Forget Zero Sum, Be Positive Sum with Harley Finkelstein | Where It Happens

0:00[Music] what's going on man not much good to see you good to see you i've uh i've got big news today that i feel like is proper to open with and it's related to my dunkin donuts large cold brew that i have every day see this straw yep you know how they say the little things in life are like really important well this straw is my little thing today because dunkin donuts they've had a straw shortage and they've had these really crappy straws for the last probably six months honestly it was like part of the whole supply chain shortage i read about it and finally they have

0:37brought back these orange classic dunkin donuts straws which are just better straws they're much more robust and they like hold up better and they give you better like flow through them to get a better drinking experience and i went in today to go get my coffee before we did this episode and they had them and it brought this huge smile to my face stupid thing but creates a big impact i don't do straws i don't know if i've ever told you that why um i have a thirst for life and i don't like to be constrained you know i feel like i like to open the

1:09lid and just sort of go go all in and let as much liquid as as my mouth could you know all right before this gets into weird territory let's let's jump into what we're talking about today yeah i don't know how much more i could take on that so we uh we have an awesome guest and someone that i've been really wanting to talk to for a while um from shopify uh harley and it's gonna be a blast jamming at him we've got us we've got so much to cover with him and what i wanted to talk about in the lead into him joining is this story that i

1:41did a bunch of research for for something i was writing about a year ago um and it's very relevant and it kind of has this like arrow of of progress um in technology that connects through to what shopify is doing today and building and so i feel like it's a really good lead-in so if you'll humor me i'd love to kind of start with this story and uh and start there to kind of jam for the episode okay cool yeah i'm all yours you and your team still using your personal phone numbers for work do you call customers partners or candidates with your personal phone number do you

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4:15a free trial go to tegus.comroom you won't regret it so the person i want to talk about the story i want to talk about is morris chang and you've probably never heard of morris chang because you're probably like most people and he's a relatively unknown figure although arguably if not the most impactful figure one of the most impactful figures in the history of technology which is a crazy thing to say i know but let me explain so morris chang is the founder of a business called taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company tsmc it is based in taiwan as you'd imagine and it is probably the most geopolitically and potentially

4:54economically important company in the world today morris chang is a fascinating human being and his life and story is extremely inspiring as well as being really impactful so he was born in china fled the country uh during the uh civil war that occurred i think like 1948 fled the country went to hong kong ended up getting accepted to harvard came over to the u.s to go to harvard left harvard to go to mit did his degree there and basically was off to the races on this like amazing career extremely intelligent did really well ended up joining texas instruments which you might know is like a large american

5:33semiconductor company and one of the first big semiconductor companies back in the day semiconductors if you're not aware of what they are they're like computer chips right it's the things that power all of our technology um over time they've gotten more and more powerful at this accelerating rate moore's law is the thing people talk about there basically that semiconductors double in terms of their capacity on array on regular intervals so morris chang is rising through the ranks at this company he's become a senior executive doing extremely well and then suddenly he's like 50 years old 52 years old i think to be precise and he basically

6:10gets put out to pasture um in his own words i think he says that in his biography um you know 52 years old he's running one of the biggest divisions and kind of gets transferred and it's very clear to him that they're putting him out to pasture he's no longer in charge of the most important stuff um and in hindsight i think a lot of people have pointed to potential racism you know we're talking about something in uh i don't know what years this is like in 1970s maybe or sorry 1983 um so maybe there was a you know some racism involved chinese man rising through the

6:43ranks of this american company um so he leaves taiwan comes along and basically offers to have him come back and lead their semiconductor manufacturing industry they want to promote it it's clear that it's going to be a huge part of the future as technology develops so he gets this invite and he has this realization which i think is going to be the thing that connects to all of this future technology and shopify which is semiconductors had always been an industry where you had to both design and manufacture in the same place and the manufacturing part of that was extraordinarily expensive like billions and billions of dollars to build these

7:23facilities and what he realized was a lot of innovative design thinkers were not actually being unlocked or able to do their best work because it cost so much money to start up a manufacturing facility so you had all these great people that were basically languishing and the whole industry wasn't progressing in the way it could because they couldn't actually go and start a manufacturing plant it was too expensive so his idea and what he did was he started tsmc which was the first ever pure manufacturing they call it fabulous facility where it was entirely about manufacturing and basically they would rent out their manufacturing capacity to amazing

8:05designers and so now if you were an incredible semiconductor designer chip designer you could go create all of these innovative designs and go and contract with this company tsmc to build them and what this has done is created this unbelievable industry and this incredible amount of innovation over the 20 30 years since he's i guess it's 40 years now since he started it that has allowed basically technology to continue to flourish and progress at this insane pace so what are my thoughts is that the yeah well let's start there because there's so many connections to broader technology that i want to talk about but it's a really interesting case study so

8:42let's start there so when i hear that story and the connection to shopify um what i love about it is okay what i like about shopify is that it's a business in a box and you know if you're creative and you're passionate about something to your point like you probably just want to focus on if it's making t-shirts just focus on like designing cool t-shirts and then have everything else you know managed uh and outsourced um so i think like that's what i love about shopify they have like an app store there's like fulfillment you can do there's just like everything you can do you're seeing this also with no code

9:24like now of a sudden and we've talked about no code before but like now all of a sudden like you can just um you know outsource so much via no code and just sort of put these building blocks together so what's exciting if you're a creator and you have startup ideas is it's pretty easy to get started and at least build an mvp yeah so you're hitting on something that's a really interesting framework which is um these companies like shopify like tsmc um like amazon web services who have basically done all of the really heavy lifting the really expensive the heavy lifting uh the capacity build out servers in the

10:04case of aws um that now enable creatives and idea people to go build on the back and just rent that capacity out rather than having to build it it used to be that if you had one of these ideas like if you with shopify as an example if you wanted to start an e-commerce store that was really hard to do there was nothing there was no software there was nothing you could go and just get it started up now because of what shopify's built you can go and just rent their box in order to go start your website you and i could start an e-commerce brand by tonight if we wanted

10:37to start that today and we could contract out manufacturing of product we could use the shopify system to find the drop shippers to do all of that it's really amazing and it all exists there it's the same thing as what tsmc did for semiconductor industry and for the broader technology industry because suddenly this massive ecosystem of designers was able to innovate and was able to sit around and just think about designing the most innovative chips because they knew they could rent capacity from tsmc amazon web services another example of that any new builder doesn't have to think about going and buying and building servers to go sit at

11:12their technology company you can just rent that capacity from aws who has put in the dirty work and gone and built all of that capacity out the crazy high upfront fixed costs that are associated with that they can take and spread across all of these customers that now come to them yeah one of the things that is pretty cool if you're a builder now in this whole new world is also the velocity of experiments that you can do so um you know you could theoretically be launching a startup every single week put it out there see if it resonates if it strikes a chord with people and just kill things

