard to say. Um, like less than a hundred people, maybe? Yeah. Something about there.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah, and we just sat in the lobby of... It's like 200 something, like it was, but small, smaller.

SPEAKER_02: And at the time, this was a kind of a... You had a very strange thesis. If I remember correctly, the idea was Amazon would not win it all, and merchants would want to have a direct relationships with their customers, and that if you focused like a maniac on servicing those stores, you might be able to build, you know, a modest, moderate building, a business. How did it go, Toby? It went okay.

SPEAKER_14: It went okay.

SPEAKER_20: You know, you know what? Like, the funny thing is, honestly, um, I mean, first of all... Did I describe it correct, by the way? No, you're exactly right. Exactly right. And you know what? I actually...

SPEAKER_22: I remember the setting. So this was, we were at a conference, right? Like, it was called Accelerate Ottawa, and I think you were there because, um, various reasons. I think you were interviewing Chamath on stage, right?

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Chamath, at that time, decided he wanted people to know his name, and he was like, you're the best interviewer I know. Let's go places, and you interview me. And I was like, okay. And that was like one of the stops. We went there, Waterloo and Harvard Business School.

SPEAKER_06: That was like a little tour we did back in 2013.

SPEAKER_22: So I remember us sitting down, and we were having this conversation about Shopify, and the funny thing is, you're making this almost sound too deliberate, because when you said earlier that I had some kind of a thesis about how to actually build something of any significance, I don't think I did. I honestly, I was just sort of following, like, um, like, I found this need to just start to make it easier to make online stores relatively early in 2004, doing my own. And then I was like, someone needs to really just make this more accessible, because I have only reason I could do it was because I was a programmer. And then it's really just been one step at a time since then. It's no incredible, like how, how, you know, like, how the story continued. But I don't think I knew this. I do remember that you in the interview, we're making also like you use, you had some statements in there about the potential size of a company and the hundreds of millions. And I, I was like, I'm gonna roll with this, but I'm not entirely sure that Jason is, you know, being serious, or it's just so no,

SPEAKER_17: I saw it very clearly. You know, in interviewing, you know, 1000s now of founders in my career,

SPEAKER_02: versus a journalist, and then as an investor, I was just struck by how laser focused you were on this very specific problem. And I was like, Yeah, you know, there's gotta be like, I don't know, 100,000 people out there with the store. And if they each gave you $1,000, or maybe they gave you $200 a month, like, that's a lot of money, it could be like $20 million or something in revenue, it could be huge. I was just like, I do this back of the elbow. Give me an idea of the, of the trajectory over those, you know, eight years since we last spoke, basically, were there moments along that journey, that you uncovered things that made you realize, wait a second, this is a bit of a big opportunity, even bigger than, you know, what I originally thought,

SPEAKER_38: what were those like seminal moments? Do you remember? Yeah, I mean, it's basically an unbroken

SPEAKER_20: chain. I have an unbroken track record of underestimating how the potential of my own

SPEAKER_40: company, which is, I hope will continue. I think a couple of like, I mean, we got lucky in the way that the words have rearranged itself around the thing we were building, right? Like it's,

SPEAKER_22: people are talking a lot more about entrepreneurship now, than they certainly did in 2013. People are like, everyone realizes that the internet is kind of just the thing, right? Like I, I recently heard that, um, something like 85, 90% of all the money on the planet actually only exists in, in databases, right? Like the world economy is digital. Um, there is no such, like the world concept of e-commerce is kind of, um, not, I think the right idea. And so that became clear and, and, um, uh, you know, COVID accelerated things enormously, uh, like afterwards, because everyone realized just how

SPEAKER_20: important it was to, you know, the, even if you had an existing store, like sometimes you have to, like, you are not accessible anymore. If the streets are shut down. And, um, I, especially

SPEAKER_44: if a small and medium businesses mattered a lot. Yeah. I mean, the most entrepreneurial thing you

SPEAKER_02: could do historically, I think in the history of humanity, it's open up a store and give somebody goods in exchange for coins. I mean, that's basically the history of humanity. Modern humanity is that people would go to a market, show their wares and try to provide value to people. So this idea that it would go away, um, or that one person would win it all seemed strange. So it does seem like this constant tension of like, well, why wouldn't people just put their stuff on Amazon and the third party sellers never came to pass. And since the time you've been on, I've had multiple direct to consumer brands say being on Amazon is the kiss of death. It's, it's a waste of time. You get ground down to the bottom. We want to have a direct relationship with our customers. We want to know who they are and we want to have their contact information. Is that the core dynamic that sort of created these two different ecosystems, the Shopify ecosystem, and then this like Amazon third party

SPEAKER_40: seller race to the bottom ecosystem. Yeah. And I wouldn't even necessarily put it. So in such stark contrast, I think the, I think the right idea is that, um, if you're direct to a consumer brand,

SPEAKER_22: you need a home base somewhere. Um, and ideally you do this on the open web. Why? Because it's the

SPEAKER_52: one place you can actually own like, uh, on the entire internet and the other surface you pay, uh, for

SPEAKER_40: the impression or, or you, you're renting it from someone. And, um, so, so once you have that, you can go out from there. Like, I think Amazon is a very good sales channel for certain products

SPEAKER_22: and, and, and people should use it, um, if it's appropriate, um, comes to upsides and downsides.

SPEAKER_40: And I think that's, um, uh, you know, just that might, might be a good fit. In many cases, um, people

SPEAKER_22: use, uh, Facebook to find an audience and, and, and, uh, advertising on, on, on, on Google AdWords or take talk now at any of the channels. And I think this is the key. Um, I, different products

SPEAKER_40: work in different channels, different messages, uh, uh, move different. And to your point, commerce is extremely, um, uh, related to, to, to human history. It's, it's very hard to figure out what came,

SPEAKER_22: who came first, the, the, the cities or the, the trading posts, right? The, um, the shop at the crossroads was probably the founding, uh, event of any other modern cities. And, um, you know, so, so people

SPEAKER_40: have been trading with each other for, for forever. And then the entire relationship of, um, I'm making a thing, um, that some people find extremely valuable and therefore they give me something

SPEAKER_22: of value back, either butter or, or currency, um, has just been part of, of, of, of, of, of human history for, for a very long time. And this is hugely important to bring, um, with us to the internet.

SPEAKER_20: And I think, so, um, everyone has something like everyone can add to this. Everyone who wants to add new

SPEAKER_02: products should be able to. And was the, how important was payments and getting that built in? Cause we just talked about bartering coins when you started, did you have payments in or what

SPEAKER_58: did people have to bring their, they believe they had to bring their own merchant account, right?

SPEAKER_20: Yeah, right. Um, I actually built a really popular open source library called active merchant, which is just, just does nothing else than make it so that you can connect like to 80 or 100 different

SPEAKER_40: payment gateways that I built initially with Shopify. I think what, um, became, uh, uh, apparent eventually is the thing that really, um, people don't tend to realize this, but like friction shapes the world a lot more than, um, uh, policy in most cases. And, um, what we found, uh, this was a, like an hypothesis initially and became a, uh, and became something which we confirmed through building Shopify is that whenever, um, because initially, so, so to set the setting event, first times I went around Silicon Valley trying to raise any kind of money for Shopify, I got a very similar, uh, like I got a good pushback of, you know, do we really need to be lots of online stores? Isn't there going to just be sort of one of them? Or like, maybe there's like, like, let's say 10,000 or 40,000 or something. And I think 45 was a number that I got in one rejected rejection letter. Um, there was just no agreement that there was a value in, um, making all like, like making it easy for people to start stores because there was a limited term. And, um, I think that is actually, that was good pushback.

SPEAKER_22: I think that was actually right. But the reason why there was only 45,000 online stores on, on, on the web of last decade, um, in the early, uh, 2000s, um, was that, uh, it was just too hard. So what we've realized eventually the hypothesis we had is like, every time we make it simpler, what we actually get is just more consumption because the demand was very high, but the ability to overcome the friction

SPEAKER_19: along the way, it was, was simply not that well distributed, right? So, so, so payments in a very roundabout way payments is like the perfect example of this because, um, even I almost gave up when I started my, my snowboarding store at the very beginning of this journey. Um, because it was, I didn't have great history in North America moving from Germany, and it was just really, really hard to get one of these merchant accounts. And there's a lot of gatekeepers, uh, involved.

SPEAKER_22: And, um, I, I only ended up doing it by, uh, like it, it was very hard and it would have been easy to

SPEAKER_40: give up. And so what Shopify has attempted and, and with payments, especially, uh, it's just to remove

SPEAKER_22: all these barriers and, and, and make, make ideally everything happen only once you need to,

SPEAKER_44: like once you have a bunch of sales and want to get the money paid out, we, you will then be able to tell us where to send it. And then we can do all the provisioning of the merchant accounts for you.

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SPEAKER_02: you know, the inception of the web in 9596, when it started to get commercialized and all the way to now is it was so hard to get anything done that it was causing a very small number of people to do it. Every time an entrepreneur makes it easier, more people participate. And I think one of the great examples when you were talking about this was just thinking about like, um, web publishing. And I was just thinking about I just had Matt Mullenweg on the pod. And Evan Williams has been on the pod, we got to have him on again. But it was like, just putting up a web page was so hard, you had to get Dreamweaver and build it or get it before that put up a server. And now if you want to put up a web page, you can go to Squarespace or WordPress, or even if you want to say something, you can kind of just do a tweet, like, boom, it's up on the web. And, and now of course, everybody participates, everybody publishes stuff all the time, whether it's photos, and flicker was like this nice waypoint, right? If you think about the history of photos online, we all remember in flicker came out, they created like an upload tool. Do you remember the upload tool they had? Like, you could download an upload tool, like, okay, we're going to get your camera roll off of that camera and your memory card, and put it on the internet. And now we all have these incredible devices. The app store was the other piece, right? I mean, at some point, you added an

SPEAKER_72: app store and let other people build plugins was was that another major inflection point on the journey?

