Shopify President Harley Finkelstein - The Ecommerce Entrepreneur Class

Harley Finkelstein is the President of Shopify ($SHOP), a leading ecommerce platform valued at over $80 billion. Shopify powers over 2 million ecommerce stores in 175 countries. 

On this episode, Harley and Auren discuss:  

• Entrepreneurial renaissance & record business creation
• Nonobvious brand success stories
• Shopify's ecosystem and partnerships playbook
• Canadian entrepreneurship and ambition

Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to WorldofDaaS.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and follow us on X @WorldOfDaaS.  

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Harley on X at @harleyf. World of DaaS is brought to you by SafeGraph & Flex Capital. 

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)

Transcript

Auren Hoffman: 0:02

Welcome to World of DaaS, a show for data enthusiasts. I'm your host, Auren Hoffman, ceo of Safegraph and GPFlex Capital. For more conversations, videos and transcripts, visit safegraphcom slash podcasts. Hello, fellow data nerds, my guest today is Harley Finkelstein. Harley is the president of Shopify, one of the biggest global e-commerce providers. Harley, welcome to World of DaaS. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited. I want to first dive into the entrepreneurial climate in general. I've heard that there's now double the number of applications to start businesses in 2023 versus 10 years ago. Covid was probably a big part of this. Probably a lot of other changes is a big part of this, but what are some of the non-obvious reasons for this boom in small business creation?

Harley Finkelstein: 0:51

A couple of things You're right. I mean, if you sort of look at 2004 till 2021, entrepreneurship or small business registrations had sort of been pretty mediocre, and that all changed around 2020, 2021. And it's continued. So you're seeing way more business applications happening. You're seeing way more people enter the realm of entrepreneurship, and I think it's one of two reasons. I mean, first of all, it's not a Shopify pitch. Fundamentally, the reason that people did not start businesses historically was one of two reasons Either they assumed it was too expensive or they assumed they lacked the requisite experience or understanding or know how. And I think one of the great parts about entrepreneurship today modern entrepreneurship is there's a real sort of building in public type of feel to it, and so at this point pretty much everybody knows someone who's an entrepreneur.

Harley Finkelstein: 1:40

If you go back, my father's, an immigrant, came to Canada in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution. Most of the people he went to school with their parents were like kind of professionals. They were accountants and lawyers and doctors. And my father's father, my grandfather, was not. He was a new immigrant, had no money, didn't speak English, he didn't call himself an entrepreneur, but he was. He owned a small business selling eggs at a local farmer's market and there was no glory in it and you didn't necessarily like eggs. It was sort of a means to an end. It was a means of supporting the family, whereas now I think a lot of people are seeing and are being influenced by more people around them, either commercializing a hobby and making that hobby something that's just absolutely incredible, big and interesting.

Harley Finkelstein: 2:21

About 10 feet from me is the original screen, the original screen print, where Gymshark was printed on.

Harley Finkelstein: 2:27

Ben Francis from Gymshark sent it to me as a Hanukkah present this year. Not only are we more exposed to these types of success stories, but we all know someone who's done it and therefore I think we have more audacity to try it. Second thing is the software technology has gotten so much better, so much easier Again, not a pitch for Shopify, but for $39, you can start a business and you can become a Gymshark or a Supreme or a Master Dynamic or a Kith or all these things that are currently behind me for those that are listening to this on audio. And then I think the third piece of it is that the pandemic, I think, was a reminder that those who are most resilient are going to have not an easy time, but an easier time, and what I mean by that is you saw a lot of people during the pandemic let's just say the restaurant industry that were laid off those that had side hustles, those that had other things in their lives that they were able to go and commercialize and build.

Harley Finkelstein: 3:18

They were better off. Not everyone should commercialize their hobby. Some hobbies should remain hobbies. But I do think that there is a real pent up demand today that didn't exist 10 years ago for people saying I really love tea and I've been curating my tea from my friends and family for a while. I'm going to start Firebelly Tea, which is my little tea hard to like, quit that and start a company.

Auren Hoffman: 3:37

So a lot of these things kind of start as side hustles and maybe there's a little bit of passion you're doing on nights and weekends, you're into it and then some of them actually grow to a point where you can quit your job. But usually most people don't want to just quit and start doing that. Or are you seeing something different? Are you seeing like people are in, or is this something I'm doing on the side and then we'll see where it goes?

Harley Finkelstein: 4:05

I think the thing that's most interesting is that the cost of failure is trading us about as close to zero as it's ever been, so therefore, you don't really have to make that decision right now. You just kind of have to start and if you have a couple hours you've got $29, which is the price of a couple cups of coffee or Starbucks coffee during the month. You can just get started and that may become something large. It may just be something you do on nights and weekends. It's not necessarily just retail or commerce.

Harley Finkelstein: 4:31

You think about how many people now have podcasts and how many people have these hobbies that seem kind of like serious hobbies. Rather than I got a drum set this is not me, but a friend of his drum set in his den. He's now actually doing gigs every now and then on weekends. People are taken to the next level, but the idea is that you have that opportunity to do so if there's product market fit, and I think it's a really good thing. I think this idea that there's this entrepreneurial renaissance happening right now not great, that we have to go through a pandemic in order to have it, but that is much better than I think what we saw 15 years ago, where it was a little bit of nuclear winter when it came to small business creation and most people wanted to find a safe job in a big company.

Auren Hoffman: 5:07

That is what I don't understand. So I understand why things are becoming easier to be an entrepreneur. What I don't understand is, in the 2010s, why it was so stagnant relative to history, relative to the 80s and 90s. Was it just everyone came out of the Great Recession, or whatever it was? They just wanted to flag to safety, or what was going on?

Harley Finkelstein: 5:28

there. That was a huge part of it. 2008 was a massive part of what happened subsequent to that era, which was it was a flight to safety. It was I need to be resilient, I need to be independent, but sort of post too big to fail. A lot of people went to get jobs at companies that were too big to fail and I think that was very different. And, by the way you take a medium-sized bank, you invest in a bank versus a very large bank Post 2008,. There was an obvious reason to go to that bigger bank because that bigger bank was saved and that mid-sized bank was not saved. There was less business registrations in 2010 than there is today. The data supports that.