11:49really quickly i think that's why you're seeing the rise of so many product studios and holding companies um we were just texting before this about cody sanchez she is like a holding company and she's like spitting up stuff and buying stuff they check out my company as a holding company and we're constantly doing experiments to see what strikes a chord my prediction is there's going to be a ton more product studios a ton more holding companies because uh you know it's just it's easier to get these experiments out the door and as creators we just have so much less to worry about um which is which is

12:29pretty cool the cost of failure has never been lower yeah and that that's how i think of it because of all of these things because of no code because of these capacity providers like an aws a tsmc a shopify you can go rent capacity so cheap so quickly because of no code low code you can go build things out without hiring a bunch of developer talent you can test ideas the cost of testing a minimum viable product minimum viable community to connect to the point that we brought up with alexis ohanian a few weeks ago you can connect those two and get something off the ground so quickly that

13:03the cost of trying something is very very low now and so to your point on product studios i think when i come to these things i think about what is scarce and it used to be that capital was scarce to go start these things because it was so expensive now capitals abundant the capacity is abundant you can go and try all these things all the technology to try them is abundant what's scarce then in my mind is execution you know it's action bias it's like people that are actually willing to go and test their ideas and go try new things and dive in on it that's what's

13:33scarce is the actual bias for execution bias for action i'm sure you have friends who text you and you're like hey i have this startup idea what do you think right and i get those texts all the time and i like now i'm kind of like well cool idea but like why don't you just go build it like go build something to test this hypothesis you know i'm getting tired of like what do you think this idea what do you think this idea because like if it's going to take you seven days 14 days 24 hours 48 hours to go and actually test this core hypothesis like

14:09i'd much rather you send me hey here's this landing page you know i posted it on twitter i got 150 email signups um here's what i learned what do you think of that versus like here's an idea i totally agree and you we all have friends that are like that too that are you know you ha you have kind of a split of friends or people in your network the people that are like ideas and nothing ever really comes of it and you're like talking about ideas which is also fine actually people that like talking about ideas i think that's great but then there's these people that we all have in

14:37our lives who are just biased for action types and those people are amazing to be around i mean we have a friend um that we're in a group chat with nick huber who controversial guy you know people uh say what they want about him with different things he does and says uh but the guy has a real bias for action and when he says he's going to do something or when he has some idea he somehow just finds a way to roll it out very quickly and test it and see if there's a market for it and it's something to look up to and aspire to i

15:06think because those people end up being winners i have a close friend this guy barrett o'neill who you will surely hear more from and i have a small holding company with him that we're working on a handful of different sas things that we've rolled out on the side don't really publicize it we're starting to do more build in public around it and he's one of those guys that the reason i wanted to partner with him on it is literally because he would come with an idea we would jam on it and a week later he'd be like oh i had my developer team uh pulled together

15:31this like quick mock-up of it what do you think how does this work like what's the click flow and it was literally seven days after we had come up with the idea and he had this prototype of it wanted to like test it with 10 customers and when you're like that and you have that kind of bias for action and you leverage all of the things that we have at our you know at our disposal today relative to 20 years ago people would have killed for that stuff you realize that today is literally the best time in history to be an entrepreneur and to be someone that has

15:57a bias for action i will say on the bias for action piece i do know a lot of people who are bias for action so they put out a ton of experiments every week month whatever but then they give up too easily on some of these experiments so that's i think we're gonna encounter that a lot in like 22 and 23. yeah which is like they're just gonna there's gonna be graveyards of these experiments and i think it's really important to like if you're a builder and you're you're putting experiments out you're not you're also like gaining the key insights you're writing down the key insights um and you're

16:32iterating you know around a problem and you're not just you know jumping around kind of aimlessly just to put out experiments for the sake of putting out experiments yeah well it's a good it's a good point because i think what you're getting at is that there's more scarcity of bias for action is real but there's also a scarcity of things like kind of grit tenacity like the ability to follow through on things um and then like intellectual curiosity i still think is going to be kind of the razor's edge between success and failure because in a world where um you know kind of compute capacity is limitless

17:08eventually intellectual curiosity and the willingness to go down those rabbit holes and figure out what it is that needs to be built in the first place is always going to be in short supply um so i mean i i totally agree with you i think it'll be really interesting to see um i mean with things like micro acquire and you know our friend gazdecki that's building that it's pretty cool because there's a real pathway for people to build something small scale it up stick with it a little bit and now there's liquidity on those type of businesses and there's a real marketplace being built around it so i think you're going

17:38to see this whole new generation of entrepreneurs like micro entrepreneurs that are going and doing these things to your point on product studios and it's super fun like the number one you know people ask me all the time like why why do i love doing a holding company in a studio and an agency and a fund and all these things and all these experiments the number one reason selfishly is that it's a lot of fun it's really fun to be a creative person and to work on multiple ideas multiple experiments iterate it iterate versus like you know you're working on a small feature of like a large thing and you're

18:12just it's just you know it's really fun to do zero to one concept building and experiments right now yeah and you can be your own boss doing that you don't have to go work for someone you can go build things find liquidity find cash flows etc pretty cool and ties so well to our conversation with our guest harley who is an amazing figure also has one of the best zoom setups i've ever seen in my life so i'm personally excited to get shown up here and jam on all of this stuff i mean what they are doing to foster the entrepreneurial ecosystem and increase the gdp of the internet i know that

18:49stripes thing but shopify i would argue actually has just as much of a claim to it they call it arming the rebels i suppose which i absolutely love and i'm going to ask harley about it but let's bring him in and let's go deeper on this stuff i really want to hear more about his predictions for the future what's working for them what's not um and just go deeper on it sounds good man i should probably look it up uh like like history of sm7b

19:17welcome in man uh 1973. okay good 1970. yeah the sm7 was introduced in 1973 and there were some revisions but effectively uh the the revision was introduced in 1999 um where there was an additional larger windscreen built in but yeah the mic if you look at the one from 1973 it's almost exactly the one we're using right now so you're telling me that our mics are more retro than greg's greg looks like he's from the future which i think is probably true because every time we get on these with greg i crack up seeing him i think he looks like he's getting into some like ready

19:55player one mode or something like that to go into the metaverse i mean it's nerdy it's nerdy it's a gaming headset it's perfect yeah yeah i i it's like the i think you know you kind of have the all-in podcast you know kind of set up there i think they all use that on that podcast yeah it's not below your line greg that's good not going there too soon i'm not going there greg and i have known each other you know this for a long long time and i know we'll talk a bit about montreal and sort of um why i think montreal's such a ridiculously inspiring place to grow up

20:25and become an entrepreneur um but greg and i've mentioned for a very long time and and it's uh i i you know him and i are peers so it's kind of weird to say this but i am uh incredibly blown away and frankly um i i just very impressed and very proud of his incredible success can you see me blushing right now no i don't want to do the whole like patronizing right i think you and i are almost the same age but i am i'm you know greg has always been someone that has great talent so it's super cool to see it i i i'm not good with compliments thank you

20:55so much um i appreciate it um i was hoping we can talk about uh montreal a little bit because sahil's actually asked me about montreal and he's like what is in the water up there yeah i call it the montreal mafia yeah did i say it's it's real yeah montreal yeah montreal i'll speak a little strange because montreal is it's the only i mean you know inside of the canadian main cities it's the only bilingual city so what you have is you have a bunch of people like greg and i who grew up there who i think greg you'd probably the same thing we only started learning french in school

