Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Lepetel, editor and chief of the

Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm

talking to Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify. Shopify is one of those

companies that makes the modern internet go. It makes software that allows

businesses of all sizes to set up online stores and from there it can handle

everything from shipping orders to financing loans for expansion. The company

went public in 2015 and it's been on a tear during the pandemic is online

commerce has exploded. This last quarter it posted revenue of 988 million.

That's 110% increase from last year. But while things are going extremely well

right now, I was very curious to talk to Harley about how we see

competitions from the tech giants. A lot of online shopping starts with

targeted ads on Facebook, which is building out its own shopping platforms.

Facebook and Apple are fighting over how those ads are tracked and served

overall. Apple, as of this week, is an amnesty trial with Epic Games about

the cut it takes on digital purchases in iOS apps. And of course there's

Amazon, which dominates online retail. Harley's point to me is that Shopify

provides tools for businesses to compete with all of these giants, and that

Shopify itself can sometimes act like a giant because it has so many

customers to represent. The phrase he used was being the empire versus

arming the rebels, which yeah, that's pretty good. Except for the part where the

empire routinely strikes back, but you'll hear him talk about that. Harley is a

true believer in entrepreneurs and that really came through in this conversation.

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