Techopia Live: Artificial intelligence predictions from Ottawa’s Shopify

hello there and welcome to tik Opia. thank you very much for joining us. yet again, we are excited because today is a very special VIP section on tik Opia. we are excited because we're sitting down here with a senior vice president of data science and engineering, David Lenny from Shopify. thank you so much for taking the time for us today. sure, thanks for having me. it's like a VIP experience for me as well. we practike this in the right. I know your schedule is busy, but I'm so happy that you sat down here with us because you know it would not make any sense if we had all these phenomenal companies and CEOs and executive within our city to tok about what's happening in artificial intelligence and genocides in general, if we didn't have the cream of the crop at the top company within our city and also, you know, making, of course, waves across the globe to tell us a little bit more where things are at for you specifically, as a companies want to get your insight on it as well. sure, as you already know, you know you continue to empower merchants. the value of AI and data, of course, cannot be ignored, especially when it comes to e-commerce in general. so I have a few questions for you today? sure, let's hear a little bit your feedback. I'm gonna start off with you: know in what big ways is Shopify using data and analytiks today? even more so than you know when you just start it off and really kind of got into the game. sure, sure you know? I think that the the best way to think about how we use data, analytiks and like machine learning and artificial intelligence here is we want to use data to reduce the sort of costs and the time required for entrepreneurs to launch and build successful businesses, and that takes a whole bunch of different forms. one good example would be: we have a probably called Shopify capital, and the way Shopify Capital originated was a lot of our entrepreneurs were telling us that they would hit a certain stage of growth and they would realize that if they had just a little bit more working capital, they could order slightly more inventory and and build a slightly bigger business. but they're sort of stuck in these existential places where they didn't have the capital, so they couldn't grow to the next level. and we said, gosh, like what if we were to offer that to them, because we really want to help them grow as much as possible, because when the entrepreneurs succeed at Shopify, we succeed. so our success is predicated on Thurs. and so, with capital, what we did is we used data to predict who should receive an offer of sort of cash advance from us and how much should we offer them, and this is an incredibly labor-intensive process. if we were doing this by hand- in fact, for the first six to twelve months we did that by hand just to learn how it all worked, and we eventually switched it all over to machine learning and we would run this once a month and just to give you an idea of the big gains we have from machine learning, running that process once a month for us would take 44,000, and it's a time just once through for a human, so we would need a staff of 25 to 30 people doing nothing but that once a week, every month. we can do that now in 40 minutes with our very first algorithm, which means, importantly, that we get huge, huge scale effects, but also we can get faster and faster at identifying an entrepreneur who needs that extra boost to help them get to the next level and won't have to wait for a month to do that work. that's spectacular. now it's interesting because that obviously has provided you with some insights and you've not obviously passed it on in to various other ways as well as you're using it. so what insights can big data offer to merchants on the Shopify platform? so how can they utilize that? yeah, I mean, really you should think about, or the way I like to think about this- is when someone's starting a business- and I like to think of them having sort like a bucket that is filled with dollars to spend creating and running their business, as well as time that they have to spend, because for lots of people, this is something that maybe they launched on the side, but they have a full time job or and they don't have unlimited resources to do this, and if their bucket is ever empty, it runs out of minutes and dollars to spend. their business is gone, and the problem is that it's leaking in all sorts of ways, because every moment you make a decision in the business is an opportunity to make the wrong choice, and so that's where my team leverages data to try to identify as quickly as possible the biggest sources of leak and/or leakage, and then either plug them completely or replenish them faster than your bleeding minutes or bleeding dollars, so that you live to sell another day, and so really you could think about anywhere that there's lost minutes and lost dollars where we're adding value. one another practikal example is we built our own fraud algorithm for order fraud, and order fraud is is all the orders going through a Shopify shop. if you accept a fraudulent order, you're going to maybe ship inventory to somebody and then days or weeks later there's a charge back in a dispute. you've already lost the inventory, you don't actually get the payment and this small entrepreneur lost that money, and that very well could make the difference between sort of living or dying in your business, and our job when we built this algorithm was to give them as much of those lost dollars back, and in our very first version of this, we reduced the false positive rate of our original model by more than 85%, and that was us identifying what are the real sales that they should say yes to. but also, importantly, we increased our true positive rate, which is our ability to detect real fraud, by more than 10%, and so what that really means is that all of the merchants on Shopify are getting more accurate risk guidance than ever before, and they can say yes confidently to the right sales. that's amazing. so now we. we spoke a little bit how you're using data science. we, we spoke a little bit how the merchants are using let's. let's think about the consumers, because obviously that's the key aspect is: but how do you think, once again, the way we are applying that information and gathering all those data? how is that changing the way people shop? consumer sizing, the platform- yeah, I think I actually that metaphor of the sort of the lost dollars in the last minutes is still a very useful one, because if we do our jobs- my team, if we do our jobs very, very well, you may not even know that we're doing them like. our goal is to help a merchant or a merchants consumer find exactly the right option, maybe find the right product, with as little extra searching as needed. you want a great recommendation algorithm that to get you to exactly the right piece of information at the right moment, and it could also help a consumer find the cheapest alternative, like if there's a way for them to save dollars and then all those dollars go into more purchasing in our perspective. so I think, in very much the way we have saved dollars in time for merchants, we're doing the same kind of work for consumers now with artificial intelligence obviously is a growing sector, not just for us locally, but globally, of course, but we have some great companies here in Ottawa, including yourself, obviously, looking for that talent associated with that as well. right, how is that going and how is this house a talent pool out there. what are we trying to do to get people here? what's what your next step? and finding the right people to really fill that gap in that need? yeah, so I actually moved here from Silicon Valley and I've been competing for talent all the time. tik. it's always hard to find great talent and absolutely I'd say that machine learning and AI has reached a fever pitch or maybe even worse, that it hasn't hit the fever pitch yet. it's just going to get even even more extreme. I find myself very lucky to be in Canada, because maybe a lot of people don't know this, but if you look back at th.

