Change has to be fundamental to a company's culture, or there is no way it can survive.
E-commerce is not an industry; e-commerce is a tactic.
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.
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.
Our hiring is almost completely built around just going through someone's life story, and we look for moments when they had to make important decisions, and we go deep on those.
My early interactions with VCs were really, really poor.
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.
Sometimes, when you're building a company, out of necessity there's just a gazillion things you have to learn and figure out.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.