Tobi Lütke

The only online stores that existed were already rich businesses that had the $25,000 or $250,000 to make a web presence and build an online store.

And they were all attached to existing businesses that are already rich.

No one built for the new entrepreneurs.

Shopify grew its market instead of competing for percentage in a market.

And I think that is like a very, very, very different thing.

Shopify is not a unique idea at all.

It's like, in fact, it's one of the most, I mean, there's hundreds of companies that have and do ostensibly the same thing.

The technology industry, it's never about who does something first.

It's always about who does something right, which is what makes it so interesting.

All the e-commerce companies of that time, even if they started wanting to service new builds, entrepreneurs, always fled upmarket because their people had a lot of money.

They serviced existing business and could make way more money.

It was expensive to deal with small businesses.

The general advice that I got when I was growing up was just use eBay.

Start your business on eBay.

If it works, then talk to a company called, the one I got recommended was Miwa Merchant, which would then take a lot of money to build an online store because now I have enough money to give it to them.

And then you would replatform again afterwards.

it was like specifically for the new entrance i i i'm not aware of anyone making that specific um uh goal it might that doesn't mean it didn't exist and no one did it there was one like the closest analogy was a thing called yahoo stores um um which actually paul graham started was an interesting character in his own variety started y combinator later and which of course became

the origin source for so many of the tech industry's greatest companies now.

But his original project was a thing that got purchased by a company called Yahoo and then turned into Yahoo Stores.

I tried to use that and could not make it work.