Harley Finkelstein: 6:04

But I do disagree that the 2010s was sort of this lost decade for entrepreneurship. When I think about, like Figs or Gymshark or Glossier or Everlane or Dollar Shave Club or Brooklinen these were all kind of founded around that time I feel like the 2010s are actually defined by the rise of these direct-to-consumer brands. We played a huge role in that, certainly, but I think brands also got a lot more dynamic and disruptive. I mean direct to consumer. Brands like Glossier also evolved. They moved to Sephora and Mattel Creations. Mattel is a company that was started in the 1940s. Obviously, two products Hot Wheels and Barbie Barbie named after their kids. Mattel Creations came about in the 2010s when Mattel realized that in the basement, in the vault of Mattel, they have all this incredible natural property that people love and are obsessed with. And let's actually start building businesses around each of those particular brands. Less amount of people starting businesses, but a ton of creativity happened in that 10-year period businesses, but a ton of creativity happened in that 10-year period.

Auren Hoffman: 7:07

Is there a sense where, historically, if you think of the average person, at least 90% of their income comes from one main source and today you're starting to see some class of people have many jobs? On like the very high end, you have these people on like six boards or something. They make something. On the more emerging end, you have someone okay, they're an Uber driver and they do this, and then they do something online for this other thing, et cetera. Do you think we're going to see a world where more people where there's no like one dominant, no one place, is like 50% of their income? I think for some people it seems like at least it's on the rise.

Harley Finkelstein: 7:41

That trend it's on the rise, but there's going to be people who fundamentally believe that work is work and life is life and those two should never cross. I think you have a different type of person whose identity is not necessarily to use a Bezos line. It's not work-life balance, it's work-life harmony. It all kind of works all together. And when I put my head on my pillow at night, I'm doing so as an entrepreneur and a founder and the president of Shopify and passionate father and husband and someone that loves to play tennis and for fun, I interview old Jewish entrepreneurs in their 90s. I have a little project called Big Shot where I'm creating an archive of the greatest Jewish entrepreneurs of the last half century. More people are becoming more multidimensional. Now. That's a very good thing. Now it's important.

Harley Finkelstein: 8:24

One of the things we talk a lot about at Shopify, from a product perspective, but also from a focus perspective, is your main quest must remain your main quest.

Harley Finkelstein: 8:32

The most important thing is to keep the most important thing, the most important thing, that really, really matters.

Harley Finkelstein: 8:37

I do think there's a risk of being a jack of all trades, master of none, but more generally, you are an investor, you're a leader, you're a podcaster, it all kind of fits together somehow, or in this nice little package, each thing kind of works itself out. I do think, though, that if I found out that my family physician was also a DJ on weekends at an after hours club, there may be some concern there as well. I think that more and more, what is happening now is people are searching for their life's work during their life, unlike, I think, our previous generations. More what is happening now is people are searching for their life's work during their life, unlike, I think, our previous generations, who kind of did a job they didn't love their whole life and then eventually retired and did their life's work. We want to do it during our life, and, at the same time, our life's work is not necessarily one particular thing, but rather a combination of things that create our self-identity.

Auren Hoffman: 9:22

Now, small businesses is roughly, I think, about 40% at least of the US economy. By the way, in India it's something like 90%. It's crazy, yeah. In emerging economies it's even greater than that.

Harley Finkelstein: 9:33

Totally, they don't call it small business, they call it survival. It happens to be small businesses, but that's because the barrier to entry is lowest.

Auren Hoffman: 9:39

Do you think that steady states at 40 in the US and some of these more developed economies, how do you think that changes? Because you could see a world where these large businesses, these magnificent seven, get so big and government gets big, et cetera, and all of the economy drives there. Or you can see this these small businesses being able to fight back and they've got all these new tools to be able to do that. Where do you see that going?

Harley Finkelstein: 10:04

One thing that I think people miss is that, just going back to the Gymshark story, the Ben Francis story, that was not his first business, but because the cost of failure was low and the barren entry was low when he realized that his first business was there was no there there, he was able then to try something else. So I think that, while you're right I don't know the exact numbers you're saying 40% or so could be right, maybe in the US alone. I think that the more the cost of failure is reduced and it's less costly to just try something, more people will do it, and someone's gonna have a friend who says well, if you did it, maybe I can do it also. I think more people will enter it as well.

Harley Finkelstein: 10:42

Entrepreneurship does get a little bit overly glamorized. It's not easy. Most small businesses fail. The key, though and frankly the entire mission of Shopify is to, as much as we possibly can, reduce the rate of failure on these businesses. Give them a little bit of an extra shot at making it happen and, if it works, make sure they can scale to do many billions of dollars a year, because sometimes that's also the problem.

Auren Hoffman: 11:10

It's working, it's working well, but it's really hard to take it to the next step. And nowadays we have all these great tools Shopify among them to allow us to grow those things, whereas before you're doing so many things, you're capped sometimes and you couldn't get out of this loop.

Harley Finkelstein: 11:20

One thing that I think is not as understood as it should be is this idea of default global. When we were on the IPO Roadshow the question that I liked the least. We took the company public in 2015, may 2015, so about nine years ago, and we did like 93 meetings, and I love the Roadshow. It's a great thing, I mean as an entrepreneur. It's so cool. I think Toby liked it, probably a little bit less than I did. I love telling the story of Shopify, but we're on the show and we kept getting these questions of TAM total adjustable market and at the time, we had a prepared response, which was there's 46 million retail SMBs in the world and 10 million retail SMBs in America and we have a small percentage. We have a lot of room to grow.

Harley Finkelstein: 11:58

If I were to do it over again, I would do it in two ways, two vectors. One would be, first of all, in 2015, we were taking the company public. We couldn't have anticipated that the largest shapewear company on the planet would be created by Kim Kardashian. We couldn't have anticipated that one of the most important sneaker companies on the planet, or sneaker brands on the planet, would have been created by a hip hop or a rapper? We couldn't have because that was not within the total gospel market of our target demo.

Harley Finkelstein: 12:26

The same thing goes for consumers. Today, when you press the launch button on your Shopify store, you've built it, you've added inventory, picked your theme, configured your domain name and your payment gateway and you're ready to go. You started placing some ads on Meta or Google or whatever. Most people that are really thoughtful they are default global immediately. The difference between Main Street and the internet is that on Main Street you literally have a physical geographic boundary of who you can sell to. They have to actually walk into your store. The internet democratized distribution entirely to the extent that now, when you hit that launch button, you should sell to people all over the world. There's taxes and duties and competition, all that. Forget that for a second.

Auren Hoffman: 13:07

I assume all that stuff is becoming easier, the taxes are becoming easier, the custom stuff or whatever Exactly?

Harley Finkelstein: 13:14

It is. Shopify markets effectively puts all that on rails anyways Taxes, duties, translation, cultural nuances. In one country it may be more of a courier type delivery as opposed to FedEx or UPS or USPS or what have you. But that all is getting easier and, by the way, over time it's going to continue to get easier and easier. Look right now, in China, about 50% of all retail is done online. So the 50-50 split, I think it's like 25% in the UK.