SPEAKER_40: It absolutely was. It's a, I mean, I mean, again, commerce is complex. It's, it's, it's very, very hard to build software that can address a lot of different use cases. And the inspiration there

SPEAKER_22: was really operating systems like you have to, like an operating system that does a good job modeling the primitives can can then be used for it for everything. Again, like, in many, in many, you invoke the 90s. The 90s, like, it was very hard to do anything with internet. And but it was

SPEAKER_02: also very idealistic in this way. Explain to people who weren't around what it felt like for guys like us and everybody else who started joining this, what that revolution was.

SPEAKER_20: I would I mean, I would love to know your story there too. But like,

SPEAKER_40: I'll give you one if you give me yours. Yeah. Yes. I remember when the internet came to town, like, I mean, the whole concept is funny. It's like the first ISP, basically, at the local university. And I mean, I sometimes think about this, I don't, I'm trying to figure out at the point before that happened, what would be the one way how I could have communicated with people who weren't, who I didn't know. Like, I guess I could have caught in some kind of radio, live radio show or something like that. Yeah, but that would have been the only way how you can send deputies, communicate with people who don't, you didn't know a phone number of. And the so so it's hard to take people back to the times when that was ordinary. But like,

SPEAKER_22: it was profound to see the internet, right, and realize that you can go in a chat room and talk to people or put up a website, which then you don't even have to be there. And then people could interact with if you had the technical ability to do that. And I think a favorite pastime was,

SPEAKER_40: what would the world look like in which doing these things that we now are possible are going to be everyday things that everyone could do? And in which ways would that change the world, right?

SPEAKER_22: And I think there's a good deal of idealism that came from this. And some companies, I think, are

SPEAKER_40: really born out of this, like out of this world, and are trying to kind of like make something significantly simpler, but then also build a platform for everyone to make it even even simpler. And I think this is, like Shopify, fundamentally, is an implementation of these ideas. And we want, like, we want to make sure that people could solve the problem that it was very, very hard to build

SPEAKER_19: software that helped small and medium businesses, right? So, because the dynamic of, I mean, usually,

SPEAKER_40: when there's a really valuable market somewhere, and people look at it and say, okay, I mean, not everyone's service, but search, like, it's really, really valuable. And then you can, you know, like, you build a company that is the search engine.

SPEAKER_02: And that was the one I was thinking about when you said, like, it was so idealistic, and Google came along and said, Well, what if we index the world's data, and everybody had access to everything, people don't remember, that if we wanted to get information, we'd be like, I wonder if there is a book about, you know, C++, or Pascal, or whatever, you know, thing we wanted to learn about. And then you go to a bookstore, or a library, and you would ask people is this is, does this exist in the world? And online was originally, like, you could ask other people

SPEAKER_85: for information, and people might be like, Yeah, I have, I have a file on my hard drive, I can give you a file, I have something about chess, I have a, you know, a document about that is really idealistic when Google said, we want to index the world's information and make it freely available to everybody. Now we just take that for granted.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah, and it was profound. It was a profound experience. And then the first time, but what was the first time you got it got to see that? I mean, well, I mean, different experience from

SPEAKER_17: it coming to town, given from where you are, the I was on bulletin board systems in the 80s,

SPEAKER_02: like PC board, etc. And so we were using modems, I had my first modem was a 300 baud ventile, then I got a 1200 board haze modem. And I was like an assistant sys admin on a PC board. And was very interesting about that is, there was no internet there. But you could plug in two modems into one computer if you had enough slots, or maybe even three or four. And then four people could be online at the same time and chat with each other. And then we just basically used message boards like forums, and you would be get a busy signal, you would post it, and then you just let it keep getting busy signals. And you'd war dial it until you got online. When you did, you would post a bunch of comments, and then you were supposed to get off as a courtesy to everybody else. And you would download all those messages, read them offline, and then go and upload them. And that was my first, and we were trading software like chess master and stuff like that. We were just trading wares at the

SPEAKER_67: time hacked software. But then I went to Fordham in 88, and they had the internet. And I remember this guy, Jose was like the night manager, and we would be in the computer room. And he was using the send command to talk to this woman he had met in like Brazil or something, and they were going to meet each other in person. And there was a send command. And then there was like gopher and FTP. And this is all before the web existed. And people were trading files, and then you would send a message. And my distinct memory was, it said hopping from Fordham, to you know, Duke University to Miami, to Mexico City to here to here to here. And then we wait. And 60 seconds later, we would get a message back. And so it was literally like a 30 to 60 second delay chatting with this, his, you know, girlfriend he'd never met in Brazil.

SPEAKER_92: And my mind just melted. I was like, how much does that cost? And he was like, $0. I'm like,

SPEAKER_02: what? And it was called BitNet. And he was like, Well, there's ARPANET and there's BitNet. We're only on BitNet. But there's a bridge over to ARPANET. It's like, how do you get on that? And like, Oh, we can't get on that. We're not supposed to be on there. But this is before it was

SPEAKER_70: commercialized. And that was my first kind of moment long before the the web browser existed.

SPEAKER_20: I mean, I mean, all of what you just talked about is like a sirens call of just never coming out of this particular like, like part of like history, because this was just so in like BBSs and ASCII. And like, I remember being able to tell the make of a modem on the other side, just from the handshake sound, right? Like, you could always you could always tell the six of

SPEAKER_94: modems. And yeah, but but anyway, I think you have to like, unfortunately, like, no one's

SPEAKER_97: interested in this is, you know, this podcast exists for me to have an interesting conversation. And if anybody else happens to like it, that's fine. Perfect.

SPEAKER_98: But let's keep geeking out of this. What was your first computer?

SPEAKER_40: Yeah, I got a Amstrad CPC, which I don't know, it's a basic, like a basic computer, but it was a European make. Really good device.

SPEAKER_98: Wow. What would you have cartridges or a tape? What do you use for storage?

SPEAKER_40: It had one of the first hard disk drives and which was mind blowing. I even had color screen, or at least some colors. And it was a good machine. There wasn't a lot of games for it, partly because the games are made for C64s and so on. But

SPEAKER_22: it was great because, you know, back then, it was like bite magazine had like, it had like, game listings in basic on the back. And so you typed all those. And yeah, you can make your own snake.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Yeah. So exactly these kind of things. And then, you know, like,

SPEAKER_02: people forgot that, like, in order to play a game, you would be given a piece of paper by your teacher and they'd say type these in, and you would type the code in. And then you'd run it and then you'd be able to play the game. So you do like an hour of typing, and then the game would run because it didn't exist anywhere. And then eventually floppy disks, hard drives came, you didn't have to actually do that. But it could take, you know, five minutes to load a piece of software and to get it to

SPEAKER_09: run easily, easily. My first computer was called an IBM PC jr. And it had one of the first floppy disks and then two cartridges and a modem. And it was really cool. You could stack these cards onto the

SPEAKER_85: side, you'd slap these cards onto the side and connect them. And then eventually at a hard drive. And, you know, then I became like an IT guy. And I just would make 15 bucks an hour when I was 15 years old in 1985, when the minimum wage was 250. I had like jobs for 1015 $20 an hour doing like databases, and building stuff for, you know, medical offices and stuff like that to keep track of their patients. It was pretty cool. Like that moment in time, I imagine you had a very similar

SPEAKER_40: experience there. Because um, um, I, again, I don't know the people around you. But like, in my case, again, I'm from a little city in Germany, and I am this all existed to me, but like, I didn't really know anyone else who had computers. And I remember at some point in my teenage years, I don't know what particular event it was. But like, I at some point, I had this sort of, it might have actually been a first experience around the internet, where I had this sort of, like this experience of now seeing, I know everything around me is going to change. And very quickly throughout my lifetime, because um, just like, it was so clear that, you know, you go through a normal day, and I, you know,

SPEAKER_22: you went with my parents to some kind of passport office to to to then, you know, wait in line and fill out a form. And and, you know, on the other side, the person was just sort of typing something in a typing machine, and that was filling out another thing. And then, and I had all these questions

SPEAKER_19: about how this works. And at some point, I had this realization of, you know, at the end of all us people doing all these things, it's just going to be typed in a database again. And I know that we can

SPEAKER_40: end to end this really, really simple. And I was something along those lines, maybe not quite so detailed. But I had this experience. And I think other technology people who came in touch with technology in during this time had this probably as well. But you just knew that you knew something about the world

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SPEAKER_02: you'd meet somebody and they'd be like, Yeah, I know, I have a computer too. And you'd be like, Whoa, and then you would just spend 10 hours talking about all the different things you're doing. And I actually, you know, when I get that sense, again, is looking at the crypto folks, it's almost like they know that, yeah, okay, the arc of history is going to this like distributed system is going to be on a blockchain, nobody's going to control it, there's going to be hashes, that's how you're going

SPEAKER_09: to do it. And it's going to change everything, they kind of see a future that if you're not writing that code, or you're not involved in it, and I feel like the biotech people like people working on, like synthetic biology, like, it's almost like they can see the future and none of us actually

SPEAKER_02: understand what they're working on until they make the vaccine for the pandemic in two days. Yeah, it's just like, you know, we got you, here it is. And then we spend a year trying to figure out if it worked. And they're like, No, it works. We made it in 48 hours. MRNA is like a real

SPEAKER_100: technology. And everybody's like, how do we know it works? And they're like, it works here.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah, it's the code. It's yeah, I mean, that's just crazy, like profound as well, right? Like,