21:32around the fourth or fifth grade that's right right so most of us did not grow up i mean we're anglophones we speak english at home but in school in quebec you did not learn english until again you're probably you know eight or nine years old and so you know montrealers say things instead of saying like the water is cold they'll say things like it's cold the water which is a weird thing it makes no sense but it sort of takes its cues from the french language but i i actually think at a you know just a montreal city-wide level montreal is an immigrant city and you will find very few people that

22:08go back three or four generations uh in montreal greg i suspect your grandparents probably were the first gen in montreal they were born actually in montreal like they were so it's that's fairly not common you know most of um my father was was born in hungary he immigrated to montreal when he was you know five years old and i think one of the things that montreal has done is it's embraced the sort of this immigrant culture which effectively is entrepreneurship because you have no capital you have no experience you have no money so the thing to do is go and find a way to hustle and make you know put food on the

22:46table and that takes the form of what is you know famously known as the shemata business in montreal which is the clothing business uh which is you know where dove charney and american apparel got started and you know buffalo jeans and parasuco got started there and a whole pajar a whole bunch of you know global fashion brands all got started in montreal because the barrett entry into that into that industry was low but you know my my grandfather sold eggs at a farmers market for his entire life and so i think more than most cities uh that i've been to montreal embraces this idea of being an entrepreneur and owning your

23:20own small business it's so interesting what you just hit on in a number in a number of ways but when i think about like montreal and then new york city right um both are kind of cities of immigrants but new york be very quickly became the center of the financial world and in the early days like it was a center of capitalism and there was so much capital and so i think there's probably a grittiness of the entrepreneurship in montreal that it developed from not being that where it was you know like now they call it bootstrapping but basically you had to you know hustle and figure out how to

23:52make the working capital model work and figure out how to how to kind of grind your way to that success because you didn't have those ties to the global financial center like you might have in new york and you didn't necessarily have this the people that i looked up to remember um my first i had a couple businesses when i was a kid like 13 years old but my first real business was a t-shirt business that i launched when i was at mcgill so i was born in montreal i lived there till i was about 12 years old then i moved to south florida with my family

24:21i went to uh high school in south florida and then moved back to montreal when i was 17 to go to mcgill and um it was a tough year for my family my my dad was no longer around family goes bankrupt so i started a t-shirt business and i remember uh i remember that um when i told people that i was starting a t-shirt business uh it wasn't that uncommon it wasn't like well aren't you a student aren't you don't you have to go to school it was sort of it felt culturally appropriate or or at least geographically relevant and appropriate that someone in montreal would be starting a t-shirt business and

24:56i i don't know if this for a fact because greg and i did not rehearse this but greg i suspect you know a lot of people that started t-shirt businesses i know a ton i know a ton and you're completely right in the sense that like it's almost unusual if you go work at you know if you go work on wall street um and i remember i dropped out of mcgill and i remember i was really scared to have that discussion with my parents and my grandparents and stuff like that um and i went to my grandfather who was an entrepreneur um kind of like old school um and i went to

25:28him and i was really nervous about like telling him and i just remember being like hey i'm gonna drop out of school i'm gonna start this company and he wasn't saying anything and i was just like i was just speaking really quickly and i was like oh my is he does he is he gonna prove he's not gonna prove and he was like yeah that makes sense you know it was supportive um and that's kind of the vibe in montreal it's so interesting that you kind of bring up the cultural side of it it's something i think about a lot and i think about it in the context of both

25:58broader culture like within a city but then also on a micro level within a family and how entrepreneurship and that grittiness is sort of something that's built in you from a young age and that you learn and you see it around you and like i like i come from my mom is indian my dad is white jewish from the bronx actually my great grandfather was a vegetable peddler in the bronx allegedly uh allegedly he sold vegetables to babe ruth that was like something i was always told as a kid growing up of course you can't prove that that's one of those things that like you can't disprove it but like i

26:28was a baseball kid growing up i played baseball in college and so that was always something i told my friends when i was a kid like my great grandfather knew babe ruth um but my family like my my dad's uh academics professor at harvard my grandfather my mom's side similarly an academic we didn't really have i didn't have people around me constantly um that were starting things or that were kind of um you know building new ideas and so when i went to go start my own life and go to college or go get my first job there was always just the pat it was like the clean path

26:57was basically you go to college you get a degree you go take a stable job and you kind of work in that make money and put your head down and that was what life was and only when i met greg and a handful of other friends after when co-fed started did i start to see this other side of life and i started having this like decentralized friend group that showed me the other side and the other way of doing things so i'm fascinated by this like cultural entrepreneurship movement as it were i think it also depends on you know who are the role models in any

27:29particular community obviously in the valley you have a certain set of role models that would be very different than you know say on wall street and i think in montreal or you can sort of replace montreal with entrepreneurial cities um you know for example like i've been told that chicago is incredibly entrepreneurial relative to new york for example um and i don't know i don't know all the american cities but toronto for example is i think less entrepreneurial it's the biggest city and in canada it's far more you know there's like there's the wall street of canada called bay street in toronto and i think it depends

28:04on who are the who do people try to emulate and in a place like montreal you tried to emulate at least i did growing up the entrepreneurs the people that started something from nothing and i remember in those first couple of months of starting this t-shirt business there was this coffee shop uh in chabanel which is the montreal garment district called gentilly uh greg i'm not sure if you ever went there of course um but it was it was a sort of you know kind of grimy coffee shop but the cool part is you can kind of just sit there at the coffee bar and you can listen to

28:37mostly these like you know old men these old jewish men you know talk about uh business and talk about what it was like to start and and they would you know they would complain and they would lament but they also would sort of talk strategy and talk about deal making and i think because of that um those were sort of the leaders of the city and i think because those are the leaders of the city those are people wanted to emulate it encouraged people to try their hand in entrepreneurship in a way that felt almost safe if you failed because at least you mean this is sort

29:05of you know greg your grandfather and this conversation with your grandfather is well you know go and try he he didn't necessarily talk you out of it where where i suspect a lot of people that didn't grow up in a place like that with a family like that would say are you crazy like go to school get a degree that is exact that is the the safest way to to make money or to be successful i i also think uh so could not agree more on on a few things okay a few reactions to that number one like i think it's so important that everyone finds their own

29:36gentiles whatever that is you know just a safe spot where they could share stories share experiences um harley i'm curious like how how important do you think that is to some of the entrepreneurs that you see in terms of you know having a safe spot is that is that key to success so we're going to jump around timelines a little bit here but um just to connect some dots so i finished undergrad finished uh university actually didn't finish at mcgill i finished a concordia which is uh sort of you know mcgill's kind of uh younger brother across the street in montreal my teacher business had you know had