Auren Hoffman: 13:42

Why is that the case in China? Is it just they just skipped it? They just didn't have the embedded stuff, so they skipped it. A lot of his grocery.

Harley Finkelstein: 13:49

grocery plays a huge role in that They've been doing it for a lot longer than we have in North America.

Auren Hoffman: 13:53

There's some a more sophisticated delivery system.

Harley Finkelstein: 13:56

Regardless of what age you are. These super apps are effectively running your day to day and even in terms of the way the government operates there. You're renewing your passport in some cases, or your driver's license through these super apps. It's just more embedded there. I'm in Canada, but I assume in the US it's the same To renew your passport or your driver's license. There is some element of physical presence you have to do in US and Canada go to the DMV or something. It's just not as baked in or organically embedded into the culture there. The UK actually is fascinating because it's 25%. It's really high. It's like 10% more than US and Canada.

Auren Hoffman: 14:29

Do you think also, like a high urbanization makes it more likely or makes it easier, or do you think there's other factors that make it harder in like the US and Canada? Or is it like a cultural thing?

Harley Finkelstein: 14:40

The Canadian geographic landscape should be perfect for e-commerce. It's massive.

Auren Hoffman: 14:45

Canada is huge. I assume it's somewhat spread out there is concentration around the US border.

Harley Finkelstein: 14:52

That's well known. But the density of Canada if you remove Toronto, montreal, vancouver, it's not a very dense country. That would presume that e-commerce would have massive penetration here, and we don't. We actually lag even below the US there too. But I do think back to the original question is that would presume that e-commerce would have massive penetration here and we don't? We actually lag even below the US there too. But I do think back to the original question.

Harley Finkelstein: 15:08

Is that, yes, more people will try to head an entrepreneurship. Yes, more people will have greater success faster because, simply, the scale of these tools, something as simple as the flash sales that are happening right now on Shopify whether it's Taylor Swift Two days ago, it's Saturday morning Taylor Swift dropped CDs, compact discs, on her Shopify store, which she signed, a bunch of them, massive flash sale. Or it's Supreme does a flash sale every Thursday at 11 am. Or it's Kith doing something. The type of infrastructure that we've had to build for these means that anyone using Shopify should never have a ceiling on how big, how fast, how aggressive they can grow. So you can start with any of these products hopefully ours and you can scale really, really big and you never have to replatform, which was not the case in previous versions of enterprise software.

Auren Hoffman: 15:56

What has surprised you most about how e-commerce has evolved over the last 15 years?

Harley Finkelstein: 16:02

I think the best brands in the world have non-obvious strategies, and I think those non-obvious strategies are very interesting because they allow the underdog to succeed. I'll give you a very simple example here which is kind of geeky. But there's a company called Lafica. Lafica makes a kettle that looks like a DJ turntable. The Venn diagram overlap of Lafica is people that like tea, which is me I'm almost always drinking tea and people that also like DJing, which is also me. From a global macro sense, it's very, very small, but that's still probably 10,000, 20,000,. It's very, very small, but that's still probably 10,000, 20,000, 100,000 people on the planet. And so Lafika is like non-obvious product design. That, I think, is really cool.

Auren Hoffman: 16:46

It's like finding these Venn diagrams where nobody else has invested in this very, very niche-y thing, but there's always 10 to 100,000 people in the world that fit almost any random Venn diagram In the physical world, maybe other than Manhattan, I'd say you couldn't actually open a store that just sold DJ kettles, but on the internet you can.

Harley Finkelstein: 17:05

So that's sort of a good example to me of a brand that's like a non-obvious product. Design Non-obvious products also, I think is really interesting. So there's a company called Brunt Workwear. This is a classic example of a brand selling a very non-obvious product, which is workwear boots. These are like the boots that you see people wearing on, like construction sites. They sort of have the steel toe. If you go to a construction site, you notice that most of them are wearing the same boots. First of all, they don't look very good. Second of all, there's just been no innovation.

Auren Hoffman: 17:32

They're kind of like these beige boots you've seen for the last 30 years.

Harley Finkelstein: 17:37

Often, your employer buys them for you. If you're on a construction site and you're a construction worker, they'll buy them for you. Oh cool, I didn't realize that. By the way, they're not cheap, they're quite expensive. But then you have a company named Brunt Workwear who, six weeks before so basically as the pandemic is starting like summer 2020, the entrepreneur, the founder behind it, sees his friends, who were all construction guys, wearing these boots. They're not comfortable, they don't look good and decides he would basically create a better work boot with steel toe for a very particular demographic tradespeople where there was not a great product that existed. And I think this year they did a million dollars on Black Friday that's public information that they posted that.

Auren Hoffman: 18:16

That's so cool. Why would that do so well? I don't know. I'm giving like work gifts to my loved ones on Black Friday. You would think that would do well any time of the year.

Harley Finkelstein: 18:26

If you have someone in your life who works in a construction site and you're like, what do I buy this person? It's a pretty great gift that this person, for the next three years, monday to Friday, as they go to work, is wearing better, comfortable boots that are safe and actually look pretty good Same sort of thing like a kettle. It's interesting.

Auren Hoffman: 18:41

If I bought something for my wife I don't know if I'd want to buy her a briefcase. I think I'd buy her like a jewelry for Christmas or something.

Harley Finkelstein: 18:48

Yeah, maybe, but I think you're making my point, which is you were not the target demographic. By the way, there's a great story. I'm going to digress for a second. It's worthwhile hearing this. A really close friend and mentor of mine is Seth Godin, the famous marketer and writer. Seth has been in my life for a decade and him and his wife are like relationship role models to me and my wife, lindsay.

Harley Finkelstein: 19:05

Seth tells this great story that when Mama Fuco first opened in New York City, he was invited into the restaurant by David Chang and he sits down at the table. Give him the menu and he's like he says to the waiter I'd love the Brussels sprouts, but, by the way, I don't eat bacon. Waiter says okay, well, they're made with bacon. He's like I know, but I don't eat bacon, so I can't eat it and also it's cheaper for you. Don't use the bacon. Waiter goes back to the kitchen, comes back and says sorry, mr Godin, we cannot do that. Mr Godin says I don't understand. Eventually David Shank comes this is wonderful, but I made this particular dish with this particular set of ingredients and if you don't want bacon on it, this dish is just not for you. And that was the moment that Seth knew that Mama Fuco and David Chang would be incredibly successful. Back to your point. These are not products that are for everyone. These are products that are for a very specific person or very specific type of person, but it works really well.