SPEAKER_20: we now can modify cells in a software addressable way. Basically, that's not exactly it. But like, you can actually compress it into a sentence. MRNA is a pretty solid metaphor. Yeah. Yeah. How does this plan look different in 20 years based on this? I mean, like,

SPEAKER_125: how is it looking differently by the end of this year already? Right? Like, it's not like, it's not even theoretical at this point. MRNA I mean, I think it's, we're pretty safe to say,

SPEAKER_02: this is the last pandemic. Like, if we have another pandemic, and the, the MNR RNA people are going to sequence this stuff, they're going to have the solution. And then it's really just a matter of looking at our process of these, like multiple phases and going, you know what, just do a challenge trial. I don't know if you know what a challenge trial is, but no, so it is very simple. It's really interesting on an ethical basis. I'd be interested in your thoughts on it. You can, you can either give 30,000 people a placebo and 30,000 people your vaccine, and then see who gets COVID and who doesn't, and then study it six months later, right? Or,

SPEAKER_67: we can get 100 volunteers, give 20 of them one vaccine, 20 of them another vaccine, 25 of them another vaccine, and the fourth group a placebo, and then give all of them coronavirus on purpose, expose them to it on purpose. This is considered the height of unethical in medicine. But we do send astronauts to space. And then if there's a new airplane, somebody's got to do the experimental

SPEAKER_85: flying on it. And people ride motorcycles 200 miles per hour on the Autobahn and do all kinds of, we send people to war to fight over oil or whatever. Like, the idea that we wouldn't do a challenge trial is just crazy. Like, I don't understand the ethical dilemma here. If people

SPEAKER_67: are informed, and they have consent, we could, we could have saved the 10 million people who died or, you know, in COVID could have been half of them 90% of them 90% would have been saved if we had just

SPEAKER_85: done a challenge trial. And now there's a bunch of scientists who are saying we need to rethink this concept of challenge trials. And they're actually doing them in the UK right now with volunteers who are young, because obviously COVID doesn't, thankfully, you know, impact the young like it does the obese or

SPEAKER_67: the old. So anyway, the the the mRNA stuff, if we do challenge trials, we could basically kill the next pandemic before it ever gets on a plane. Or even become aware of it.

SPEAKER_20: I mean, this is what I love optimistic take on it. I agree with you like about the really, really,

SPEAKER_22: really need to learn from this. There's tools we didn't have here. And, you know, like, we can build a much, much, much, much better society on top of lessons that came through this because I think it's

SPEAKER_40: like, it I think it really gave us a sense for the kinds of like, just challenges that on one side, we can see on the other side, the kind of challenges that we can overcome by especially thanks to

SPEAKER_125: technology, like, well, or science. Yeah, in this case. Yeah, yeah. What do you think the big lessons

SPEAKER_09: are coming out of the pandemic? What do you what realizations did you have? Because it's, it becomes this when you pause society for a year, and we're taping this literally in the week, we're 50, we're literally exactly 52 weeks from when San Francisco was shut down, like on the March

SPEAKER_85: 10 ish timeframe. What did you learn from all of this? Like, what's your takeaways now that we're

SPEAKER_14: kind of in the end game? It's hard. I mean, it's hard to make it like, like, even even put the bullet

SPEAKER_83: point list up. It's it's, it's, I think, I think almost every model and theory that I had about how to work together how to build things got either invalidated or got significantly higher resolution.

SPEAKER_22: Like, I, for instance, I, you know, I believe that there was, like, no way to replace proximity as a factor in building fantastic products, like you kind of like proximity of a team is just so powerful and so multi dimensional and the osmosis effect of just people talking about the problem. And the third person like say, like, listen to it, learning from it, or even having an idea and,

SPEAKER_20: you know, all these kinds of things. I didn't think it was replaceable, but clearly isn't it's incorrect, because the credible software and things are being 100% correct, we were wrong.

SPEAKER_02: Matt Mullenweg, Envision and 37 signals, Jason Fried, they were right. The problem was, I think, you need to have 100% participation in buying. And it was very hard to get that. But when everybody basically has a gun to their head, and it's like, you have to work from home, and we have to figure this out, because there is no choice, you can't get on a plane, you can't sell the software by being in a meeting, you can't, there's no whiteboard, figure it out, get a camera at home. This company, we're not

SPEAKER_40: pausing the company, we have to move forward. Yeah. And so I guess when learning on the other side, there is that the thing that was important for high quality product creation is high fidelity teamwork. And I think you kind of it's one of those things you get automatically by proximity, but you don't need proximity to do so, like, as long as everyone has, like good internet hookups, like reasonably good cameras, and it's just like, it's not like, you know, the angle, but like, you get on a call with everyone, and everyone's like, so it looks sort of up into the nose. And, and, and, and, you know, like, if you can, if you can actually get a small team together, where everyone has the right kind of setup, and the software is there to support it, and you have some, like, finangles way of having something that works almost as well as a whiteboard that people have

SPEAKER_22: sort of you like, I mean, this is the worst the software will ever be for remote work right now. And then like, this moment, it will only get better from here. And it's quite, you can, with all the right kind of boundary conditions, you can put some really, really high fidelity, high context teamwork together. And that works really, really well. So that's, that's been fascinating.

SPEAKER_09: What did you learn as a manager of people remote? Because my superpower was my ability to sit with

SPEAKER_02: somebody or take them for a walk, or have dinner with them. And my also superpower, like doing an interview was to be in the same room, and be able to connect with somebody by looking them in the eyes. I said, I will never interview somebody over zoom, or go to meeting or Skype, because it's just I felt like I couldn't have a real conversation. Here we are. This is like one of the best conversations I've had all year, like, and we figured we seem to have figured it out. But I'm wondering, like,

SPEAKER_09: in in the as a as a manager of what do you have 10,000 employees now? I mean, it's got to be

SPEAKER_151: 70,000. Not quite. Yeah, yeah, something 67,000. Yeah, 7,000 employees. Yeah, I mean, you have some

SPEAKER_09: number of direct reports, some number of meetings you used to do with groups, like, how did you adjust

SPEAKER_108: as a manager? What best practices have you adopted, created or improvised? I think, I mean, and the book

SPEAKER_40: on this is still being written, right? Like, this is, it is an extremely challenging time to for all

SPEAKER_20: leaders, I mean, for absolutely everyone, but the leaders, especially because I think the bottom

SPEAKER_22: dropped out on a lot of the tools we've had, like, I, a lot of situations that just arise, and, you know, people disagree with each other, got resolved by, you know, everyone getting in a room and just

SPEAKER_20: starting from the top and saying, Hey, all of us agree that planet Earth is a pretty good place to live.

SPEAKER_83: And then, you know, like, you just sort of take it from big picture. And then you walk down the list

SPEAKER_19: and say, Okay, and here we arrive, you think we should do the package management of our application this way? And you think we should, you know, like, after this, everyone's like, you can do this in one room, but like doing in a zoom, zoom call feels weird. And so I think this is the interesting thing.

SPEAKER_40: I think we just like, at least I, I can't speak for myself, but maybe I've heard this from other

SPEAKER_22: people. So maybe in general, like, the culture hasn't built correctly around video chat before, right? Like, and people who study the history of other communication devices, like the telephone, actually point out that this is a very ordinary thing, like, people used to calling someone ended up,

SPEAKER_40: um, I mean, saying things like this, you know, this is political residence or something like this after

SPEAKER_19: picking, you know, and there was an entire formality, like, it's, so I think, I think the interesting thing is, eventually people realized, you know what, let's do telephone, kind of a way we just talk to

SPEAKER_22: each other. And I think a lot of people realized, hey, there's no other way to go. So let's just do

SPEAKER_19: video chats, kind of a way we used to do things together. And all these assumptions about what

SPEAKER_14: works and what doesn't like, I mean, maybe we had to adjust a bit in certain certain things. But it kind of worked. It kind of worked. You know what I did, I just put my foot down with people. And I said,

SPEAKER_09: you have to have an ethernet connection on your computer, you have to have a proper microphone,

SPEAKER_02: because I'm a podcaster. So I know what a proper microphone is, you have a proper microphone, you got to get that goddamn ethernet cable, no Wi Fi, because it's garbage, you need to have a proper processor. So you need to have a computer from the last 12 months, 24 minimum, and you get a digital SLR and a proper light ring. And you and I have these perfect setups. And then of course, zoom and

SPEAKER_09: and other platforms have really revved on the software to make it really tight. And now here we

SPEAKER_92: are. And then people also know how to use their mute key when they're not talking. And they know the quick key all day, you know, toggle your sound on and off if you're not talking and how and how to like

SPEAKER_09: run an agenda. But I had to learn how to manage people. I just told everybody, listen, I don't

SPEAKER_02: want to manage anybody anymore. I don't actually get enjoyment out of out of it. If everybody could just put here's an idea. And I basically gave everyone an idea just at the start of the day,

SPEAKER_85: put in slack what you're working on one bullet or three, I don't care what it is. And at the end of the day, when you're done, reply to that same one with what you got done. And if you need help with

SPEAKER_67: them, I call it the SOD and the EOD start of day, end of day, and then I say on Friday, and it should take no more than five minutes. That's the key. And then on Fridays, just give me your EOW and share it with the entire group transparently. And don't put in silly stuff like did email or had lunch. Just put the major points that impact the business. And it's not a contest for whose is the longest. It's a contest of, you know, if anything, how productive you want to be in the company, what kind of contribution you make, but then also tell us, it's a contest to see who can inform everybody and how in sync we can be with the least amount of meetings, right? So it's almost like a video game of how can we just do less, but be more informed, right? And it's worked some people that doesn't work. And what I found too, is some people weren't actually doing a lot. And then there was this like pervasive fear, like, Oh my god, I'm a great culture person in the office.

