Tobi Lütke

There were like eight or something in 2008, eight people.

We made some money, and I still had some savings from Snow Devil, but I wasn't taking a salary.

And we were just living with my in-laws in their house, Fiona and I. And so we kept costs down.

It was hard to meet payroll.

I went to Silicon Valley finally and just started fundraising.

I had learned how to do all this, and I did have a pitch deck and so on.

You know, ultimately, people passed for one reason or another on the company.

And a very important big venture capital firm that everyone would recognize passed on the Shopify deal.

And years later, I met with the partners again.

And the partner asked, like, hey, Tobi, what did we miss?

I was reminded, you passed because you decide for yourself that there's a global market of 40,000 online stores.

This was the internet at the time in 2008.

There's 40,000.

And if Shopify is successful, it might get 50% of the market.

That's like...

still not enough business to justify the valuation, which would have been very low.

So what did we miss?

Okay, here's what we missed is that Shopify itself was the solution to the very problem that they stated.

There was only 40,000 online stores.

Because no one made it easy to start them.