Shopify to Vacate its Ottawa Headquarters to Push Digital by Default Culture

shopify has been one of the biggest winners in the stok market in 2020.. their market valuation has ballooned up to 120 billion dollars. they're so flush with cash they're cutting their office space. well, shopify's already had a lease for the last three years in canada at its sprawling 18 floor complex. they built out 170 000 square feet of office space to accommodate a thousand- nearly a thousand employees, and they have a hiring goal of adding another thousand in ottawa and another thousand in british columbia. so why did shopify decide to bail on their lease? well, first of all, they still have obligations until 2026 and last week pinterest paid a penalty of 90 million dollars in order to break their lease early. so this digital by default is taking storm, and you can see that the tik companies from the top are adopting this and trying to cut down on their costs before they incur any more. although shopify will have a carrying cost of this office space that they're not going to use, they will save out on the build out and also will try to sublet. it sounds like that won't work really well because when you find out your the tenant owner is going to be shopify and they're eliminating office space to go digital first and save money. i don't think they're going to have enough buyers in the commercial real estate market. although there hasn't been enough of a wave in the commercial real estate market, we're definitely going to see more big businesses adopting this trend. it is an impressive move by shopify to make this commitment to being a digital first company, and that's why remote teams like ours and these publicly traded companies are riding the wave into the future. if you are carrying commercial office space and you have a high carrying cost, this is likely going to eat away at your margins and leave you holding a bag of debt. so eliminating your office space or starting a company without any office space is a great way to keep your margins high and keep your costs low, and that value is passed on to your customer and in shopify's case, that value is going to be passed on to its shareholders. so we're going to continue to look at this story and how shopify is transforming into a digital first company, and it's also going to be interesting to see what other companies are going to adopt the digital by default culture. trust me, it works. we've done tremendous results and i am bullish on shopify and even pinterest at being more successful because they don't have the liabilities on their books anymore. well, shopify. couple more years, six years- not too bad. thanks for watching now. please subscribe to our youtube channel. every day i'm publishing videos on growth hacking, digital marketing, how to be a successful entrepreneur. i really want to enable you to become a decision maker in your own business in the future of work. so if you want to come along with me on this journey, hit subscribe, hit notifications and i'll tok to you real soon.

