YouSaid · the spoken record

Harley Finkelstein

lines on the record: 122
first: 2020-12-10
most recent: 2020-12-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This build a business competition was try to convince people that if you have ambition, you can be an entrepreneur. And we did that by virtue of, frankly, bribing them to start a business by offering a $100,000 prize to the store that sold the most. And it was a very simple competition. You start up on day one. Six months later, we evaluate who did the most sales and they got a hundred thousand dollar check. What was neat about it was We got a lot of attention. We were in the New York Times and that was a really, really big deal for us at that time. I don't know the headline is offhand, but it was something like a startup creates their own startup competition. And it was a really meaningful thing for us. And the build-of-business competition ran for five years after that. And frankly, we're now actually thinking about what the new iteration of it is for next year. But it ran because it became such a big part of our story. And some of the greatest direct-to-consumer brand.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Combined, like you could have said a baby dollars, and like it would have been the same thing to us. That's how much $100,000 was. But this idea that, and frankly, I now realize how much foreshadowing that was in terms of the company that we are trying to become, which is the world's entrepreneurship company, we wanted Shopify to be more than a software company. We wanted to create a movement. We feel that the world is better with more entrepreneurs. How do we get more people to try their hand on entrepreneurship? And in the same way, one of the amazing marketing hacks that Nike did, and this is, I mean, they deserve all the credit in the world for this, is they convinced the world that anyone that has a body is an athlete or can be an athlete. That was completely different than the previous iteration of who wore those early iterations of Nike shoes, of running shoes. It was for people that, you know, lived in Oregon and went to Oregon State and ran track and field. But they convinced the whole world that if you have a body, you are absolutely an athlete. And I think what we began to do through”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey, you guys have the right software for anyone who has already decided they want to be an entrepreneur using Shopify is a great idea. But what about people that have not yet made decision? Because for 99.99% of the world, entrepreneurship is out of reach. If you don't know an entrepreneur, if you have never started a business yourself, it does feel intimidating. It does feel out of reach. Through this conversation, somehow we landed on this idea that what if we created a competition as a proverbial kick in the butt to convince folks to try entrepreneurship and use Shopify and the store with the highest sales would win $10,000. And I distinctly remember you saying, yeah, that's bullshit, $10,000 is nothing. You got to give out $100,000, which was most certainly more money than we had in our accounts, certainly more money than any of us had.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are you familiar with the Jeffrey Moore book Crossing Chasm? So fundamentally, if you were to ask me what build a business did for Shopify, it allowed us to cross the chasm from early adopters that were using it. And this is sort of, I mean, the neat part about Toby writing the software in Ruby on Rails is we got some early traction from that Ruby on Rails crowd. And that was great. But the mainstream had never heard a Shopify, had never heard of any of us. It was unknown to them. And so your comment that”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you actually gave us one of the best pieces of advice as an advisor. I don't know if you remember, you remember this, and I'm going to butcher the exact quote you gave us because I'm sure it was far more eloquent than what I'm about to say or articulate. But you said, what you guys are building is great. The problem is that most people that think about entrepreneurship immediately think it's either too complicated or too expensive or too difficult. And that if Shopify was going to be something important in the world, we not only had to build great software, we also had to convince the world to try their hand in entrepreneurship. And that was one of the biggest pieces of insight, certainly in the early days we ever had received. And that was from you. And we're internally grateful for that.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't imagine it was, I assume it was a lot more of hey, these guys are amazing, the best platform ever, they, of course, they have lots of at-scale stores, and so you don't have to worry about them. But what was interesting was Iden had come to you because of our existing relationship and you had made the intro to us from Iden. And I actually didn't know that until this morning.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that really was one of our first major blowouts in terms of demonstrating the scalability of Shopify. And that's the type of investor he is.