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

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2020

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Tobias Lütke started Shopify, he wanted to empower merchants to start small and build resilience. Tobi spoke with Guy about the relevance of those principles in 2020, as he explains the rise of Shopify sign-ups during the pandemic. Jon Stein spoke with Guy about starting Betterment in the wake of the 2008 recession, and why this economic downturn could be the perfect time to start a company. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating these turbulent times.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New years is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:27.0	Hey everyone, welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition. I'm Guy Razz.
0:31.0	So today we've got excerpts from two recent live conversations from our new video series.
0:36.0	You can catch them every Wednesday and Friday at 12 Eastern on our Facebook page.
0:40.0	Later on the show we'll hear from John Stein, the founder of Betterment, and investment startup about what to not do with your money right now.
0:47.0	But first, my conversation with Toby Lutke, the founder of Shopify, the e-commerce platform that powers more than a million online stores.
0:55.0	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.
1:07.0	Anyway, since the pandemic began, Shopify has actually seen a spike in new customers setting up e-commerce sites.
1:15.0	Same thing, by the way, happened to Shopify after the financial crisis of 2008-2009.
1:20.0	Toby joined me from his home in Ottawa, Canada, where he's helping merchants stay afloat while managing thousands of employees.
1:28.0	So I'm Toby right now in terms of Shopify. I think you've got 5,000 employees in offices in Canada and abroad.
1:35.0	How are people working right now, presumably remotely?
1:38.0	Yeah, exactly. I imagine everyone else, at least in the technology industry, is doing it.
1:43.0	Maybe we have Slack, which is taking over the role of the hallways of office. I'm jumping from Google Meet to Google Meet right now, basically all day long.
1:51.0	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.
1:58.0	But one thing that really is special is Shopify sort of found its role doing a recession.
2:04.0	We felt there was something specific for us to do that would actually help other people.
	...

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