More:STOCKS to BUY and HOLD today - The 3 STOCKS I'm holding LONG TERM

THE EVOLUTION OF SHOPIFY

I'm gonna give you the history on Shopify, but before I do, it makes sense to understand where we are in the lifecycle of e-commerce platform. so right now in our community we have three big new shopping cart platforms. we have shopify, bigcommerce and Volusion and they've kind of emerged after the legacy era of shopping carts. now I kind of look at it the same way that the electrical grid in the United States is not quite as good as the electoral grid in Asia, because they got to see us build our electrical grid and then they built theirs from there. so they got to look at all the problems we were having and then build their grid with all those problems in mind. when I started in e-commerce, there were only legacy platforms. it was Yahoo and there was Magento and there was X cart and it was shopsite and there was like these, these platforms that that are not quite as good as the platforms that we have today for a number of reasons. but what happened with the way Shopify came into existence is that the initial developer, the initial coder, the, the owner, one of the owners of Shopify- was looking at these platforms for his own e-commerce business and he didn't. he found them lacking, so he built Shopify out of that. he built this platform based on his own needs as an e-commerce merchant. now the cool thing about Shopify, as I mentioned, is that their focus is on making sure that they have the best product out there. so they understand that they're not the best at email marketing, like Aweber is better than Shopify at email marketing- so Shopify doesn't try to build that into their tool. they don't try to build that into their system. they just have an open third-party app network where you can layer on all these kinds of things- email marketing and live chat and follow up. so they have a really wide, open third party app network and things plug easily into shop Shopify. they also have, in my opinion, the best pre-done theme network. so if you want to start an e-commerce business and you want a pre done, pre designed, high level ecommerce theme, Shopify has the best platform or the best marketplace for those themes. so I flew up here to shoot some video for Shopify's ecommerce university, which is their their way of providing educational content for e-commerce merchants that use Shopify, and I'm getting a chance to look behind the scenes at their company culture and how they treat each other and how they work together at their platform in a way that I've never, I wouldn't have a chance to- just by logging in and playing around with it like I'm getting to look behind the scenes at what they're actually up to them, what they have coming down the pipe, and I can tell you that I'm very, very, very impressed with Shopify. so I want to take you now behind the scenes, show you a little bit of their headquarters, show you some of the cool things that that are going on here and just give you a look into what's going on in this really cool ecommerce company in our community. I think this is fun to have a look at the companies in our community that are doing innovative and cool things and and when their goal is to support us, they want to come up with the best possible product for e-commerce merchants. they want to have the best product so that we have the best experience and have the best chance of being successful with our e-commerce businesses. so let's go now and have a look at the Shopify headquarters. so I'm at the first stop. we're gonna do multiple stops around it, Shopify, because the way they have this done is they've gotten the second floor and the third floor now of a building here in the downtown marketplace. by the way, I'm in New York City. I had no idea how close Ottawa was and how cool it is here, but they've got the second and third floor of this building and they have it broken up into this circle where it's like a Center in the middle. and then you go around this circle and there's all these different meeting rooms and we are at the first stop, away from