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's a new story about him. In the early days, after he invested, one of the things we needed was we needed some, we needed a merchant that was going to sell its scale because we needed to test the resiliency, but also the scalability of Shopify. And Iden heard this and immediately connected us with Rovio. And so I don't know if you remember this, but Angry Birds was just Rovio's major hit is Angry Birds. Angry Birds was like flying in, I think it was 2011 or something like that. The brand, I think they were from Finland, if I'm not mistaken. The brand just blew up. Like they had Anger Birds Kola and they had Angry Birds clothing, but their plush toys was one of the most hottest selling items of the season. And hearing that we needed to test the scalability, but also to show that you can sell at scale on Shopify. I didn't connect it to us directly with the Rovio people and within like a matter of a week or so, they had launched the Angry Bird store on Shopify.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly not some well known, highly respected investor from Silicon Valley who cut his teeth as an early employee at Google and had this great reputation. But I didn't show up. And part of, I mean, once you talk to him, you realize how smart this man is and how intelligent he is and how experienced he is. But just him showing up was such a wonderful, him and I talk about this story all the time now because it's just a great story. That's in a nutshell where others would write an email or phone you or want to do a, you know, a video conference his style is you show up. And he ended up coming to the Series A, which I think and hope it did. It was a really good investment for him. And first Mark also, first Mark Capital from New York, also joined. Same type of dynamic. They simply, Amish at first mark, really just showed up and helped us the second we encountered them. And that was our Series A. It was a $7 million round. I think it was a $25 million evaluation, maybe $25 post. And that was our Series A in 2000.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we knew that Bessemer, we wanted Bessemer around and they ended up leading the Series A. But there were two others that, a bunch of other people had heard we were raising and we got some in-bed interest, which was really great. But there were two others in particular that really kind of set themselves apart. And one I found out earlier today from you, actually, you have a connection to. I didn't actually know this story until this morning. At one point in the middle of the fundraise, in the middle of deciding what the round was going to look like and who were the investors going to be and what the terms of deal was going to be like someone showed up at our door in Ottawa. We were in this area called the byword market in Ottawa, right above a restaurant. Wasn't a necessary fancy office, but someone showed up and his name was Ida Senkit from Felices. And he showed up. And I know now it's like, well, I mean, if you want to do a deal, you show up. But at the time, no one had really ever shown up at our door.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then customer lifetime value is LTV or customer lifetime value of CLTV. And it was instructive. It was valuable. So funny enough, we were already kind of working with Bessemer, even though Bessemer had no idea that we were doing this. Now, maybe this is an entire pitch for you see so much content coming out from the investment community, whether it's white papers or blogs or podcasts. But in this case, it absolutely worked for us. It was incredibly effective because it showed us, wait a second, there is a venture firm out there. There are a bunch of partners out there who really understand our business at a very deep, sophisticated level.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Council are already taking without even sort of realizing it. And I think around the time, maybe a year earlier, Besser Venture Partners had written this white paper, which I think is still available online. It's called the Ten Laws of SaaS businesses. And the white paper, it was great. It was important for a couple reasons. One, it gave us the nomenclature that even today we still run the business with things like monthly recurring revenue and ARPU and customer lifetime value. And it provides us with a set of calculations and formulas that allowed us to know whether or not our business was healthy or not. Just a quick”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We decided to raise our Series A, I guess around mid the summer of 2010. We decided that it was time for us to raise our Series A. And that interest or that appetite to raise some money was based on the fact that we began to understand our business not completely, but at a deeper level than I think we previously did. We understood what were some of the puts and takes the company, how to spend a dollar here to make $1.80 on the other side. And so therefore the more dollars we had on the left side, the more dollar 80s we get on the right side. We also realized that we were kind of doing this alone. We didn't necessarily have too many folks around the table that understood our business and understood software as a service, as a business model, that understood retail and commerce. And it just felt like the timing was right for us to raise around. The first thing we did was we had asked ourselves, who are we already working with indirectly?”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obi had already known me well both as a friend but also as a merchant on Shopify, as a customer of Shopify's in early 2010. I joined the company. And I think my original title was VP BizDev and Legal Counsel or General Counsel or something like that.