Modern society and the online world present us with many success stories. Yet we generally only see the aftermath of this success. We see the tree reaching to the sky, but the roots that made the growth possible remain invisible. Let me start with a story of personal failure.
Modern society and the online world present us with many success stories. Yet we generally only see the aftermath of this success. We see the tree reaching to the sky, but the roots that made the growth possible remain invisible. Let me start with a story of personal failure.
“It’s fascinating to read poetry in its original form, but it’s just as fascinating to read it in a variety of translations. Suddenly the same text takes on new dimensions, as if it were growing in new directions.”
(Bloomberg Businessweek) Last February e-commerce company Shopify Inc. replaced the “Ottawa, Canada” dateline that began its press releases and earnings reports with a strange new one: “Internet, Everywhere.
What Zoom was to corporate America during the early days of the pandemic, Shopify was to small-business owners
The Globe and Mail Bookmark Please log in to listen to this story. Also available in French and Mandarin. Log In Create Free Account
Getting audio file . This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy. Full Disclaimer
Alia Youssef/The Globe and Mail
After the year Shopify Inc. has had, you might expect its co-founder and CEO Tobi Lutke to sound a little…cheerier.
Riding a global surge in pandemic-related e-commerce traffic, Shopify – which makes the software used by more than a million merchants to sell their products online – surpassed Royal Bank of Canada to become Canada’s most valuable company. It now has a market capitalization of US$177-billion, making it only the second Canadian tech company, after Nortel Networks, to reach such heights. It raised billions of dollars from stock sales last year and even posted a rare quarterly profit of US$191-million in October on third quarter on revenues of US$767.4-million –