Be a platform, w/Shopify's Tobi Lütke

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Welcome to The Blitz scale zone. Meat. Eight year old.

Archibald T. Winnie Maker the Third. You're about to hear him take his first confident step. into the world of entrepreneurship. Mm. His launch pad?

Why, it's that time worn gateway. The lemonade stand come and get your lemonade fresh lemonade here. Hi Archie. Enter Loretta Lovegood 7. And three quarters.

Is that lemonade? Looks delicious. Say, my mom just baked some fresh cookies. Maybe I could sell them from your stand. Then we can both make money and bring even more sweetness into our customers' lives. Now

Witness how Archibald takes his first misstep. No way, Scram! This is my stand go find your own! As Archibald grew into adulthood. So that lemonade stand.

Then А стітва франчи. Then A nationwide chain.

All selling. His own Winnie Maker brand. And not a single drop. Of anyone else's. But why stop it simply peddling lemonade? We'll do wholesale, we'll do sodas of all flavors, a theme park, an all under the Winnie Maker brand. And woe betide anyone else who tries to muscle in on my market.

But an Archibald's obsession. Like the sour lemony seeds. of his defeat. We now fast forward a decade. And join a board meeting.

As he learns the true cost. Of his hubris. Uh, Mr. Archibald, sir, I'm afraid profits are down 500% for the quarter and customer satisfaction is plummeted. What? How could this be? It seems we have a competitor we overlooked. Impossible! Ooh! They're called Loretta Love Goods Open Emporium. It's a platform that lets independent merchants sell lemonade and soda. And cookies, and whatever else they want. Then we must crush them! I'm afraid it's impossible, sir. Their ability to respond to changes in the market is astonishing. In fact, there's only one course of action left if we want to survive. Well Out with it, man!

Now Archibald T. Winnymaker III. Had to drink his most foul tasting concoction yet. For he had To swallow his own pride.

Hello? Hello Is this Loretta? I was wondering if

If you had a space on your platform for Winnie Maker Lemonades Of course. Archibald. had fallen under the hypnotic.

Zero sum spell. That the best way to win. is to beat every one else. Only too late. Did you learn the path to true strength?

Lies not. In monolithic power. But on letting as many lemonade stands. Flourish. As are people.

Who want to sell lemonade. Mm. I believe the secret to massive scale is compressed in three words. B A platform.

Build a virtuous cycle where everyone wins. And you'll emerge the biggest winner of all. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three bedroom apartment. It just seems absolutely not all. Ten years later, I'm like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it.

This is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman. Co founder of LinkedIn. Partner Greylock.

And your host. And I believe the secret to massive scale is compress in three words. B. A platform. Build a virtuous cycle where everyone wins.

And you'll emerge. The biggest winner of all. Conventional wisdom tells you Business is always a zero sum game. Everyone else has to lose in order for you to win.

So grab every possible piece of your business for yourself. Sure, a lot of iconic businesses are Or built that way. But there's another model that will take you farther. Find the areas of your business you can open up.

And let other companies build with you. Think of the iPhone. Apple could have decided to make all the apps themselves. But they knew. The more apps there were.

the more people would buy the iPhone. The more people buy the iPhone. The more companies would develop apps. It creates a virtuous cycle. where your company gains momentum from everyone's success.

This virtuous cycle also makes you more robust. More nimble in reaching new markets and quicker to react. When the market changes. I wanted to talk to Dobias Lutka because his dramatic success with Shopify is a classic example. of the power of a platform.

If you bought something online in the last year. And it wasn't on Amazon. Then Shopify's platform. Probably powered the purchase. In two thousand eighteen

More than one million businesses made over forty billion dollars in sales using Shopify. and app developers for the platform made over ninety million dollars. And yet. Shopify flew almost entirely under the radar of Silicon Valley VCs for the best part of a decade until its IPO in 2015. During this time, Toby quietly built Shopify into a commerce powerhouse.

From their HQ. in Ottawa. This success. All ties back to Toby's decision to turn Shopify into into a platform.

One that helps merchants build online stores. And also helps developers Build specialty stores for merchants. That might sound like a money grab. But it's actually quite the opposite.

I love the way Toby described it to me. what we did to get the platform off the ground. is to Basically leave all the economics for the Shopify on the table and give it to the third party app developers. It it's it just started out

And to this day is a incredibly valuable platform to build on for other people. And we build a lot of the technology which is underlying it in Two thousand nine. And Only in in two thousand eighteen. Almost decade later.

