If you go into business school and suggest firing a customer, they'll kick you out of the building. But it's so true in my experience. It allows you to identify the customers you really want to work with.
— Tobias Lutke
I always loved retail. I love the ideas behind it. I think small-business retail is one of the areas where capitalism works so wonderfully well.
I am a worrier. I tend to do something about what I worry about.
In my worldview, time is energy that you can invest in things, and money is energy that you can invest. Time has significantly more leverage than money in terms of how much energy you get out of time.
It is my strong belief that computer literacy should be part of our educational system's core curriculum.
I got my first computer at the age of 6. To me, it was magic. By the time I was 12, I wanted to know the secrets behind the wizardry, and that started my journey toward computer programming. This was the early 1990s, when computers weren't built for the mass market.
We need a lot more technically literate people. The computers are the tools that are going to solve essentially all problems, and the people who can use them better will be more effective.
You really want a company that's full of people from all these different backgrounds and then allow them to be creative as possible, come together, and come up with great ideas.
Every phase of building a company is really hard.
No one benefits from us not taking credit for our successes. There is no virtue in allowing kudos to go unclaimed or elsewhere.
I spent my time, growing up, essentially between two things: technology and retail. I was fascinated by selling and loved the idea of making a profit, but I also spent a lot of time on technology.
I'm ridiculously lucky.
You have to put more of a well-rounded company together to make it in Canada, and I hope the Canadian market is going to be known for these well-performing, solid companies that people can rely on.
It took about 10 years' time for Shopify to be an overnight success.
Different people need different kinds of communication for it to have the same effect. That was something I had to learn.
I have serious, serious problems with personas - with unauthentic individuals.
At Shopify, we are trying to make things as simple as possible, but for the business owner, it's not unlike starting your own little shop along Main Street somewhere.
Shopify was built as a company that could be run remotely anywhere.
We are reluctant to do these bigger acquisitions that are then integrated, especially if they are committed to a certain product that they want to build that we can't guarantee we will keep evolving.
Our mantra has been, 'We will not buy a company unless we think the people that make up the company have a better job the day after the acquisition than before.'
Given the success rate, if you want to get wealthy, entrepreneurship is a horrible way of doing it. There are significantly easier ways of doing it.
Computers add convenience to our everyday lives, but we are limited in what we can do with technology others have imagined. The ability for humans to teach machines entirely new things - coding - is nothing short of a superpower.
It is incredibly powerful if you solve the problem you actually have yourself. It's really tough to develop a good product when you don't have very close proximity to the people who actually use your product. The closest proximity you can have to those people is to be that person.
Sometimes, when you're building a company, out of necessity there's just a gazillion things you have to learn and figure out.
A lot of the best technologists live and work in Canada, and every once in a while, they are aggregated by a Canadian company, and then suddenly, they're not anymore. But the people are still here - they're just working for American companies to the benefit of American bottom lines.
People say Facebook connects the world. Facebook has 5,000 Ph.D.s that think about how to make you click on ads you don't want to see. Their business model is about something that most people would not perceive as making the world better.
What could be more Canadian than working hard to figure out something new and sharing it with the world? The world wants to hear from us!
If you believe something needs to exist, if it's something you want to use yourself, don't let anyone ever stop you from doing it.
Being a start-up has nothing to do with the numbers. It's that everyone who works there has the chance to do everything and have an impact.
All of us in Canada have to be better at making a dollar count, because we have fewer dollars.
Shopify has been a perpetually underestimated company at every point of its history.
To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas and interfere with the free exchange of products at the core of commerce. When we kick off a merchant, we're asserting our own moral code as the superior one. But who gets to define that moral code?
My early interactions with VCs were really, really poor.
I'm always trying to think of ways to make something more efficient. If I have to do something once, that's fine. If I have to do it twice, I'm kind of annoyed. And if I have to do it three times, I'm going to try to automate it.
More and more people are opening online stores and online retail businesses. This market is expanding very, very quickly.
E-commerce is not an industry; e-commerce is a tactic.
We have a lot of really great companies in Canada, and I think there's always been this fear that 'great' in Canada doesn't mean great on a world stage. We need more self-confidence. We are building incredibly good businesses with incredibly good people, being loyal, dedicating themselves to solving important problems.
I care about working on interesting problems, and Shopify is this gift that keeps on giving for working on interesting problems with amazing people.
Computers are the most powerful tools that humanity has ever created. Yet, we treat them largely as a black box; as if it were an alien artifact that magically appeared on desks, in homes, and in our pockets.
A lot of people have a great business idea; they just need a little push to make it a reality.
It's this concept of 'just fill up a building of smart people.' It sounds so basic, but honestly it might just be the secret behind Shopify's success. We just do that and get out of the way.
When the market turns down, a lot of people lose jobs... and that's the time people become entrepreneurs. Downturns end up being the best times to start companies.
We are at our best when we are at our proudest. Canadians need to harness that confidence in every arena, not just the ice rink. The Maple Leaf stands for quality, thoughtfulness, and innovation, so let's brand it proudly on the things that we've invented, created, and figured out.
Why do Canadians sell themselves short? I've never been able to answer that question.
Growing up, I spent my time doing useless stuff looking at computers.
We're trying to build the largest start-up ever without becoming a big company.
Once you've made peace with the fact that you're hardly ever going to work on anything that you're actually good at, the only thing that you can do is get good very fast on everything you have to do.
It's not a principle unless it costs you something.
Everyone loves feeling comfortable. But it's actually completely useless.
I think I probably had to start a company, because I don't think I can work for other people.
