How to Live in Everyone Else's Future (with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke)

Hello, Acquired listeners. Since we did our episode on Shopify six years ago, they have turned into a giant public company. They went public in 2015 for less than $1.5 billion. Very cute by today's standards. They're worth nearly $200 billion now and doing about $10 billion a year in revenue. We've gotten to know Toby and the team pretty well since then, and Toby is an incredibly unique thinker. We were originally thinking...

Let's do an ACQ2 episode on Shopify's recent developments, sort of everything that's happened since, which ended up turning more into a philosophical conversation about the state of computing, how AI changes everything. and what's possible to build in the future because of AI. Yeah. We also got into some of the more insane moments for Toby as a CEO over the past few years, like when the company almost became a meme stock, going from...

trading around a 20x revenue multiple before COVID up to 70x, then crashing back down after COVID in SERP. Today, though, they're nearly back at an all-time high, but this time... Because the business and the revenues are actually doing great, not because of a COVID and Zurb-fueled bet on the future. Yes. So please enjoy our conversation with the founder and CEO of Shopify, Toby Lutke. Where have you spent a disproportionate amount of your mental cycles in the last month?

another platform shift and man like it's just every single time i think i have my head wrapped around it it's like it it's remarkable how quickly one normalizes to um uh completely futuristic new things appearing. We are all kind of like, yeah, I guess I can just paste this into chat GPT and like ask it questions about it. I'm still hung up on like...

There's software that no one wrote and I have to interview it to figure out its capability. So my time is like really just interviewing like these like... New models are coming out for their capabilities and just trying to figure out how to make them idealized, nonjudgmental teachers for people. They keep getting better and how to create structure around. judging new models for their capabilities, figuring out where the edges are of what they can do right now, but also make it so that

I can very quickly retest any new model coming against those edges to figure out if we've crested another. Do you have your own personal test harnesses built to try to understand capabilities? That's exactly it. This is what I'm describing, but you're nailing it.

I have no, have like a Tobi Eval. It's like literally a folder of prompts with expected and judged results. And I'm like, I run it against every model. Like at some point I'm like, Yes, I have these chats and I have these standard questions and then I sort of make decisions based on this.

I can write code that does this for me and run this against every model. And like, it's just like, it's funny how you're thinking a voice while engaging with these tools, right? Like, this is like not how I would have approached this before, but like speaking with... a lot of machine learning experts, this is how they have been doing this. These ideas of building evals, they are called, right?

That's not a term to most people and it's sort of a niche product of the machine learning world because it's essentially just batch jobs which just try the same thing over and over again and then judge the results. Yeah, I know them as unit tests. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So unit tests were around and were like kind of a revolution in the early 2000s, end of 90s. I remember when people sort of proposed automated unit tests as a thing.

I talked with you before about my wonderful Meister where I did my apprenticeship with at Siemens. He always said, like, you have two years to develop software after you start, and afterwards it's like someone pours cement into it, right? Like, you're never going to change it again. And that was true in the 90s. That's how people thought about software.

Right. Software engineering was like civil engineering. It's like you build the bridge, the bridge is done. Exactly. It was an end date to it. And then if you wanted to evolve it, you rewrote it, right? Like, you know.

like Windows was a rewrite every time every major version was actually a start from I mean they took some with it but like it's mostly start from scratch software evolves forever um I mean I still can't really explain why BitRot exists like why does a great piece of software is really really bad like a decade later right like it's like it hasn't changed we have changed right our expectations have changed maybe but like um

As soon as the new iOS is announced, the old iOS feels like garbage. Right. And it's not that your phone got slower and it's not that those UI paradigms sort of expired. That's right. And I see this like really vividly. This is a good example because... you know i do all these product reviews and um i'm also like i mean it's so it's it's such a bad thing to do but i i just i physically can't restrain myself from hitting that

update to latest beta button when it appears anywhere. It's just like, I cannot. It's like, this is... sirens call there's no amount of do you run beta software on your phone first version like i just i can't i can't not i'm like and i have a single phone and i'm like i'm just gonna I find all the bugs that are waiting for me as interesting constraints that I can like play with, you know, just like...

Do you have like Craig Federighi on speed dial and you're like sending him screenshots? No, no externalities. I'm just like, I own it. I own my own problems. I'm going to the first developer beta and if five of my apps that I need every day don't work, I use it as delightful.

full opportunity to learn about new apps right so it's just like you're a public company ceo and sometimes your phone is just randomly crashing it just doesn't work but that actually is avoidable and but not for you yeah it's Whatever the consequences on this are. And this is why Toby is special.

So anyway, it's just like live in, you know, as much as iOS is just updating to a new UI paradigm called Liquid Glass, which was very much maligned right off the bat by people and somewhat rightfully so in some instances. But to be fair, Apple has an uncanny ability to introduce things that afterwards seem that was clearly the right thing. It's not even clear that they are better.

It's just very clear that they make everything else worse. It's induced bit rot on everyone else in a way. So I've been living with this changed UI for a while and I'm in these product reviews with my own teams. you know, we're looking at designs which are clearly sort of good designs in the context of the world that we are now leaving, you know, in a way. And like, it's incredible what it does, like, because I'm like,

hey, designers, I know you need your own betas. You need to design for the device as it will be experienced by people in the future, right? And so I find that is just like... the biggest job that um you know i personally can do for the company and then my company can do for my customers which is like live in everyone else's relative future

You don't even need to predict the future that well. If you just live in everyone else's relative future, which really is just a couple of high conviction, high courage, update to beta clicks. It's not that hard to live in the future. It really isn't.

Yeah, exactly. You just go experience, you know, develop taste for it and figure out how to make your own decisions. And this is, of course, extraordinary to making, you know, Sidekick inside of Shopify and like having the AI assistant, which is now like massive. Okay, so yeah, tell us about that and like... Back to BitRot, I mean, I was going to ask before, a lot of code is now not written by humans, and it's trivial to just be like, yeah, update this, make this better.

What's going on in Shopify? I mean, exactly. What an incredible change. Code used to be by far the most expensive thing to produce, right? I think really, really good code for lot-bearing things is still exactly like this. But around the margins, there's a lot of... A lot of the kind of code that glues together inspired infrastructure can now just be treated as...

Like a first draft for something. And I think that's actually extremely healthy. This is a property of almost every great piece of software. There's a very clear split somewhere. There's a layer.

The Linux kernel needs to be developed in one way and then the Linux operating system just uses the kernel's infrastructure and pretends like every computer is the same because you can... like it creates a pretend world that's easier to reason about so that then the software can be implemented abstraction it's a beautiful thing yeah abstraction but inspired abstraction abstractions can also be bad because like

Abstraction is just another word for pretension. It pretends, like everything that abstracts something just pretends it's different from how it actually is. And so abstractions can be incredibly powerful and... There are some, one could name, which have like really stood the test of time. But a lot of abstractions are lossy abstractions. They actually pretend the system is something, is a lot less powerful than what it actually is.

which really really matters if you evolve things on top and then you end up on this like tower of abstractions you sit on top you want something for which you would actually have to go down here and connect and then you have this sort of a spider web of cables left and right. And it's just like, it's all like spaghetti, I invent. This was like the world of, to make it concrete for listeners, the write once, run anywhere mobile idea.

Where, oh, we'll just cross-compile to all of the different phones back in 2012 or so. Phone Gap or Xamarin. Yeah, and the abstractions ended up being too lossy where you didn't actually be able... have access to the capabilities the html5 debacle of like okay we'll just write for html5 and it'll run like a native app and you know like

Yeah, and, you know, very, very good software companies believe that to be the way, right? Like hybrid applications were all the rage in the beginning. And remember, the phones were really, really slow back then. The phones are insanely quick, and even today, hybrid apps are not that great. So, you know, Facebook or... famously was all in on this idea. And Samarine is a good example. So there's a lot of these kind of picking the wrong abstractions early really constrains what you can do on top.

But very often, when abstraction is wrong, it means you can't actually reach great software anymore. You actually pretended the world is simpler, but you don't actually allow all the most load-bearing. pieces into this pretended world that are at some point required to make the software just really, really good.

And so, you know, again, I'm a toolmaker, right? Let's keep beating on this submarine thing which no one's heard of, but like just I think we've described it enough so that people might have an idea for what it might be. Just imagine you use very bad software and... the team that started the project decided early to use submarine and then they never had a chance of making this as good as all the other things you really appreciate on your phone due to this decision no matter how good they are.

It's like building your house on top of your kitchen table instead of on the foundation of your house. That's a very good analogy. There are early decisions that will constrain how good you can make something. In our parlance at Shopify, that means certain ideas, certain abstractions, certain choices bring the ceiling down. As in, like, if you have a scale from 1 to 10 of how good something can be, 10 is...

world-class masterpiece and one is like horrible. What you hope to do is that you use abstractions to make it easier to reach a good number. It brings the floor up. It's at least this good. right that's what most abstractions do and from business value this a lot of businesses choose tools to make it at least this good because that is sort of a passing grade right like it clears the hurdle why why would any customer use shopify it's like well okay

I could go build my own e-commerce checkout payment system. My store is going to be at least this good, even if I do zero customization. Right, right. Well, if you set out to do your own, like from scratch. and this is not your core business, what you get back might actually be like...

completely underperforming what you wanted, right? So you can't even use it. And might be, will be. Yes, very, very, very likely. And it becomes one of those ever like deathmatch projects that you just pour resources in. It takes incredibly good people to rescue a bad project, which is like hard to even convince good people to do this. Windows Vista. Yeah. So you end up in this world where, you know, so bring the floor down is what people hope for.