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not in my stomach. And what I loved about entrepreneurship was my Sunday nights always felt like my Friday nights. And I love that about it, that Saturday morning or Monday morning, it all kind of feels the same. And so probably halfway into the article, so month five or six of working at this law firm, I called Toby and said, I really want to join you. And at the time, it was Cody and Daniel as well. And I really want to join you guys and help you build something big and meaningful and important. And it was mostly, you know, Toby, Daniel, and Cody are three of the most brilliant humans I've ever met. They're certainly on the technology side and the R&D side. And I felt I can come in and sort of help on the business side. And that was that first call. And I think after I had to meet our original Angel investors, a guy named John Phillips, who's still on our board now. And I had to meet John in Toronto for coffee and had to convince John that I was the right person for this. And I think after, you know, trying to convince everyone over a matter of months, coupled to the fact that Tony.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At this law firm. Whereas entrepreneurship to me felt like a true meritocracy. Law firms, and probably accounting firms too, and some other sort of big companies like that or industries like that, they all probably have this as well. It felt a lot more like it was all about legacy. They wanted to know who I knew. They wanted to know how many years I'd been there because I was a first year lawyer, I was being given work that was appropriate for a first year lawyer as opposed to being given work based on my capacity. I was told to do things in a certain way because that is what articling students do. And because I was a first year lawyer, because I didn't come from some fancy last name family, I didn't necessarily understand how to dwell in that environment. In fact, it completely depressed me. I thought I didn't like what work was becoming for me. My Sunday nights were the worst period of the week. I would get this.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to work as an articling student. And then after those 10 months, you write the bar exam and you get called to the bar, and then you're a lawyer. And that's all, that process is finished. I moved to Toronto in 2008 to a fairly large law firm in Toronto. And for the first time in my entire lifetime, I realized what people were talking about when they were using expressions like a case of the Mondays or TGIF or Living for the Weekend, that my entire life, my relationship with work, whether it was DJing or selling t-shirts or it was sort of hustling through school plus also having an online store, my relationship with work was always that of one great passion, but also great love and great fun. And I just, I loved working. I found it very satisfying. And I like the challenges of it. I like the satisfaction of learning new skills. And that all went away.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now you're winding me up. So after grad school, I moved to Toronto. So I think this is how it works in the US as well. But after law school, in order to get call to the bar and officially be a lawyer, you have to do this thing called articles, which is a 10-month program. You have to work at a big law firm or any law firm for that matter, but you have to work at an accredited law firm.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It only lasted like, I don't know, two years or so before some big company came and bought all of these licenses and I wasn't able to sell it anyway. But that's kind of how I did it. And actually, in hindsight, I haven't never even thought of it in this way, but it was almost like licensing arbitrage where no one wants it here, but there's value to it, but no one actually recognizes the value to it because they're using a physical retail business case or business model for it. But if actually if I'm selling it online, then who cares where they're based? And that's kind of how it happened.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a limited period of time the license for the Dark Knight, Batman logo, which was sort of the new franchise, we're getting a lot of attention. And I knew I was only able to afford to have that in particular cities and no one wanted it. So what I tried to do is I tried to find cities where there was a movie theater, but there was no shopping mall. My hypothesis at the time was kids and young people are going to go out and watch this movie and they're going to come home. They're going to say, hey, I want a t-shirt with dark knight on it. Where am I going to go to buy it? Likely they'll go to Google. They'll type in Dark Knight t-shirt and I can simply bid on the keyword in that particular geography because no one else was doing it at the time and Google AdWords was still fairly new. And it would result in them eventually coming to my online store. So I did not have the rights to sell this in any major city, frankly, any city with more than 100,000 people, but I had lots of small areas, geographies across Canada, where I was able to sell it to a very small demographic.