It's been Like I I think Bill Gates said it. I think it's something that's called the Gates line. You're not a platform until the people who are building on you make more money than you do. Exactly. And uh we've only cleared that in two thousand eighteen. So it it takes a long time. Yes. Um And it it's It is hard to do because you are leaving

a lot of economics that you could easily take for yourself uh on the table or actually you're investing it into your own future by giving it to other people. And that's very hard to do for most businesses. Yes. No, exactly. Part of the dynamic by which I actually look at the majority of my investments, like Maybe ninety percent plus is do I see a route to being a platform? And do I see the team wanting to build the platform and how to do it? And building platforms is super hard. We talk about platforms a lot on the show.

And Toby is right to invoke Bill Gates. Bill knew early on that Microsoft would succeed by building a platform. by making operating systems that others could develop for. And any machine could run. Here's how Bill described it to me.

Was the virtual cycle. The cheaper the PC was, the more bond there was for PCs, the more software for our platform there was, the more people would want to buy those PCs. So the main reason to become a platform is to kickstart that virtuous cycle. Bill talks about. And a platform should be your endpoint.

But it shouldn't be. Your only aim. Here's Eric Schmidt. Google's former CO. On exactly why.

Another failure that I've seen many, many times at Google and elsewhere. These people decide that the platform is what they're building rather than a solution. There are no cases where a platform emerged That was highly successful. Before

It had a use case that solved a new problem that was important. But you don't write a business proposal saying I wanna build a platform. You write a business proposal saying I want to solve the following problem in a new way.

Which will result in a platform. To see how Toby found that problem that needed to be solved. We need to go back in time. Or snowboards.

He started his career as a programmer, but found himself miserable. In his job. I wanted to find something that I could still do with my technical skill, which would give me some advantage, but then I could earn my money in a different way and recover programming as a hobby for myself.

To rediscover programming as a hobby. Toby decided to start his own business. He and his friend, Scott Lake, started the online snowboard store Snow Devil in two thousand and four. They thought it would take just a few days to get their online store up and running.

But it was harder. Than they thought. Did I try to find the right software to use? For this business. And

I was stunned and couldn't find anything. And it's It it's not that there wasn't e commerce software, but it was just all Basically. User hostile database editors at best. Uh-huh.

It was so clear that no one who's ever run a retail business has had any part in building these pieces of software. So the best option became For me to just build my own software from scratch, instead of using anything out there. So I I I started doing this. I I found some technology which I really liked, which wasn't Java Enterprise.

And uh That was Ruby on Rails, if I recall. That was Ruby on Rails, exactly, which came out right around two thousand four, right around this time. Ruby on Rails is a programming language. I did the day and night thing, probably working sixteen hours a day. Um and A couple months later launched

The Snowball Store and It ended up working really, really well. And then this is part of the story that I'm probably the least familiar with. So I'm asking a question I actually don't know the answer to, which is So Snow Devil was that store. Exactly. Toby

coded the back end for Snow Devil. But their customers were interested in more than snowboards and padded jackets. People started asking Toby if he'd build the back end for their online stores. And that's when Snow Devil decided to pivot.

They ultimately became Shopify. Basically what my initial Shopify was is that We wanted to build the perfect piece of software. That I wish I would have found when I started my snowboard store. With Shopify.

Toby was aiming to make it easy for anyone to set up an online store. And unlike Toby, they wouldn't need to wrestle with the hostile programming languages or appreciate the elegance of Ruby on Rails. They could just sign up on Shopify and do it in a matter of minutes. But this direction wasn't for Toby's co-founder. So Toby

The engineer. became Toby. The accidental CEO. He spent two years searching for a replacement. Until

Eventually. Someone took me aside and gave me a good advice that I will never ever find anyone who will care as much about Shopify as I do. And uh that is actually probably the best qualification for a CEO. And was that. A V C or someone else? No, it's an it's an angel investor.

And then what was your thinking about, okay, I'm gonna become CEO. And now I need to learn this. Right. How did that Path begin. I started it the same way I start everything. I'm like, Okay.

I have no idea what this is like. I don't know how the components of it or the shape of it all. So that's Read some books on it. And um

Most of the books were Andy Groves, um High output management. Yes. Yes. Which is Incredibly lucky as a first book about business. Yes.