30:14some success and mcgill did not encourage you to be a full-time uh working student you either went to school or you worked but doing it together concurrently was sort of frowned upon and they would encourage you to do a reduced course load and you know i was all of 18 years old or 19 years old and i didn't want to do that so there was another university in in montreal which is you know not necessarily as prestigious or well known as mcgill but they they were totally fine with me being an entrepreneur student so i transferred and i graduated and a mentor of mine who had been a

30:42mentor of mine since i was a kid convinced me to go to law school um not to become a lawyer but to become a better entrepreneur and this particular mentor his name is philip reimer um he was teaching law that that year in 2005 at the university of ottawa he was effectively taking off some time from his legal practice to teach which is something that was very meaningful to him and so he said why don't you you know apply to school university of ottawa and go to law school there and i got to ottawa in 2005 i i'd never been here even though it's so close to montreal ottawa

31:12just was not on my it wasn't on my radar it's the capital of canada but just never been here and the first thing i did was i asked where the entrepreneurs hung out because the entrepreneurial community had effectively became my tribe when i moved to south florida as you know a 13 year old jewish kid i didn't know anyone i also you know immediately there was a club at my at the high school i went to is called spanish river high school a very large public high school uh there was something called business uh young business leaders of america or something like that and i joined that club and i

31:43met more entrepreneurs and those became my friends and so when i got to ottawa i asked where the entrepreneurs were and i was directed to a coffee shop in ottawa and that's where i met toby i was doing the t-shirt thing he was doing the snowboard thing and and so not only do i think having a space where you can go a safe space where you can go and learn and talk and and and find you know and hear about these great war stories from people that are more accomplished than you are but i think it's also important if you're an entrepreneur to find your tribe you know i spend my entire life

32:12trying to encourage more people to be to try their hand in entrepreneurship but the one thing that most people don't talk about is that it's really really lonely i mean i don't know if i can curse on this podcast but like it's [ __ ] lonely it's really lonely it's it's probably the most lonely profession out there you know even if you are you know uh in a service-based business at least you have like colleagues around but like when you're an entrepreneur there's nobody around and and for the most part if your parents don't believe in you and your you know and and your friends think

32:41you're crazy like it's it's just you're always by yourself and so not only do i think a place like gentilia a physical location is important to go and spend time but also the people that you will meet there presumably and and hopefully will become potentially your next your business partners as was the case for me this is one of my favorite things uh to talk about because you're hitting on like two concepts that are incredible independently and also collectively because they tie together one is like this whole idea of um you know locations where smart people can come together and gather and like those rooms i mean we call this show you

33:18know the room where it happens because it's like these rooms have always existed and they've never been democratized because you didn't know you might not have access to that room you might not have gentilia you might not be able to access that group you know the the people that are in the coffee shop whatever it is a lot of that is now in the cloud and greg and i were talking about it before you joined that like the cost of failure is so low today because you can start things up you can try things you can rent scale your business in a box like shopify which we can talk

33:46about all of these things exist and you can go access these people through the internet you can go find these friend groups find these rooms where these conversations are happening in the cloud and you don't have to be in a physical location anymore a kid on the streets in india that has access to his phone because of what reliance geo has done has a lot of the same opportunities today and hopefully will continue to have even more um as the kid who grew up in greenwich and went to the ivy league and that is such an amazing empowering thing of technology the other thing you hit on which i love

34:19i was talking about with someone recently is this whole idea of like decentralized friend groups um which to me is an interesting concept you historically had centralized friend groups you had your like one pocket of friends that you all you went to school with or you had a job with and those were your friends and centralized friend groups are great but they also create kind of an environment of group think you're like the same type of people they grew up in the same neighborhood and have the same set of experiences backgrounds etc decentralized friend groups are something that i think has been accelerated by covid because you have

34:50these pockets of friends that you've met in discord servers you've met in group chats you've met all over the world that you're interacting with and the result of that is you have these creative new ideas you go pursue new things it completely changed my life meeting greg and some of the people that were in a group chat um so that because with any group because fundamentally with any group which you have is you have a centerpiece so the centerpiece is the thing that sits in the middle of the group and i think historically the centerpiece has been location so i go to a particular high school that's my

35:19centerpiece we go to high school together or i grew up in a particular neighborhood um you know that's my centerpiece and i think now the major shift that you're describing is from centralized friend groups or or community to decentralize is that now the centerpiece is interest and so it doesn't matter where you're located it doesn't matter frankly what your socioeconomic status of your parents might be because who the hell cares about that what matters now is what is the center piece of of of actual interest and and i'm in a whatsapp group right now a yakitori whatsapp group i kid you not i'm really into like this

35:52this sort of my kovid hobby was making yakitori for my wife and daughters which is japanese barbecue i was just looking it up while you it's really cool it's if you like cooking and hosting it's like this amazing thing because you get to pick the charcoal and each charcoal smells different there's all these techniques and it's cool like very similar to any great you know hobby um you can't get there's no perfection perfection is is is impossible so you're always working at it but i you know i have uh a yakitori group of people on uh that we share stories on um on whatsapp which most people all never meet in

36:24person but they're my friends we communicate we spend time together on digitally and i think actually going back to tying that back to entrepreneurship that is what i think is so interesting right now of being an entrepreneur is that for the first time i think maybe ever you mentioned that the cost of failure is as close to zero well that's true but also it is less lonely now because it seems at least to me that we now know more people that are entrepreneur entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial than ever before and part of that you know i like to i think shopify and companies like shopify has made it more accessible from a tooling

37:00perspective from a functionality perspective but i also think like from a society perspective you know um you you get a high five if you go to some ivy league school but you also get a high five if you launch this really cool new direct to consumer brand you know making tea or something like that and i think that is so fascinating so it ties directly into like my favorite thing about shopify which is this whole framework of arming the rebels um and i know it's something you guys talked about in the past and i love it as a general concept and i think it's fascinating but i would love

37:33to hear what it means to you and how you think about that tying into what you guys are building so the um that where that came out of is you know if if amazon is is building an empire the metaphor is that shopify is arming the rebels and part of it is that for a very very long time um it was very difficult for someone with a product to to reach an audience to get the product into the hands of of anyone uh around the world if you go back like 300 years i mean everyone's talking about direct to consumer now as if it's like this crazy fad and i by the

38:11way i don't think it's a fad i think it actually will be steady state but if you go back 300 years when you as a consumer wanted to buy bread you bought bread from the baker and you bought shoes from the cobbler and that's just how it went and then uh in this date i know for sure i know we're talking about dates earlier but in this statement around 1876 there was a department store the first department store was created in philadelphia it was called wanna makers department store it was created by john wanamaker who was this entrepreneur uh politician he actually he was the guy

38:40who coined the phrase fifty percent of my marketing works the problem was i don't know which 50 percent and so you had this so that was the introduction of intermediation in commerce and retail and effectively that's kind of how retail operated uh you know for the last i don't know call it 130 years or so where you have a product you went to go meet a buyer um you know at some big department store or some grocery chain or some you know local boutique and you tried to convince them to put the product on the shelf and you shared the profit margin with them and the reason