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the licensing world is really interesting because what happens is you have what's called a master licensor who has the rights. And it's not always DC or Marvel or even some big company. It's sometimes maybe based on some sort of legacy or some sort of legacy deal. Someone acquired the licenses a long time ago and has held on to it. But then you have these things called sub licenses. And what was neat about that was there was no way that I was able to afford the license for any of these t-shirts or any of these logos in Toronto or Vancouver or Montreal. They were just too big of a city and they were too expensive. But there were all these, not even secondary cities, these sort of tertiary cities or tertiary regions where no one had the license for and no one really wanted the license for it. And my thinking at the time was one of the license that did one of the assurs that really well was when the Batman Dark Knight movie first came out. So I think it's around 2006 or 2007 at this time. I knew that I was able to...”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Folks that had the Batman Dark Knight license was Walmart, Walmart in Canada. So, I mean, literally, I was sitting in tax law class as a complete nobody and I was competing against one of the largest companies in the world. And I was only able to do it because of this piece of software. This software was just magic to me.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Differences of each other when I was first setting up Smoofer, I wanted him to waive the fees because he was a friend of mine and I thought he should waive the fees for Shopify. And so I would basically call him every single week and ask him to waive the fees. And I think eventually he got so annoyed that he just made my store completely free. And years later, of course, when I decided to join, he would say that, you know, I was this kind of this monster and he made me his monster as opposed to sort of be on the outside. But we became really good friends and we throughout law school and business school. I was a Shopify merchant. I fell in love with Shopify. I thought how incredibly democratizing it is it that me, some, you know, it's probably 22 years old at the time, some punk kid. I didn't have that much money. I had enough that I was able to start a store, but not enough that I was able to, you know, do anything meaningful, that I was able to build beautiful business while sitting in tax law class that was able to compete against the largest companies on the planet. I mean, the other.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way that he sees the world is very different than the way I see the world. And in many ways, we just, we really connected on a mutual admiration and mutual love of entrepreneurship and company building and commerce. But we also...”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was sort of the time like Zappos and Google was like a lot of the company names of that vintage were kind of made up words. Yeah, right. Sort of like the next iteration was the affi vintage and the next iteration was the.io vintage and but this vintage when I started was it was just a lot about finding random words and the URLs and dot coms were available. So I started this still t-shirt business called Smoofer. It was a licensed t-shirt business. So I own the rights to some of the Marvel comics and DC comics and some of the rock bands licensing for you. And just started selling these t-shirts on Shopify. And more importantly, or equally as important, the same time I really started to develop this wonderful friendship with Toby. He, you know us both really well. Him and I are polar opposites in most ways. He is cerebral. I am incredibly extroverted. He's a little bit less extroverted.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A product to sell was able to use Shopify and very easily set up a beautiful online store. And I was one of the first people that used Shopify. I met him at this coffee shop. I told him that I was looking to move my t-shirt business from a wholesale promotional business, which required face-to-face engagement into more of a virtual business that would run while I was sitting in tax law. And in my classes in law school. And I became store 136. I built a little store called Smoofer. Yep, that's true.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's on exaggeration at all. He didn't like those two options, and so he created a third option. And he wrote this piece of software. He was using a new coding language at the time was incredibly contemporary called Ruby on Rails. He was one of the core members of Ruby on Rails. And he wrote this piece of software to sell these snowboards. And he had a really good snowboard business, Snowdil. It was a really cool business. But eventually, as the summer came and people were not buying snowboards anymore, he had a decision to make. Either he would start selling skateboards or something for the summer, surfboards, or he would take the thing that he had built for Snowdil and allow other people to use it to build their own online stores. And he decided to do the latter and focus on the software side, like the snowboards were a good idea, but he really believed the software side of it was a great idea. And he created Shopify. And this idea was anyone that had”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any type of permanent residency. And so he sought out to try to sell snowboards on the internet, built a company called Snow Devil. And at the time, this is like 2004. There were two ways to sell something on the internet. The first way was you paid a million dollars to some sort of enterprise-y type of company, Oracle or IBM or SAP or just these big enterprise companies, and they would do this big, massive installation for you for e-commerce. But it was really expensive. On the other side, you could use and sell your stuff on a marketplace like eBay or any marketplace that allowed third-party sellers at the time. And even though that was inexpensive, it effectively meant your renting customers from that marketplace. You never actually own your own set of customers. And so Toby being Toby and being this credible software product genius, and I say that.