Harley Finkelstein: 19:59

One other one that I want to give you that I think is fascinating is what Drake is doing with a business called Drake Related. Drake went on tour for the first time in four years Another Canadian, by the way, another Canadian, yes, I'm only talking about Canadians. I think he's also Jewish. So another Canadian Jew Shout out to the Canadian Jews out there. He wanted to create an experience, because it was the first time he was on tour four years that would surprise and delight the people that showed up.

Harley Finkelstein: 20:23

And the concept that he used was sort of this bat signal concept, like the bat signal in the air when Batman is needed. So what would happen is, as the show was finishing, right outside there would be at the side of the building, he would project the bat signal, which was a QR code with a geofence radius of the arena, and then fans would literally go and snap the QR code and they'd be able to get all types of, they'd be able to buy stuff. They'd get all types of free surprises, like unreleased Noctas, which is his line with Nike, but it was a completely unique shopping experience where you had to be there in order to see the QR code. You couldn't transfer the QR code. What had happened by the end of the tour was people actually, even if they didn't get tickets were still showing up for the drops.

Harley Finkelstein: 21:12

In the parking lot, you could still see it or something, or whatever. Often it would be in this random spot, so you'd have to walk around the arena to find the Drake signal, the bat signal. It was so, so cool. I really loved it. And then maybe the last one I'm going to talk about more of a traditional one it's unique which is Glossier 2020, everyone is saying physical retail is dead, height of the pandemic. And what is Kyle? Who's now the CEO? And Emily is the founder of Glossier? Do they make this intentional choice to make their stores the most immersive experience ever, so that when stores reopen, they feel like retail theme parks that are so on brand for them? Today they're the blueprint, I think, for physical retail. Those are just a bunch of things that are non-obvious but incredibly correct. And I don't know. We have millions of those stories on Shopify, which is really cool.

Auren Hoffman: 21:58

I don't know. We have millions of those stories on Shopify, which is really cool From a tech perspective. Where do you think we still need to enable things much more over the next five or 10 years? Whether you're giving advice to entrepreneurs, or it's your own roadmap for Shopify, or you're just hoping other people build things, what are you hoping happens so that we can really have even more of an e-commerce revolution?

Harley Finkelstein: 22:20

We're trying to work on this with Shopify audiences, which is our answer to placing ads across digital platforms. Just the top of funnel stuff, exactly. I still think that it's very difficult for most. You can be a wonderful craft person that makes this beautiful teacup that I'm using.

Auren Hoffman: 22:36

Yeah, how do people find out about it? Exactly, that is more challenging. Like that turntable kettle. How do people find out about it? Exactly, that is more challenging. Like that turntable kettle. How would you even find that audience?

Harley Finkelstein: 22:43

You're really setting me up here. That was a shop app, the shop app, which is one of the most popular shopping apps on the planet, which we built. That app suggested that I buy this particular kettle DJ kettle. Why? Because I've been buying turntables and DJ equipment on the shop app for a long time and I've been buying kettles. They saw you and they found you Exactly. I think there is some way to go there. I think there's better ways to get more visibility.

Harley Finkelstein: 23:09

Another one that I think was challenging was you had this chicken and egg problem when it came to influencers and content creators and brands.

Harley Finkelstein: 23:16

There was a period of time 2017, 18, 19, where every content creator was starting to build a product. They wanted to basically build a brand, and every single brand was starting to create content, and I think what you ended up with ultimately was content creators that were creating kind of mediocre products and product companies that were creating very mediocre content. It was obvious that these were sort of like advertorials. The issue was they just couldn't find each other, and actually we have a product called Shopify Collabs, which it's pretty good and it's getting much better, but there's still some ways to go for it, but in its final iteration. It'll be this incredible matchmaking service so that you have an audience.

Harley Finkelstein: 23:56

Let's say, you're a YouTuber and you make great cooking videos. We'll connect you with Our Place or Hexclad or any of these amazing brands on Shopify, because you're creating great content and you're using Hexclad anyway. You should have a relationship with them so they can pay you a commission for that Stuff like that seems obvious, but there's still a lot of room to grow there and a lot of improvement to be made.

Auren Hoffman: 24:20

You're like like second party. In some ways your audience is similar to mine, so maybe you can somehow advertise, or we can do some sort of collaborative product together, or whatever it might be that's right.

Harley Finkelstein: 24:25

If you're a big company, if you have a top thousand or a top hundred YouTube channel about cooking, you probably can get to Hexaclide on your own, but think about the long tail of these millions and millions of content creators that are making food stuff. They don't have massive subscriber bases. They have a couple thousand people, let's say. However, those thousand people really like their content. Now if they're actually connected with another one? So there's some stuff like that. I think that that's the second one. Maybe the third one, I would say, on the technology side of things, is. I do think, though, that way too many retailers and brands generally are making the mistake that they're like we are online retail, we are an offline retail, we are an omni-channel retail. I don't think that's the future of commercial retail. I think the future of commercial retail is I have a product to sell, and I have a good understanding of where my audience spends their time, and I'm going to sell. However, is most convenient for my audience or my consumer base.

Harley Finkelstein: 25:16

Something that is almost never talked about, but exists in the world is Shopify has a Spotify integration. The reason it's not discussed? Because most people, most of the time, would never use that integration. However, if you are someone that actually has, if you're Connor Price, one of my favorite up and coming independent artists amazing guy, never heard of him. I'm going to check him out. His stuff has gone viral. Really good, connor Price. He's got a massive following on Spotify. He also has an incredible merch store on Shopify. Now, directly from his artist profile, where his consumers, his fans, are spending their time, you can buy his stuff and, by the way, those are the two companies that I always hear most confused.

Auren Hoffman: 25:57

That's something we'll do in April. Fools. People always say Shopify when they mean Spotify and vice versa. I mean it's a good company.

Harley Finkelstein: 26:03

Obviously they're both amazing companies, but, yeah, we do get confused. Luckily, we're in different industries, but those are the type of things where I think what Shopify wants to become ultimately is a retail operating system. In order for us to be a retail operating system for the brands that use us, a retail operating system for the brands that use us, we not only have to do what they need right now. We also anticipate that at some point, spotify, a music streaming service, may also become a place where people spend time, and therefore you should also sell in that service area.

Auren Hoffman: 26:27

One of the things that's changed, I'd say, in the last four or five years is just like it has become much, much easier to pay everywhere. There's all these different payment systems. Obviously you have Apple Pay, you have Google Pay. Obviously you have the ShopPay. You've got Stripe, you've got Audient, square's got the Cash App. There's all these different ways for a consumer to pay so much easier today, and that gets rid of the friction, whether you're online or offline. Where do you see that evolving?