39:13that that physical store was entitled to a percentage of your profit margin was because they were giving you distribution they were renting you their customers for a cost and the internet happens and now the internet all of a sudden makes distribution effectively commoditized it's it's universal now it's democratized anyone can can distribute it but it was still very very difficult if you were wanted to get your your product in the hands of consumers even with e-commerce and i think if you look at the early days of e-commerce in the united states um which by the way looks very similar to what e-commerce looks like right now

39:48in china even though china's at a much bigger scale most commerce most e-commerce in china right now is happening through a marketplace whether it's jd or taobao or team or alibaba but in the last 15 years or so what has happened is um through companies like shopify but but also others as well there's sort of been this trend now where makers entrepreneurs creators um you know business owners have said i actually want to have a direct relationship with the person buying my products and using shopify or using a product like shopify they are able to alleviate and remove the inter intermediary the middle person and go

40:30direct to the consumer so part of what i think has happened as you sort of zoom out now you see a vast majority of of commerce uh still happens on marketplaces i don't know the exact number but you know if you look at amazon something neighborhood of 35 to 45 of all e-commerce in the united states is done on amazon and a lot of that is done is third-party marketplace uh commerce so it's not amazon selling it's it's them inviting third parties to sell their products on on that marketplace and that works great uh and from a consumer if i wanna buy something fast and cheap and easy it's a great way to

41:03do that but you as the merchants those are not your customers you are renting customers from amazon and if you decide you want to leave amazon for whatever reason you you don't take your customers with you our version is we think that actually you should be able to have a direct relationship with the end consumer you should be able to own the entire stack of of the customer relationship because it's your business and you know we now have about two million uh stores on shopify um which is amazing but if they if any of those merchants want to leave shop i hope they don't those are their customers that don't

41:39belong to shopify and one of the other things that's happened is that sort of on the supply side on the demand side you also see consumers more than ever before today voting with their wallets to buy direct from those independent direct to consumer brands that's the reason why you hear so much about you know uh jim shark or why all birds and and figs and bombus or and fashion nova and tommy john underwear all these amazing brands are able to do so well it's because it's entirely their business and they own it they don't have to rent customers anymore and so to us and certainly to me on a personal level

42:12that is the way that we are allowing and enabling these sort of rebels to be successful and fight off sort of the the evil empire i suppose um and i think direct to consumer is not just a fad but rather it's a much better way to do commerce and i suspect that's what that's gonna that's where it's going i think there will be a place for marketplace based commerce particularly when you're buying something that is somewhat commoditized something you need but you know i'm wearing a blue salt hoodie and i'm wearing james purse pants and i'm wearing bomba socks i'm never going to a marketplace to buy this i'm

42:44going to go directly to jamespurse.com or bluesaltorbamas.com to buy it because it's my way as a consumer of voting with my wallet to say i want more of those brands to exist yeah and you have you have a really unique thing in that number one you measure the success of shopify in the success of your customers and so when i see toby or you celebrating the latest ipo of a shopify based brand that is such a cool thing because it's so directly tied uh to you to see your customers succeed you're not you know competing with them in any way like it is very very real and

43:23it's so real in terms of the authenticity that comes across from you toby the whole team how excited you are when those kind of things happen and when you're able to scale with these companies so that they can go do that the other piece is similar to what greg what i was talking to you about with morris chang and tsmc in that you have this story that has enabled so many people to become entrepreneurs and so you've armed the rebels and there were rebels that existed that just needed to be armed you've also created a bunch of rebels um in a way which i love because there's so many people who they

43:57had an idea they had something really cool they wanted to start it but man it was really hard before and it was so hard i don't know how to code i don't know how to set up a website or create a store or get manufacturers and do drop shipping there's so much [ __ ] right but all of a sudden now because of something like a shopify or like a tsmc in the semiconductor space you can go rent that you can have this kind of business in a box and so my great idea now i can actually bring to life quite easily and more importantly you can focus on

44:26your great idea as opposed to focusing on you know servers or merchandising or inventory management or fulfillment if you look at the shop of filming network for example all these things that we think are pain points that we can help with that's we can and we can make it so that you as the entrepreneur can just focus on doing what you do best which is making your your actual product and one thing that i don't think people you know people talk about gmv of shopify and and how much our merchants are selling and you know if you were to pretend shopify was a retailer i think you probably have seen

44:59me say this number of times if you pretend we were retailer we would be the second largest online retailer in america after amazon the reason that that's important is because what we now can do that we haven't been able to do even five years ago is we now can go and act like we're the second largest retailer on things like capital and payments and fulfillment and shipping and we can give any entrepreneur that's getting started on shopify right now every 28 seconds an entrepreneur gets their for sale anyone starting right now can get access to all these tools as if they're the second largest retailer in america

45:32that is a real leveling of the playing field that is what it means to arm the rebels but that's that's only half of it the other half of it is that when we um we went public uh may 24th i think at the sort of uh badge up there may 24 2015 we went public we was a dual listing new york stock exchange and and toronto stock exchange and i remember on the road show uh which is a fascinating experience for any entrepreneur and uh frankly one of the most fun uh couple weeks of my life they ask you but tam what is your total addressable market because of course the

46:05analysts need to create their model they need to figure out you know what is this company worth and how what what is the what is the growth rate and what is the potential for this business and the the best number we would give was something like well there are like 46 million retail smbs in the world and so you know at the time i don't know we had 100 000 merchants i'm not sure exactly the number was but no we we have a long runway and the reason we gave that number is because they we had to give a number they wanted to know what our tam was but

46:34that actually was not even close to being accurate because at the time because that definition was someone that was an existing entrepreneur who maybe wanted to expand their business or move from offline to online um rather i think a more honest and and truthful definition of our total just market is anyone that wants to make something and then ensure someone else gets access to it and i think whether it's a vertical which is you know huge right now like nfts and you see jimmy butler and martha stewart using shopify to sell nfts or it's you know drop shipping a couple years ago which frankly i thought was

47:11just was totally misunderstood and i think drop shipping was just this great process improvement for retail where instead of spending money on inventory you were able to you know spend your money on marketing um all these things are able to emerge now because more people have decided that entrepreneurship may be for them and that was not the case even 10 years ago it was you know greg growing up i know you were sort of in your group of friends you were the entrepreneur um and that was kind of a you were unique in that you weren't the athlete you weren't the you know debate champion you were

47:40the entrepreneur and your group of friends like i was um that was a unique thing my hope and my suspicion is that is far less unique today and shopify is doing such a good job at supporting all these people and i want to read you an email i just pulled it up that my dad sent me about okay my dad has been a retailer comes from a retail family you know i don't know 100 years or so something um i'll have to send him this clip um and he recently told me that he you know he had this yahoo stores for like many many years and he recently told me

48:21um that he was going to move to shopify and he sends me an email and my brother on it and he says built he says my new website built it all by myself with three hours of customer service help from shopify it was a blast to do and i called him and he was so stoked to so you know he he built this thing by himself sales are coming in um and the support just having uh the support of shopify is is sometimes what people need to to actually um you know we talked about this actually before you came on like taking an idea and actually executing it yeah and how