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess, yeah. No, I mean, it's far less sophisticated than that and certainly far less glamorous. But I just was told that these guys hang out at the coffee shop. And I walk into this coffee shop and it was a group of five or six people. And some of these people was, you know, it was Luke Levec created Travel Pod who then went and built messenger kids at Facebook. He actually just recently joined Shopify. It was Sam Zayd from Get Around, which is San Francisco startup. Iden Mizrahi, who did fluid surveys. He's now doing fellow. And it was Toby. And Toby was an immigrant to Canada. He'd moved here a couple years prior to that from Germany. He moved here because of Fiona. He met a girl who's now his wife. And he moved to Canada. And he initially, because he couldn't work, he couldn't get a job. Someone told him that without, you know, without having your social insurance number in Canada, you couldn't get a job, but you could start a business that entrepreneurship was a thing that you can do without having any type of permits to be living.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Organizations, one was called Invest Ottawa. And I just asked around where the entrepreneurs hung out. And someone said, there's a group of entrepreneurs that hang out every Friday night in this coffee shop in Ottawa called Bridgehead.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mentioned earlier 2005, I moved to Ottawa on advice of the Sky Phil Reimer. And when I got here, I did not know a soul. I had never even been to Ottawa before. Ottawa was the capital of Canada. It's kind of between Montreal and Toronto, which two of the major cities in Canada. So I arrive here and starting law school and I have no friends. I have no family here. One of the things that was really valuable to me in Montreal when I was going to McGill was my tribe, the people that were sort of my people, my community, the people that I hung out with were also entrepreneurs. And that happened sort of organically that I just met other entrepreneurs and we became really good friends. And so it just worked. And I began to believe that in order for me to find my new tribe, my new group of people in Ottawa, I needed to figure out where the entrepreneurs were. And I just called a bunch of random sort of business incubator type.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the one common thread or common theme in my, I've been at Shopify for more than a decade and I'm 35. So like almost a third of my life I've spent at Shopify, which is kind of crazy. But those are the numbers has been how do I get more people to understand what we are doing? How do I properly storytell why Shopify is so damn special? Obviously, it's much easier for me to do that today than it was for me to do it in the early days, although we should talk about build the business because probably the first real storytelling opportunity that we did as a company was build a business and you were sort of the co-founder of build a business. We can get into that later. But I would say today my job is besides the storytelling thing, it's bringing on some of the brightest, sharpest humans on the planet to Shopify and then making sure they absolutely have no roadblocks or constraints in their way so that they can do their life's work with us together. That sounds a little bit motherfucker.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My official title is Chief Operating Officer. And from a sort of divide the world and conquer perspective, I look after more of the business side of Shopify, the commercial side of the business. But actually, we talked a bit about it earlier about this idea of requalifying for your job. Part of that annual requalification that I'm trying to do each and every year is to also understand how to add the most amount of value. And one of the things that I think is really important in the early days of any company and actually it's super important as a company ages, but certainly in the early days where you don't have 6,000 people, is to figure out, okay, what are the ways I can add value, things that only I can do, things that have the greatest impact.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny, I'm just reading. So Stephen King wrote a review of Elements of Style, and this is a funny review that he wrote. He said, there's little or no detectable bullshit in that book. Of course it's short. It's 85 pages, much shorter than this one. I'll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read elements of style. Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principle of Composition is Omit Needless Words. And I will try to do that here. That's his entire.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And probably the third thing is what you'd sort of said this earlier, but we did moot court, M-O-O-T, which is effectively like debate. You're pretending like you're in court. There's a judge. There's a jury. There's two sides of a particular argument. And whether it's debate or it's moot court, that has been instrumental in my life. And I loved Moot Court. I did quite well. I was able to compete with other schools and people in different countries. So whether it's debate or it's MootCourt or it's any way that you actually can get into difficult discussion where the other party is not only looking to be right, he or she is looking to prove that you are wrong. Man, I think that is incredibly instrumental.