Harley Finkelstein: 26:54

I think, the accelerated checkouts and generally the payment options. Shoppay is currently the highest converting accelerated checkout on the internet. It converts no joke 36% better than competition and 50% more on average.

Auren Hoffman: 27:07

You just like put in your phone number, like boom, I'm like wait, wait, wait, what I just paid. Like it's so easy.

Harley Finkelstein: 27:13

It's super simple. Like 150 million consumers buyers have opted into ShopPay. Shoppay's checkout is so fine-tuned that you don't have to use it. You can use any other checkout you want we integrate with like I don't know I think over 100 of them. But at some point if you're spending a lot of time, effort and money trying to get people top of funnel from wherever to your site browsing, adding stuff to cart, get into the final step and then you lose them in the checkout.

Harley Finkelstein: 27:41

Abandoned checkouts should not exist, but they still exist because if you're going to ask me to put in my address again, I'm probably not going to check out. So where is it going? I think the ones that have earned the right to exist will become more dominant. I think Shopify checkout and ShopPay certainly has earned that right. There are a lot of other great ones. Loves buy now, pay later. The reason that we have ShopPay installments, which we built in partnership with a firm, was for some of those merchants they're really going to want and they should offer this, especially if it's expensive. It's a great model. By the way, it doesn't cost the consumer any money. It's free to the consumer. So it's four equal payments, very simple. You understand what your payment schedule is, and it's the merchant who's the one that pays for it. I don't think it's necessarily about one particular payment method. I think it's really about do you understand the buying preferences of your consumer? Reverse, engineer what are the best tools to use? And for most merchants on Shopify, that happens to be ShopAid.

Auren Hoffman: 28:40

One of the other guests at World of Desk. He has an anecdote. One of his friends was flying from London to Dubai and at the airport he realized he had his passport, he had his phone, but he had forgotten his wallet with all of his credit cards and he decided to do the trip anyway. He could just use his phone to pay for everything in the restaurant, all those types of things, the whole trip while he was there. It's incredible the way the world is moving.

Harley Finkelstein: 29:04

I totally agree on that. I also think that, back to the model of technology and what technology is going to do, it's becoming almost like talk about it, but like talk about AI, for example. I think that AI is going to be a massive advantage to anyone who uses it. I think in particular, though, there's this really interesting disproportion opportunity for SMBs, something super simple. I posted yesterday Saturday, I think about Shopify Magic with this new photo editor. So Shopify Magic is our AI tool. We have it embedded across all of Shopify's products, and so I posted about this photo editing.

Harley Finkelstein: 29:40

I ran one of the first Shopify stores. I'm now running another new Shopify store with Firebelly. I want to test the products. Photo editing used to literally have to, with a cursor, go around and actually cut out your image digitally, and if you did it and you were good at it, I got okay at it. It still wasn't nearly as good as what a large scale merchant could do, because they have a full team of people doing it, but, like something as simple as photo editing using Shopify magic just removing the background, you can place it with anything you want, you can turn it around you get a 360 view if you want.

Auren Hoffman: 30:15

It's a super practical tool that allows you to actually upload better stuff. That's so cool. You shouldn't have to be a graphic designer to run a commerce site or have to hire one. Correct and by the way.

Harley Finkelstein: 30:22

You already have to do enough stuff. You have to be good at making product building the actual thing. You have to be good at digital marketing. You have to be good at making product like building the actual thing. You have to be good at digital marketing. You have to be good at merchandising. There's a lot of stuff you have to be good at. Over time. We think that AI will actually take away some of those pain points. Another example is product descriptions. Product descriptions even though it may not seem like a super sophisticated task, it's actually really valuable for search engine optimization reasons, for navigation reasons. You may be okay at merchandising and marketing and so you can write a decent product description. Most people can't, but some people can. No matter how good you think you are at writing product descriptions, you plus Shopify Magic will do a way better job.

Auren Hoffman: 31:01

It's like having a great editor who can help you hone it.

Harley Finkelstein: 31:04

Exactly same thing. I absolutely think that, over time, this is where we are uniquely positioned to leverage the power of AI for everyone on the platform, including the large brands, but also SMEs Some of these people have a unique voice and once you start to scale, okay, well, it's really hard to scale that founder's voice.

Auren Hoffman: 31:22

Sometimes they're whimsical or they're funny or they're humorous or whatever. But once you see 20, 30, 40 product descriptions with their whimsical voice, you can help them scale that up a bit. And now you take that founder and allow them to spend much more time being creative than having to do all these other types of things.

Harley Finkelstein: 31:40

You just said something that I think is really, really important, which is they can now spend time on more important things. The biggest challenge to any entrepreneur, whether they're running a large company or they're at their mom's kitchen table, is their number one resource is their time, and so anything that you can do that allows them to focus the most amount of their time on tasks that are high value tasks and reduce those low value tasks. That is a game changer for anyone who's starting or running a business, small or large, and I think that's one of the major benefits of AI is that a lot of those tasks that are not necessarily high quality tasks, you have to do them, but if you do it really well, it doesn't mean you're going to make a billion dollars or a million dollars or $100,000. That actually is where this thing gets really, really fascinating.

Auren Hoffman: 32:24

One of the things I really like about Shopify is just the ecosystem, not just the merchants, but other tech companies who are involved. There's so many of them, like. Clavio is just one of my favorite companies. It's an incredible company. Me too, andrew is amazing. We are together investors in Gorgeous, which does customer service software for Shopify, which I love Another great company, which I love Another great company. How do you think about this ecosystem? There's always this kind of tension with the ecosystem and the platform. How do you think about it?

Harley Finkelstein: 32:55

Some of that tension is misguided. I think the key to this whole thing is there's the famous Bill Gates line you're only a real platform if you create more value for others and capture for yourselves. 10x, I think, is his thing, something like that. I think the key here is having transparency, actually saying the thing of here's what I'm going to build and here's what you're going to build. So a couple of things. So the ecosystem is a huge part of our business.

Harley Finkelstein: 33:18

One of the first things that I worked on when I got to Shopify almost 15 years ago was the partner ecosystem. The original catalyst for it was we couldn't be everywhere ourselves. We didn't have a very large team, so we needed agencies and freelancers to be on the ground helping to get more people to use Shopify. But also, from a product perspective, there was no way that we were ever going to build 100% product market fit for everyone that ever used Shopify. So instead we basically decided that the 80% the stuff that most people need most of the time has to be world-class Checkout, inventory, storefronts, resiliency, speed, cdn all the stuff that is table stakes today. We have to be the best the world at and then, on top of that, create really great APIs that allow third parties to come and build on top of Shopify.

Harley Finkelstein: 34:05

And in the early days I literally would call app developers and say, please build of Shopify. And in the early days I literally would call app developers and say, please build on Shopify. And sometimes we incentivize them with additional rev share or something to get them to do it. Now it's a bit different because today, if you're building a product or an application or anything functionality wise for the commerce and the retail space, shopify is probably the best go to market strategy for your application. Shopify App Store, which now has or 12,000 apps in there, is the best place to get in front of customers for it.

Harley Finkelstein: 34:32

But it was really valuable because it meant that, no matter what you need to do on Shopify, everyone got 100% product market fit and we didn't have to build ourselves. It also meant that we were able to build a lot of other companies alongside our journey. So, whether it's Klaviyo or it's Gorgeous or it's even companies like Stripe and Affirm and Globally, these are companies that very early on became important parts of Shopify. In the case of Shopify installments, our buy now, pay later product that's powered by Affirm. In the case of Shopify markets or cross border checkout that's powered by Globally in Israel. So we've not only brought people along on the ride with us, we've grown with them as well. And so I told Andrew this when he took Klaviyo public at the IPO. I was like this is going to be one of the greatest days of your life, and frankly it's one of the greatest days of my life too, because we've kind of built this together With the Klaviyo.

Auren Hoffman: 35:22

You can imagine so you mentioned this like top of funnel product with like advertising. You can imagine, okay, well, top of funnel product with like advertising. You can imagine, okay, well, like, shopify could build a great one, but Klaviyo or maybe one of the other partners could also build it. Like, how do you decide? Does that fit in the 80% or not?

Harley Finkelstein: 35:36

It's more scientific than that Do most merchants on Shopify need Klaviyo? No, most merchants on Shopify need email marketing. We have an email marketing product that most merchants can use most of the time, but if you're starting to grow you need more of like an advanced system. Advanced, more sophistication. It has to connect with a bunch of other pieces of software. You want to do batch emails and there's analytics involved. That's the space that Klaviyo occupies, and it's great for merchants, it's great for Shopify, it's great for Klaviyo.

Auren Hoffman: 36:09

That's kind of the way we see it. Most merchants use QuickBooks or Xero or something. You kind of need something like that. Once you get to a certain size, I guess you can imagine Shopify building that or you can imagine partnering. It's a very sophisticated, tough piece of software.

Harley Finkelstein: 36:21

We don't do accounting on Shopify, but every cloud accounting software that you just mentioned is integrated with Shopify. I don't think Shopify would deserve the credit we get, or deserve the right to requalify to be the commerce partner and platform with all these brands, if we didn't have a basic email product. You can do a lot of great stuff directly from Shopify markets, which is our checkout, which does conversion of currency, does taxes, does translation. Once you're running a real business at scale and you're really selling around the world, you should use Markets Pro, the pro version of Markets, and that is powered by Global E, because, frankly, what Amir and Nir, the founders of Global E, are doing, is amazing. All they do all day long is think about cross-border checkout. That's their whole business, and I think that's the way to kind of think about it.

Harley Finkelstein: 37:07

Now, the key, though, is for us, we have to keep innovating, we have to keep building more and more product, and so when we do that, that's where the transparency comes in. I think Shopify actually has become a company that's really good to partner with, because we are so transparent about hey, we're going to build this thing, but here's the good news All of this other stuff around it we're not going to touch. We want you to build for it.

Auren Hoffman: 37:28

Of all the major tech companies, it has the reputation of being, like the most partner friendly.

Harley Finkelstein: 37:34

Even with Google or Meta. We have a partnership with Amazon as well. We actually believe that partnership's done really well, where you're very clear of what both sides want and require. You're also quite clear of what is no-go zone for both sides. I think we've done a good job of that. It's an important part of our business.

Auren Hoffman: 37:51

There's all these companies calling themselves the Shopify for X, which I'm sure is very flattering, for you Saw one the other day. It was like the storefront for influencer creators to help monetize ads or whatever. What do you think about some of these companies that are out there? I'm sure you've seen thousands of them over time.

Harley Finkelstein: 38:09

Anytime I hear someone says oh, we're the Shopify of something. I think it's a huge compliment If they're building something great and they're entrepreneurs. I think it's a great thing. In terms of some of the more niche products that kind of look like Shopify. Well, we're the Shopify for content creators. I'm like I think that's Shopify. Well, we're the Shopify for artists. I was like I also think that's Shopify.

Harley Finkelstein: 38:27

There's some places where, like, they're carving out one feature of Shopify or one niche of Shopify. I don't know who the biggest content creators are on the planet, but it's probably someone like Jim Kardashian or Bieber or, I don't know, mr Beast. Those are all Shopify merchants. I love hearing we're the Shopify for X in a different industry.

Harley Finkelstein: 38:43

But I think, looking at Shopify and trying to figure out, we're going to take this one piece of shop like just use Shopify, the pricing, the product, the way that we talk about the company, the brand being the entrepreneurship company. We're trying to make it so that when you have an idea in the shower in the morning, you come out of the shower. All right, I'm going to do this. But that is done on Shopify and we know that not all small businesses will succeed. Some will fail, that's okay, but the ones that do succeed will not only offset the cost of ones that don't, but will stay with us indefinitely. And that's how you get the Gymsharks and the Figs and the Fashion Novas and these stories of sort of feastables, these stories of these companies that were born at their mom's kitchen table and, in some cases, are publicly traded companies. They're still on Shopify.

Auren Hoffman: 39:25

You're a big Canadian supporter. Shopify is kind of the diamond star of Canada. Where do you see the Canadian tech scene going?

Harley Finkelstein: 39:35

I was born in Canada. I grew up in Florida, in Boca Raton, south Florida, then I came back in 2001 to go to McGill and then moved to Ottawa in 05 to go to law school, not to become a lawyer, to become a better entrepreneur. Met Toby that year became one of the first merchants on Shopify, as people know, and then so I've been in Canada for I don't know 25 years now. Let's say I think Canada has a very strong entrepreneurial culture, I think it has a lot of capacity, but I think we need more ambition.

Auren Hoffman: 40:00

It's an extremely high rate of immigration, so the population's growing quite rapidly.

Harley Finkelstein: 40:05

The last three years record immigration in the history of the country. We're a country of 30 something million. I think we had over half a million people immigrate last year alone. On a proportionate basis, that's huge. Two things One is I think we need more ambition here.

Harley Finkelstein: 40:16

We need way more headquartered companies in Canada I think any healthy community has HQs in those places as opposed to branch offices from large US companies. We need way more acquirers versus acquirees. Often when I talk to startups, their biggest ambition is to be acquired here. That's great. In some cases that changes their life. That's like changing money. But I think we got to shift that mindset to what if? Instead of being acquired, what if I acquired someone else? I think that is one of the things that will catapult Canadian businesses and their ambition to grow even bigger on our home turf. And I also think that we have this tendency.

Harley Finkelstein: 40:55

Are you familiar with the tall poppy syndrome? Yeah, so for those that don't know, this is a Commonwealth country phenomenon. You see it in the UK, australia, canada, a bunch of other Commonwealth countries, nordics and stuff too. Exactly, it's loosely defined as this perceived tendency to discredit those who achieved notable wealth or prominence. We have a real issue with it in Canada, almost as if we're allergic to success as a nation, and I think we want to foster more of these billion-dollar companies. We need to kind of just shed that crap.

Harley Finkelstein: 41:27

I could live anywhere in the world. I'm choosing to live. I love living in Canada. Canada to me is like America for Europeans. The lifestyle is incredible. There's this joie de vivre, this joy of life. I live in Montreal now, which is my favorite city on the planet, beautiful city. My wife and I selected Montreal because we think it's just this incredible place. So you have to kind of want to live here. But I think this tall poppy syndrome is not great. And even on the IPO Roadshow, going back to 2015 again, the first thing that we heard from investors was oh.

Harley Finkelstein: 41:57

Canadian IPO. We haven't seen one of you since Nortel or BlackBerry. There's never been a trillion dollar company ever created in Canada. Well, there's been very few of those period. There's been very few of those period. There's been I don't know 10 of them or eight of them in the US, but in Canada. The largest company in Canada has historically been the Royal Bank of Canada.

Auren Hoffman: 42:14

You're also a prolific angel investor. I think you've been in SoFi. Your Notion you're all these other great companies. I see how being president of Shopify makes you a better angel investor. How does being an investor help you be better president of Shopify?

Harley Finkelstein: 42:31

I don't know if you know the Stephen Covey book the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Auren Hoffman: 42:35

Yeah, I read it a long time ago. I remember in college Great book.

Harley Finkelstein: 42:38

But Stephen talks about, make the main thing, the main thing. Keeping your focus and efforts on the most important goals actually help you accomplish them. For Shopify, it's merchants first. For me, it's Shopify first. I don't necessarily think I'm an especially great angel investor. I like to angel invest. To me it's a little bit of like paying it forward. It's kind of like DJing or something that's right.

Harley Finkelstein: 42:58

We had some really good, helpful people in the early days of Shopify and I had very helpful people in the early days of my life that were great mentors that supported me, that invested in me both financially and with their time, that probably had no business doing that, and so to some extent I do believe in the value of pay it forward, and my wife and I have invested now in 50 companies. Let's say Some of them have done really well, some have done very, very poorly. When we assess founders Lindsay and I my wife and I tried to do this together we actually look for obsessiveness obsessiveness Better on the jock and not the horse. But the question we always have is things get rough at home for them, things get rough in the office for them. Can they help keep solving problems?

Auren Hoffman: 43:33

How do you figure that out from a short meeting with them?

Harley Finkelstein: 43:41

How do you know that? I think life stories are really valuable. I like people that have had deep adversity. My dad went away when I was a kid, when I was 17 years old. I have two much younger sisters, so I've been supporting my mom and much younger sisters, one sister 10 years younger than me. I've been paying for Jewish private school for my sister since I was 17. Not to say that I'm the model for that, but I think having that type of adversity when you're young rewires your brain. Toby talks about that. Something changes when you're responsible for payroll. Your brain gets rewired. I think you can look for that. It's cool if you played on the tennis team. It's much cooler if there was no tennis team and you created a tennis team. You became like a state champion on the tennis team.

Harley Finkelstein: 44:20

But ultimately, I think that great operators generally are really, really focused on their main quest. I also believe in founder-led companies. I think that one thing that people don't talk about when you think about big tech companies is you can separate them between founder-led and professionally managed, and there are some companies that look like they're founder-led but they're professionally managed. Microsoft Satya does that really well. I like founder-led companies. Those are my people. It's a breed of its own.

Auren Hoffman: 44:45

Now a couple of personal questions. I think you mentioned at least six or seven times on this podcast about Jewish. How do you think about that? How is that important to you? I don't know that usually that's not like. The front and center thing that people always talk about is their religion. How do you think about that?

Harley Finkelstein: 45:01

I'm not especially religious. I don't go to synagogue or temple or anything like that. I don't wear a yarmulke or anything like that. I'm a proud Jew. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. My dad recently became more religious. Forget the religious aspect of it. I'm fascinated by the plight of the Jewish people. I mentioned that during the pandemic. My best friend and I created this project called Big Shot. My best friend is a guy named David Siegel. He created David's Tea, took it public. It was an $800 million tea company, had retailers all over the world.

Harley Finkelstein: 45:30

We started meeting these people in their 80s and 90s, these Jewish entrepreneurs who in some cases, literally grew up in concentration camps or displaced person camps and they ended up becoming Izzy Sharp, who created the Four Seasons, or David Rubenstein or Larry Silverstein, who owned the Twin Towers before 9-11. These people that had no money, no education, no relationships, no connections, somehow became these titans of industry, became these hugely influential people. In some cases, like the Four Seasons, changed the entire business model. I mean, the Four Seasons business model is unique to its own. It doesn't exist anywhere else where someone owns the real estate and they run the service piece of the actual hospitality side of it. And so we began to sit down with them and just ask them questions.

Harley Finkelstein: 46:13

The Big Shot podcast or project, it's just for us. We don't watch sports on Sundays. We do this on Sundays instead. I know we've done like I don't know a dozen interviews or so, and it's just this interesting thing. But I don't think religion plays especially a large role in my life. The Jewish culture is something that I am fascinated with and I'm really proud of.

Auren Hoffman: 46:31

I saw you tweet a couple times about Hanlon's razor. I always find it like a great way of thinking. That's the incompetence versus malice. It's also just a better way of going through life because it's a way of essentially not thinking. People are out to get you. There's no reason to be mad at somebody often about it. How does that fit into your philosophy?

Harley Finkelstein: 46:53

I'm an optimist. I think the future belongs to the optimist. I've always been an optimist, even in hard times in my life. I've believed in the kindness of humans. I've been the recipient of kindness in humans. What you're describing is really this concept that most people assume when something bad happens to them, that it was caused because of malice. In actuality, most times it's actually caused because of incompetence.