What a lot of people miss is very often the same systems bring the ceiling down. And so what you are trying to do as a toolmaker, as an infrastructure builder, as a product maker... is you want to make a tool that brings the floor up significantly, but doesn't constrain the ceiling. And that is extremely hard. I think it takes, sometimes it takes...

It might not take decades to build it, but it does take decades to build the mental picture to really understand all the aspects of a problem domain. in such a way that you know, you have to look around five corners to know, am I going to restrict someone's potential of making this sort of choice that's here ahead of me?

Modern operating systems are wonderful. They don't usually lower the ceiling. You can build any amazing piece of software on top of Windows, Linux, and OS X now. We figured out how to do this because we have been building operating systems for a very long time. And there were clearly attempts that were wrong. You know, there's many such spaces, e-commerce software being one of them. It's just like, yes, we want to build something that works like this. However...

It also matters how likely it is. Like what is the distribution inside of the users of the system of people who hit 10 out of 10 versus like if your floor is 7 out of 10, which is really good. Is everyone clustered there and one or two people managed to take it to the storied heights? That's also bad. And again, this is why I think AI is so exciting because I think it's...

Its principal ability is really to help massively shift the sort of scatter plot of where people end up as compared to their own vision. I want people, if they have, like, whatever their vision is, unencumbered is a 10 out of 10. on the scale. I want them to hit it. And I just, like, if they don't...

There needs to be good reasons and ideally their own. Like the choices they made, maybe a mistake, maybe their product is not good. Not that the platform constrained them into not being able to make something great. Computers should never constrain people. It's like this is not their computer. So the computer is to get people to...

build things that they could not possibly imagine having solved otherwise. This is the sorting, this is the ordering. Computers are there to make humans better, never to constrain what humans can do. What does that look like from a product? I can imagine, but what sort of products are you building that take advantage of that? Usually when it is a 10 out of 10, very often people are working with

experts. Some people will really dedicate themselves to really understanding all the ins and outs of a really complex piece of software. In many cases, that's the only way we could get there, although I think the role of software is to minimize the need for this kind of thing. We want to make it approachable so that people can sort of, again, accomplish their initial goal.

get online, have this checkout, be able to sell the product that they spend a lot of time with, and if they have additional time to invest, be able to start, we call this hill climbing, right? So now with, like, you have an AI you can ask. In fact,

we are going to increasingly ask you what your goals are, right? Or at least we either try to find ways to uh deduct that from what people are doing with the software or just straight up ask my my theory is that people are very happy to tell us what their goals are and a lot of software just doesn't do it because it can't action it right

Maybe we could put a to-do list there and help you with record keeping, but we can't do anything about a to-do list before AI. And now, again, with these authentic flows, we increasingly can. Yeah, I think the way to get to 10 out of 10 is just really sit on the same side of the table. We have the intake. You very naturally tell us what you're trying to accomplish.

And then we can show you here's what a prototype would look like of this idea that you have. And just like also implement just these obscure best practices, right?

I've spoken with one of our customers. They're selling rugs and... Rocks? Sorry, rugs. Oh, rugs. Okay. The woolly stuff on the floor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like beautiful carpets, really. I should use the word carpets because that works better with my accent. They were just not making progress in... with a Europe strategy and kind of about to pull out and then they used some tools that we wrote out not really knowing what it would be used for to just change the pictures.

update the images of all their products away from Malibu beach houses to Parisian apartments. Like this was not a new photo shoot. This was actually just like, do this for me. Wow. And their sales tripled because...

Four years ago, three years ago, this would actually technically not have been possible to do. Now it's about the most boring thing you can imagine, right? Like this is how much the world has changed. I mean, at a minimum, it would have been like, okay, let's book a photo shoot in Paris and let's like, you know.

Yeah. Like allocate some capital organization. Like it needs someone's attention, probably someone. Let's get some product there. Exactly. Yeah. And so now this is just done and like this has proven out. And again, I'm sure they don't run these. AI changed product pictures now in production. I'm sure they did the shoot afterwards. But they also discovered something over their business which would have been entirely obscured to it. But this is an applicable lesson across the entire platform.

And something we can absolutely help very small businesses that don't have the resources to go reshoot all their pictures. And shoot, this stuff is now so good that you probably don't need to do the shoot. Even if you are the biggest business in the world.

differences. It's undiscernible. Yeah. And you know, like, when you talk about the biggest business in the world, they already operate like this. Like, Ikea does not, that is, like, the Ikea catalog is not, has no photos in it. It's all renders. They just like, they create really, really good versions of... Oh, car commercials are not videos of cars driving. It's renders of the cars. Yeah. And you only know because...

the professional drives on closed roads has disappeared, which was required before, right? Like, so that just doesn't, they don't need to show this anymore because I hadn't noticed that. Like, there's no one actually driving. That's the giveaway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think the way this really hits for me the most is, again, I grew up on all the sci-fi books that everyone in my generation really grew up on, or many did anyway.

they're sort of like very very optimistic but also far future like uh asimov and so on and what's your favorite by the way um i i i am my favorite that's actually I think Snow Crash is my favorite. And Neuromancer. I recently reread Neuromancer. It's a really, really good book. In so many cases... Especially Heinlein did this. There's usually a catch-up chapter. Here's how we get to the starting point of the book. And one of the events is always in 20...

21, 10, we passed the Turing test and like there were celebrations in the streets and then something turned sour usually right after, right? Like to set the stage. And you know what no sci-fi author dared to predict? It's that the Turing test just passes by. We just blow by it and nobody noticed.

There was no New York Times front page article that we passed the Turing test. It's not even like the tech community was exploding about it. We all were just like, oh yeah, we're in the generative AI era now. Clearly, GPT-3.5, which is like... It's significantly worse than something you can run on your phone right now locally, like pass the Turing test of flying colors. And this is crazy. This is the craziest thing about the actual world, if you think about it. It's interesting that...

Maybe I'll take back my previous comment. What was actually happening when we passed the Turing test and no one cared was we were all so focused on, oh, is this the path to AGI? I kind of wonder if AGI will be the same thing. where we do actually achieve AGI, but we'll actually be talking about some other future milestone that we're wondering about. I think humans are incredibly good at moving a group host.

Yeah. It's like there's some kind of expectation-related version of a hedonistic treadmill that we sometimes talk about, which is just like it moves forward. We adjust to our circumstances incredibly quickly. And so, I mean... almost everyone listening lives their own dream life from many years ago, right? Like people accomplish their goals.

We kind of never stop to think about it. And I think this is like, it's really, really hard for us to judge our own environment and what's going on around us. So I think, you know, like on a societal level, this even seems to replicate. Again, the Turing test was one of the best takes we've had, and now people criticize it because it's not good enough, because I suppose it wasn't. But like...

It was still the best test that people generally referred to about figuring out if something is intelligent, and they passed it, and there was no parades, no... front page news no no no ticker tape parades you know it's like it's we should have yeah it does seem though that they're like there are a few ceos of which you are one that uh

notice this and like you're behaving you started this whole conversation by saying you have the privilege now of living through another platform shift i don't think any the world has quite realized yet that it's a platform shift yeah i um but I wish people would and I wish people would like sort of seep in the remarkableness of it like it's just like I don't like I don't know if you've ever done this like I mean I love the

VR, Google, MetaQuest and so on. I use it more than most because I use it for like racing simulator preparations and so on. It's an incredible device. VR was another one of those things. we thought we would get at some point and then it came and like it's kind of like there people use it sometimes for like their fitness workouts or whatever it's just like it's a

Like, it just folded into the ambient world, at least for some. We take it wildly for granted that that technology is cheap and plentiful today. Yeah, exactly. $299 or whatever, like, for a remarkable device, right? You know, augmented reality. also something people talk about you you can buy them next week like it's just like an event next week after we film this and then afterwards you can just purchase video yeah yeah the metaglasses yeah amazing um uh and so um

That's all around us. And, you know, one thing that really struck me is when you play with MetaQuest and VR goggles, there's one game which I really highly recommend people. it's called job simulator have you ever encountered job simulator okay you have to try it out job simulator is like this sort of satirical take of like a like it pretends we're in the far future and there's museums

where people go to figure out what the job was. Yes. And it starts you on a cubicle. And, you know, like, you have to turn on the computer. And you have to, like, to turn it on, you actually have to plug a... uh uh power cable into the wall right and it's like otherwise it doesn't work and you just think it's broken and it it it's it's so wonderful because like it plays on the

future historians and robots kind of getting details wrong. I actually think it's like profound and actually brilliant commentary on the world. But I think what I did. this nails is that I think we will have VR simulations of these times. I think we do. I think this is golden age of humanity right now. I think it's the end of the beginning.

I think people in a thousand years will study these times the way we are studying Cicero's times of the end of the Roman Republic and as a significant part of history. It's kind of where we figured ourselves out in a lot of ways. And yes, there's like people look at, you know, you look at the news, there's lots of, like there's a lot of current affairs in events. I think they will fade out behind.

simplistic terms like obviously there was like strife in any kind of time doing great change but it's so unmitigatedly good it's like there's so many things we are bringing to the world these gifts of incredible technology and progress that are coming rapidly, that are all kind of the types of things that are going to make...

It gives individuals with vision so much more agency, which is the thing that's always at the top of the funnel of anything that people truly care about. Everything that people really... love, all the products, all the experiences, other people's, like, are things that people thought for. It was a passion, the results and the residue in a museum of, it's a museum of other people's passion projects, as John Colson puts it. Such a good quote.

Such a good word. I think that is probably the best tweet on the entire X platform. It's so good. We'll link to it for listeners who haven't seen it. I'm sitting here thinking, if I could kind of describe your life. You started a company in the previous technology era, the web era, and then, you know, took it into the mobile era. You have a family. You have hobbies. You've talked about racing.

And the entire world is going through what I think you think is the most transformative change in the last hundreds of years. What should you do with your current life in reaction to that? knowing that you live at one of the most crucible moments in history when we look back at it. Me specifically or is my advice? Maybe you specifically and then generalize it. What should people do if they believe this? It sounds like you're interviewing models every day.

the ones with floating points in them, just to be clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You were interviewing a foundational model. Exactly. Important distinction. Good distinction. I mean, here is what I'm doing. This comes fairly natural to me and I think it's a little bit a job for me to... transmit some of the awe I feel about the times, right? Like I think that what we think of history

currently is wrong. And again, the people in a thousand years from now who are also going to play 2020 simulator. I'm never going to get this image out of my head. I love it. They will think about these decades and this time differently because what we will do in due time is reintegrate technology into our own history, our own self-history.

is one of sometimes decline, right? We are talking about the Golden Gate Bridge being built in whatever, two, three years. We are rightfully saying we can't do this anymore.

we are looking at great works and infrastructure projects and our like a great generation of wars and these kind of things and look at this and say well um uh we can't experience a world right now where um people build Bethlehem Steel or people build Henry Ford's factories or they're just like physical manifestations of incredible

power of, you know, human beings coming together and creating things is sort of manifest for us to see in front of our eyes. And so therefore people judge that we no longer do this. However, we are actually absolutely doing this. It's just the great works are. Kernels of operating systems, the browser, lots of the software platforms, the phones, the incredible advances in silicon lithography, and the...

Again, the models that we create and train and the data centers that support them. Some of it is actually physical building, laying the energy infrastructure and the power generation, the power transmission, the buildings themselves, the heat management, the cooling. Less than three years ago, ChatGPT didn't exist. Yeah.

But it is physically not as imposing. So like a data center, I love the blinking lights down the aisle, but man, if you have been to what a refinery looks like or a natural gas liquid... plant, it just hits you on a level that it requires zero analogy to understand how incredible of an achievement each of these things is.

like the bridges we drive over um are like they're just like man this is this is humans being their best selves creating you know shaping things not just like and like very often not stopping at utility, but also going for just beauty by itself. Like the ornamentation is lot-bearing because we are not just recreating things. So there's no ornamentation on the outside of a data center that eventually will train superintelligence.

In fact, we hide it. We don't put logos on it. We try not to have them on maps. Yes, exactly. It's going to be as obscured as we can make it. So, I think this is one of those things in a world that sends people astray. So, back to what I... I love to transmit this because I have cultivated...

Like every technologist has to an appreciation for the abstract in the same way that people naturally come preloaded with an appreciation for the concrete. Like I can look at a piece of software and appreciate it. in the same way how I can look at the pantheon. And unfortunately, that is not something that comes easy. In fact, that requires...

And it's also probably not worth the time that it takes. You really have to rewire your brain in a very significant way. People will build tech companies. Any human can look at the pantheon and be like, but not any human can look at. a piece of software and say, wow. Exactly. And we even have thousands of years of understanding about why the pantheon is. We can start with math to tell you why the ratios are correct.

We know we're close in the abstract realm. We can't describe why software is good, truly. It's taste. Some people know it when they see it. It's something you cultivate. And so it's just abstract on top of abstract. If you build a tech company, you kind of have to do what I'm talking about to yourself because, again, I see this in my customers.

The reason why my customers love building physical stores, retail stores, is because they can stand in them, they can see them, they can judge every piece by touching it. They can watch their customers come in and look at things. They learn what the first thing is they look at and how they handle it. Do they pick it up? Is it clothing? Does it feel right? And do they put it down? Is that something for them?

And they will rearrange the store every day. They hill climb inside of it because they can judge everything. It's concrete. With an online store, it's not. We try really hard to tell you live how many people there are and tell you stats about it. it's always abstract. It's numbers. It's not real. It doesn't hit us. Even if you cultivate an appreciation for looking at the numbers and looking at stats and become data-driven, if you would do...

an analysis of how a day went in your mind while being in an fMRI machine, it would be a very small, it would be neurofrontal cortex only that would light up. If you would think about your day in the shop talking with people, it's the entire brain lighting up. It's just, we don't, we are predisposed to appreciate the concrete, of course. We have this exact thing with Acquired. We release an episode. Numbers instantly hit hundreds of thousands and then over the course of months hit millions.

And I look at the dashboard and I feel nothing. And then David and I do one in-person thing at Radio City Music Hall. With a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of those people. And it's like... My whole blows up the whole brain, like emotions I've never experienced before. Memory is created. Nostalgia is created. Relationship is created. You're on cloud nine for weeks and you're like, that was nothing compared to what was in the dashboard. But yes.

is so true and it's it's like i i don't know how to solve it and i think it might be not solvable because it kind of depends on like it might it might honestly depend on our hardware at some point like it's just like the the the we can convince our incredibly malleable frontal cortex of anything, and it can learn to appreciate the abstract, but the lizard brain is not convinced. Is the age of... vr the answer like is the next stage after charts and graphs and tables to like create full like

abstract experiences of, yeah, like this is how many people, if you were standing in your store right now, this is what it would look like as people were shopping. Yeah, this is how busy your Shopify store would be. I actually think, I think it will get better and then...

not nearly the same. I just don't think it's reachable. I do not think you can replace it. And I think that's a real constraint and we just have to look around it. But that's a great point though that you were saying a minute ago about part of your job. And part of the industry's job is to convey that and describe that to the world. Okay. So what do other people, what should other people do?

if they agree with you that this is this moment of great historical significance? The actual thing I do is I found myself a thing I really, really care about and try to bridge from a future to people like I care about. It's like... I build Shopify. I try to understand what the future looks like with any trick in the book. And I want to help with what's going on.

finding a task that you care about inside of the change is is i think the best position anyone anyone can take it doesn't have to be a software company like so much of uh music is going to change because we can generate quite extraordinary music from Nuance directly. That's seen as a threat and similar to how words can be generated with AI in an even more obvious way.

It's an integration. Help everyone figure out what is the clearly human part. Because here's a funny thing. There's a couple of worlds where AI has already massively... you know, obviously math, like the calculator has been there for a long time and the best calculations and fastest calculations were clearly not done by humans ever since the calculator came around, right? So chess is such a good example of this, like the best game of chess in every year.

of the last 20 years has been played by machine against machine. And no one gets a shit. No one watches those matches. No one studies them. But everyone knows who Magnus Carlsen is. We actually care not about chess. we care about humans playing chess. And this is the one thing people really do get very wrong here. We need to figure out how to treat the new capabilities as instruments that we can play.

and then explore that space and teach others. And I think that's going to be the most fulfilling and fun position because it allows you to... seep yourself in the things that were previously impossible while they are still hard and figure them out, which is always one of the most fun things. and then teach others, I can highly recommend it. It is incredibly fulfilling. All right, listeners, now is a great time to thank a new friend of the show, Koifen. And it's funny, they're new.

But actually, I've been using their product for years. My research project for every single new Acquired episode involves Coifin. So when they reached out to sponsor the show, I thought, well, this is convenient. Indeed. So Coifin is a financial research tool loved by both individual investors and financial advisors.

Individuals use it for stock research, graphing financials, and portfolio tracking, and financial advisors use it to build model portfolios and create client proposals. They have live market data and powerful analytics tools. Bloomberg terminal except without the huge price tag, right? Yes, essentially.

It's a web app, and it's totally self-serve. I've actually not talked to anyone at the company for the first few years that I used it. So Coifin is a product that the broader market, like all acquired listeners, would use, not just Wall Street investment bankers. It's where I pull things like...

growth rate or gross margins or the P.E. ratio or revenue multiples for every company we study. And you can compare these things over time with historical graphs or against other companies. It's often what I use when we're studying private companies, too, like Rolex or Mars or...

ikea to look at the comparables to estimate what these companies would be worth if they were public they also have a screener that lets you filter across thousands of stocks so you can quickly surface investment ideas yep so the general idea is if you're someone who's used to living

in data, you should have that at your fingertips as you think about investing. Exactly. It's got these great graphs for data visualization wrapped around institutional grade data. So if you want to understand what assumptions are baked into the stock price today, Coifin is for you. I was about to say that acquired listeners have a great offer, but Koi Fin's free product is actually already really robust. Which is what I was using for years. I know, I know. But...

Indeed, for Acquired listeners and also for you, Ben, if you go to coifin.com slash acquired and you end up upgrading to paid, you'll get 20% off your first year. Our thanks to Koyfin. That's K-O-Y-F-I-N dot com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes. It's funny. We were talking to another CEO yesterday who is a huge football fan. american football fan and uh last year wrote an ai agent to do his fantasy draft for him

And like scour the whole internet, take into account all the likelihoods to be injured. Yeah, incorporate stuff that people generally, like first he was like, what do people not incorporate in their fantasy drafts? Well, first it was what do people incorporate, but they actually don't know all the information. Great, go ingest.

all that information now what are the factors that i think people aren't thinking about yeah yeah yeah and uh so like one of those was like propensity to be injured like yeah that should be really important most people don't account for that great write an ai agent does that

Or if they do, they have incomplete information and you could go get more. Yeah. So wrote it, crushed it, you know, like won the league, you know, all that. Like this year, everybody in his league is using an AI agent. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, so then like, you know, well, she shouldn't like NFL head coaches do that too. Like one, one thing on this, this like, well, now everybody's doing it. This thing I've been thinking about is, um, when you really see.

the full capabilities of the latest thing in AI and you get a demo of something or you get to use something for the first time that you're like, this isn't how I was using it before and this is not how other people use AI. You think, whoa, I have an edge.

I actually can do something that people didn't think was possible. It's become clear to me that even five years from now, people who are successful, it's not going to be people that are making things in an unassisted way. Everything is going to be. assisted and so the best people in the world at anything necessarily will be the people who best know how to use these tools do you agree that like this is this is the new bar to be a human out in the world

is understand how to best be a user of AI tools. Yes, but I think for a bigger reason than just the AI tool. I think in terms of stability, which even our industry had, Things were just not changing that much. 2015 to 2021. Exactly. So that time, I think that entire 2010s decade in tech was...

I mean, obviously, people will rattle off a couple of things that changed. But we had the mobile phone, we had the platform, and we just sort of scaled the ideas that all come from the previous decade. There, it's pretty obscure. But when things... become change faster it becomes very obvious and there's two groups of people are people who fundamentally have fallen into in love with problems and people who fundamentally have fallen in love with solutions and um i think that

But sometimes, like, of course, the people who really fall in love with solutions, obviously, then grief, if those solutions become unideal. That makes perfect sense, and I'm sure it sucks. It's happened to me, too. I love computer programming, like, low level. stuff for just like for no reason. I will never implement most algorithms again because I can just like, when I type the function name, there's gray text already and I can hit tab and then it's implemented.

and sometimes better than probably my naive first implementation would have been anyway. So there's some artistry lost and some skills that I no longer need. But again, the people who love to solve problems are the ones who are just so enabled right now. And I think everyone starts there. No one is... falls in love with solutions at the beginning of their careers. It's like you can't. And so I think people need to remember how they got to where they are right now and realize that

This is just a bit of a calcification of who they were. And they need to take a step back and realize probably life was more fun than I was walking around looking for... how I will do my craft, right? Like how I will do my thing. Like this even gets so far, like even in the corporate world, like jobs, job descriptions, like job titles. We've gotten incredibly... We are almost pushing people into this, like into falling in love with solutions. Like, you know...

You're a sales operations expert, right? Like what is that? That's like a title for a particular way how companies end up solving a particular operational problem they had at some point.

What you actually are, like, it's like you're an amazing human being that got hired into a company and the company wants you to add as much of what you've got to the mission, right? And, like, clearly... you can you can zoom out everyone does this when going out with friends and venting right like it's just like you're talking about how the place could be better well forget about the title like let's figure out like how can you contribute like and and everyone who's like

really immersing themselves in these tools. I sent a memo to my company and we set the expectation that Like we require that people reflexively reach for AI now and we require it because it's unfair not to because the people who do are otherwise going to be the people who sequester all the best careers to themselves, right?

I think it's fair to tell everyone, but that's what it takes now. Be clear for everyone who didn't see or forgot the memo from just a couple months ago, but it feels like a few years ago. You're now required in Shopify to use AI as your first... pass it, everything, right? Which was controversial when you sent it and now seems obvious. It's like, yeah, exactly. I didn't think I was sending a terribly controversial message to begin with, but then...

Someone told me that it's like being leaked in bad faith, I think. So, and then I just like posted it. So that I think worked quite well, at least there. I was surprised how many people cared about that. And because it says a couple of things. Don't, if you, at the beginning of a project, use AI to prototype it. And then if AI is really bad at prototyping, make fun of AI. I just want, it's not about what you...

make with it, it's what, that you did it. Because it might surprise you. And also, way earlier in the conversation, we talked about Ewalds. If the AI is bad at the thing that you asked it to do, now you have an eval for the next AI that's coming out. So you're building your quiver of tests. What are some of your evals? Like you mentioned you have this like...

folder of instructions? What are some of your tests? A lot of this is like things where, you know, like from coding, for instance, where it just like misunderstands a certain prompt, which it had enough context. I like the term context engineering because... I think the fundamental skill of using AI well is to be able to state a problem with enough context in such a way that...

without any additional pieces of information, the task is plausibly solvable. That's actually a really tricky thing. And now with a lot of agents, the agents end up being pretty good at figuring out what's missing and go get it themselves. But I think that's, I mean, the crazy thing about AI is like it can do this. I think the skill people should build is trying to not require it to do it.

Why is this a useful skill to build? First of all, it makes much cheaper to use AI. It makes much higher likelihood of success. But this is really funny. I think it makes you better. in so many other ways that has nothing to do with AI. I write much better emails since I became a good context engineer. I just like, I now realize how much is unsaid in instructions and why so many things.

So much of what people describe in companies as politics is actually bad context engineering. It's really funny because I so often end up doing the, what is the root note of a problem here that we all have? And you realize after digging one, two layers down, there's just a fundamental disagreement on an assumption about how to do it. Like, what is good? What does good look like for this area?

David and I have just finally started taking some things that we previously thought, oh, that's part of the secret sauce I've acquired. And who knows why my neurons fire that way? It just comes out and it's part of the magic. We started actually writing down instructions so that AI can do things that we previously thought were like part of our magic.

And it's less magical than you think. We've just never had to actually codify how we do the job before. And I think that's probably a lot of people. We were like... uh it's a failure of introspection of what actually makes the work that you make good um and once you actually write down your process and all that you actually and have an

evaluation framework for what makes it good it actually is quite executable by ai 100 and and you you are i don't know how far you're down this journey now but like um there's an entire world that opens itself up to you once you start doing this because um Like I have this too and we have this at Shopify. We use entropics term for, we call these things constitutions, which is maybe a little bit too grand. But like figuring out a document that is actually like sort of...

all the things that are not platitudes, like all the things where someone else, like some other company, would plausibly take the other side off. But those are the real choices, right? Like if no one would take the other side, it's platitude. but teamwork is clearly something any company wants, right? Usually the company values end up being just platitudes. It's very funny. So you end up like creating a list of these kind of things that you uniquely would pick a side on.

The trade-offs that you're choosing. Yeah, exactly. What makes, you know, basically, like, write down your uniqueness. And then you get in an... Absolutely fascinating word because first of all, you can use it. You can hold up to your book and just saying, okay, well, help me here with this and these are things you need to know in your, again, context engineered window. But it gets way more interesting when you use...

you know, your favorite episodes transcripts, you add this and say, what's missing from a document? And you get suggestions. And you're like, could we have made Costco better in some way? Yeah, right. It's scary, right? Yeah. And so what you will realize is this is another hill-climbing exercise because this constitution will get much, much longer and you actually will collaborate with AI on it. These things are incredibly valuable. You know, just like, you know, anyway, there's so many...

This gets too much into the weeds, but like inside of Shopify, there's so many things that can be done like this. We have product principles which I wrote at some point and have since been hill climbing in a loop like this. And any project in our internal systems now, like when it goes into like to review time, it's like we can run against the product principles and also the specific principles against office area. And it's not like...

some control mechanism. It's in fact, it's honestly just like here is where interesting discussion should happen. It guides the conversation because they often what we find is the product principles are wrong or imprecise or... stated too broadly with not enough provisos. And because you want to write for a large audience in generalities, but like when you do work with AI, you can actually say, okay, well, actually let's write all the statements next to the convictions, right? Like, because...

It's interesting you need deterministic instructions for a non-deterministic machine. Right. Because, yeah, like, and they are, of course, non-deterministically interpreted in the end. But this is also... the beauty of it because sometimes it's like, it tests you. Sometimes it says, hey, this is contradictory and it isn't. And then you have to have a conversation with it about it. And like, you realize...

You know what? That mistake in the way you read that you made probably is... That happens non-zero times a few minutes, too, right? So... finding a more precise version of stating the thing that you're trying to go for or better examples is also really valuable. All this to say, increasingly I find that And this is why I'm saying you have to interview these things. Like one thing that I'm really noticing with the latest series of models, specifically GPT-5 Thinking and Pro, is that...

You know, I feel like I'm pretty good at asking questions, and I can take these conversations with AI into very, very, very interesting places. I have started now asking the AI what my next question should be, and I get better ones very often, and that's pretty impressive. Because, again, it wants to predict. And they have no memory very often with all your private conversations. So they are sort of like, you know, I probably...

When I'm at my absolute best, I ask better questions when I'm at my average. And so it can execute against an idealized version of myself. It's really, really fascinating and really valuable. I have run like a keyboard logger. and sort of what is the active window and take a screenshot of a window of my machine every 10 minutes. and archived this for going on 15 years now. It's something I've always been running and just for my own purposes. So you have an archive of...

your daily digital activity of the last 15 years. Yes, yes. Holy crap. Wow. And I also... What a gift. Nobody has that. I would never have imagined this ends up being as valuable as it is. and uh it's like how toby became toby how shopify became shopify it's basically that and i i know i i um It's my, a lot of my weekend projects are actually just like, you know, running through all of this and putting it together because of course it's dispersed keyboards with lots of noise in it.

Different formats over time. Yeah, and every once in a while I use Vim, at which point there's a lot of what's in the keyboard buffer is complete nonsense. But the nice thing is, with enough AI tools... you can turn this into pretty clean timelines. Right. Without you having to write a script that's like, okay, every time I'm hitting Q, that disregard. Yeah. And of course, the format changed a million times and there's missing bits and pieces. And then I have my calendar, which I can...

which I'm now adding to it over the times and a lot of emails, like just headers of who I converse with and so on. Do you have that in a repository and then you can just like, whenever you say like,

whatever AI model you're using, like, hey, I need you to make something like Toby, just look at this. And then, like, do it like this. Yeah, that's what he's about to say. This is exactly it. So, like, it's, I mean, the actual format was, I just always turned it into text files, which are, like, the most lasting bits of...

artificial, it's the best format in the world because it lasts forever. And now I've been working on doing more and more work on just like analyzing it and cleaning it and adding more things because the value of this is getting incredibly high. um i've also been like always doing like my notes i kept them and so like there's their times and so on so i have a i i'm i have a lot of digital artifacts uh about myself which you know again what prompted you to start doing that

My initial thing was I just wanted to know what I mind spending my time on in general. And there were some tools that came out. Like Rescue Time kind of stuff. Exactly. I forgot the names of them. But there were some tools. But then I've always been...

Like the things directly about me personally, I want to keep on my machine. There's been sort of a bias, which probably comes from when I started using computers. And these are interesting challenges, right? So anyway, so I have all this. I don't even know how I specifically got there. What's the most useful thing that you found to input that into? I have a period of time where I went from full-time programming to fundraising to...

learning company things more clearly. And just like charting it as a time span in different applications is interesting. It's also like, I mean, from seeing what I typed into what applications, like text. at docs and stuff like this. I also like, I can track some of my beliefs changing, which is, that's a really interesting experience because it's, I mean, the brain is fundamentally thought to be a backwards facing.

narrative consistency optimization device rather than actually a chronological data bank. I read a great book recently that described a key element of the brain as the press secretary. When anybody asks you why you did something, the book's called The Elephant in the Brain. Yeah. You have this press secretary that comes up with the rational answer of why you probably did it, but that part of your brain was actually not present at the time of decision. Yeah, and I think that's very fundamental.

the brain optimizes for narrative consistency um and so um having some of the you know just like things i typed um you know like i like on many issues that face a company. It's just like fascinating. I haven't come to a real conclusion, but I have the ability to do it. I might be a bit... slow to really do the study well. You just have to kind of...

Eat a bit of hamper pie. At a minimum, what an amazing archive, right? Companies have archives, right? And it would be like board minutes. You have a moment-by-moment source of truth of how this happened. Can I ask? I'll ask you the question and then I'll give you some context to try to lead the witness a little bit. What are some of those things that you think you changed your mind on over time that you used to feel strongly on and you feel differently now? And maybe to give the context.

uh everyone remembers 2021 shopify is like the media darling you know crazy stock run up multiple goes i think revenue multiple went from

20x to 70x, something crazy like that. To narrative, you know, human brains and narratives, COVID happens, people are at home, Shopify! Yeah, right. Does this, then does that, and you, like, slowly... you know you're you're within i i think you have an internal rule at shopify you don't talk about the stock price but we talk about it here on air uh spinning distance of all-time highs again yeah um

I just want to throw that out as some context if you choose to adopt it for the answer to the question of what are some things you used to believe that you no longer believe. Yeah, so this is interesting because now I can do like... we talked about the archive I can now go and check this but like here's what my brain potentially narratively lays out for me is that I was quite

I have always seen the stock price extremely different. I work on the fair market value of a company, which is an unknown thing, but the stock is essentially trying to... The stock is a betting market on the fair market value, right? So it will oscillate over the thing. And so I personally didn't, like, I felt the company was, like...

I mean, obviously fits better in the times because now e-commerce is more important. And I think that it's like actually increases the fair market value of a company. We basically, it was like we trained for this moment for us, right? But, you know, I... it went really really high and really really low and and this is like the oscillations over this it's it's it's whiplashy inside of companies um but it's um i don't know i feel i feel like through this i ended up

My convictions were pretty unchanged. The thing that though happened is where I got caught up is there was like a bubble of belief that we just had to like... massively increase the size of a company the headcount and so on to like to to deal with this and for that it would be okay to um change like the hiring standards but I changed my mind on a lot of things in fact I think I changed my mind on I would change my mind on every opinion I have if someone shows up with good

data on it. And I think that's actually really, really important. Can you remember something from the sort of early founder type days before you became like a... manager and an executive and a leader that you've done a 180 on? Like straight up, I didn't believe in leadership. I just didn't think leadership was important. I felt that...

If you get really good individuals and can point them in the same direction, or even without that, all the right things would happen. And I thought this partly because... People really disliked leadership. So clearly the right people would show up. I believe those things are utterly incorrect now. I think people love leadership.

like they like they love complaining about it too which they should and it like it deserves all criticism it gets but like there's something absolutely wonderful being part of a group that's being led and obviously i'm not obviously a leader like especially outside of shopify like i love just being part of a team and nothing

more fun than having someone who has a vision um like and and and building something every hackathon i go i'm just like hey i'm taking a vacation from leaving i'm just like you tell me what to do it's so good um so you know that's a that's a that's a distance traveled that's an almost 100 swing on on this particular issue. The first version of Shopify, everyone made the same salary, right? Like, it's just like, we kind of like...

Hey, let's not have difficult conversations by just paying everyone exactly the same. We'll figure this out. How long did that go for? Well, like not long. But like my first 10 people or so. I'm going to say, hey, Ben and I do the same. Yeah. We're just like, hey, everybody in the choir makes the same.

So it's like, it's just like, and you know, I think that's, I actually really like this. I now know how egalitarian social is, that's coded, but like, I love starting there, right? Like, because... I think that would be cool if that would be a good way of doing it. But actually rejecting these things one step at a time is actually perfect because now you don't have a derivative idea of something. You've ran the test for you.

It strikes me that when you started the company, you knew nothing about building a company or leadership or having anything of this scale. And you had to sort of, from first principles, go from doing it wrong to doing it right. along the way. Where are some places where you found shortcuts where you didn't have to learn it yourself and you could look to some other leader or bring in someone great and that person actually just had like a whole bundle of shortcut?

One of my most important realizations at some point, like I found myself at some point only doing things I dislike doing. And I... I'd like to think that even the things I dislike doing, I can learn to, like, I think everyone can get sort of to 80% of state of art pretty quickly on any topic. But, like, I was just kind of miserable at doing this. And the reason why, like, everything I like doing...

I had no problem delegating to other people because I know it's fun. Everything I didn't like doing, I did myself because I didn't feel like I should ask people to do it. And luckily, I overdid this to a degree that I had to... um but it broke it was really really it's really good to over swing right like it's i find that if something just sort of works you don't have to counteract but if something really breaks you then you would just like have to examine the entire picture and

i i just ended up like realizing everything i don't like is someone else's dream job and that's like incredibly liberating so so since then i've been creating lots of beautiful dream jobs of stuff that i don't want to do so and that's like uh this is people ask me a lot about hey toby why do you actually still like do programming and why do you find it valuable like my i mean

I have a mind I can't find things that aren't valuable fun either. It sort of ends up being the same to me. I do trust that if my mind wants me to go in a certain direction, that there's a premonition that it will be valuable in some odd way. even as analogy or so as like perspective, or because I meet people that are just... That's probably the successful founder archetype, by the way. If it really comes down to one thing, I think it's having that intuition.

where the overlap of things that are interesting and exciting to you and value creative just like happened to be perfectly overlapping. And for instance, the leadership thing, a lot of this came from learning an instrument. And I really like playing guitar. I'm very bad at it. But the funny thing then is I got fascinated with music theory and different genres, and I got so much more out of music.

And eventually we got to spend some time with jazz musicians who were very high near the top of the pecking order in that world, especially guitar related. And so... Only after I understood how a jazz band works did I realize what leadership actually is. Because this is where the business world is just incorrect. It's so chain of command.

But a jazz band is, you have a clear leader and sometimes the leadership changes and shifts around. But like what the leader does is not dictatorially say what is. we are playing and how we're spending our time and what to eat. They just invite other people that have merit for what we want to do. In fact, maybe not even. Just invite any people and ask everyone to add. what they've got to a very basic set of conventions. It's going to be in a key. It's going to be a temple.

It's emergent. It's like the piece of music is being created at that moment. And the next note is entirely dependent on the merit, skill and taste of the people who are showing up. And I think this is the best metaphor for what a great team is like. Like, there got to be constraints. It needs to be in the key. It needs to be at a tempo. But sometimes even the members of a group propose changes. We go to a different set of chords. We go to a different key. We go from major to minor.

People play dissonance to create tension, which is against the rules, to then cause like a... merging back of a music, like bringing it back home feels incredibly powerful to everyone listening. And that's mastery, knowing the rules so that you know when you can break them and why.

Well, this sounds to me like the definition of a technology company. Exactly. Like Henry Ford couldn't set up the assembly line like this because every worker needed to do the same thing and every car needed to come out the same way.

and it had to be any color you want as long as it's black. But like, yeah, software doesn't work that way. Software doesn't work this way. People do try to build software this way and really, really try to turn it into something that... actually resembles what a car assembly line looks like after it's created like that's really really dialed in and like everyone has like does one widget and you get like

2% out of the individuals that you hired, right? Because like they are incredible. They have a lot to give. They have a lot of priors. They like give them the room to contribute, but then hold them to it. But you would be amazed how often this happens. I've learned so much from video games about business. Yeah, yeah. You've talked about this a lot. I've learned so much. Okay. I'm asking for personal research here. When did you start playing video games with your kids?

And how did you do it? Just basically as soon. I mean, I think we didn't do screens until they're two years old, which we sort of picked. And I don't think that's necessarily even... Good advice. I think maybe it's fine. Like a two-year-old can't play a video. My daughter's four and is like, she's just on the cusp. So the way we played video games was we used an iPad. We were lying on the couch together.

i i start minecraft and they tell me what to build they point at things i build them right so that's this is us playing video games together um and some of my most fond memories because even two year olds would just basically just know words like letting them choose what we built like we i i i played minecraft a lot before before that um in various instances i never built such interesting things as the kids told me to do like we built tree houses and uh like

things on top of three hours. Like, it's just, I wouldn't have imagined this because there's so much creativity there. And so, you know, that's already a small team. Like, I let them to be the jazz director of our play session. And I think I... I think video games are very maligned, and again, some of it deserves criticism, but there's always a question, what does it replace? In those moments, it...

I probably needed some downtime, right? Like, and this was some way for us to do this. Like, I have a tricky job and sometimes I need to shut off my brain too. I'd rather do it doing something together with a two-year-old being creative than... being upstairs playing Minecraft or so, you know, like, I mean, not exactly what I would be playing, but so I think this is the most important question. So we did this very early and then it became much more intensive during COVID because...

I was really worried about how cuckoo and everyone was. I was really worried about the lockdowns and what they would do to kids, especially in that all my boys were in ages where... failing softly was just really important for them like you just like have to kind of make mistakes like I've gotten where to where I'm in by just

having failed more than others most of the time. And I invite it. I like failing at things. I like being bad at things. Which is something I want to cultivate with them too, being very authentic in the world, making lots of choices there. You stretch yourself. It's so fun. I was so pre-biased this way anyway, but my daughter's just at this age. She's about to turn four. And even just in the last week...

She's, we have a steam deck. I'm previewing my carve out for the next episode. This ongoing saga of David's carve outs about. Will he or won't he get a steam deck? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's gone from like me playing this thing to her being like, I want to move the character.

and then like watching her figure out how to use a joystick and like the first night is like you know it's like watching a monkey try to use the joystick and now she's like moving the character around and it's like whoa you know it's so cool and it's so important to not jump in and do it for them if you like obviously you can do everything better but like

This is such an important thing to let them actually, like, they ask me for help and I give them pointers of how to do it better and it's like, it takes a lot. Like, it's so hard. Oh, so, yeah. You want to short circuit it. Last night she was like, oh, I want to talk to these people. And I was like, okay, hit the A button. And she's like, you know, watch her figure out.

What the A button is, unfortunately, is just like spamming the A button. And I'm like, okay, no, no, no. You see or figure it out. Imprecise instructions. Hit the A button. You need better context. Yeah, exactly. So just like a recent thing is I'm dyslexic. Two of my kids are also dyslexic and it's frustrating because like it just sort of gets you, like it makes some things quite harder. The end of the school is wonderful.

Her middle kid finally got frustrated with just not being able to type well. I'm like, okay, well, what are you going to do about it? Let's build a habit somehow to do it. And then, you know, he was doing a typing trainer and it's just, my God. He was very good at it and did it for 10 minutes a day. But man, is that boring. So then I went out and like, clearly someone must have solved this. And so...

We ended up finding on Steam a game called, I can't remember the name, but it's like a roguelite typing game where you're in the middle and words come at you and enemies and you need to type them to shoot them and then you can...

choose upgrades and like it's like now all my kids are playing this type trainer yeah and just like even though the other ones don't need to learn that yeah yeah like now like the younger ones also getting good at typing now because they were all like doing 10 finger typing and getting to like he's i think I think he went from 16 words a minute when he started. He's now at like 70. Like he types like average speed of most people. And that was like a month. And I'm like, man.

How many people think, like, I wish I would have learned to type better? Well, let me tell you, as a video game, you're going to fall into this thing and you come out on the other side being an excellent typer. And just like, again, we have not integrated video games correctly into society either. Like, we are just like...

We're treating them too frivolously. And as a family who solves problems with choosing video games as a thing that we've done periodically, this has been just one of those, talk about it, parenting hack. It's like... Amazing. So it looks super fun. Okay. So I have a, to bring it back to Shopify, is that okay? So I have a company specific or company journey specific question for you. If you're an outside observer to the company, it seems like this.

meme stockification thing that happened in 2021 is a very consequential event to the company. And then you have this 80% drawdown, you're in this public market valley of despair situation. What is it like living through that? And if you could build a time machine, what would you go tell yourself? Yeah, so look, it is very hard for me to...

I'm trying to like key an interesting answer to almost any question because that makes it sort of, that's sort of a puzzle of a good conversation, right? Like how to take this in the most interesting direction.

I find this one is really kind of stumping me very often because it just wasn't that interesting. And maybe the most interesting thing about what you're describing is that it wasn't interesting in a significant way. If I would have a time machine, I would tell... I mean, I guess the only thing I would tell... Let me surface that. I should get like...

quickly get the credit rating and the sort of facilities down to do a buyback. Like once it goes down, that would be great. But like, it just like, like I would be opportunistic about it. Like, I think that... I love that. Spoken like a true entrepreneur. Own more of my company. Yeah, it's awesome. Love this company. Best investment I ever met, for sure. So, I don't think it was interesting. I think it was...

Inside of a company, we were fair market value of a company. It was something. It actually didn't go down in this time that the stock went down. It did not change. The actual intrinsic. Yeah. Everyone in the market are wonderful because people buy and sell and someone buys it with a high conviction and someone sells it with low conviction. If you have a lot more people with low conviction...

then the price is going down because the clearing price shifts. And the low conviction is not due to what the company do very often. Low conviction might be just because the vibe changed. And because people's conviction that there will be buyers tomorrow changed. And interest rates changed. Interest rates changed. Russia invaded Ukraine and every stock moved in the entire market.

But none of those companies has shifted in fair market value outside of maybe military contractors. So it just doesn't, it isn't that interesting and it doesn't affect... i i think the company a lot but it sort of hangs over company it comes up a lot and the group i'm sort of usually somewhat upset with is um

you know, sell-side analysts who gave buy ratings at these ratings, right? Like, it's just like they are the only professionals whose job is to inform the public with good advice and like telling people to continue buying.

if companies go to 70 something times revenue like feels um i mean i feel like an asset test for your quality of your predictions right like so i but like somehow ends up being um entirely um unproblematic for people doing that, where somehow the fact that they did that and made some people purchase at these valuations, which then lost a lot of money afterwards.

you know, on the sell side was probably, you know, Goldman Sachs because they do fundamental analysis and realize that this is probably overvalued and sell it to people who then lose their shirt. That feels bad. I want... You know, I love the fact that I've made a lot of money for a lot of people who had conviction in the company and, you know, who purchased Shopify early. I made sure I...

The most different thing I've probably done to most companies of my cohort is that I went public very early, right? Right, right. It's like over 10 years ago. 2015. Depending on how you count, it's like a really Shopify sort of 2006 launched. the product Shopify, which really is beginning of that. We were public, I guess, nine years later from there. Which today is short. Today, it's like, well, maybe in decade three, we'll go public. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We went public.

with every dollar that we ever raised still in the bank and add a billion and a half valuation, right? You went public at a $1.5 billion valuation. Yeah. It's funny, we did a Shopify episode and that is still not, that's a crazy low number by today's days. Yeah, and I love it because it means like, hey, I love the facility of public companies. I think it's so cool.

What means people participated in your growth? People can buy it on conviction and say, I like what this company is doing. I like its positioning. I'm going to put this into my hopefully tax-free savings account for a long time. And I am very motivated by building something that becomes of more and more value to the people who have high conviction.

So I love it. I'm the person trying to convince everyone else to take their companies public because I think it's just like the right thing to do. Again, it's also valuable for a company in many ways.

Again, it's not difficult. It's just like sometimes it's annoying. That's true. But everything is... What's your point about like for every... job you dislike there's somebody else who's dream job yeah exactly exactly yeah and frankly i thought we were data driven before we went public and we really got data driven for a process of taking the company public and i i learned a lot um again 20 of the process was like

I felt pretty sorry for myself for having to do, but 80% ended up being utterly valuable. And just like every challenge you set yourself. What are some other things in this 2021 period? Sort of as historians, David and I can't help but zoom in on these moments of a great tumult for companies and see how they changed. So I'm curious, one thing you've shared with us before is that even though...

everyone's issuing all these buy ratings, you actually felt like we're not a very well-run company. And you actually had to change a bunch of stuff, including people. Can you walk us through some of the things in that 2021 forward period? where you look back and go, okay, we're a much more resilient company today because we took XYZ actions? Yeah. Well, I mean, I changed the way I work inside of a company because I just felt like I need to, like I have special...

special privileges in Shopify history, such as I've seen every version of it and therefore I have an enormous amount of context. Like my own context engineering is like easy because it's all pre-lauded with. every important decision that I've been doing shopping for 21 years that's helpful that helps a lot in product and it helps a lot in strategy and it helps a lot in these kind of things so anyway

During this time, I mean, Harley, who I've been working with for 15, maybe 16 years now, is... He's the president of Shopify. He's president of Shopify. absolutely wonderful uh a human being and incredible storyteller and uh you know just creates lots of capacity for me to um be more internal focused and um other than harley every other executive is uh more recent now and it's um um it's a combination of things like i might it's not because anyone's bad people but like everyone of a

previous team, it became a really, really good optimization function to learn a particular way to make me look another way. Like to speak about your area in a way that I was... This sounds really rigorous and good. You're probably not deciding over my current biggest problem, which is the one I want to work on. Therefore, I'm going to look elsewhere. And the thing that COVID did is like there was just no possibility of...

me being diverted in attention because I just went through everything and like went through every project, every talk with every team directly. When something was really like stuck in engineering, I talked with engineers and so on. This is how I used to run the company before I got into taking a little bit more of an abstract view of a company. And so I did more of this and realized this is what I love doing.

it's incredibly it's tons of work but i would probably do it if you wouldn't pay me for it now shopping looks like this i every four weeks i review every project we have internal like this GSD thing where like every project goes in, AI analyzes it against all our product principles. It's really cooking with gas now. And it's just like building a company that's just like...

fundamentally built around a certain conviction about a cohesive way of how great products are created. And getting to explore if you're right about it and figuring this out, is this actually a good way to work together, is cool.

And it's something that is unique to, I think, founder-run companies that are there, which are enabled in such a way that you can really build them differently. Yeah, that was the thing when you started the answer of like, well, the thing about this... period in history was it actually like wasn't that big a deal and it just smacked me in the face that like only a founder-led company could say yeah because if you weren't a founder-led company you would have gotten fired yeah

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 100%. That's the craziest thing. Again, I really make a massive distinction. Like, founder-run companies, ideally, we should find a different term in companies even. They're just so different from more managerially-run companies, more traditional companies. They're just... completely crap in so many ways if you judge them basically just from the perspective of companies. Companies are all like have their shit figured out and are operational and like...

And yet all the most valuable companies in the world are founder-run or look kind of founder-run in some way. Yeah, because there's playbook for major-run companies and they are bad at adopting to the new things because they're fundamentally, again, no one carries...

the full legitimacy inside of a company. Legitimacy is a currency in a company. No one carries a full legitimacy in a company, even the CEO. The CEO just has a lot of input on the plan. The plan carries the legitimacy, right? And so... In a managerially run company, the plan for the next year or years, if you're in a good one, is the thing that everyone defers to. And the CEO is an avatar and advocate for the plan.

And so changing anything requires an enormous activation energy where, again, if legitimacy is invested in an individual, then you can pivot on a dime. The people who don't like this don't work in these companies. So you have like broad agreement on that's the way to work. That leads to bad outcomes often. But like, you know, if...

The individual who's playing this role is very conscientious and is very open to feedback and changes their mind, strong opinions weekly held if better data shows up and so on. It can operate at a... quite a good batting average, which makes the highlights and the accomplishments will end up making up easily for the downsides. I'm remembering maybe it was a Don Valentine thing or maybe a Mike Moritz thing.

That's right. We're sitting here in Sequoia. We're recording in Sequoia's offices because my home is under construction. So here we are. But I think Sequoia had a rule or one of their playbooks of evaluating. founders of um has to be right a lot like that that's the that's the judgment you need to make as a shareholder in a founder-led company like do i believe this founder is going to be right a lot

If that is the case, then great. Yeah, exactly. That's what you need to aspire to. Which actually, I guess that was borrowed from Bezos, right? That's a Bezosism. I think Be Right a Lot is an Amazon leadership. That's right. I think that's right. And it's a really good one. It's so to the point.

What do you think? Let's draw a clearer distinction between managerial-led companies and founder-led companies. Because I would argue, you know, Satya is not Microsoft's founder, but it's starting to feel a lot like a founder-led company. Or, I'm trying to come up with another good example. See, but this is the thing. Such is my go-to example of someone who has transcended it. Jamie Dimon. Right. Both of them have...

Like, and this maybe is being cute with language, but here's the way I would frame it just to have some term to hang an analysis on which can incorporate people in extraordinary individuals like this. I think both of them have given re-founding events to their companies. I think they have made such large changes with such clear breaks from the past.

that they actually are the auteurs of their company's cultures now. Certainly, certainly in J.P. Morgan's case. We went through the whole thing with it, like Bank One, this is J.P. Morgan's case. I think also, like, I know lots of people.

From Microsoft. Yeah, and absolutely Microsoft. Like Satya did too. Yeah. And these things aren't as significant as like... what warren buffett did to berkshire hathaway you know it's like completely unrecognizable microsoft still resembles the microsoft of old um but it's it's it's it's transpherically opposite on many convictions it's like using

um web kit for its browser not inter explorer it's it's like it's very problems it's more open source uh than i mean apple is for sure it's shocking that they've become a great business without owning the important platform of the era Like that was the entire thing that their success was predicated on in their heyday. They don't have that importance now, that relevance, and yet it's still a great business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you could argue Azure is actually...

more of a platform now. I don't know. I mean, this is not the episode about Microsoft. I appreciate Microsoft. deeply and it's full of incredible individuals and it's hard to find fault there. It's just such an incredible company and such a storied business.

Again, I aspire to build a company that lasts for a long time. So Microsoft has been incredibly successful at this and managed to reinvent itself. It's the second most valuable company in the world, I think, for free or something. But it seems like there's... It's interesting to hear you include CEOs like that in the country.

There's a group. There's a group of... We do need a better term. Frank Whitman goes into companies and turns them into sufficiently more spam to give them re-founding events. So I think this is actually... an employable strategy it requires enormous intestinal fortitude and will probably not work often and the existing shareholders handing over the control for someone to yeah like uh in a one-way door manner take the company over yeah

My sense is we will see a lot more of it. I, like, you know, one of my executives, Cass, is, like, going to Opendoor and, you know, like, again, obviously that story will have to be written about how this goes, but that's a... I think that is a business that, everyone agrees, requires a re-founding event to have a shot. And you see more recognition of that coming in.

I think, you know, compensation system even set up to facilitate this kind of thing. It's zero dollar salary and it's all based on the stock.

does well yeah something like that which is i mean again that's that's a founder type conversation uh like a conversation that's similar to starting yeah that was you know jamie diamond of like i'm gonna put half my net worth into this company that i've just joined as ceo that's right yeah like if Like all in this, like people underestimate how expensive hedging is.

But all this to say, so we've come here to the talk about founder-led companies and managerial companies. Currently, people don't understand how stratospherically different they are. I think the thing that will contribute to... understanding this in the future is because we actually, I think, will determine that there is sort of a middle ground here that is sort of, you can get it from both sides.

like super highly enabled individuals and with an acceptance for things going wrong as long as the balance arcs towards great success is what you want. Right now, the only people who are in a position to ever get there are the founders of companies because the shareholders didn't traditionally let them.

right and and so i think like jobs got back there but wouldn't have if you would have come in as a new hire right like at apple um so i think uh i think they'll find new tools and then i think people yeah people appreciate this now in a way that they didn't before. I mean, hell, the playbook of VCs used to be step number one, fire founder. It's like we've seen enough iterations of the simulation now where you can say, oh, actually, it is worth it to vest all of our trust into this one person.

And there's going to be plenty of individuals who are not worth that trust, right? So this is, again, it will fail and it's risky and people don't like taking risks, especially investors, because, again, like if an open door isn't working.

The people who, you know, made this deal with CAS are going to not look very smart, right? Like, so it's high alpha upside downside, which many people avoid. But like, I think... again we will see this being de-risked um and so anyway it'll be more common um but we're also you know we're operating in the more and more companies are operating in the technology world yeah uh which is going through this

ridiculous, crazy platform shift, as we talked about in the first half of this conversation. You have to operate this way as a company. You have to. Right. And this is super important because we're not talking about the generic. There's no question of where in the spectrum you want to be. If you're... if your business is making, is a widget supplier to General Motors or something. It's like just operational effectiveness.

like sweat every detail fridwick taylor stopwatch everywhere being founder run there doesn't do anything it just like adds chaos and adds hard to predict uh like quality control i imagine so um um

There might be someone hearing this. There might be an industry which is being reinvented right now. Maybe. But I think the default position should be you want these to be actual companies. This is why I also feel like it's actually better... to call the founder run even public companies kind of ventures or missions or something it's like

Probably nonsensical to try to make that change and make that stick. It'll never stick. Was this part of your process of discovering that leadership is important for you and for Shopify? Yeah, absolutely. Because I feel like I... I felt very, very dumb the moment I made this realization. I feel like I've had everything basically through most of my life to make this realization very, very early and it took me way too long.

But it's that leadership and consensus are two sides of the same spectrum. Like they don't intersect at all. It's like every time consensus makes a decision. It's the absence of leadership. And so I also think not enough people know this. I still feel like it is a bit of a secret because even in our language, consensus is a positive term.

Maybe it's fine, but consensus is always the absence of leadership. No one, like everyone abdicated their leadership responsibilities to cause a consensus to emerge and prioritized. the presence of a consensus to finding the best solution. Some people are so clever that they can manufacture consensus around what they would have chosen anyways and operate this way.

But that's sort of the only time these things combine. And usually it's you decide one thing or another. So do your alarm bells go off if you start sensing consensus around something in Shopify? Oh, even worse than that. I actually use it when I... don't want decisions to be made. If you want to put something, you're like, kumbaya, we're all going to get in the room. I think most companies play too much with pricing all the time. It just causes all these problems with data.

it makes it hard to predict and then suddenly you A-B test discounts and then you cheapen the product because now people are just going to wait for the next discount and stuff like this. I mean, obviously, obvious things are valuable strategies, but like, I think people overdo it and make like full-time positions, changing pricing and so on. And I basically like every five years I say, okay.

let's look at pricing let's from first principles like um uh get to a pricing if that happens to be the same we have today we don't do anything in other cases we we make changes And then it goes back into firmament and we are not looking at pricing again for five years. Just because otherwise it's too distracting to a company. And I used to just forbid it from doing pricing. Now I have a much better way. I create a pricing council. Ha ha ha ha!

And the council can, if they come to a consensus that something is a better idea, they can then pitch me on it. And it's like super easy to say no at this point. And they don't get to a decision anyway. So I don't have to deal with it anymore. So you have two layers of protection. Yeah, it's exactly perfect.

You're not going to get to a decision, and then you still have the V-table. Yeah, yeah. Once you see through the matrix, there's moves become available to you, which are highly efficient. This is like whenever a company tells us that there's a V-team forming to look into something. Yeah. sort of like a committee or like what so it's nobody's job yeah no i think that v teams can super work it just you have to have a leader

It needs to be extremely clear who is responsible. This is the old Apple thing, the DRI, the directly responsible individual. And it has to have someone's name next to it. Is it? Yeah. Apple maybe too, but like Amazon is definitely big on the DRI thing, yes. Exactly. So yeah, I'm a fan of making this quite fluid. I think it's like...

Like I said, I'm going to be a team member in a hack day project. I'm not the leader. I think very often it's like if not commonly the person who's the leader of an area. is different from the highest paid person. You're not actually making the choice of leadership sufficiently is one test I apply. Because by default... MO in every company is the highest paid person is making decisions, right? This is actually why I take a $1 salary. So just to like... Well, but that, I mean...

You benefit by far the most if the company does well. Of course. And because it's like I can and it's fun. And anyway, whatever. What's the term the hippo? The highest paid person in the organization is always the person that's right in a room. Yeah, I want to signal that I will come with opinions. I want everyone to give me better ones because that's fun. So anyway, so consensus, decision-making and leadership, I think a spectrum.

If you see instances of leadership, you also saw a company that has the ability to avoid needing to make every one of its decisions via consensus. The problem with consensus decision is on that spectrum from 1 to 10, it's usually a 6 or a 7. You're just like, by the very process of... making it need for making a consensus you optimize for lack of downsides so people are almost always better than five because they really like they they don't get the middle you get like some

The best version that everyone can agree on. It's like back to the floor and the ceiling thing. Consensus will get you a floor, but it'll cram that ceiling. Exactly. That's exactly what it does. While in the presence of leadership, you can hit any number 1 to 10. And if you're a company that wants to hit 8, 9, 10 or die trying, then you kind of have to... Rule by fiat. It's the only answer. But more charitably, like...

When we're looking at creating the best products and the biggest companies and the most successful organizations, what you are looking to do is create an extreme outlier. And extreme outliers can only be created... you know, pick your term, whether it's by an auteur designer or rule by fiat or leadership, you know, rather than consensus. Outliers come from like a single vision.

executed by a team of people, not an agreed upon vision executed by a team of people. That is 100% true. And this is like... very consistently demonstrated in every area where it's quantifiable how good things are. I don't think a great book has been written. as a big collaboration between multiple people it's like books are as good as they are because they're always single author there's a

supportive agent in the editor, clearly. But that is a supporting role. This is so interesting because I completely agree and I'm like obsessed with auteur-driven things. And yet we operate a partnership where neither of us are the boss. Yeah, but it's a totally different thing. We're a two-person partnership. We are one person. I suppose a two-person committee. We're like a married couple at this point. It's like a fused brain. I don't...

That you work by a committee. I think you, like, every single time I see a great partnership, it's when I see people who are actually learned to respect and trust the other person, like each other. in which areas they tend to have a better higher betting average that's actually true that that's not we don't operate by consensus at all we operate by

If one of us wants to do something, we do it. We should search our iMessage thread for defer to you. Yeah, yeah. That's just like anytime one of us wants to do something. We're both founders. And so anytime one of us wants to do something, we do it.

That's just what it is. Exactly. Exactly. And I work very closely with lots of people that were just overruled, were given the right to overrule me. Like my, my co-founder of the shop was Daniel Wynand, who was a brilliant designer, chief design officer eventually. And. he had veto rights over every feature that he shipped. And I made the decision on what we were building, and I wrote most of the code, especially because at some point it was the two of us only.

He said no to features that I wrote and wanted to share because we couldn't figure out how to make the UX code for it. And that was important because Shopify's killer feature in 2006 was we had brilliant UX. Like this was... You know, we were the linear of our time, the Figma, and it's always been incredibly important.

um the people who have a highest context and the greatest scholarship over aspects of the companies also that's not consensus that is actually straight up leadership again right like the leader on that aspect becomes that person and so um It's important that you need to be able to realize. You shouldn't listen to this and be like, oh, I need to be like Toby and I need to.

be the leader on every single thing in the company. That's not the lesson. I'm not. I absolutely am not. What I don't believe in is pushing decision-making outwards, sort of as grassroots or down an organization idea.

I also don't believe in top-down decision-making. I believe in pulling decision-making inwards. I create the highest ideal liquidity environments in which we can make very good decisions quickly but where it's very clear who's making making decisions and who's consulting on it and this is again these like review cycles i talk about are that like we are going through a thousand projects it is a crazy thing to do it's like texts

starts at like 8 a.m. and usually runs to 10 at night, three days out of every month. And the follow-ups from this are probably for a weekend. I do follow-up reviews and stuff. It's just like... I happen to like working, which is good. You sound locked in. It's like, it's good. It's like, this is what I want to do. And I think it's...

I'm doing a thing that I didn't set out to do. I'm trying to build at massive scale, like a societally important piece of software. Like it's like, there's a lot of, if you subtract Shopify out, like if it disappears overnight, there's a lot of countries which would have uh no gdp growth second order gdp because of shopify is massive yes of all your customers yeah it's like just like plain uh gmv uh like uh gross profit dollars like just sales across the platform is like

I think a third or more of a Canadian entire GDP. What's the number-ish? It's like 400 billion kind of things. It's just absolutely crazy. Again, I didn't hardly mix it, so I don't... I think that would make you either the second or third largest retailer in the world if all of that GMV was accruing to one retailer instead of the distributed. Yeah, which obviously it isn't. So this is a highly virtualized way to think about it. But like in terms of the checkout that ships, it is the...

in the top three busiest checkouts on planet Earth and at a growth rate that it might end up being the biggest. And so that's a tremendous responsibility, which I... Man, I don't operate too much on regret minimization. I actually like a slightly different framework where Bezos famously talked about future regret minimization. What is the nuance? I'll get into this because it's fun. But my biggest regret would just be like, hey, I didn't take responsibility seriously enough.

I think it sucks when people use bad software. I think it sucks when anyone's underperforming their own potential due to tools. I can do so much here, so of course I'm dedicating myself to this kind of thing. Very early, we talked about founder-run companies versus managerial companies and how in management, like a CEO is being fired when results are bad, which I think is fundamental. That's multiple levels of wrong.

The way to judge a CEO is like, out of what opportunity did you carve what company? And maybe even for what reasons? And, you know, like, you look at something like... You know, eBay, which by rights should have all of commerce on the internet, right? Like they were there first and had everything figured out. Owned PayPal. Incredible business model, asset light. Shopify does not own.

drive it's like it's like they had the entire thing they in the paypal acquisition like think about the stuff it's like peter thiel coming in elon musk you know max leftchin and like a million others besides. David Sack. The guys that started YouTube. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, think about the talent density that they've got. So from that moment, what's eBay now? Not that. Right.

I mean, you can even play, this is the craziest thing, you can even play that game with Microsoft, right? Like, it's like, obviously, the courts have now said that Apple can charge 30% on all the economic activity on top of platform. you know some emergent provisos um and maybe cough outs um that means microsoft could have done this with a pc right um uh they got in antitrust over shipping a web browser which is so insane if you think about it right like it's like

What they should have done is have an App Store and charge 30% of literally all the money I'm playing with right now. So what kind of trillion dollar company would that be? Obviously, I'm not advocating for this particular reality. I'm very glad this didn't happen. And I think maybe all of planet Earth is off better because of this. Ben, you have your theory that every great company...

has latent economic value within it that it chooses not to access. Story potential energy. Story potential energy. 100%. So out of what opportunity did you have what? It's actually the right question. Of course, much harder to judge. But at least for purposes of every CEO evaluating themselves on the job, that is a question they should ask themselves. So that's certainly the question I ask myself.

Okay, give us your version of the regret minimization framework. Okay, well, I mean, I do agree with it. like like in in in general i think it's just lossy and i think it's much in enhanced so the way i before i knew that was the way jeff talks about it i i always somewhat maybe more sort of philosophical I just feel at the end of life you meet with people the person you could have become and so you

I think the work in life is try to minimize the difference between that person and who you actually ended up being. So that's certainly what I do. I think one ingredient in this. Say that one more time. Is it at the end of life? At the end of life, you get essentially like the game over screen is like you get this, like you get to meet the person you could have become if you would have.

The best version you could have been. The best version you could have possibly been. And I think your goal on Planet Earth is to minimize the difference between that and that potential. So, like, again... This is not, I don't think this is a truth of any kind, but it's a very, very valuable story to believe and sort of a thing that I get a lot of value out of.

I think one of the most important ingredients is not just think about future self-regret. Don't think about what you're at a deathbed you would want to do. You need to consult your inner 16-year-old too. This is so important. We live in such amazing times and we have accomplished so much. Many people, like everything we currently have is something that we dreamed of at some point. And it's important.

That's such a perfect place to end it. Yeah, couldn't agree more. It feels like such a cheap way to make better decisions, but I wish more people would do it. Yeah. Well, Toby, thanks for doing this with us. This was good fun. I love that. That's a great conversation. Thank you very much. Thanks for your platform. I keep saying this, but I love your podcast. So great work. Thanks for letting us be a fly on the wall on your own discovery journeys on restored companies.

Thank you. Thanks, Toby. Awesome. All right, listeners, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.