49:03how much do you do do you think about that in terms of uh supporting the you know the ecosystem in terms of like product road mapping and stuff like that a ton i mean you know couple of things that i think shopify has a couple competitive advantages um one of one of those advantages uh and we'll talk a bit about the ecosystem the partners because they play a huge role in shopify in the last i don't know 12 months or so um i think i said this in the last earnings call like 46 000 partners agencies freelancers have referred shops merchants to shopify so they're sort of distributed you know

49:37force out there uh distributed like salesforce out there you know encouraging people to try their hand on entrepreneurship and use shopify part of that also is there are right now as we sit here thousands of app developers all over the world thinking about how to make shopify's product better so that no matter who you are no matter what your business is no matter what your dad is selling whatever that use case may be there is a way there's functionality he can add to a shopify store to give him a 100 product market fit on the support thing it's a it's it's a fascinating thing because you know in in

50:08in product organizations and product companies you can kind of look at support two ways you can say well support is effectively um uh subsidizing a deficiency in the product that the product is not good enough so you need support we never really looked at it that way even from a very early stage we always you know focused on having someone that you can talk to 24 7 even if it's not a technical support call um one of the things we we often do shopify just using slack is we'll post a lot of um recordings message um uh phone calls uh with permission for merchants of a particular call and a support

50:44person may say uh support advisor may say hey there's a really cool call and posted to the whole company we'll listen to it together or at a town hall we do everything every thursday we'll listen to support calls and what you notice is that often what people need is not necessarily technical support where they're trying to you know use an api or they're trying to integrate some sort of third party erp system most of it is just like business coaching it's someone who's on the other line that says yeah you know i see you've had a couple sales um hey it looks like you know you're getting great

51:15traffic from instagram or from pinterest or from you know some other uh some other site have you thought about activating the pinterest channel the instagram channel the ticktock channel so support is is often i think looked at technology companies and software companies as this technology support but rather when you're talking to entrepreneurs in many cases first-time entrepreneurs often what they need is they just need a voice in the other end to give them you know to tell them to keep going to give them some tips about maybe something they haven't thought about yet and that's a huge part of our business um and even today uh you know there are there are

51:49brands that started on shopify around around their mom's kitchen table that are now multi-billion dollar companies um who i still speak to every week or two ben francis uh who's ceo and founder of jim shark is someone that i've known pretty much from day one when he was a pizza delivery boy uh in london and starting to do jim shark on the side to now where i think jim shark is probably one of the biggest rivals of nike if you can you know if you can believe that um and i still speak to him fairly regularly now the questions are you know more about scale and more about building

52:20an executive team and coaching um but that that matters a great deal to us and and you know this is going to sound a little bit like mother goose but but shopify in many ways if you sort of reflect go back a little bit when we talked about growing up in montreal there is no better company for for me for for me to work at for hardly to work at in the world than shopify because fundamentally and i think you guys do this so well too both of you do this um your professional life's work your professional mission and the mission of this podcast and frankly the mission of your businesses

52:53is pretty much the same think of how unique that is i mean greg i don't know what your what your dad sells and and uh i assume it's a physical product but i suspect that he may be interested in his business i'm not necessarily sure that he would say that he's obsessed with that thing um or you know go back you know 50 years and look at someone is running a tire company um was that leader was that founder was that you know executive were they obsessed with tires or was it more just like widgets to them and they could be selling tires or they could be selling

53:24you know cars they could be selling anything or light bulbs it doesn't really matter to them and i think the opportunity that that a lot of us have and you two are sort of poster children for this and and i think i am too is that their the overlap of my personal mission my personal interest and my professional mission interests are completely overlapped that is so unique that's an incredible way i've never actually contextualized it for myself that way and it is it is a really powerful thing to think about it also makes me think you know what is the atomic unit of passion um for that tire

53:57sales you know for the for the tire entrepreneur because for them yeah it might be a widget the tire but maybe what they love is the feeling of um selling or helping customers yeah it could be a tire it could be a you know different widget but they still feel like it's their life's work to kind of help people i don't know get get through their life in a more efficient way have you guys thought just on on your prior note about kind of um the loneliness of entrepreneurs and this network you've created and needing to just talk to somebody have you guys ever thought about like creating some sort of shopify

54:31sellers like mentor pods or like network where people can you know find someone to talk to that isn't necessarily you know a person they see on a daily basis yeah so uh we have two experiments running right now one is in um downtown la and the road dtla um which is it's called the shopify space and anyone can walk in and there are support people on the ground there uh you can be a shopify merchant or not if you want to have you know just sit around and and work you can there's like classes and and courses there and workshops there's a photography studio there's a podcast

55:04studio oh cool and then we just opened up one in excuse me in november in new york city yeah uh on green street i believe um and again anyone can walk in and it's just again like it's not about shopify it's about you know just walk in and and if you're an entrepreneur you are welcome here and what's so interesting is when you walk into these places and i've had a chance to spend time in both i mean it's cool to have these workshops and we had you know atom bomb squad and the hundreds there giving a talk a little a couple weeks ago and there's

55:33some really cool things happening great coffee bar there but more importantly what you end up seeing is that someone is just sitting working on a laptop and someone else is next to them and they've never met before and very quickly you almost you watch this interaction sort of happen in like in like hyper real time and they'll say what are you working on i'm working on this oh that's a problem i'm currently facing or you'll you'll go to the photography studio which is kind of downstairs in the soho space and you'll see someone go up to somebody like hey try taking the photo like this as opposed to like this and

56:01it's it's kind of an amazing thing to watch and in in some ways where this you know what this gets to a little bit is this idea of of like zero-sum thinking or the opposite is here so i'm thinking that i think so many entrepreneurs uh past generations sort of our parents and grandparent generations entrepreneurship was this kind of highly guarded secret like don't tell anyone it's mine and i don't want anyone to share in in in this and know my strategy that's another thing that's that's been completely flipped i think because distribution because now everyone's addressable market is the world is that the zero-sum thinking is is really going

56:39away and so people are happy to share you know um how to do great adwords and using particular tags or how to create great content on youtube i mean if someone asked you how you guys have created this amazing podcast i suspect you would say well here's what we did i don't think you'd i don't think you would um i don't think you would limit that information because you were they were to compete with you because that's not really how you think about the world you think about the world in a in in that there is unlimited amounts of of energy and unlimited amounts of audiences for

57:10this great podcast and i think that is really cool and totally different i call it positive sum magnetism uh i like that it is i think of it as when you when you start genuinely celebrating the wins of others you find that you start winning a whole lot more too totally um and there's something so beautiful about that when you can just genuinely cheer for other people to succeed and feel so happy for your friends and you and honestly feel even happier when you see your friends succeed than when you succeed totally and you just find that good things start happening when you adopt that mentality

57:43in life i totally agree with you harley i gotta ask because you mentioned adam bomb squad and uh actually bo sahil and i have atom bombs what uh and i noticed you've been getting into it can you tell us about your um what you know the rabbit hole of web 3 and and just like how you're feeling about it all um yeah i mean frankly i i i read uh a lot of what you guys write on the topic and i i listen to your podcast and and uh you know i subscribe to your sub stack uh greg so a lot of what i i'm learning is i'm sort

