Nikhil Thadani
Analyst · Nikhil Thadani from Mackie Research. Your line is open
Thanks, guys. How should we think about the competition going forward? With Square buying Weebly here, it seems like a bunch of other guys are sort of trying to move to your model of putting online and offline together that you guys were probably the first at. So how should we think about the competitive landscape going forward? Thanks.
Tobi Lütke: Yes, good question. Like I mean, one thing, I think, it really confirms that we had it right. So Square buying Weebly, I think, you will see just about every point-of-sale company buying – launching something like Weebly, I mean, buying in the case that they’re really late or hopefully, they’ve been booked for a while already, I’d say, spotted this trend earlier. We are just going for – like this market was very weirdly dominated by different, usually incompatible point solutions for all the different things that retailers had to do. And when we came by some of you on the – during the IPO roadshow, I think that’s what we leaned in and said, hey, we think that’s wrong and I think – we think that retailers need a centralized software that can easily move all the inventory into different channels that might actually sometimes be fairly short lift. They are pop-up stores, they sometimes are campaigns on social media, they – obviously, it involves an online store and point-of-sale if that’s what you need. And all of this should be, you should think about – like you should think about the software needed in this space a lot more like an operating system on which – on the top of which our software is built that specializes depending on the business that – that’s the business needs. And that was our vision all along, that got largely ignored initially. And then, like I think, people have been paying attention and everyone realizes that clearly this is right and clearly this is the driver of all the growth that Shopify has had. And now, more people are coming around to this. We started booking on this about five years ago. We launched it three years ago. We now have – we know a lot of momentum because of it. So it’s like, I mean I think, if you see a growth story like Shopify, you usually see a company that defined a new space. And so that’s – I think it just goes to show that we – our crystal ball is reasonably clear and we are working on all the things that’s next and I’m actually looking forward to having some other people look at the same space and seeing what they are seeing, because I think that’s more fun frankly from a company building perspective than trying to do it all alone, so that’s cool.