Shopify Inc. Class A subordinate voting shares Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026
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Good afternoon and welcome to the Shopify session at Goldman Sachs Technology and Communacopia. I'm Gabriela Borges. When I was debating with Shane from Shopify how we could amp this presentation up a little bit, we thought it would be really fun to have Archie Abrams, Head of Growth, join us from Shopify, and of course, Jeff Hoffmeister, CFO. We really thought this would set us up for a little bit of leveling up in the Shopify discussion beyond all of the good stuff All the numbers that Jeff typically shares with us.
Look, it's such a great time for it because the investor questions that we've been getting have gotten much more technical and specific on Shopify's moats over the last six months. I wanted to start this conversation with a little bit of a reflection on the culture that Tobi has built at Shopify.
Yep. There was a podcast that came out, I think it was a couple of weeks ago now, where Sam Altman, he opened up talking about Tobi and how he's just such a great example of a founder CEO who actually rolls up his sleeves and gets into the technology.
Yep. I know from speaking to you guys for a number of years now, that the first principle of thinking at Shopify is pretty unique.
Tell us a little bit, maybe via an example from your day-to-day, where this plays out in practice, and Shopify essentially thinks first principles about adopting AI.
Yep. Yeah. Archie, you want to start?
Absolutely, yeah. Thanks, Gabriela, for having us, and excited to be here. Working with Tobi is amazing because he is so hands-on-keyboard, right? He is in the technology himself, doing it. Just the other night, we were going back and forth very late into the evening on how different AI models are discovering Shopify merchants and Shopify itself. Right? Really trying to reverse engineer a lot of that discovery and what makes a merchant appear, what makes Shopify itself appear, and using it as an opportunity to really rethink the information we are giving to merchants, and how we are even structuring ourselves. So that depth and that level of understanding I think is really unique in how we build and what we are doing.
Jeff, an example from your day-to-day?
Well, I think one of the things, and Archie alluded to it, the one point I would expand on is because Tobi is so deep in the technology, he is exceptional at making sure we constantly are questioning how we have built a product. And maybe it was built on an architecture that even though it is only two or three years old, could be rebuilt in a way. We see this a lot where he is like, "Hey, this is phenomenal, but if we want to take this to the next level, we need to do this.
Let's use this latest and greatest technology in order to enhance the product so that makes sure over the next two or three years, it is even further along." Or the other thing which I see a lot is we will be doing product reviews, and a bunch of engineers will come in and say, "Hey, we did a bunch of work. We got it down to 10 milliseconds," or, "We did this," or, "We did that." And he will be like, "Well, yeah, it needs to be two." And they are like, "No, no. We just spent two months trying to get this down to 10 milli-" He is like, "No, no. It has got to be two." The consumer experience demands this.
He is very good about taking that product knowledge, thinking about how we apply it, and make sure we are delivering merchants what they need, not what it is that we are kind of obsessed about building, but what they are actually going to utilize.
Jeff, there was a time, I think it was around COVID, actually, when Shopify still used to give us merchant acquisition numbers every quarter. And I remember investors used to ask us, "Look, at some point, this merchant acquisition gravy train is going to slow down because the depth of TAM just is not there." Archie, I know your role focuses a lot on merchant acquisition strategy.
Talk to us a little bit about what the strategy is. Shopify has sustained these growth rates. It does not seem like merchant acquisition is slowing down. How are you able to generate this sort of infinite TAM?
Yeah, it is a great question. I think that the key to our strategy has remained timeless over time, which is that we believe that the next large Shopify merchant is just getting started today. Our job is always to meet entrepreneurs early in their journey, wherever they are, and lower the barriers for as many people to start. We know that many of those businesses, they might not actually succeed, and that is totally fine because the businesses that do become brands like FIGS, Alo Yoga, and the like, and of course, we grow right alongside them. One thing that is really interesting about the merchant acquisition piece is one of our goals is always to build trust with entrepreneurs.
As I mentioned, a lot of those businesses, they might join, they might not be successful on their first attempt, but actually, over 40% of businesses on Shopify are started by merchants, with their second or third or fourth business, coming back to start over. If you look at one example of that, Ben Francis, the founder of Gymshark, actually started multiple businesses before he hit it big with the apparel brand, Gymshark. That goes to us really lowering that barrier to make it really easy to start in our integrations with all of the agentic platforms so we are there, building trust along the way, and then helping more merchants come on, be successful over and over until they have hit that successful business.
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