SPEAKER_85: Like I'm, you know, very affable and people like me and you know, I'm great by the water cooler,

SPEAKER_67: having a cup of coffee, but am I actually plowing through stuff to get us to a goal? No. And so it kind of actually made people aware of who in the organization was actually carrying the bricks, and who was building the wall. And then other people were kind of sitting on the side like getting coffee for everybody, which could be a value pursuit, don't get me wrong. But I did find this has become a great, um, it makes things more, I don't know if you find this, but it kind of levels the playing field for a lot of the, the newer employees, because everybody's the same, like you

SPEAKER_85: and I have the same zoom window as CEOs, as the same size as everybody else. It's not like it's proportional, as opposed to an in person meeting. Yeah. Hey, everybody, I thought I would bring

SPEAKER_67: Christina Cassioppo. I pronounced it correct. I'm hoping Chris got it. Yep. All right. You're

SPEAKER_148: the founder of Vanta. People have been hearing your ads on the pod for the last year. And I thought it'd be fun to have you on and you to explain why you created Vanta, and what sock two is and why it's important people get it right. So let's start with what is sock two, for people who are just

SPEAKER_177: realizing they have to become sock two compliant for sure. So sock two is at a high level. It's sort of a customer asking you to prove your security. So if you've heard about one, it probably comes, you're probably a B2B company and you're, you're doing sales and somebody asks you, Hey, can I have your sock two report? Or, you know, Hey, can you go through security review? Or they usually don't phrase it like this, but Hey, I'm going to put a bunch of data in your product. And I want to know if you're actually going to be secure or leak it over the internet. So they ask you to get a sock two report.

SPEAKER_72: We know it's 20,000 to 50,000, maybe even a hundred thousand. You know, if you roll your own, you do it manually. What is the average Vanta customer spend?

SPEAKER_177: Yeah. So the average Vanta customer spends less, so kind of 10,000 on up from there, but then even in terms of the cost savings, it's a ton of time savings. So rather than kind of giving up an engineer or two for a year, which is just super painful, no matter how large your company is, it cuts it down to can be 20, 40 hours on the low end.

SPEAKER_182: All right. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming on. And you've been very nice to our audience, giving them a thousand dollars off, which is a really significant and generous offer. Go to Vanta.com slash twist, V-A-N-T-A.com slash twist to get a thousand dollars off your sock too. Thanks, Christina. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_40: No, I think it's fascinating. I, again, it's going to be hard to suss out the second order effects of

SPEAKER_22: this. I, I'm, um, I think I'm, I'm, I'm really optimistic on the, uh, like, uh, like all remote

SPEAKER_20: book. I think, I think the best companies in the world will be built completely remotely with, with, with, with no, um, uh, like at least no state of headquarters. I, I don't, I think they've like being together in person is still going to be very, very important. Um, but, uh, more deliberate,

SPEAKER_187: I think. How, how do you plan on doing it when you get out of this? I know Canada's been a little slow on the vaccine. I don't know what you guys are doing up there. What is that about? Like, how

SPEAKER_02: does, how did cat, I mean, you guys seem to do a great job of controlling the virus, but you didn't plan ahead to buy the vaccines. And then we did a horrible job in America at controlling the virus. And we did 3 million people yesterday, which I think, what do you have 30 million people in Canada?

SPEAKER_191: Yeah, something for them. Yeah, something.

SPEAKER_67: We did 10% of Canada yesterday. Yep.

SPEAKER_20: I, I mean, I don't know, I'm not, not an expert, uh, like at this. I, uh, but, um, I mean, uh, leverage certainly helps the United States. Like, uh, you know, once the U S really, really, really, really, really wants vaccines, I think, um, yeah, a lot of vaccines go to us. So we have a lot of

SPEAKER_83: money and tanks. Lots of, uh, lots of, uh, uh, uh, people to call who, uh, will really react to, uh,

SPEAKER_20: of a strong inquiry. I think that really helps with getting, getting a lot of vaccines. Um,

SPEAKER_196: so, uh, I, I, I don't know if that's a big factor. I, I, I don't have a line on the truth.

SPEAKER_148: What, um, well, putting that aside, um, let's assume everybody gets vaccinated. This thing goes

SPEAKER_85: away in the next couple of months, which is what's happening here in America. Thankfully, finally, um, what are you going to do? Let's say we're in September and there's zero cases or close to zero and zero deaths. What's your first, you know, sort of move as the CEO of this giant company. Do you bring everybody together for a big party? And do you start thinking about letting people

SPEAKER_197: come back to the office? How do you, or have you even started that planning or is it just better to

SPEAKER_40: heads down and not even think about it? Yeah. I mean, lots, lots of conversations about it. It's not clear to us right now exactly how to, how to do it. It's, um, uh, we will definitely,

SPEAKER_22: I mean, it's so easy for us tech companies to, to, to work remotely together, uh, with everything we've built for ourselves. Um, so we should not rush to be the first ones back together because I mean, that comes with risks. Now, if the risk is zero, it's a different situation. Um, so I, I will

SPEAKER_09: find out. You have some giant headquarters you're paying tens of millions of dollars a year for, I'm assuming if you were housing thousands of people, have you gone back to it and how depressing

SPEAKER_100: is it to, to write that check every month for this giant office space that is empty. It's gotta be

SPEAKER_06: infuriating or is it like just some weird, like, you know, and some costs, I, I guess, you know,

SPEAKER_94: you gotta be fatalistic about it. It's, it's certainly not helping us much right now, but, uh, it's yeah, I'm not, I don't want to think too much about it. I'm sorry. I mean, some people were like,

SPEAKER_02: think about like, I think it was Pinterest in San Francisco, like decided to build an HQ, right? Which is like, what do you do when you go public and you get a big, you know, uh, war

SPEAKER_09: chest of capital? You're like, I should build some awesome place for us all to get together. They build the mothership for Apple and they just paid like a hundred million dollars to cancel it. They

SPEAKER_196: paid a kill fee to cancel it. It's probably saved a lot of money doing that. I mean, I think that's the way they want to go. Yeah. Can you imagine writing that check?

SPEAKER_213: It's a hundred million dollars for me never to set foot in this office. That's gotta be the,

SPEAKER_100: that's the worst speeding ticket you'd ever pay. I know. Here's a hundred million dollars

SPEAKER_78: to, to, to, to buy the right for me to not get the thing, but, uh, yeah, I'd like to cancel my

SPEAKER_217: order from my Ferrari. Here's a million dollars. Oh, well. Don't bring it. Oh, well.

SPEAKER_19: Um, I actually, to be fair though, like, I mean, that, that shows a significant, like the sunk cost fallacy thing is a real thing, right? Like if you're able to pull that off,

SPEAKER_20: like make that hard choice, if it's the right thing, then, then like, I mean, that's, that's a really good indication that that's a very well-run company. Um, because, uh, you know, again,

SPEAKER_17: it's hard to do these things. I mean, the sunk cost fallacy is so, so real, isn't it? You, you,

SPEAKER_187: you face it as a developer all the time, right? And you're, you started as a developer. Do you

SPEAKER_108: still write code ever? Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. You miss being, you know, 12 hour day coder.

SPEAKER_52: That's a really good question. Um, I, I think the 12 hour day coding has never been a goal,

SPEAKER_22: but sometimes happened just because there wasn't anything more interesting going on on planet Earth than figuring something out, right? Like it's, um, so in, in a way that's not the objective, but, um,

SPEAKER_40: I love coding. I, I find, I think, I think we are all, I think the narrative around programming is more interesting than people realize just because really since blacksmithing, we never really had a craft that makes whether the craftsmen actually make their own tools, right? And I think there's, um, um, um, uh, you know, that, you know, the, who, who said it like, uh, first we make two of the tools

SPEAKER_22: and then the tools make us. Um, yeah. I mean, yeah. I think. I mean, primates make tools,

SPEAKER_92: right? Like you see these gorillas take sticks and stick them into the anthill to get the bugs out to

SPEAKER_22: eat, to get the heads out to eat. It's a, it's a thing. It's purely cause and effect for like, like for, for primary purposes, like, I think, I think what, I think what we do is, uh, I mean, but, uh, we are genetically no different in the last 70,000 years, right? We've been, uh, like, so, so the difference between, um, us back then and now is really the tools we have available that, like, and the stories we tell each other, right? And, um, it's amazing that you can put people on the moon, um, or, you know, go to space on reusable rockets and do all these things and have internet, um, based on just tool building upon tool building. And then, and of course, um, software is like the ultimate, uh, play of leverage because you have this zero marginal cost copying, um, uh, infrastructure that everyone on planet earth can add to and, and constantly come up with, try to come up with better ideas. So I'm, I'm like, this is the thing that I'm really, really, excited of us by and why I love being a programmer because the leverage you get as an individual being able to build something that then is available to everyone is just enormous, right? Like, obviously Shopify is a good example of that. Um, and, uh, I, you know, I think that's like,

SPEAKER_40: that's really, really important. There's so many stories about, you know, what you said earlier, uh, is, is totally true about, you know, ethernet plus, uh, like DSLR camera and an SM 7B microphone. Um, but in a way, like we need technologies to come in and make it so that someone can buy a single thing and then plug it into one thing and then all of this needs to work well. Right. And we need to marshal the complete infrastructure that we've built around machine learning to, to, to, to take teeny microphones and make them sound good. And we need to, uh, you know, like all of this, like there needs to be like significant movement to make the setup you and I have here, uh, which we can do because we're tinkerers, um, available to everyone. This kind of democratization of good

SPEAKER_235: things is important. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's really interesting to, I love the,

SPEAKER_09: the thought of the compounding nature of software, and it's also happening in hardware. Now, if you just think about what happened with the smartphone revolution, if we hadn't, an apple hadn't produced an Android phones, billions of smartphones and billions of batteries and billions of charging stations and got obsessed with how fast can we charge these phones?