the video studio where we just were shooting that intro, and it- this is a sleeping room. this is this is a sleeping room. I think they even hire massage therapists to come in and like give their employees massages. what's cool about a company like this? you can tell a lot about a company when you look at how they treat their employees, about how they, how they are to the people who work for them, and one of the interesting things I think about Shopify is that they're not super focused on. you must work 9:00 to 5:00. you must work X number of hours. what they're focused on is if you're an employee or if you work with this company. from what I gather and from what I've been told, is it's more about: can you get your job done, and this is how I run my business as well- this is how I run my employees- is. I don't care how long it takes you, I don't care how you do it or when you do it, just that this is the goal we want to accomplish, and are you going to be able to get there before our deadline? so they've got cool stuff like a nap room. like maybe you're having a tough day and you need to take a little 15-minute power nap. they've got a place to do that and I think that's really cool. so this is the NAP room. now we'll move on. I think our next stop is gonna be in the little in the lunchroom and there may people- may even be people eating lunch. I think I hear them. so let's head on over there. okay, so that didn't go quite as planned, but they have a slide. this is this is they have a slide in this. we're in their lounge right now, where the lunch is over here, and they've got a slide up there. it took a lot, from what I've heard, it took a lot to get this slide put in. there's all kinds of zoning issues when you're gonna have a slide in a business, but they've got a slide in their lunchroom. so when you're having lunch if you want to go play, and I think that's, I think the point here is that they have some focus on play. play is such an important part of putting together a good work environment, allowing people to play with each other and and having you know some level of fun. and I just ate, I just ate it on that slide and I would. I mean, I'm not gonna cut that out, but that wasn't. I was not intending to fall down like that. but let's take a look at this at this lunch room. that learn. I want to show you the lunch. they do catered lunch every single day. check this out. I'm a fan of sushi, so every day if you work at Shopify, you come in. they've got fresh lunch for you, made hot, all kinds of fancy stuff. and what's what's cool about this is I'm a vegan. right, I'm vegetarian. I mean, I think any diet is awesome. I choose to eat vegetarian. I've not. I've been here two days now. there's there's been vegetarian food, so they're catering to everyone sushi. it's pretty fancy. I'm just gonna grab a piece. Oh, Mikado sushi. now, what else is cool is that they don't waste this food. at the end of the day, they'll pack it all up and they'll put it in this fridge over here and you can take it home so you can have lunch made for you hot and fresh every day and then you have dinner catered for you. so the other, the other thing that I think is interesting is if we look around this lounge- and I don't know if we'll be able to pan to that shot- because they have multiple little spaces where you can hang out. so if you, let's say you're, you're working really hard on a lunch meeting, you want to move and have your pod, eat lunch together and work together. it's not just like a big open cafeteria space. they've got it really well laid out. so whoever designed this place was really smart and was thinking about the company culture and was thinking about people being able to eat and work together. because you know when you send people out for lunch they it's kind of smart, they just like detached from work. but if you have lunch catered at, if you build that environment in here, it's actually ends up being more productive and more fun for the folks in your company. so something to think about: in your company you may want to feed your employees lunch, okay. so this i