And he told me that Building a business sounds of all a lot like an engineering challenge. And That gave me a lot of hope. I mean, I was probably miserable at it in the beginning, but slowly with a very patient team and Started on average making reasonable choices and just learned remote. I'd say Toby's choices were more than just

Reasonable. He understood that to build a great platform and He first needed A great product. Building a platform is the most valuable thing in the world. But you you you can't do it immediately. You have to

build a base of people using the product first because otherwise the platform is not valuable. But how do you build a product? To meet all the needs. Of all those stores. Selling all those different items.

Fortunately. They have a lot in common. The lucky thing about our industry is that the first eighty percent is almost the same for like everyone needs a website, everyone needs a payment gateway, everyone needs a domain, everyone s needs the shopping cart and like a product grid and uh some content management system or the fl workflow system, all that stuff is Luckily the same. It's the next twenty percent which are perfectly unique. Building the first eighty percent was straightforward.

But if Toby's team also built the last twenty percent of unique features. It would create an almost enlist engineering challenge. It had other drawbacks too. We knew that if we would add all the features at all our unique customers, we would end up with this problem of uh having something that is impossible to use. Toby worried.

That if they tried to build everything for everyone. they'd build a product that worked for no one. It's a phenomenon called feature creep. And Toby had seen it before. In previous versions.

Of Microsoft Word, for example. We were worried about what we internally called the uh Microsoft Word toolbar problem. No. This is hard to explain because no third has a ribbon and hides a lot of his stuff, but back in those days and we talked about it. Word had tourbars and uh if you were

On a normal Seventeen inch screen and you would enable every single toolbar that you could. I we would actually only have a centimeter of space for actually typing text, right? Because Word has a lot of features. Uh and you know package good software has to make a another sale every single cycle and and that makes perfect sense. But we thought that That was the problem for for us building Shopify because

Um E commerce is like we have a home of These businesses. Like we have software that people open up in the morning and that that's their work day we've spent it in it. Instead of giving in to feature creep.

Toby focused on getting Shopify's core features. Right. Then he opened the platform to outside developers so they could create specialized apps that merchants could install on their stores. Think Customer support chat.

or specialized inventory control. As more developers built custom maps for merchants. Toby saw the potential for a true platform. One where merchants could choose from hundreds of apps. And developers could offer their apps to many more merchants.

Toby remembers asking early merchant developers If they'd be willing to turn their custom apps. into something. any merchant could buy. And the question we always ask saying, Hey, you know

This seems like would you generalize this and make it so that other people could also use this? And Eventually we heard yes more often than no to this question, and that's when we introduce an like an app stock where we Developers could list their software.

And created the solved the discovery issue and then Yeah A typical Plus Shopify store probably has twenty different apps installed, crossing over a billion dollars. Now that's awesome and really good thinking. And it's one of the things where

You know as you know. Everyone's learned To be obsessive about talking about network effects. Because they understand network effects create deep modes in business uh lead to compounding value even at large scale.

And that, for example, one of the reasons why people neglect the platform is one of the key network effectors between uh platforms and developers, platforms and applications. suite of applications that each have its own creative team working on stuff. That's another one of the compounding loops. Which then a customer going, Oh, I need Those ten applications on this platform.

This is what I need. This is this my my life, my business, my work is built upon this. Right. Yeah, I mean probably one of the more tangible reasons why people Uh you use Shopify by default if without thinking about it. Now if I have anything related to the problem of needing to set products on the internet.

It means that as soon as someone does some innovation in in the space The form that innovation will take. is likely in the form of an app that is going to be in the app store related to Shopify. As soon as there's a new uh sales channel, as soon as Instagram says okay, let we will

How Products to be sold. You add Instagram as a new channel to your Shopify account, Shopfire store. And um you're off to doing it. It's worth talking about what this used to be like, right?

Even like ten years prior. For a business to go into a new channel. What's it? But director's level decision. Bof.

Probably a ramp up of twenty new hires and an implementation plan of eighteen months. And yet People now sell across five different channels probably in the first

half year of business. And it's like this is the power of software. Like it gives superpowers to people that I never even thought about. It's we have uh very frequently these funny like emails or conversations with some of our customers who come back from some e commerce conference and I just like completely confused about what kind of stuff they talk in their keynotes about having a single view into the customer or something like this across all their different businesses. And like standing up a data warehouse and for all the advantages of this would be a keynote at some conference. And it's just like

If you signed up last week for Shopify you have all these things because obviously you do. It's an amazingly thriving ecosystem. It's among the different parts of genius. The Shopify App Store officially launched in two thousand and nine. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position.