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you bring in someone, this is why I love podcasts so much or interviews for that matter so much, is because when you bring in someone who's written a book and you give him or her an hour of their time and you ask questions about the book, you tend to very quickly get to the part of the book that they loved writing the most. And that tends to be, not always, but that tends to be the major takeaway. And so if there's 12 chapters, usually the writer, the author, in this case legal textbooks, the legal scholar on the topic will very quickly get to, okay, forget all that. Here's what I want to talk about today. And that, I think you can replicate without going to law school simply by watching great podcasts and great interviews and just really high quality conversation.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“43 pages. I mean, it's incredible Wow. Yeah. So if I didn't go to law school, but I want to replicate some of those learnings, some of those lessons, the elements of style was a big one. That would be first. The second thing that actually it did was we had a lot of guest lecturers in law school. And I went to law school in 2005. YouTube was probably around or wasn't necessarily as popular as it was now. But one of the things that the professors did, and I think a lot of law schools do have this type of dynamic where they bring in guest lecturers.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. That's right. Yeah. I mean, frankly, everything I learned in law school from a writing perspective, the elements of style would have taught me already. And I think it was written like the 1920s. Yeah, 1923.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“None of the other details really mattered. The problem was not all teachers were consistent in that way, and some professors”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always tried to kind of work backwards from what is the actual thing that the teacher wants to teach right now? It's not necessarily about the property. It's not about the fall. It's not even about the tort itself. It's about some other thing that the professor believes will be valuable for these students to go off with after this. And usually it's something that is far more universal and far reaching than just, well, this is how the case ended. And so what I tried to do constantly was, okay, this case, x versus y here fundamentally, the professor wants to get to the point where we can have a discussion about city land. And so how do I go from the overview of the case to a discussion with city land? And through that questioning and through that critical reasoning and critical debate, I was sort of able to draw some sort of almost like literally a map between that initial question to the final question. If I was able to get that.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally does, and actually, it's the best way to defeat them because then it's basically unforced errors as opposed to forcing them to make an error or to make some sort of mistake. The way that it worked, at least in my law school, but I think this is the case in most law schools, is the teacher would ask a question randomly to a student and say, you know, Mr. Finkelstein, tell us about this particular case. And then what he or she would do is they would ask question after question, which help them substantiate whether or not I understood the case itself. So for example, hey, what's this case about? I would say, well, this is a tort case, for example, and someone fell on someone else's property. Okay, well, why is this controversial? Well, the reason is the property that they fell on wasn't actually the homeowner's property. It was a city property. Well, okay.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pedagogic was super practical that it taught me how to very quickly reply and quickly think on my feet or on my toes, but it also taught me how to write really, really well. And for those things alone, I wouldn't change it for anything in the world, which is very, very different than I don't want to slime MBAs, but I did a joint law MBA. So I also went to business school, whereas the MBA was entirely case study based. Most of the case studies I felt were not even steeped in any type of reality. I did not find that to be at all valuable relative to my law degree to run a company like Shopify today.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get called on, it would prevent me from doing well in another class who also used the Socratic method. And that ability to quickly stay on my toes and be ready at any moment to answer a question in a way that provides the professor with the information or to substantiate that I know what I'm talking about, but didn't necessarily require me to spend all of my time perpetually studying that actually was one of the most valuable things. So I would say that and the second thing is writing. In Montreal, I went to sort of a Jewish private school and in the States I went to a very large public high school. And it was a really good public high school. But I got to school. I went to McGill for undergrad and I had never really learned how to write really well. And I only realized that in law school. I only realized in law school that I was able to write a lot, but it took me a long time just to get to the point. And that actually was another major piece of, it was shaped as a pedagogical learning, but it wasn't actually.