58:23of learning as i go here i think a couple of things i think that you know we talked a little bit about um more people are trying their hand on entrepreneurship and more people are trying to participate in this in this sort of modern economy and i think web 3 does that i think anything that allows you know i um right behind me uh i have this it's called a harold town as the painting behind me it's one of my favorite artists it's a canadian artist i bought it from uh from his he's he's long gone but he was sort of like one of the rebels of the canadian art scene in

58:52the 50s his art's super cool and i bought it from a gallery owned by his family um i love it i'm going to keep it but at some point maybe i get sick of it and i i resell it the fact that his family doesn't get anything from that resale even if i resell it for double or triple what i bought it for which i might be able to because the price of his art has gone up dramatically um that seems weird and what i think i like about web3 generally is that it feels far more to use this term democratic it feels far more fair the fact that i can you know

59:28uh if i were able to embed some smart contract and that 10 percent of every of the resale price goes back to the family who i've gotten to know pretty well and frankly their f that family can use this money i mean this isn't a very wealthy family this is a family who you know is relying on the income from uh from harold townes art that i think is is incredibly interesting the other part that i think is interesting is that whether they're nfts or anyone participating in web 3 it feels very entrepreneurial um i know you both sort of look at it from the lens of community

1:00:00which i think is absolutely accurate but it also feels more entrepreneurial it feels and more people are now commercializing their art their thing their their their widget their product and that i think is really cool i think it's also you know um just to give some some concrete examples here um during uh the first round of covet in 2020 you'll remember that um there was that uh the nba played in that bubble in disney um i forgot what the bubble was called but anyways apparently the coffee in the bubble was not very good and uh a great uh great ball player named jimmy butler uh who's of course

1:00:36very famous uh started making coffee for his colleagues and friends and teammates and frankly people in other teams and he would charge 20 bucks for this coffee and it became kind of a thing a kind of a you know a an interesting thing that was happening in the bubble that jimmy jimmy butler was creating uh was basically making coffee out of his like quote unquote dorm room and selling it and then you know things go back to normal and then jimmy butler decides to create big face coffee brand um on launch on shopify and i remember going and i love this idea i thought this was so so cool

1:01:08and i remember going to uh big face coffee and everything is sold out and i was like oh that's that's shitty like i wanna i wanna support him i love this idea of an athlete also becoming an entrepreneur and i got tons of examples i can talk to a beast mode apparel and the story with marshawn lynch which is a really cool one too but i i want to support i wanted to vote with my wallet and so instead of buying uh the coffee which was sold out i actually bought one of his big face nfts and you know it's my it's in my rainbow wallet and you know i don't display it

1:01:36anywhere but i like the fact that i have this thing that i can do this this tool that i have at my disposal as a consumer to vote for something to exist and more recently you know learning about i got a chance to uh spend some time with bobby hundreds and understand how the hundreds have sort of formed i think they're an amazing amazing brand of course but they're also very very talented designers that i now can vote with my wallet to support them by not only buying an atom bomb nft but also i can display as my profile picture on twitter which is right now

1:02:07this idea of encouraging more people to commercialize something deeply personal to them is really cool and i think web 3 does a lot of that now like any new trend i think there's probably a dark side to this i don't you you two would know more about that than i would and so you know i think there there should be some some form of skepticism i don't think people should take their rent money and go buy a bunch of nfts if they can't afford to uh if the price drops but i do think that this idea of them there being way more uh opportunity is is is only gonna be a good thing and

1:02:39then from a commerce perspective where i think this gets super cool is that um you know uh one of the recent hundreds drops was basically gated um and the the key to access the drop was uh having one of the having one of their nft's uh particular collection grant of teas this is getting really interesting and so you can think about an artist for example um you know i talked a little bit about uh um athletes becoming entrepreneurs but artists also becoming entrepreneurs and you can sort of see it and there's some cool stuff happening i mean you know this is kind of an old school example but

1:03:11um when i used to go to concerts when i was a kid and i wanted to support the band i would go to the merch table and buy some shitty guilt and t-shirt with a screen print and the tour dates on the back i think that's what we all did whereas now if i go to um you know a drake show i can go to and buy an ovo collaboration with canada goose jacket which actually is the winter jacket that i wear uh all the time so it's just it's this fascinating thing now you can imagine if i'm a really big drake fan that i can buy a

1:03:41particular nft and now i get access to different merchant only is for his best fans or his most important uh you know the people that he values their commitment to it to him the most that's where the stuff gets really really cool and um and so and that's i i think more entrepreneurs is a good thing and i think web 3 is actually producing more entrepreneurs than ever before funny story about atom bomb squad which greg will laugh at me about when uh when they released um it was like you know mystery nfts when they when they first dropped and greg and i were talking about it i was like oh that's a

1:04:15cool project i should go buy a couple and um i fat fingered a buy and bought a uh mystery release bobby uh adam bomb squad nft for 2.5 eth when they were all at 0.25 and um then i like you know i was looking around like an idiot it was like one of my first nft purchases and greg was making fun of me and then a few days later the release happened it turned out the thing was a rare one and i sold it for five eighth like a few days later and lucky so it turned out to be like rather be lucky than good um but no

1:04:46completely agree with you you know i personally think of all these things in like gartner hype cycle terms or you know clearly there is a ton of hype that has been built around this but there is also a ton of really interesting underlying innovation and progress and the reality with a lot of it is it's sort of a natural evolutionary feature this hype because it draws a ton of capital but also a ton of talent into the space that will build the next layer of innovation so even if we go through kind of a cycle where it's a bear market and people aren't talking about it every

1:05:17day those people in the capital really did come in to build something like we just saw ryan the head of gaming at youtube just took a job to you know go be ceo of polygon labs crazy big big web 2 role and he leaves to go take this job in web 3. there's a lot of that happening and it does feel there's something that's very real and i actually heard this on one of your podcasts i think with alexis where you guys are talking about you know watch where the smart people are going to work and you can sort of see trends that way i i think that's certainly the case what

1:05:45i like about it is this like this term starving artist um has been it's it's been a real thing for decades or hundreds and hundreds of years where someone who's so creative who makes beautiful art can afford to put food on their table i'm not suggesting that web 3 changes that i am suggesting however that web 3 makes it a little bit easier to make a living and if that is where this is going i'm going to support it so we have to ask you before we uh before we lose you here we always try to wrap the episode with asking for predictions so give us your

1:06:24you know it doesn't have to be several give us your predictions for you know five ten years from now in in technology and the world of entrepreneurship but what do you what do you think the world looks like what are your what are your predictions um that's a loaded question a couple things first of all i think we started by talking started the episode by talking about home towns and cities and where we where greg and i grew up um i actually think the concept of hometown is changing i think from where humans like what what a human says their hometown will change fairly dramatically over the next 10 years i