The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years. Building. Creative planning where wealth works together.

Learn more at creative plating dot com slash masters of scale. The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wire's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable?

How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show.

Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Before the break. We heard how Toby opened up an app store for merchants with apps.

Created by third party developers. This kickstarted a positive feedback loop that spurred innovation. Merchants were attracted by the ever growing range of features which While developers were attracted by the ever growing demand from merchants for apps. And this

is one of the biggest strengths. of a platform. You can rapidly respond to that long tail of user needs. And this puts your virtuous cycle into high gear. Cultivating a rich ecosystem of third party developers isn't the only way to do this, though.

You can also do it by keeping your model flexible. and ensuring the feedback loop between yourself and your customers is as short as possible. This is the approach that Julio Hart's CEO of Eventbrite. Picks.

One of the things that's actually been a strong contributor to our competitive mode, if you look at at where Eventbrite sits in in the live experience market and who we are. Is Our instinct to not try to force the product to be something

specific to just one kind of event creator. While you can say that, yeah, the top four largest categories, music, festivals, registration events, endurance sports make up about eighty percent of our gross ticket fees today. The other twenty is just completely long tail in terms of category distribution. And that gives us a really interesting playground to both cultivate creators but also to expand our platform capability.

You can hear more from Julia on this in our episode titled Let your customers Be your scouts. For Shopify. Developers built around the core product.

fulfilling merchants' needs, and ultimately attracting more developers. And more merchants. This thriving. Self reinforcing ecosystem. Of merchants.

And developers. Is what set Shopify. Apart. It was a platform that people could mold to their own needs. And by 2015, the platform had over a hundred and sixty thousand merchants.

But Shopify. had barely registered. In Silicon Valley. In May that year. It went public.

But in the run up. It was apparent they had really flown. Under the radar. even to the day of our IPO roadshow, we where we flew around to talk to all these financiers. We got our deck out and baby said

So that sounds interesting. How have I never heard of you? I put it to Toby. That his ability to go. Unrecognized by Silicon Valley.

Was part of Of his success. From the outside looking at Shopify, I think part of the benefit you had And this is actually I think among the group think of Silicon Valley is

is everyone thought it was a combination of Amazon and maybe eBay and it was all locked up and there wasn't anything interesting there. Yeah. And because that was the group think you could actually build very systematically and actually even build a new platform because the platforms are what really lock things in. Absolutely. Right. And you could do that and then you could say, Well Once we kind of pop above the radar, then we go fast. Until then. Hey, nothing to see here. We're just we're just building some stuff and it's really important and we know we're doing something important, but we don't need to tell you that. Exactly.

So for me from a blitz scaling perspective, what I would say is You actually have to choose When you're gonna try to hit the afterburners. Yes. It's a mistake. To think blitz scaling needs to be a white knuckle ride on a roller coaster right from the start.

A viable strategy is to take the time to build out the foundations of your business. Build Under the radar. And this is what Thriving as a platform allowed Shopify to do. It was building something that even Silicon Valley VCs

didn't yet understand. Part of the blind spot I think Silicon Valley would have had and I'm My guess is you bumped into some of the stuck in the VCs in Silicon Valley. Um would be the oh no no this is already owned by Amazon or maybe by eBay and there isn't isn't really room for another.

And yet you saw a path. And then you grew into it in a competitively differentiated space. What was the path that you saw? And then what was the learning of that journey? Second value. has always and uh

Still does and potentially will always underestimate commerce. Just straight up. There's a reason why most commerce companies can't come from Silicon Valley. And I think this is actually has a lot to do with biosmos if everyone Kind of

Observes the current Debate. And the early successful business models uh were advertising based and By way, in China they are commerce based. And I think that

is a very, very big difference between those two places. Business models are generally more about selling things and then Advertising. And for European living in Canada and observing places from outside. That just kind of felt really obvious that It was underestimated. I I just even when I was meeting with venture capitalists, they

Always wanted me to answer how big the TAM was. Tan the total addressable market. Which I always got terribly confused because This is retail.

Basically Or everything. Like it's a four trillion dollar. business uh like a four trillion dollar market just for online parts in in the next couple of years. And so it's like This is so unbelievably big.

I I don't know why I have to make the case for that. But then I would get back that they estimated that this is again middle last decade. But there's only about forty thousand online stores online and even if I could get fifty percent of those, that would just be not bad. compelling of a venture capital investment. And to which I always try to say it's like well you realise

Why there's only forty thousand stores? Because no one has ever built software for the new businesses. Like an entire software world. Did the obvious thing. E commerce software for existing retail businesses who wanted to go online. That was like term back then going online, right? And like makes sense both like existing businesses have money, new businesses don't yet have money. In fact, you know, they're also not terribly sophisticated. They need a lot of help, probably lots of support.

build this thing, but that is why it didn't look big. So it is a completely chicken neck problem that I was Trying to tell them that I want to solve. Now

Just on Shopify you have a million merchants on the platform. Every Fifty seconds. A new business has

Their first sale. on Shopify alone. Right. It's not that we have all of a market. So It just was so obviously

important, obviously big and uh There was obvious reasons why this wasn't Growing because It was too hard. And only the Venn diagram intersection of

People have an interest in retail and computer programming abilities. could actually be new entrants into the space. It was this failure of Silicon Valley VCs to grasp Shopify's value that made Toby conclude that he was better off in Ottawa. Toby could see the virtuous cycle that Silicon Valley created.

Best companies draw the best talent. And build the best products. Which draws more talent. And more companies. But he didn't see

how we could win there. I couldn't answer the question about Why I believe I can be the most magnetic obvious company to work for in Silicon Valley. Because there's already Google and Facebook was growing very fast and

I didn't think being top three uh would be that valuable. You want to be number one, right? And so I'm like But I can't do this in Canada. So Toby built Shopify in Ottawa. On his own terms.

I realised at almost every business book that I sort of then was reading was not written for me, right? It was written for the people who were building companies in these places. And uh that the rules of secondary cities uh is uh completely reversed.

Like for instance, when I hire someone, the chance of us working together in five years or ten years is massive. No, about in Toronto. Right. So That's just one very tangible difference, right? Like uh average tenure, I think, in engineering in Circle Valley is sort of like eighteen months at this point.

That means I can invest completely differently. Into people. A learner's organization. In fact. I think any organization

can be a learner's organization, no matter how short, long, or punctuated its tours of duty. But Toby's differentiation goes beyond Ten year talent timelines. Not only was he outside of Silicon Valley. He was bringing his engineering mindset to his role as CEO.

then you come at things from an engineering um background, especially if you've I've been involved in architecting fairly complex systems is that use systems thinking. You know that in reality, a company is a very complex set of different factors, which are all kind of influencing each other. And Then if you want a certain behavior, you need to figure out what loops reinforce these particular behaviors and what your potential points are that you can tweak. Toby engineer Shopify's culture to be open internally, and this created a virtuous cycle of its own.

New ideas could surface easily. Then rapidly gain traction. This stimulated more new ideas in a chain reaction. that let Shopify punch above its weight. the closest relation to any organizational system we had is actually from the open source community. And

The ideas of How to produce good work. How to be completely independent within the company. But collaborate.

how to have everything out and open like default all information to open and creating um ways of for people to help themselves. Like all these kind of organizational systems. ended up creating I think something fairly novel in in the way we organise ourselves. And I think that ended up being an advantage in in band. So this open culture led Shopify to build an open platform model.

Which attracted merchants, who attracted developers, who attracted merchants, who attracted customers, who attracted Well. You get the picture. And at the heart of Shopify's culture. Lies a deeper inside of Toby's.

That commerce isn't just about selling an item. It's about telling a story. There's a very strong believe uh Topify but Commerce is a relationship.

thing and not a transactional thing. A lot of commerce world is about connecting with something larger, and joining some kind of tribe. The best way to tell real stories is This idea of a brand.

And giving brands. A way to have something they own on the internet. is hugely important. Of

Either the people who told the best stories around the campfires in the in more primitive times or the people who listened the most to those. And I think that It just sometimes gets lost. Because at a certain point you just Think about things too rational. It's those kind of stories that fuel Shopify's

Virtuous cycle. And it's amazing and super gratifying part of Shopify's journey now. Where you know a lot of little lights can Become a son. Yeah.

Like wonderful stories of people from Islands in the Pacific selling furniture all over the planet again, people actually moving there to help, and which hasn't happened in generations. So that's super gratifying and this is the opportunity we're taking really seriously about like what can we do when we put a lot of small things together to act back. Putting small things together to act big. That's the heart.

of platform thinking. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies.

Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Chayubi. On my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives.

Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. The show is recorded on site in California and produced at the studio inside SY Partners in New York. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our producers are Chris McLeod, Adam Scus, Jenny Cataldo.

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