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the things that this is such a strange takeaway from law school, but the Socratic method made me really, really good at thinking on my toes. It forced me to, you couldn't read every single piece of assigned work because by the nature of law school, a lot of the intention is to overwhelm you with content and readings and work so that one, you can get ready for the practice of law in the corporate world, I suppose, but also they wanted you to be able to start making good decisions about how to acquire information in the most effective way. The Socratic method for me was incredibly valuable because it meant that if I was given three cases to read, and one of the cases was 1,200 pages, and I can't read that in 24 hours, I would have to understand how to get the information, how to acquire the information in such a way that I could regurgitate it or I can repeat it if I was called on, but not know enough about it that if I did.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've studied Socrates and some of his work, so I assume there's origins there. But law school uses the Socratic method, which at least the iteration of it in the law school that I went to was it would ask the professor at the front of the class would ask a question and would”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like that it would teach you how to write, how to think critically, how to debate, how to argue. It would teach you how to read 4,000 pages and pick out the one line. They call it the ratio descendi, the one line that matters in a court case. You'd be able to pick that out at 4,000 pages. And he convinced me that that actually would be an incredible advantage in my career to become an entrepreneur And so I applied to one law school on the advice of this guy Phil Reimer, and I got in near Shiv Ottawa, and I moved here in 2005.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“other than the fact that the people buying t-shirts from you are students and you're a student. So you kind of have that connection with them. But that was it. And his proposal or his idea was, have you thought about going to law school? I was like, no, I don't want to be a lawyer. Why in heck would I go to law school? Anyways, what he did was he said, look, next year I'm teaching law at the University of Ottawa and he's doing it part-time. He's sort of a big partner to big law from here in Canada. And he said, I think law school would be like finishing school for you. It would be like etiquette school for you to be a better entrepreneur.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Countered him, we always had these really interesting conversations about business. And he would teach me things like the difference between the debt side and the equity side of a balance sheet. And he would teach me the idea of investment and taught me about equity markets and stocks. And he would explain it in just this very simplistic, digestible way. And I just like I did throughout my undergrad years, I called Phil towards the end of my undergrad and said, okay, I had this little business. It does well. I think I'm just going to continue building this business. And his insight was in the same way that you were able to disrupt a bunch of existing incumbents selling universities, t-shirts across Canada. Anyone can disrupt you. You do not have what Buffett would call a moat around the business. There is no competitive advantage here. And so eventually, this business will not become anything. It won't become that big. And it's going to be a great...”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sustain me so I can finish undergrad and not have to move to part time classes. What it didn't do though, and this is where Phil Reimer enters the picture, one thing that has been really valuable to me growing up was I was always able to have this group of mentors in my life. And I know you talk a lot about mentors and we've talked a lot of mentorship. But I've always had these groups of people in my life who I just really admire for totally different reasons. And I've taken this pretty far. Lindsay and I got married in 2013, basically six months prior to getting married, there were three people that just seem to have the greatest relationship to their spouse. And I called them and said, hey, tell me about being a great spouse. And I did the same thing for being a dad. I did the same thing and a bunch of different aspects of my life. But when I was starting out in entrepreneurship at McGill, one of the people that I contacted was this guy, Phil Reimer, who was just a friend of my parents, who it turns out wasn't even that close to my parents, but he just, he always seemed to, every time I met him or in count.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I spent the next two to four years, I guess two years until it sort of took off. And then, but four years in total, selling t-shirts all through undergrad to almost every university across Canada. So it worked. It worked to some extent. It worked that it allowed me to pay my tuition. It allowed me to help my mom and my dad and my siblings. It helped.”
2020-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #486: Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, The Future of Retail, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT