How I Built Resilience: Live with Tobias Lütke and Jon Stein

Hey everyone, welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition. I'm Guy Raz. So today we've got excerpts from two recent live conversations from our new video series. You can catch them every Wednesday and Friday at twelve Eastern on our Facebook page. Later in the show, we'll hear from John Stein, the founder of Betterment, an investment startup, about what to not do with your money right now. But first to my conversation with Toby Ludke, the founder of Shopify, the e-commerce platform that powers more than a million online stores. Toby was a guest on how I built this back in August of 2019, and if you want to hear his backstory and how he lived with his in-laws for 10 years while building Shopify, You can find that in our podcast queue. Anyway, since the pandemic began, Shopify has actually seen a spike in new customers setting up e-commerce sites. Same thing, by the way, happened to Shopify after the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Toby joined me from his home in Ottawa, Canada, where he's helping merchants stay afloat while managing thousands of employees.

So um Toby right now in terms of Shopify, you've got I think five thousand employees in offices um in Canada and abroad. How are people working right now? Presumably remotely? Yeah, exactly. Um I imagine like everyone else, at least in the technology industry, is doing it. Like we have Slack, which is the taking over the role of the hallways of office. Um I'm jumping from Google Meet to Google Meet uh right now, basically all day long. There's so much new that has to be figured out. Like I used to just sort of walk around and meet people and it's much easier to say yes to meeting after meeting The one thing that really is special is Shopify sort of found its role during a recession. Um

We felt there was something specific for us to do that would actually help other people. People were losing their jobs. And almost like a fallback to plan B for their lives. We always wanted to do this thing and tried it and Like we were uh eight people back then, now we have five thousand people. Like i it's it's amazing to see exactly the same spirit committee the team, which is that our job is to get more small businesses to survive. That's the only thing that matters right now. You've got I think a million e commerce sites all around the world. Tell me a little bit about what

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