SPEAKER_85: It would have never trickled down into your Tesla. And that would have never trickled into your quadcopter. And now the quadcopters, I don't know if you said Joby is going public, Reid Hoffman's taking a public Mark Pincus. I said, read on the pod talking about it. That would have not been possible. If Elon haven't made a million cars with those battery packs,

SPEAKER_67: because now the battery management and fast charging allows you to have a V toll. So you're going to be able to go from Ottawa to the airport in a V toll, you know, and it's going to have eight

SPEAKER_85: rotors and it's going to like, I would never get in a helicopter. Those things are death traps, but a V toll with eight rotors and to go out and it's just the software is like, Oh, two rotors are out. Just redeploy the energy and it's done.

SPEAKER_09: And it feels like that's happening with software so quickly. I mean, startups today, I had a startup that built a million dollar business basically on Slack, like just charging people subscriptions to go into a Slack room. And I was like, there's no, you don't have any developers. So no, no, we just charge people on this Stripe account to go to this landing page. And then they are in a Slack instance and we built some glue with, you know, Zapier or this and that, the no code startups I'm seeing, which actually is what Shopify is right too. And people can build an online store with no work. What's the story with your international expansion? Is that, is that where the growth is coming from now for you? Or is it just in continuing to add products and services for the existing base?

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. I mean, the, the, the growth is just, I, again, it's, it's, I think it's, it's digital retail time on planet earth because of COVID. So, uh, it's really kind of everywhere. And, um, uh, I mean,

SPEAKER_22: a lot of, a lot of the reason why people use Shopify now is because of this idea around multi-channel, which really just like we've worked with Facebook and TikTok and everyone, right. Um, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to help, uh, bring commerce into, into, into these channels. Um, but there's a lot,

SPEAKER_40: there's a lot of things going on. I think to, to, to, to, to like the theme that you talk about with hardware, like there's sort of a commoditization of particular, um, uh, units of hardware, which

SPEAKER_22: makes them cheaper and then, uh, they can be used, but there's almost a more money, maybe not more

SPEAKER_40: interesting, but to me, like it's a really tangible story. I want making more, more things software

SPEAKER_22: addressable. Like this is like MRNA is, is, is it makes something software addressable or quasi software addressable. I think TSMC, the company is made, basically made hardware, uh, chips, software addressable. Like you can buy a license from, um, from, um, and a couple of methods and, and, and you can get a chip made, uh, stamped out pretty quickly. And, and, um, it's just, uh, we,

SPEAKER_125: we are doing, um, uh, a lot of this around, uh, uh, fulfillment warehouses. Like we are building software to make fulfillment warehouses, software addressable in a, in a proper standardized way.

SPEAKER_17: Do you have warehouses? Do you, yeah. So you have warehouses and then I guess the,

SPEAKER_85: there's all these companies doing shipping robots that move the pallets around and pack the boxes.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah, exactly. Stuff. Exactly. Exactly. This is the kind of thing we ought to do and, and work with

SPEAKER_22: a lot of other people who are doing these kinds of things, because we, we really think that, um, a lot is going to happen once, um, um, the various fulfillment warehouse, which there are a lot of, um, can be addressed by API in general. And then you can build very, very intelligent systems on top of that, uh, to, um, like we have something called the Shopify fulfillment network that, um, um, um,

SPEAKER_40: basically abstracts the entire, like, just like payments, it abstracts the entire, like, logistics away from people, right? In such a way that you just send products to nebulous product,

SPEAKER_22: product cloud, and then they show up, they have, they are ordered. And that's kind of, that's a degree by which entrepreneurs want to think about logistics.

SPEAKER_09: You know, it's interesting. You say this, the number of people doing direct to consumer product companies has gone a hundred X since five years ago. I used to see like, you know, Dollar Shave Club and Casper, Warby Parker, whatever. And now every time we do a new accelerator class, I get like 20 of them. And I'm like, how are you doing this? Like, well, I have like somebody in China makes the hoodies, and then they send them to this fulfillment center, they have my Shopify

SPEAKER_251: store. And then I put it on Facebook and I connected and yeah, I sold 70,000. I was talking to somebody who sold 60, $70,000 worth of hoodie in a month. I'm like, how did you do it?

SPEAKER_09: She's like, well, I contacted like five influencers and then I, you know, ordered them and they shipped them to a fulfillment center, one of yours and boom, they're in business. And I'm like, wow, that's fascinating. So then by making all of that transparent, this woman was able to

SPEAKER_85: focus just on what the hoodie should be. And now she's got a hoodie that's got like, um, her innovation was to put silk in the inside of the hoodie so it doesn't mess up your hair. And women have gone crazy for these and she makes whatever 40 bucks a hoodie and she's just printing money and she doesn't need to know anything about fulfillment or payments or building a website or even making the hoodie. She just needs to know like, this is what the hoodie

SPEAKER_40: should be. Yeah. Pretty wild. So it's pretty wild. And it's like, it's, it's, it's almost again, jumping around in time here, but like, do you remember the, um, uh, I think Kevin Kelly wrote it, the, the essay around a thousand true fans? Of course. Yes. It was one of the seminal ones that

SPEAKER_09: broke our brains. He was like, if you just have a thousand fans in the world, you'll never be poor. You can always make a living. Like comedians can go with your Joe Rogan. If Joe Rogan lost everything and just had 1000 true fans who he could charge 10 bucks to come to a comedy show,

SPEAKER_40: he can make $10,000 anytime he needs to. Right. And that's a, that's very, very, very different vision for, um, like the direction the internet could go. Right. And in, in, in somewhat like,

SPEAKER_22: depending on how you observe the internet and in, in some cases, in some ways it went against that idea, right? Like it's, it's very much, it ended up like most parts of it sort of got, um, uh, and ended up aggregating together to one player. And, um, I think, I think it's really, really, really important that we preserve the opportunity space on it. Um, so that, uh,

SPEAKER_125: this 1000 true fans thing can, can, can work its magic because I think it's really, really important for economies and, and, and, and, and so on.

SPEAKER_09: Well, also, I mean, people having the ability to have fulfillment in life and to not be, you know, a wage slave, or just be worried about their future. The, I'm really fascinated by what's going on with like Patreon only fans. Yeah. And now Twitter's like, you know what Jack's like, I don't know if I like advertising. I think I'm just going to let you subscribe to people.

SPEAKER_85: Then I don't know if you've seen this on YouTube, but a lot of YouTube channels now, it's like every other video you have to be a member and you can not, you can subscribe or you can join. And there's two buttons on YouTube. Now I don't know what's going on with creators on YouTube, but back to the 1000 true fans and sub stacks. Another great example. You get 1000 fans to pay you $10 a month. As a journalist, you're making $120,000 a year. You're giving 12,000 to sub stack. You net 108,000 and you're getting paid 70 80,000 by tech crunch. Who's not going to be free? Who's not going to take

SPEAKER_40: that deal? I mean, it's, it's sustainable, right? It feels sustainable. I think so. I mean, it depends on, I mean, it depends on always what you do. But again, like the nice, this is the beautiful thing that the 1000 true fans is like, you like, you're not going to make a fan out of

SPEAKER_22: someone unless you provide them with significantly more value, like, I mean, higher utilitarian value, then I think, I guess $10 a month. So that's the exchange. And it's kind of there's a purity to

SPEAKER_40: transactions. That is, it's, there's a simplicity to it, like, it's a thing we have been doing, like exchanging something for value for for for for the via transaction for for cash is something we've been doing for 10s of 1000s of years, everyone gets it. It's it's if it's not too disintermediated through like a channel ownership and merchandises and limited shelf space. Like someone saying, Hey, I want you I am this thing you have, I'm buying this from you. And I'll do it again, especially,

SPEAKER_22: is like, it's a extremely potent way for you to vote for something needs to exist more in the world, right? And I think that's really, really, really, really important.

SPEAKER_09: It's so powerful, as you're saying, because back, you know, to Taleb, you know, you have skin in the game, right? I'm sure you've read some of his books. But this act of saying this has value in the world, here's the $10. Even if the object is not worth $10, you give people $10,000. I watched this, um, channel on YouTube after every Knicks game, that's the basketball team that I follow in New York. And

SPEAKER_02: this guy CP does a live stream after every Knicks game and between 2000 and 6000 fans coalesce, and they listen to him talk about the game. And then we asked him questions. And I kid you not in the chat room, they have these like super stickers. And people give $2 $5 $10. And I've seen people giving $100 $500 once $200 tickets. And I talked to him about it. And he's like, Yeah, you know,

SPEAKER_85: I could almost quit my day job working at this big financial firm if I wanted to. And they're not,

SPEAKER_67: they're just doing it optionally there. It's not like you have to do it in order to even consume the

SPEAKER_85: content. It's not a requirement. It's it's a it's a tip. And that's like the next level of this is like, wait a second, everybody's going to be like a Mandicci family. Like I just want this art to exist in the world. I'm going to sponsor it. And angel investing is is the next piece I think to fall

SPEAKER_74: if you just think about startups, what was your first round of funding? Do you remember?

SPEAKER_42: Yeah, I remember it. Well, first round of anyone external was, I mean, six years after company

SPEAKER_109: started like $7 million investment, like round of SMA leading. And so Bessemer put 7 million and the

SPEAKER_72: companies weren't at the time 10 million 20, maybe 20 something. Right. So they buy a third of the company for 7 million. That's worth 30 billion today or something.

SPEAKER_217: Something like that. Pretty good investment. Yeah. Well done Bessemer. I think you returned every fund in the history of Bessemer. Do those guys, did they send you, I don't know, bottle of wine or something?

