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Harley Finkelstein

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122
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2020-12-10
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2020-12-10
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  1. “Shmuta business, which is basically Yiddish? Yeah, it's Yiddish. Yeah, it's a Yiddish term that basically means clothing. And part of it was Montreal was an absolute immigrant town. My family came to Montreal from Hungary in 1956, but it's an immigrant city. And so the neat part about the parallelist route, the Shmata business, was that it had a low barrack entry. So you can start a business with little capital. And I had little capital, but I had this one piece of insight, which is McGill University, where I go to school, needs t-shirts every semester. And my feeling was if I presented them with a compelling proposal, good prices, and I was also a student there, how could they not give me the order?”

    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

  2. “And it just wasn't working. There was no way for me to make enough money that I can still have a full-time class load and curriculum and also help my mom and dad and sisters and also pay my bills and stuff. And a friend of mine just was on student counsel at McGill and said, hey, just so you know, if you're looking to start a business, one business that is kind of interesting is that McGill University spends like $25,000 every semester on promotional t-shirts. The stuff that you see in the bookstore, the stuff you get in your orientation bag that says faculty of science or faculty of arts or whatever it is, hey, if you want to start something and that may be an interesting thing to start. And Montreal has historically had this incredible, they call it the Shmata business, but it's basically the apparel industry. You have companies like Buffalo and American apparel and parasuco and countless other companies have all been created from Montreal. There's a very”

    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

  3. “Fell apart for us. And my mom called me and said, Hey, you got to move back down to Florida because there's no way you can say I'm Montreal. We can't give you money. We can't, you know, we just come back down here and we'll figure it all out. And I was 17 years old when I started Miguel. I was a bit younger than my peers. I loved Montreal. I loved being on my own. And so I basically told my parents, hey, I'm going to stay here. I'm going to figure this out on my own. And I'm actually going to also try if I can to help the family out as well. I have too much younger sisters. So I thought, okay, I'll figure this out on my own. And I tried my hand at a bunch of stuff. I worked at a travel agency. I've been a DJ since I was a kid. So I DJ'd parties and events and weddings and anything that Bartzvis and lots and lots of Bar Mits is like 300 Bar Mitzvah's, as you know. We talked about that a lot. And I DJ'd. I was working at a travel agency trying to go to McGill.”

    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

  4. “Yeah, my dad was just over leveraged for the most part, and he was doing things he probably shouldn't have been doing. I got it. And he just, he just did stuff that was just highly correlated to the equity markets doing well. And when the equity markets fell apart.”

    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

  5. “Had offered basically me in state tuition. And it was like $1,800 a year. And there was just, I loved Montreal. McGill is a great school and it was $1,800 a year. And so my parents were like, you got to go to McGill. Get to McGill in September 2001. And, you know, 11 days later, September 11th happens.”

    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

  6. “Absolutely. If you've ever been to Montreal, it's the most amazing city in the world. It's sort of, you know, it's like it feels European almost, but it's in Canada, which is a wonderful country. But it's cold as hell. And February is a Montreal are notoriously bad because it gets dark very, very early. The number of sunlight hours is very small. And it's not just February. I mean, it's basically January till the end of March. And I think my parents, as they were deciding where they possibly could move to, I think it was going to be somewhere warm. And so it was a combination of staying on the East Coast, EST time zone, and the fact that we had some friends and family that had been living there already. And so they just decided, let's go somewhere hot. And so, yeah, moved down, and this is probably 1996, moved down to South Florida. And then after, in high school, it was time for me to consider where to go to college. And my parents didn't have very much money. And so if I were to go to a U.S. school, it would have required me to take out some sort of student debt. But because I was born in Montreal, McGill University, which is a great school.”

    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

  7. “Yeah, so I was born in Montreal in Canada, lived here until I was 13. When I was 13, there was a referendum in Canada and Quebec where I lived, where Quebec as a province wanted to separate from Canada. And the referendum never resulted in a separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada, but it created a really tense environment, particularly Franglophones living in Quebec. And so when I was 13, my family decided to move down to South Florida. And so I went to high school in South Florida. And then after high school, I taught.”