Auren Hoffman: 47:14

They just didn't know better, or not even incompetence, but maybe that just wasn't their highest priority thing. Exactly, that's right. You just forget I forgot to invite you to my birthday party, or whatever you must hate me.

Harley Finkelstein: 47:26

Well, no, you just forgot. Or actually, you had 10 seats and I was seat number 11. There wasn't enough seats for me on the birthday party. Another term that I talked about earlier which I really believe in is the idea of like joie de vivre, which is a French term. If you're in Montreal or in Quebec or, frankly, you're in any French area like France or Paris, you hear this term joie de vivre, this joy of life.

Harley Finkelstein: 47:46

I actually think if you have people you love in your life Alexander Chalmers, who's like this Scottish or Irish writer, he talks about the three things you need to have meaning in your life, and I think joy and happiness. He says you need someone to love, so your family, your friends, someone in your life. For me it's my wife and my daughters. Something to do For me, it's my work, that's Shopify for me and something to look forward to, and that might be something like tonight having a special dinner. It's fun to look forward to something, Something to look forward to something, but those three things. I believe that I always try to have those three things in my life and always have, and I think that creates more joy and that creates more optimism and it's just a better way to live.

Auren Hoffman: 48:26

I've always felt that Now I know you've got an interview show and before we started you said you want to ask me a question, which usually doesn't happen. But I'm going to give you the floor, since you're such a great interviewer yourself.

Harley Finkelstein: 48:37

You and I have never actually met. This is our first time connecting over video like this. We never really met before. When you reached out and asked me to do this podcast with the World's best, initially I was like huh, I feel like I know Oren better than I do, and so I went to my email box and I just typed in your name and you sent me a message the day before my birthday, every year, I think for the last five or six years. I actually haven't pulled up here. I'm going to check right now exactly when it started.

Harley Finkelstein: 49:05

It's hilarious Since 2017. Oh, I guess that's a long time You've been sending me messages. It's very simple. Let me just read it for your listeners From Oren Harley. Happy birthday tomorrow, harley. Hope you are having a wondrous 2018. That was it. Another one is happy birthday, harley. Congrats on the awesome success of Shopify. That's all it was. Oh my gosh, this is embarrassing. This is last year, 2022, or two years ago. Hey, harley, wishing you a happy birthday tomorrow and after I upload my consciousness to the cloud, I plan on sending you birthday wishes for the next 1,000 years. I'm saying this because I don't actually know anyone else. I know a lot of people, so do you. I don't know anybody else that does this. I'm curious one why you do it, and I'm curious one why you do it, and I'm curious about how you do it.

Auren Hoffman: 49:49

You think about birthdays. I love birthdays. I'm not a big birthday guy. For some reason, when I see somebody's name, I have a sense of roughly where in the calendar their birthday is. Wow, you're like a birthday savant. So I don't know your birthday, but when I see you, I see Halloween. So I know your birthday is near Halloween. I don't know exactly it is Wow, but I know it's like near Halloween, so I have this sense. When I see other people, I'm like you're July 4th, your Bastille Day, your whatever Memorial Day I have a sense of, roughly it's usually within two weeks or so. So, for whatever reason, that's just always something I've found interesting, even when I was a kid. It's just like where on the dial are they on a birthday?

Auren Hoffman: 50:35

I use like a software called TitleDoc that reminds me of birthdays tomorrow that are coming up, and I don't send everyone, everyone, but I like to think about everybody. It's like that person you met at a wedding six years ago. You sat next to them. You've never talked to them since, but you had a lovely time talking to them. You're like, oh yeah, bob was so nice, he was so interesting, and then you just remember him. And then sometimes I go stalk him on LinkedIn or Facebook like oh, bob's married now. Oh look, his kids are beautiful. Or oh, he's got a new job. Or sometimes I'll send him a message. I don't always. It gives me that once a year opportunity to think about that person, so I think it's cool.

Harley Finkelstein: 51:14

I love it. It's also a great networking hack. It's a reminder every year. It's like a sign of life. I've worked with Ken AB Tessus, but would I have responded to the request for the send me these birthday bands? I don't know, maybe not.

Auren Hoffman: 51:26

My friend Todd Satradati says hey, it's proof of life. You got to do something to have some sort of proof of life. We live in a busy world.

Harley Finkelstein: 51:34

I love that. That's really smart. Well, thank you for having me on. This is a really fun conversation.

Auren Hoffman: 51:38

Yeah, super fun. Last question we ask all of our guests what?

Harley Finkelstein: 51:44

conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice. I think people go to school for all the wrong reasons. The reason most people go to school, especially higher education, college, grad school, is to get a diploma, to get a job. It's totally bullshit If you decide, no, I'm not going to go to school. But if you go to school and you do that and instead you take this selfish approach to it, which is I am paying you $15,000 for law school and in return I'm going to demand $15,000 worth of skills, your ROI you probably need 3x, that's right, Like a master class type thing. It actually is an incredible thing to do.

Auren Hoffman: 52:14

Law school was finishing school for me for entrepreneurship, which by the way, you're the only person I've ever heard say that about law school.

Harley Finkelstein: 52:21

I have an MBA. I went to business school. I got nothing from that. I made some friends and some connections, but other than that, law school is like finishing school. I learn how to write, think, be more articulate, how to negotiate, how to debate. So I think that if you actually use a more transactional approach to education, I'm giving you this, I demand these skills back, and you don't care about grades or stuff, you're just there to acquire skills.

Auren Hoffman: 52:42

It's one of the greatest places, just like you would if you got guitar lessons or something Exactly.

Harley Finkelstein: 52:47

Look at it the way you go for guitar lessons as opposed to going to get guitar lessons, so the guitar teacher gives you a good grade, so you can go and get yourself a job playing.

Auren Hoffman: 52:54

That's awesome. I love that. That's super great. This has been great. Thank you, harley Finkelstein, for joining us on World of Das. By the way, I follow you at Harley F on Twitter. I definitely encourage our listeners to get you there. This has been a ton of fun. Thank you so much. If you're a super data nerd, go to worldofdascom that's D-A-A-S worldofdascom and sign up for our weekly data as a service roundup newsletter. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, consider reading this podcast and leaving a review. For more World of DAS and DAS is D-A-A-S you can subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts, and also check out YouTube for videos. You can find me at Twitter at at Oren that's A-U-R-E-N. Oren, and we'd love to hear from you. World of DAS is brought to you by Safegraph. Safegraph is geospatial data for physical places. Check it out at safegraphcom. And by Flex Capital. Flex Capital invests in data companies like those we talk about at World of DAS. Check it out at flexcapitalcom.