1:07:01think i think it'll kind of be like this where there's a like you'll have an hq where you or your family you know my for me it's my wife and my two daughters like we're based sort of our hq but i think we'll have a lot of satellite locations and it's not to say we're gonna have like homes everywhere like that it's just where we spend our time i think that is going to uh will not go away post covid uh i think that that that idea of hometown will change and i think actually that that's that's really interesting um that creates a bunch of ripple effects into so many areas i mean

1:07:32you think of the storytelling of your daughters how education is going to fundamentally that's right because the school is going to have to uh and also what what i believe education is i mean you know um my wife and i i went to law school my wife's uh you know as a psychotherapist we went to graduate school i don't think my kids are going to do that um if they want to they can but i'm not sure they will but that's right that that will change but also in terms of my connection to the hometown um the way that i want to contribute to my hometown i mean when i moved to auto

1:07:59105 part of and i've been here now for you know uh for for 17 years now if i felt a commitment to the city i still do and if i spend less time here does that commitment change and how does that all work out and so that i think is going to be uh or even where does my mail get uh where do i get mail right it's like home phones are gone so it's not really an issue anymore but but where does mail arrive when someone wants to reach me that's going to change as well so there'll be a ton of ripple effects i think around the idea of like what is

1:08:28someone's hometown i think um i i i do a lot of you know broadcast and tv and so i think a lot of it brought you know broadcast and television for example one thing i thought that is super fascinating is um if you look at uh the nielsen ratings for q4s on out you have a q3 is that for 2021 the number one the mo sorry the show with the highest average views on television i'm sort of eye roll but it's tucker carlson whether you hate him or like him that that is you know that's factual there's about i think there's a 3.5 million average views per episode for

1:09:04tucker carlson um and below that you have kind of you know cnn and all the others um but if you look at average views on joe rogan it's 11 million it's you know it's almost four times as big that is unbelievable and i don't think i think that's going to change the media landscape this is a weird comment to make but a couple of months ago kim kardashian was on snl and uh if you watch her i i don't step that late but i did watch her her monologue and she said this thing that was fascinating i think it went over everybody's head for the most part

1:09:36because it was sort of a joke but she said it is uh this is kim talking she said it is really nice to be on snl in front of an intimate audience i think on that show snl did something like seven or eight million viewers and again she was poking she was kind of making a joke but what she meant was that that is probably the smallest audience that she has had on anything she said in the past year or two because she can get hundreds of millions of people watching her pretty much do anything that is a dramatic shift or you think about um so so i think just on the media

1:10:08side i think we all kind of know that that the future of media is probably not you know exclusively linear television but i think from an entrepreneur perspective if you're thinking about how to get your story out there and you're using a pr firm they're trying to get you on you know good morning america and it's not working it doesn't matter there are so many other ways that are easier to to leverage and easier to get attention that actually may have even higher viewer numbers which i think is also quite fascinating uh tension is decentralized now that's right and actually it's it's it's could be even

1:10:37more impactful in the way that um in the way that that we can all do it without you know having connections or relationships into the big you know big broadcasters um probably in the last one just because i i sort of spent most of my time thinking about commerce and and retail i think talking about omni channel selling on online or offline or you know instagram or we just announced a partnership with jd so now merch in the chat they can push products right to jd uh we have an integration with spotify so shop so spotify um artists can can easily sell merchandise to their fans

1:11:12i i think talking about a cup talking about omni channel in the future will be like talking about a color tv today you never would say color tv i think every business will be by its very nature omni channel even restaurants um you know the french laundry this famous restaurant in uh in napa uh in youngville like now has a shopify store where they're selling meal kits and they're selling cookbooks and they're selling kitchenware and it's just go there during the uh during the day i mean totally tone deaf but uh but so i i think this this idea omni channel even though you hear it at every single

1:11:46retail and commerce event and every white paper and uh i i think that is just gonna be steady stated that's just what it's gonna be um what else um those are great yeah those are some of the ones yeah those are some of the ones i've been thinking about i think people are people will start you know yeah those are some of the ones that are on top of my mind right now i've got a loaded last question where do you think the the t space is going because i know you are involved in a tea company and and next time well you're you can come back

1:12:13on the show anytime you want but the next time we need to be drinking tea i i totally agree i am drinking my fire belly tea right now i mean part of the fire belly thing is uh this is not me trying to you know promote fire belly but i've been drinking coffee for most of my life um i've had anxiety most of my life as well i didn't necessarily recognize that there was a direct relationship between my afternoon coffee consumption and my anxiety levels it was only the last couple years actually through covid that i discovered it one of my closest friends is david siegel who famously

1:12:43built i think probably one of the only billion dollar tea companies ever david's tea uh they had like 400 locations he took it public in 2013 i think um and so during covid i told him that i need to stop drinking coffee because i was just my anxiety levels were not being helped by it and he turned me on to green tea and he curated this amazing green tea for me like the best green tea on the planet and so that happens and then at the same time uh the last time i built a store on shopify was in like 2006 it was a t-shirt shop i was one of the first

1:13:14merchants on shopify that's how i met you know that's why i got introduced to the company and i wanted to know what it was like to build a brand new uh business and brand in 2022 and so we launched firebelly tea together and so we have this great tea company which every accessory is made by david it's like all the accessories he always wanted but couldn't find he he designed it all from scratch and has like the world's best tea and so uh i think i think more people should drink tea i think most people assume that tea is like you know they don't really understand it they got in like a gift

1:13:42box or some sort of like you know gift package and like they'll have um and actually tea uh is for me at least it gives me this incredible calm alertness uh and anxiety levels have been better uh and i can sleep at night uh far better than i did when i was drinking coffee so it's been it's been super helpful well i'm gonna do a one-click check out using shop pay on firebelly tea.com right now to try this out and isn't shopping amazing isn't shopping the best amazing to try to kick my large dunkin donuts cold brew habit in the afternoon uh you do can you sleep okay the nights

1:14:15when you have that i blew out this is a longer story for you at some point but i blew out my caffeine receptors playing baseball in college because i was hurt and so i was ending up drinking i don't know so you can just 100 milligrams to like just not feel pain when i was throwing so i can still do it but it's not good for me and i know yeah so i'm gonna i'm gonna buy using my one click checkout chape oh thank you um some of this matcha probably harley won't promote it but i will promote it check out firebelly tea the the slogan's amazing it's i think

1:14:42it's feel the difference because you will feel a difference so check it out everyone's listening um harley you've been so uh so generous with your time thank you so much this has been so fun um people could find you on twitter where else yeah uh harleyf on twitter um harley on instagram uh and if you're an entrepreneur you want to try your hand in entrepreneurship check out shopify i think that uh i think it'll make it a lot easier for you and um if you're like the three of us uh on this podcast right now i think entrepreneurship may be the best way to find your life's work so i'm

1:15:21grateful you guys invited me on thank you so much for coming this was one of those holy [ __ ] i can't believe i get to do this for a living moment isn't that great right i mean chat with you so seriously grateful and uh so excited to have made your acquaintance [Music] hey everyone sahil here by now you know that i love going down rabbit holes and today i get to share one of my secret tools with you tigus in today's market we don't have time to spend weeks getting up to speed on a new company industry or idea tigas is the fastest way for investors

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