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. Well, I mean, honestly, I don't think I would have made it to this point without like, I really like, especially, um, uh, generally Jeremy and Trevor, who made a huge difference. So

SPEAKER_282: I know it's like unpopular to, I don't know.

David Friedberg: I think actually that is the right take, which is if somebody supports you early and it pays off.

SPEAKER_02: I mean, any founder I've ever talked to has been thrilled to see the bet pay off. It's like, thank you. We wouldn't be here if we didn't have that capital. Uh, but the point I was about to make is as we make, um, software and networks that just make it frictionless to vote with your dollar.

SPEAKER_09: And this is why I think the, the one piece of crypto I really love is the frictionless voting. Imagine if that 7 million was 700,000 people for $10 and they, and they got the 10 X return,

SPEAKER_92: the 10,000 X return and you made each one of them a million or something. I mean, that would have been even more wonderful or equally wonderful. And that's where I think the

SPEAKER_85: world's going to get to is imagine somebody post a startup idea, like on a Kickstarter, Indiegogo or the syndicate or angel list and people could vote globally, but will be limited to $10 per

SPEAKER_02: vote. We could vote every day on ideas. We want to see in the world and big ideas. Don't, you know,

SPEAKER_72: many hands makes for light work. This ability to make small bets is just so powerful. I'm, I'm so

SPEAKER_284: encouraged. I love that vision. I hope you're building this.

SPEAKER_85: I mean, the problem in the United States is I am building it with this thing called the syndicate, but the problem is you have to be an accredited investor right now and there's all kinds of caps and limits. So we're really trying to protect people, but we're limiting the, you know, the arc of humanity because, and I think ICOs were just this. It was people making these crazy bets. Unfortunately, the people involved in it were maybe less than upstanding, or they actually weren't builders. They were more just charlatans in, in most of my cases. So the company,

SPEAKER_09: if I remember correctly, when we talked was making 20, 30, 40 million bucks a year. 2020,

SPEAKER_287: you did $2.9 billion. Is that right? Yeah. Oh, my Lord and profit. Yeah. Yeah. Profitable.

SPEAKER_20: Um, like 1.7 million merchants. Um, wow. I mean, talking about the 40,000 that people assumed would be

SPEAKER_22: existing. Um, it's, it's, it's, it's big thing like on, on Black Friday, uh, Cyber Monday is our

SPEAKER_20: busiest weekend to sort of our, you know, uh, I mean, so our super bowl basically, um, uh, is, uh, we, we, we, we did fight over $5 billion of, uh, sales, like in those, in those couple of days.

SPEAKER_22: Um, if I was super gratifying, just because again, like there's a lot of very small businesses behind this. And, um, it's, it, it just was really like, it's, it's such a meaningful thing to be able to help so many, like building a business model around helping others. It's really good.

David Friedberg: So it's very grateful for that. It makes it easy for you to hire people and have people stay at the

SPEAKER_09: company because you're enabling all these people to make money every day and make a living just like eBay did. Or I think Airbnb has that same kind of feeling every day. It's like, wow, we empowered these hosts to pay their mortgage every month in some cases, or, you know, if they got laid off and they were doing this as any job, but literally doubled revenue from 2019 to 2020. Is that right?

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. Like what's the entire retail retail sector got put, like put forward in time five years or 10

SPEAKER_22: years or something, something between those two things. It's like, you look at the course and it

SPEAKER_296: just, it's, it's a straight jump, uh, right with COVID. So, and so that will taper off a bit or it will

SPEAKER_187: level is that, has that leveled off now? Or is it just still going parabolic? It's hard to know which direction it's going. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I watched, I don't know if

SPEAKER_09: you saw Disney today hit an all time high. It's like the idea that it's so interesting what happens during a pandemic is it, it forces people to get so focused. Disney is like, well, I guess our North

SPEAKER_02: Star is now Disney plus. There's really no discussion. People are stuck at home. There's no movie theaters. There's no, I mean, I guess people could buy merchandise, but they can't come to parks. They can't go to movie theaters. Everything has to be Disney plus. Now the entire company got reorienter into Disney plus, and I think they hit 80 or 90 million members in a way. That's what happened with you too. Correct? Yeah, exactly. I, I, by, by the way, I, I think this is another, we talked earlier

SPEAKER_22: about the, you know, sort of the lasting changes of, of COVID. I mean, I, there's an entire conversation around cities losing monopoly on the best jobs in the world, which is again, a fascinating thing that'll make a lot of changes. But like, I think one thing it did for at least the companies, but I mean, for, for a lot of companies is everyone had to kind of re-derive all the things they were doing, um, from first principles, um, at the beginning of this, right? Like everyone,

SPEAKER_40: you know, I don't think Disney plus would have gotten to get the primacy that it now has with, with Disney, um, without COVID at least so quickly, you know, there's a lot of shenanigans going on in large

SPEAKER_20: companies, especially when one thing is sort of threatening another. Um, but, uh, you know, you know, in our, in our case, we really, we, we, we said, let's zero budget, everything we're doing.

SPEAKER_22: Let's throw all, all the plans. Let's re-derive the projects we've got going. It was actually kind

SPEAKER_19: of amazing. I went back to the list of things they cut at the beginning of COVID about a year ago. And I now realize, like, I thought we were focused, but we kind of weren't, right? Like it's, it's amazing how many small things, um, made sense when you sort of organically, like we did this, and then we did this and we did this and we did this. And, um, I, I know how we got there, but like,

SPEAKER_22: that doesn't actually help merchants anymore, which is the only thing that matters, right? To like, in our case, we are like, this is one thing we want to, like, we want to make entrepreneurship trivial on the internet. And that's, um, that's, that's important. Um, so yeah, it, it really helps. It really helps. It's, it goes back to, you know, but it goes back to, uh, Taleb's, uh, other book Anti-Fragile, which I think is overlooked. I think it's his best book. Oh, it's fantastic. I mean,

SPEAKER_85: you figure out what's anti-fragile in a moment like this for sure. Yes, exactly. And home delivery, you know, I mean, that, thank God, uh, you know, Uber's anti-fragile. Uber was the, the, the penultimate example for me, or maybe Disney as well. Because if people can't go to a theme park or the movies, they have to stay home. And we now have Disney plus, if people don't take an Uber to go out to dinner, or go take an Uber to the airport to go somewhere, they order Uber Eats. It's like, wow, which I mean, you thrive no matter what happens in chaos, and your business is anti-fragile

SPEAKER_09: as well. I mean, if people go out, they need to buy their camping gear to go camping. If they stay

SPEAKER_58: home, they need to buy something to entertain themselves or keep their house clean or cook.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. And, and then, and on the other side, if people, if you, if you have a business and you,

SPEAKER_40: no one can get to your store anymore, and then, um, you need, you need a way to like get help. I mean, in, in our case, there's amazing stories of people getting together to, to, to actually get

SPEAKER_22: all their local businesses online so that people could purchase from them, uh, on the cup side pickup.

SPEAKER_40: And, and, and home delivery fronts just so that they could actually help their local businesses

SPEAKER_22: survive. And, and there was a huge move to buy local again. And I, I mean, I think this actually really worked in, in, in, in, in, in, in our favor, or at least it's really, uh, um, consonant with the story we want to tell because, you know, if no one buys from your local business,

SPEAKER_86: but local business go away. And, and, and then you don't have that ability anymore to, to, to, to walk there and, and purchase things even in, in the best of times. And it's hard enough

SPEAKER_311: to make a small business work in, in, in, in normal times. So helping them through the pandemic

SPEAKER_187: was really important. Think about how anti-fragile they are coming out of this.

SPEAKER_09: Yes. They had mastered how to run an in-person store. Then they were forced to master doing online when they had, they probably didn't even have an email address for their business. They barely knew how to keep their Yelp profile open. Now they come back to the table and say, well, we can open up the store again. Do we want to do that? Or we would rather just grow this business 10% a month because the store was growing 10% a year and an online store can easily grow 10% a month, but an in-person store cannot grow 10% month over a month. That's just not possible. It's just, you can't change the demographics of the area. You might be able to grow 1% a month or something like that, but you're not growing 10%. And now they have both options, right? That's what's going to be real. What do you think happens to all these storefronts, if physical storefronts, all these restaurants, what do you, and all these office spaces,

SPEAKER_187: because we're talking about cities here? What, how do they, how do we redeploy office space in the world that people are not going to use, or they're going to use, you'll probably go back to work, but use 10% or 20% of it, right?

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I think the storefronts, I think they stay, I, I, I, I mean, this is my hope. And anyway,

SPEAKER_22: I think, um, what, what I think would be the best, if we could eliminate the either or decision, because, um, and I think software has some like role in this, um, you know, keeping multiple systems up to date is really, really hard, but if it can all be powered, like from like, if it's all kind of perfectly in sync everywhere, like, um, then it's, uh, it's actually not that hard to, to, to run a physical location outside of, uh, you know, being able to staff it and, and, and so on. And, um, I think people will expect businesses to show up in everywhere. Like, like you, like people want you to have, um, uh, like a, like a Facebook shop, if you click on something on Facebook and, or an Instagram, and then, uh, you know, like a, like a physical store and, uh, um, an online store and all these kinds of things like meet people where they are is important. Uh, and I think now small and medium

SPEAKER_20: businesses are actually really well set up for this on, on the side of, uh, corporate real estate. I, I, I, I really don't know. I, I, I think it will be fine because it got underbuilt. It got really tight. Like, I mean, I, and, and only in other cities I was, we, we were growing in like, uh, Montreal and Toronto and Ottawa and, and, and Waterloo and so on. And like, we were struggling

SPEAKER_22: finding space everywhere. And so I think, um, I think, I think there'll be a pressure valve. Like,

SPEAKER_320: it'll take the pressure off in San Francisco. It's, it's, it's basically over. I mean, we have so

SPEAKER_85: much office space and rents went down a third, basically, or more. And I think it's going to keep going down. I mean, it's really, I moved to San Francisco and the Bay Area five years ago, because I was like, I want to see if I could be the best angel investor ever. I think I need to be

SPEAKER_72: there. I've invested in more companies remotely. I've never met the founders. And I'm, I feel like I'm making better decisions by not meeting them in person, because it's all due diligence and no showmanship. So you eliminate the sizzle from it. And everything just immediately gets down to brass tacks. What's the growth? Who are the customers? How much do you charge? And nobody wants to be on zoom for more than 15 or 20 minutes. So you can see three times as many companies,

SPEAKER_85: people like I gotta get off this call. This is like making me mental being on zoom all day.

SPEAKER_09: It's a it's, it's really gonna, the other thing I find super interesting, you, you benefited being in Canada with a different salary structure, but people were getting paid typically 30 40% more to locate in San Francisco. And in the venture community was getting impossible to get some top flight, you know, management team member to join your startup income because they said, I just don't want to be in San Francisco. I'm sorry, I just don't want to pay. You know, I want to have a house and want to have a backyard. I, I can't afford to live there no matter how much you pay me. And it's just too arduous and painful and private schools and everything. Now, this whole concept of like, somebody in San Francisco gets paid $100,000 and somebody in, you know, Ottawa gets paid 50,000 for the same work,

SPEAKER_187: I think it just all levels off to 60k, you know, or 75k, whatever the number is, between these things are, how do you deal with that salary? Do you have the salary differential by

SPEAKER_14: city? And have you had to deal with that yet? I mean, this is a complex conversation. And in some

SPEAKER_40: cases, you just had to kind of like, we had to pay some additions, like, like, almost it depends on top. For like, in San Francisco, for instance, just because it just wasn't possible otherwise. And I think, I think the salary thing is sort of a sideshow. I think this is gonna, I think you're

SPEAKER_22: totally right. It will normalize globally. I don't know exactly where it's going to meet.

SPEAKER_326: Globally too, right? I didn't even think of that. I was just thinking of the US and Canada.

SPEAKER_22: I think this is I this is going to be very, like, again, the second order effects, even of that are kind of fascinating to to consider ever even considered that people living

SPEAKER_09: in Costa Rica, with a cost of living a $500 a month for their renting a house versus 15,000

SPEAKER_85: a month in the Bay Area versus 4000 a month, you know, in Canada. Yeah, I mean, if you want to go

SPEAKER_20: into further future, think about Atlantic Ocean with a Starlink hookup, like in international waters. And so I think I think the next 10 years will be sufficiently weird for all of us nerds to just kind of like, like, like it keeps keep things interesting. We will see people do things that are like, completely sci fi right now. I mean, literally, Peter Thiel could buy

SPEAKER_85: an old cruise ship or a an aircraft carrier, put it in the middle of the Pacific or Atlantic or dock it somewhere, make his own sovereign state like he was

SPEAKER_332: He had some like, didn't he have plans like this?

SPEAKER_85: There was a sea, there was a sea island company he invested in that was going to try to find an oil rig.

SPEAKER_92: Yeah, that was basically a sea land or like a decade ago. Yeah, that actually is going to happen now

SPEAKER_78: because of Starlink. Yeah. Well, I don't know, but it could, right? Like, it's because you can get

SPEAKER_40: the hookup. But apart from that, like, again, cities are going to lose like, cities had a since the industrial revolution run with a monopoly on the good jobs. And then cities are very valuable. So this is something we probably shouldn't, like, we shouldn't lose because they are really important, networked cultural institutions of, you know, great progress. However, being able to work from like, on your own terms, for as good of a job as you can, you can find or find the right, like, you know, product market fit is a real thing. But like, I think you've talked about founder market fit before, which I loved. But there's really like, you know, person company fit, like, it's this sort of alignment of worldview, like, the externalities of success in this company

SPEAKER_19: do things that are meaningful to me, like, where you kind of like, can you can let yourself like, really, really, really, be into the company you work for. And that's really depending on your own values. And like, how often does this lineup at that particular company happens to just be in the

SPEAKER_40: city that you also happen to have built your life or your family is and, and then people have to compromise between their different variables? Why? Like, like, it's, it's, I think people are going to make much more, like better, like setups for themselves. I think that's going to be just a big

SPEAKER_186: mistake. Well, I mean, as well, rest in peace, Tony Hsieh, my good friend, who died last year. I don't

SPEAKER_108: know your friends with Tony or, you know, yeah, is really, really tragic. And I think the pandemic had a big part of it. It's very sensitive individual. And you just think about his philosophy

SPEAKER_186: of joy and happiness. And he built a company around that concept. He's truly a pioneer on so many

SPEAKER_329: levels. You know, first in terms of customer support, and just saying, we have to be ultra

SPEAKER_85: focused on those customers, and make them love us and go any amount of customer service you can do is allowed. Like, I remember him telling me that that was his basic like contest to see how crazy a customer service person could go. And he told me the story one time, I'll never forget it, that like

SPEAKER_187: ups or FedEx or whoever lost some shoes for a wedding. I don't know if I ever told you this story.

SPEAKER_09: And, you know, they were going to come on a whatever, a Wednesday or Thursday, the you know, the dinner is on Friday night, the wedding Saturday, and the their panic, they're trying

SPEAKER_02: to find him now it's Thursday, still missing. It's Friday, they're still missing. And one of the employees just takes his corporate card takes the shoes from the warehouse and gets on the next flight out of Vegas, shows up at the wedding, gives them to the puts the shoes on everybody, and then

SPEAKER_17: goes to the wedding, and then comes back. They lost, you know, $1,000 on setting those shoes. But the greatest story in the history of the company and what an amazing message to send to

SPEAKER_09: the rest of the company that there's things that are more important than just the unit economics,

SPEAKER_22: right? Totally. I think this is something that all the best companies have in common, like there isn't,

SPEAKER_40: like, everyone has to build a priority list of things that are meaningful to them. And money and

SPEAKER_22: revenue will have to show up somewhere because like their companies. But like, I think putting

SPEAKER_20: it number one spot is incredibly overrated. It's big, there's, we talk about this internally, they're like, we have like, number one priority is, let's go build the best product we can possibly

SPEAKER_40: build. And then, you know, priority number two is, let's be, let's make some revenue so that we can do more of priority number one. And then actually, priority number three is never mix one and two, right? And so I think that's, if you really like look at, like, because that seems to be the commonality, right? It's like, there's a reason why this is done, like, why the company is built, and why that's standing for. And, yeah, there needs to be an engine, like, like, but you don't drive a car just to burn fuel, you burn, right? Yeah, you're not able to get some combustion engine.

SPEAKER_353: Yes. We're not opening the hood and being like, wow, look at how it's burning gas. It's like,

SPEAKER_196: where did it take us? Yeah. I mean, I guess, I guess there are people who do even that, like,

SPEAKER_354: but like, it's, it's, there are people who love those engines. Yeah. It's like, well,

SPEAKER_196: it relates to investing in that I was trying to explain this other day. I said,

SPEAKER_187: when I look back on my career, there'll be five companies that were 99% of the returns. And then

SPEAKER_09: there'll be 500 companies that I will have put more time into than the top five, much more time. And of those 500, 400, 450 will return zero. And those are the ones that will build my reputation. And that's what I'll be remembered for is, when those companies imploded, when they didn't work out, when the founder was sitting there, in the wreckage of their dream, laying everybody off,

SPEAKER_85: who called them on the phone? And who and who took them to dinner that night? You know, who took them for a walk and talk? When it was over, right? Or when they were struggling, that's really how, you know, and that really is separating one and two, right? One is how supportive

SPEAKER_72: can you be of the founder and two is, okay, we do need to get a return for our LPs. It's such a and then three don't mix those two, right? This is the best part of the podcast. This is why I do the podcast, Toby is because I've learned something every time that just changes my thinking is the

SPEAKER_85: power of a great conversation. I love podcasts. I think there's just you do an internal one, right? Yes, I do. Tell me about it. Are you ever thinking about releasing it public? My God, I'd love to, can I get a private RSS feed for that?

SPEAKER_40: What do you do on the internal Shopify pod? It's bi-weekly, like every two weeks, I release an episode. It's called Context. And it's just, it's literally about this. It's like, like the story you just told about that that Tony shared is a good example. There are like these sort of touchstone moments in a company's history where like, it's really valuable to just

SPEAKER_19: talk about which ways could we go? Which ways did we go? And why did we do it? What was considered? What did we get right? Like it's not always like this, but this is sort of ambition that I take people back into these high context situations, because I think through that people can get a much

SPEAKER_40: better sense for the process of the company building. And it gives me an opportunity to,

SPEAKER_20: because there's a thing called Chesterton's fence, which is also a fun story, but it basically, I shouldn't have invoked it right now. It's kind of hard to explain, but it basically,

SPEAKER_14: like it's a mental model that says like... It's second order thinking. It's second order thinking, exactly. But before you remove a fence, try to figure out why it was

SPEAKER_40: put there, because maybe it was put up in a hurry, and it's really not necessary, and you can just like change it. Or maybe there's a really good reason for it to be there, which you should figure out before you take it down, right? Yeah. And so, but a startup company, like a company of any company is full of fences that people look at

SPEAKER_19: and say, I don't know what, that doesn't make a lot of, you know, I'll be sure this should be there. Let's actually move this thing. And you know what? And all of a sudden, all the tigers come into the cup, put the fence back up. But like, it's a bit random to people, like which of the fence that we put up in a hurry,

SPEAKER_40: because we were like just trying to go 1000 miles a minute, or which fences we were very deliberate

SPEAKER_22: and very careful about. So, and you don't want to be a company where no one changes any fence, because when you're like, that's stasis, like that's putting cement into a company.