    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

  8. “Maybe it's a Canadian thing. Maybe the only reason we're nice is because we're Canadian. And frankly, I can tell you that there are some challenges that come with the Canadian thing as well. There's a lot of great advantages. There's something called the Tall Poppy syndrome here in Canada, which is you don't want to grow too tall because someone's going to chop you down. And you do feel that from time to time, but for the most part, building a company outside a tech company outside of Silicon Valley, I think has been incredibly valuable to us.”

    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

  9. “Flip side of that is in order to do that, every single person, particularly on the leadership team, has to requalify for their job every single year. And that is difficult in year one and year two. It becomes incredibly difficult in year 10, year 11, and year 15, where the stakes, the challenges, the opportunities are all so much bigger. But I think for the most part, we've all focused on requalifying for our job and also keeping our, I don't want to say modesty, but just staying grounded in this whole thing and realizing that there is like we're the same folks who are there at the beginning. And I don't know in that way, it's just been a really awesome experience for us.”

    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

  10. “If you study founders going back 100 years, at some point there is this natural graduation where someone decides it's time to bring in the quote unquote adult supervision or something like that. And you sort of lose the connection with the founding story. But because for the most part, those of us that are still at Shopify today are still the same group that were there in the early days, we've brought each other along with us and we've brought our friends along with us also. And it's made for a much richer experience. It's made for a much more meaningful journey when you do it with people and you grow together. Now, obviously.”

    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

  11. “I appreciate you saying that. It's been the journey of a lifetime, and there is not a second that goes by that I take any of it for granted. I think that part of the story is that we've built something special and meaningful and valuable to the world, but also we've done it, you know, Toby likes to say that we are on a journey doing difficult things with friends. And I think there's nothing better in the world of doing things that are difficult and challenging with people that you deeply like and you, deeply respect. And the cool part about it is A lot of the friends we had in the early days, like you, for example, you're still part of the story today. I mean, you and I talked earlier today unrelated to this podcast, but something totally different related to your business and our business and finding a connection point and helping each other. That type of community, people talk a lot about their group of friends or their group of their community, the people they spend the most amount of time with, but there's also sort of a peer group at a company level. I think that tends to get lost because most companies as they grow, and especially history.”

    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

  12. “Think we were just a bunch of Razor Series A, and I think our Series A was, I mean, it was sub 50 million. I remember the exact number, but it was definitely sub 50 million. So I guess a lot has changed from our original encounter, Tim, to now, wow, yeah, I think when you put it in that perspective with that type of Delta, it does seem quite incredible.”

    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

  13. “We first met in sort of mid 2010. We had probably, I would say around a dozen people at the company total. And I think we had just either had just raised or about to raise our series A.”

    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

  14. “6,000, I think we're over 6,000 employees, and market cap is, I don't know, 100 and something billion, depending on the day. I think it's around 120, 130 billion.”

    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

  15. “Just not in the atmosphere. And this idea that you can actually build systems to allow you to run a business concurrently with doing anything else you're doing, whether you're in school or you have another job, that was somewhat foreign. And yet I knew that if we encourage more people to experiment with side hustles, it would lead to entrepreneurship and hopefully would eventually lead to them using Shopify. So certainly that was an important book in my life, but also in Shopify's life.”

    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

  16. “Order to get smarter or to understand a particular thing better, whether it's biographies or it's a business book or just generally a fascinating book about an interesting, true story. And I'm actually reading The Alchemist right now. And I know it's a book you know well. And it's amazing because the relationship that I have with reading the alchemist relative to reading a book where I'm highlighting, I'm trying to digest, I'm trying to reflect on it is just completely different and it's actually a lot more enjoyable. Actually, one of the books that I've given up the most, it's probably not the book, but in the early days of Shopify, I probably gave out 100 copies of a four-hour work week. And I'm not saying that to flatter you and I already friends. I don't need to flatter you, but what I would say though is the reason that book was so important was because in 2010, the idea of a side hustle or the idea of a hobby project that eventually gets commercialized was just not in the ether.”

    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

  17. “Talks about obviously the two main systems being robustness and fragility, but then Talib introduces this third system, of course, which is anti-fragile, where things actually get better stronger as they break, like the immune system, for example. And I've just found that to be an amazing book for the current time we're living in right now that you can take two people in the same circumstances and one just resist and the other simply is resilient about it. And that book just encompasses that in terms of the book that I'm reading right now is I'm actually reading this is shocking, but I'm reading my first fiction book ever. I've never read a fiction book in my whole life. I just haven't, I just wasn't into it. And I know it sounds so crazy, but I just, you know, it's not where I get. I usually read.”

    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

  18. “And one book that I recently reread that I know that you know about is Taleb's book, Anti Fragile. And the reason I found it incredibly valuable to reread it is it feels like we're in a time of great breakage of great change. And it feels to me like what is emerging through this global pandemic are two types of people and two types of entrepreneurs and two types of individuals, which is those that are resistant, that are kind of waiting for things to go back to the status quo that are looking for and anticipating when normalcy will return. But then there's this whole other cohort of people, a whole other cohort of businesses even who are resilient, who are not waiting for the status quo to return, but rather are thinking about how they can use what is happening as this incredible catalyst to change everything and to pivot and to adapt. And the neat part about anti-fragile 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

  19. “One of the books that was suggested to me early on in my Shopify journey was High Output Management, which is the Andygrove book from, who had obviously built Intel and had done an amazing job. And one of the reasons that it was recommended to me was it seemed to cut through a lot of the BS of most business books for better or for worse, I went to business school. And we can talk about education stuff. I actually found law school to be 10x more valuable and instrumental for my journey as an entrepreneur and running a big company. But I did go to business school. The business books that they naturally give out, I just thought was just full of platitudes and full of things that I just didn't find very wise. Whereas I found high upper management to be by far one of the greatest books. And then actually, I think Ben Harowitz's book, Hard Things About Hard Things, is almost like the modern iteration of high open management as well. And that's been another big part of things that have been valuable to me in my own career. That said, we are in the middle of a global pandemic.”

    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

  20. “Playing field for entrepreneurs. And in terms of the company, depends on the day you look, we're a publicly traded company, our market cap is above $100 billion, which still sounds unbelievable to say and something that's kind of amazing. We have about 6,000 employees across 17 offices all over the world. And in Q2 of this year, so this past quarter, we're talking 2020, our merchants sold about $30 billion worth of products on Shopify. So that's sort of some of the high-level stuff.”

    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

  21. “So we currently have over a million stores on Shopify, so a million businesses, a million brands host their commerce on Shopify. The majority of those brands would self-identify as small businesses. And some of them that were small grew into be really, really big businesses, the Albirds of the world or the bombuses of the world or the gymsharks of the world or the fashion novas. But for the most part, we have a million stores on the platform. And if you were to pretend for a second or not a retailer, but if you were to pretend just for a moment that Shopify was a retailer, we would be the second largest online retailer in America after Amazon. And the reason I mention that is because one of the things that has happened over the last couple of years as we've grown and have become, for a lot of people, the default commerce platform, we've been able to aggregate a ton of these stores to get economies of scale, which we then give to entrepreneurs and help level the playing field. And you and I have spent countless hours talking about what it means to level the”

    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

  22. “Interesting. I mean, Shopify has obviously grown considerably over the last couple years, certainly post IPO in 2015. People read about us more often. But I think most people know us as an e-commerce provider, an e-commerce platform, the place you go to build an online store. My version, though, of what Shopify is is really a bit different than that. I think Shopify is the world's first retail operating system. And we can get into what that means at a deeper level. But fundamentally, I think what we do is we enable anyone that wants to sell a product to do so, whether that's online or offline or anywhere else. And I think from a vision perspective, where I'd like us to get to is I want Shopify to be the entrepreneurship company. I don't think there's been a company that's ever been created that has been the entrepreneurship company. And I think we probably have the best shot at that. So that's a bit how I see 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