More:How to Optimize Facebook Ads

Business Report: Shares in Ottawa-based Shopify soar

time for business news. richard southern joins us now and richard, a real Canadian success story continues to make major waves on the markets. we're toking about Shopify, Tina, and if you haven't heard of it, this is now becoming Canada's biggest tik success or success story. this is an Ottawa based company. what they do? they sell a subscription software service that allows you to sell whatever you want online. so you know if Fitte, if you want to sell a book, or whenever you want to sell, you sign up to them and they provide a way for you to do that on your website. this company has been a favorite of investors. the stok's up like seventy percent since November. they reported very strong earnings. today the stok was up another almost eight percent. so you know, becoming really the, the darling of Canada's tik space. really, Canada struggled to keep a big tiknology company. of course we know what happened to Research In Motion. it didn't really happen with Carrell. obviously we know all the troubles Nortel had. so hopefully Shopify could sort of hold back torch as a big Canadian success story there in Ottawa. but they got their opening a big office here in Toronto - so Shopify do it quite well. yeah, and I actually know a few people who work there and they say it's a great place to work. I wonder if that has something to do with how great it's doing. seventh biggest stok now on base trees. these guys are becoming hard to ignore and, as you say, people like worker for them, investors like buying them so good on Shopify. now, speaking of jobs, a new study shows that a six-figure salary doesn't necessarily make life easier from a financial standpoint. 100k ain't what it used to be, but get. this new study found, Tina, that one in five people, eighteen percent of people that make a hundred thousand dollars a year, live paycheck to paycheck. and it's no surprise to the financial experts because you know it's long. but knowing that typically, the more you make, the more you spend, and of course, the high cost of living is a factor here in the GTA, if you want to own, you know you 100 K isn't a whole lot of money, right, when you factor in all the expenses. right, and you know if surveys well found that 41% of working Canadians spend all their money that they make and often go into debt on top of that. and you know it's just tough when you work a stressful job, you go home, maybe you're ordering food and there's a lot of this discretionary spending people out right now, yeah, and so it's just tough to sort of save money at into the month. yeah, definitely, especially in a city like Toronto. I wonder what that sweet number is when you just don't have to worry at all anymore. yeah, a good question of maybe another 100k on top of that. yeah, probably now a tiny Korean company is cashing in on the film parasite, so obviously you know this one. do you watch the Oscar night? Gina, of course, said I haven't actually watched this film yet, but I've heard such great things about it. yeah, I know, I've been sort of checking the movie times. I want to go see it. yeah, it's done so well, won the Oscar, and no one's happier than a small South Korean hedge fund that invested in this movie. it's called ruck young asset management. they kicked in half a million, while the movie's gone on to make 165 million and rising. Wow, so a big return on investment. this partikular fund. they only invest in South Korean movies and the fund has returned 72 percent over the past year and a half. so it really underscores how investors are looking to some more obscure investments, like movie funds, to try and make some money before we go to the speaking of movies. Cineplex has just been bought by a UK, a company called sin world, and we found out today from sin ruled that they're not gonna change the Cineplex name, though they warned there may be some job cuts. so that's the latest on us and blacks. interesting, all right, and before we go, Richard, you've got a quick look at gas prices. price of gas going down a penny tonight, though the trend it calls for perhaps a 2 cent uptik on Friday. so keep that in mind. we're back just a little after 6:30 looking at some random facts that will blow your mind. plus, I took one for the team and I watch the Westminster Dog Show and we're going to be looking at puppies coming up at 6:30. thanks, Richard, I can't wait for that. we'll tok later.

The Zipify Team Goes To Shopify!

hey, as we're here behind the scenes at Shopify and you can tell by this pattern wall. look at this thing. it's exciting. now I'm here with my team for sympathy apps. I have a 40 person team and I brought up the folks who are, like, the most involved in the marketing side of things and the operations side of things and the innovation side of things, because I want them to have a sense of sort of the culture of this company that we're dealing with in Shopify, which i think is like the most amazing ecommerce company ever. so I'm gonna take you behind the scenes, I'm gonna show you a little bit of Shopify and I've shown you this office before- but introduce you to some of my team members. it's gonna be a good time. let's go take a look. [Music]. hey, I'm here with Adam Altay. they say that, right, this dude. okay, I've been working on that for like years. actually, there's different ways. yeah, give it to you Adams, the affiliate manager here at Shopify, and you know we had simplified a lot to him for the our relationship with Shopify, for bringing us in, for giving us ideas, and Adam is like, I've met a few people like him in my life. I call them super connectors, which might actually be the lingo word in the industry. like this, guy knows everyone. he's the nicest guy you'll ever meet. he's got this sort of way of like building rapport and intimates with people really quickly, so it's a great skill set. one of the things that that you tok about that I think is really interesting is the style of e-commerce that you see. because you get to see thousands of stores, you get so much insight into what's happening in the industry and you were telling me about sort of what you saw between the difference between some folks doing like funnel based e-commerce and folks doing like brand based ecommerce. you just toked a little bit about those sort of different styles. yeah, I'm sure you see. I think there, when people are looking at their e-commerce store, they're either looking from the perspective of I have one product, I want to maximize this product at scale, and it really comes down to how good they are at Facebook marketing and how good they are at picking those individual products to maximize those individual products, and they're focusing on those one product right like one product stores, one product funnels, little niche product offer page sale it versus something like boom, where they're looking more at LTV and the lifetime of the brand as a whole and a products set. so watches boom that has multiple products in their brand, right, and so they're concentrating on different things in terms of brand equity: building brand equity and ination- a demo versus product or Facebook ad to an individual product funnel or product page- yeah, and so when you're coming into e-commerce, you kind of want to know the type of brand that you're looking to build. are you looking to build more of a funnel based thing? are you looking to build more of a sort of lifetime customer value branded play like what is your agenda? salutely at simplify apps. we serve everyone. our apps work for you, no matter what you got. but I thought that was really interesting distinction, you know, from someone who's paying, who's gets a seat at all these stores launching and you see people successful of both models, right, not like 100 on the other. yeah, and I think what's really interesting in is both they complement each other. where you can build skill sets in in the cash flow business of just trying to make it work and make $100 a day from a product that eventually then you're concentrating on building the brand and all that is transferable skills and I tell people this a lot that, like, a lot of people are starting with drop shipping and starting with these dropship funnels. I'm saying like, hey, that's a great way to go to start and get some initial revenue, but then use that money to invest in building a product that you stand behind, that has integrity, that you can you know, that has unique selling propositions in the marketplace, and then build a brand based off of that. so I kind of like to sort of think of it as, like, you're doing that funnel based model of drop shipping to start and then you leverage that revenue to then build out a brand that, of course, still has sales funnels. you know, absolutely. yeah, so out of melt, a a billion manager at Shopify relationship expert- extraordinaire. thanks, man. [Music]. hey, as we're here with, actually, who was just giving us her kangaroo, what's the everybody actually Sorensen here? I told her she was a tiger and she said she's okay. so zip, if I apps. you know we focus on direct response. we focus on getting more from your store. that's our sort of core value proposition is how to get more from your store using direct response, advertising, using sales pages, using upsells, and we're a team of sort of creatives and innovators and artists and we are not partikularly organized. you know which is mine? yeah, that's why we have Ashley. she's our project manager, our affiliate manager, organizational organizer, of all things, and so I just wanted to kind of ask you: you know, first of all, what do you think is you have a boy? Shopify is an amazing organization, holy cow. I walk through the doors of this place and it's like an amusement park if you're here working at Shopify, so I'm really honored to be here. it's like like tik Great America for you Californians. so you know what is that kind of one of the things you do? like you came into our company and zip off' I was for us, like from an organizational standpoint, almost like the company that gets the least attention, because we have boom, we have be friendly, we have smart marketer and so there was a lot to do to like get us sort of moving in a like more efficient manner. so what are the things you look at when you come into a company from an organization standpoint? yeah, absolutely. so I come in. the first thing I do is I assess each of the team members, and especially the creatives, like you were saying, and really just see how they create, what's the process and what is the most efficient way for the creatives to create and then us to be able to organize it and streamline it, to get projects out the door. so that's the first thing is, I looked where the bottlenecks and how can we exactly shift and shift those around in the processes and then just develop an actual kind of mind map, if you will, of the process to layout so we know who's responsible for what, when and how much things take. and then number three is prioritizing. so what needs to be rolled out first, what's the most important feature, how are we gonna get it out quickly? and then what are some things that we maybe don't need to focus on at this point in time, things we had not thought about. we came around, we were just stuff and it's going well. now we have you. we're super happy. thanks for coming on the tour of Shopify. we'll introduce you. some of our other team members: Ashley here, kangaroo, thanks. see you guys later. [Music]. [Music]. you missed that, but there was just a clap in front of my face to sync the audio and my team is cracking up in the background here. so we've been a Shopify for the day and every time I come here I get just like this, this jolt of inspiration, because our community is actually really big and we're doing amazing things. like this company is doing amazing things, they are changing the way that retail is done and we get to be a part of that, which is really fun, and so I wanted to just share some of that inspiration with you and let you know that, like, this thing is bigger than any one of us. it's all of us, and to be in this community and to get the opportunity to partikipate in it is a really special thing. like we are alive at a special time and we have this really amazing opportunity, and so you should take advantage of it. you know, you should follow along with what Shopify's up to, follow along with what we're up to- use our blog, use our apps, you know, and so some of the things that we were toking about today- and we met with the CEO- oh, we met with the apps team- reme.

How Shopify Went From Startup to IPO

the interpreters. beginning was very hard fast to get any kind of investment. it was mostly run on fumes on personal savings by my family in France. even in situations where we had weeks of money left in the bank, I insisted on the people who worked here to make plans and think about products that we needed. a year later it's really, really hard to have his discipline, but that's what made the difference. so this company, honestly, would almost happened by accident. when I came to Canada I picked up the hobby of snowboarding and eventually me and a few friends decided he wouldn't be cool to start Normand business selling snowboards and that idea just ducted us. so we decided to do it and we ended up calling it snow devil. I imagined setting up the online store was going to be the smallest problem in the business and it just became this exercise in pure frustration. the entire industry was set up to service existing businesses that I've gotten to a certain kind of scale, even though you know Revere's toking 2004, it was clear that no one has really thought about people starting new businesses online. eventually I said like enough is enough. em sat down, installed programming and out came a software which ran the store the way I wanted. I had a lot of late nights and it was really coming together and I sort of took a step back and said: you know what I? yeah, god, I think, was it. I think I've written the last line of code. I remember like shaking before hitting Enter. it was just like it really felt there was just so much energy which was going to go into his one command which might just change my life: arcing space - AR T space, dot space, snow devil. and then came summer, and, and, and and we- I, I remember it really well. we sat down for a cup of coffee and at a local coffee shop and this was saying: what is it going to be? is it going to be surfboards that they are going to sell? the summer is a girly skateboards. we should be terminals software company, be quite a Shopify and launched in 2006, a Canadian ecommerce startup is making shoppers, retailers and tik investors sit up and take notike Shopify made a name for itself. helping nurture - Jenny, an attorney in Ottawa. all this means what? in total, they've done really well. they've got a really really good company to this point, but I don't think theater yet. there's a ton more of us and a ton more get. we need to and want to accomplish- and I want to prefer to be one of history's great companies and amazing how many more people are able to see what I do. because of Shopify, we thrive. multiple solutions: nothing was working and, to be very honest with you, Shopify just saved our ass. Canadian ecommerce software company Shopify is going public the startup plans to list them. both Toronto and New York shop provides tiknology uses. what Shopify has, on a more macro level, fundamentally accomplished is that it took a very complex thing and wrapped it into a single, well-crafted, easy-to-understand product. when you sign up for Shopify, you're just getting a lot. you're getting the 10 years of hard work by this entire company working to make you look right as emergent the sophistikation of business they were created right now that use Shopify vastly outstrip the capabilities of very established business that might have been around for 100 years. at some points this is something that Walmart I have built for themselves or millions are probably hundreds of millions of Rd dollars. they've gotten to the point where they have data, where holes that can give them single views into everything that's going on in these large operations which we are giving to people words, starting out this sort of consideration of enterprise quality. software is powerful as moving as getting faster, and it's everywhere, and Shopify is doing this for comments. so in 1876 a guy named John Wanamaker created Wanamaker's department stores. actually was the first store in America that had electricity and had a telephone in there. this was the first department store meeting was the first time a bunch of different brands were all being sold under one roof. my opinion is that retail has been pretty boring ever since John Wanamaker created Wanamaker's department store and that for the first time in about 130 years or so, things are getting pretty exciting again. I think the next five or ten years are getting the most exciting times of retailing, of Commerce, of the last 130 years. and I think, was driving its tiknology. tiknology is making it easier for anyone to build an online store. tiknology is making it easier to connect all these different pieces. our mission is to take the concept of Commerce and redistribute it amongst all of people, not just give it to the department stores or the businesses. do you think that commerce is something massively partikipatory, something that everyone has a voice and something that everyone should engage in? we both kind of dabbled in a bunch of other different types of careers myself. partikularly. I was in tiknology for a number of years and I just kind of found that to become increasingly less fulfilling and wanted to put my time and effort into something that was really meaningful to me. when it came time to make a big move, we kind of just decided to do what was in front of us to do, which was kind of follow our dreams, and three fish studios was born from that. when we started the business three fish studios com, we got the website and that was one of my first orders of business was to put some type of e-commerce engine onto it. Shopify came onto my radar and it extremely clean, easy to use interface. that kind of fell out of the box and so we moved over to Shopify about four or five years ago and it has been great for us. so we've been very happy with it. it's really helped us grow our business. I think if you go back in time and you look at sort of the, the building blocks of what you need to be a successful entrepreneur, one of the biggest was capital needed money. in fact, you needed money to the extent that it actually caused you'd be quite risk adverse because even if you raise money, borrowed money, you really only had one shot of it. what's really nice about today is that I think what you need now was worthy now is creativity, not capital, and the fact that we've shifted away from caffeine towards creativity is really great. you don't necessary need a lot of money to start a Shopify store. if you have a product, you have an idea and you have some passion around that, you can build a store for $29 a month and that store can grow to be a hundred million dollar company. that was not possible ten years ago. we started mines iron with 2006. mines I wasn't always a shop, it was a blog before, and we met some great artists along the way. I want to do something that I really helped that create a world, so we started up mines I creative shop. we want to sell something awesome, sell something creative, so we started to pick toys, so the design of toys was just as awesome. dating we started to get into. last year, we started to think about how to do a website, so we started to look around for e-commerce platform that was flexible enough for me, that thought about mobile first, and and then we ended up choosing Shopify. I think the best thing about Shopify is that it's made me not have to worry about anything that has to do with the e-commerce portion. when I received my first are online, I remember the exact moment that someone bought something and it was only like a thirty dollar item that I was just so excited, just validating all my thoughts. I'm validating everything and I was like the best. the most important thing that have to do is to have faith in yourself. if you try to make everything as perfect as you can, it's really going to show. I think a lot of people appreciate that in the end, Shopify is really helping people who don't necessarily have the web development skills to connect directly to consumers. I mean that's really an incredible shift in what the opportunities are. we- we started my living room. there was no equipment, th