SPEAKER_40: So having people, like taking people who weren't there for the journey of, you know,

SPEAKER_22: what parts of this did we consider, which parts we did, did we have in a rush, I think it's valuable. And, and so I'm making the sound too grand. Sometimes we just also talk about like some

SPEAKER_365: random things and mental models and thinking about thinking is really the art of scaling these

SPEAKER_72: businesses is to write, to be able to go back and say, how did I make that decision? And what were the,

SPEAKER_85: you know, in investing, it's the anti portfolio. And what do you call counterfactual, I guess would be, you know, what would happen? You know, if, if you killed Hitler, the baby, or if you, you know, if the Nazis had won the world, whatever happened, like, Oh, my God, what's the counterfactual here, and in really understanding the archaeology of a company, now that you're 10 years old,

SPEAKER_72: people need or you're more than 10, right? You're like more like 15. Like, how did we get here is a

SPEAKER_85: really important discussion. And then I remember you talking about I heard on some other podcast.

SPEAKER_17: Um, you were talking about how everybody who comes to the company is like, Hey, why don't we build a portal like Amazon and put all the stores together? It's like, that's not our customer. That's their customer. Our customer is the store and the merchant. And if we start focusing on their customer, we just change customers. So you don't do that, right? But does that fence ever get? Do you ever think about that fence in a different way? Well, I mean, um, well, a lot, um, because I'm trying to

SPEAKER_22: make sure that I got this right. But like, I mean, the answer to the, Hey, let's build a marketplace

SPEAKER_40: thing, which is really like, it's, it's an obvious suggestion. Like I know where we keep getting it.

SPEAKER_19: Um, it's, it's, but it's, it's hard to explain. Hey, this is like, like, yes, this is also e-commerce, but that's an adjacency. That's, that's, it's an adjacent thing to the thing that we're trying to

SPEAKER_40: accomplish. There may be a path, which we are going down exactly the way, like on this journey we are on, where we build something that people can use in some way, but we're going to arrive there from a very different perspective of saying, Hey, let's make another internet version of this idea, right? Like we have to come there. The path dependence matters a lot. Um, but it's like, the answer is very subtle and, and, and, and the, the, the statement is very simple. Like it's a fortune cookie versus a textbook essay. And, um, I think like taking the textbook essay, compressing this into a conversation at a 15 minute, 20 minute podcast and, and, um, say like being able to refer to it when people come up with idea again, is actually really, really valuable.

SPEAKER_20: And so this is why I do, I do it. It's, I think it's, I think it's like other people have podcasts within the company as well, which I love listening to as well. So it's, it's, it's a, it's a good medium.

SPEAKER_182: Amazon bought your competitor cells. They tried to, Bezos tried to buy you at some point. Yeah.

SPEAKER_377: Maybe. Well, no, don't know. Not a good, not a story you want to tell.

SPEAKER_251: Not a story you want to tell. You, you declined, I guess, to be, let's, let's take Bezos out of it. You, you. Shopify never got bought. Yes. Shopify never get bought. We know that counterfactual. We know that factual. Yeah. Why didn't you sell to anybody? Because there were many times that people wanted to buy you. I'll take Bezos out of this, even though I might have some information.

SPEAKER_22: So the, um, uh, yeah, like just because it didn't, it didn't feel like that would be the right move in the journey, like we were on. And again, because money was never like number one anyway. So like, which, which seems like that's, but, but like, this is something I discuss whenever I talk with

SPEAKER_20: founders of companies that Shopify might look at buying, because I, I, I tend to, it's, it's, it's a, there's a funny dynamic where I tend to try to talk them out of it. Um, which is not actually a good approach. It leads to a lot less M and A than probably other sales pitches would.

SPEAKER_40: But like, I, I, I'm always very careful because, um, I, I tell them, um, the only way we should do this deal when I I'm buying your company is if both of us agree that your job as a founder of a company will be better the day after the purchase event before. And, and this can be true, right? Like, um, this, this is YouTube. Yeah, exactly. YouTube, like YouTube, Twitch are good examples of companies that could not like the way, uh, interchange, so not interchange, the way, um, peering agreements between ISPs works, like they could have never run the services, um,

SPEAKER_389: they probably fight the legal battle. I mean, it was going to be literally a hundred million

SPEAKER_191: dollars in legal bills. It would have worked. You're probably your problem. The reason is probably your primary reason. I was thinking too technical about it.

SPEAKER_85: Um, no, no, it's that reason as well. I mean, yeah. In another era, if you think back to that

SPEAKER_72: era of startups, we didn't actually think startups could be worth more than $10 billion or $20 billion.

SPEAKER_19: Because it's not, it isn't intuitive that they should, right? Because It makes no sense they should, yeah. Well, pattern recognition just, well, I mean, at least looking at history, right? Pattern recognition didn't send everyone astray because it did not have software, like the unreasonable, um, leverage that comes with software, especially software that enables more software is just like, what's the analogous of that? There isn't any, right? There

SPEAKER_02: is no such thing. It didn't exist prior in history. So it's, it's a completely rewriting of the boundaries. Evolution was so slow that we couldn't, I think we look at evolution as our like archetype, like, okay, humans evolved from monkeys, monkeys evolved from these things. And then we

SPEAKER_09: all came out of like tadpoles, like, and that takes 100 years, or 1000 years, or 100,000 years, we, we never thought like, these things could just compound so quickly. And everybody trying to compound, or I listen, we I took you for 80 minutes, which we'll keep it to an hour. I keep this is a problem. We you and I haven't seen each other in years. And we love talking to each

SPEAKER_02: other. So we'll do it again in a year. Anything? You're, you're obviously hiring lots of jobs.

SPEAKER_09: Who do you like to come work at Shopify? Who should come work at Shopify? We talked before about alignment and your life's work, who should come and be part of the mission at Shopify? And

SPEAKER_186: who do you who do you like to have in the company? What type of person?

SPEAKER_40: Yeah, I mean, that's, we love curious people really care. We love people who, I mean, especially people who actually build stores are always amazing, you know, like,

SPEAKER_22: I mean, obviously, this is not a CV, I'm trying to put together, but like, it's a place for people

SPEAKER_19: who are lifelong committed learners, right? Like, it's sometimes Shopify is sort of prefer to

SPEAKER_22: ingest as a book club masquerading as a public company. And it's like, it's a fascinating thing,

SPEAKER_40: just because I mean, for all sorts of reasons, but I'm very biased. Anyway, like,

SPEAKER_83: if people consider Shopify, I'm grateful. And so

SPEAKER_09: Yeah, all right, listen, if you if you're a considered person who likes to think about thinking, and you like to be of service to others, Shopify is a great place to go to work.

SPEAKER_02: Toby's a really considered guy. You're playing any video games or poker? Or

SPEAKER_187: what are you doing? You got a new video game you're playing? I know you're a StarCraft guy like me. I'm Protoss. I'm Protoss. Are you Zerg? You seem like a Zerg guy.

SPEAKER_98: I'm an Amazon guy. Yeah, I knew you were Zerg guy. I want to hold it against you.

SPEAKER_365: No, that's fine, man. I'm gonna I'm gonna turtle. I'm gonna put a bunch of cannons there. You can

SPEAKER_67: bring as much heat as you want. But once I get my cannons locked in, you're gonna lose a lot of

SPEAKER_361: resources trying to get past that turtling. Got it. I literally like my wife comes in, and she's like, you're 50 years old, you're playing StarCraft. I'm like,

SPEAKER_92: yes, all day long. All I do is talk to people for a living. And then I play StarCraft, and I put on a podcast, or I put on some Dire Straits live, obscure, you know, album from when

SPEAKER_85: he's playing in Munich, or Paris, or Barcelona, or Budokan. And I just lose myself for, you know, 20 minutes, 40 minutes playing a game that I've been playing for 20 years.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah, totally. And it's just like games. It's anyway, baby, we could talk for a long time about about games. I I'm a very pro and a pro VU games. That's what I mean. Not a pro player. I'm terrible.

SPEAKER_72: No, but no, these young kids are they're a whole different level. I tried playing that game they

SPEAKER_85: all play. That's like a real time strategy and with the characters, that's like Dungeons and Dragons, I forgot the name of it. God, it's the one they all play. But the number of quick keys, I couldn't

SPEAKER_46: even get through the more you're saying about like, why you love them. Finish your thought. Well,

SPEAKER_20: you thought about video games, video games are good. And again, I think one of the unifying themes of our conversation here, as sweeping as it was, going through various parts of time is important things of a future look like toys today, like the internet of the 90s, crypto, sometimes it probably doesn't look as much as a toy anymore. But like, I think some people think it's a toy. NFTs. NFTs, probably biohacking look like toys and just look like toys. It's, it's,

SPEAKER_40: it's really, really, really, really important. Like, if you want to understand the future, you have to understand today's toys. And if you want to find the most caring, like, I don't know,

SPEAKER_22: like aggressive is probably wrong, because the negative connotation, but there's like a hungry is better term. The hungriest, most interested in progress people are probably in the video game world, or in the crypto world. That's where they are right now. Right? And it just, it's, it's, it's, you do really well to study it. And it's not just for kids anymore, for sure.

SPEAKER_02: All right, listen, brother, I'll let you get back to work. I look forward to seeing you after this is all over. Let's go get some ramen or maybe me and Shabbath will come up and we'll see you will do

SPEAKER_419: like a besties podcast. Yeah, old, old, old for Shabbath too. Yeah, yeah, like, oh, it's super

SPEAKER_70: fun. We should totally do that. That would be super fun. All right, brother, continued success. And we'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups.