Takeaways from @Shopify CEO @tobi interview with @reidhoffman:

On building a Platform: to get it off the ground - leave economics on the table for the sake of customer. you’re not a platform until the people building on top of you are making more money than you. Did this for 9 yrs to build virtuous cycle.

Start a platform by solving a problem first. Tobi built a back end for his own online snowboard store. Other retailers wanted what he had. So he solved how to set up an online store without doing all the heavy work.

Built and owned core features that meets 80% of all merchants’ needs and then opened the product to 3rd party developers to meet more specific tools. Merchants attracted to growing list of features. Developers attracted to growing list of merchant needs. And so on.

On starting the company: he didn’t think to be CEO but got advice that no one will care more about your biz than you. So, he learned how to be CEO. Read “High Output Management” by Andy Groves.

By 2015, shopify had 160k+ merchants. Most of Silicon Valley didn’t know them up to their IPO roadshow. They used that obscurity to build something amazing.

On TAM: VCs stuck Shopify’s TAM to 40k online retailers. NOT THE $4T online retail market. They couldn’t comprehend that the reason there was only 40k online businesses was because the barriers to go online were so high at the time. There were a million people waiting at the gate

Tobi saw it early because the venn diagram of people interested in retail AND computer programming were low. Reminds me of @naval’s words on finding your moat at the intersection of things you’re interested in.

On Culture: He didn’t think he could attract the best talent in SV over GOOG/FB etc. He doubled down on longer tenure of Canada talent + allowed all ideas to be heard and scaled easily. Open source community created independence AND communal ingenuity.

-3.6M stores run on Shopify
-$61B GMV (2019)
-&1170ish/share
-$145B market cap
-15 years old
Full interview @mastersofscale