In Toby's Words - Victor Menasce

The Real Estate Espresso Podcast

In Toby’s Words

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In Toby’s Words

Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso podcast, your morning shot at what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I’m your host, Victor Menasce. I live in Ottawa, Canada 📝, home to Shopify. Many people in my community work at Shopify. On today’s show, I’m going to read the entire text of a memo that Toby Luetke, the CEO of Shopify, sent to his staff company. Shopify employs a little over 8,000 people 📝.

The company made the transition from an in-office environment to completely virtual during the pandemic, and they have not reverted to an office environment ever since. This memo has been reported on widely in the mainstream media, and when Toby realized that the memo had been leaked, he posted it in its entirety on his Twitter feed.

When news reporters report on a story, they’re often adding their own narrative and interpretation. I want you to hear Toby’s words directly without interpretation. So, here we go. Toby writes, “We are entering the time when more merchants and entrepreneurs could be created than any other in history.”

We often talk about bringing down the complexity curve to allow more people to choose this as a career. Each step along the entrepreneurial path is rife with decisions requiring skill, judgment, and knowledge. Having AI alongside the journey and increasingly doing not just the consultation, but also doing the work for our merchants is a mind-blowing step function change.

Our task here at Shopify is to make our software unquestionably the best canvas to develop the best businesses of the future. We do this by keeping everyone cutting edge and bringing all the best tools to bear, so our merchants can be more successful than they themselves used to imagine. For that, we need to be absolutely ahead…

This is the text of the memo in its entirety. This is one of those moments when the realization hits that if it can be done, it will be done. It’s just a matter of who’s going to do it. This is a game of eat or be eaten. This memo raises a lot of questions…

Questions like: how many other boardrooms in America is this discussion happening in? Who are the leaders and who are the laggards? Well, some businesses just think that this does not apply to them…

As you ruminate on that 📝, Have an awesome rest of your day. Go make some great things happen. We’ll talk to you again tomorrow.

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