The next big thing
ONE DAY, MAYBE THEY’LL MAKE A MOVIE about Shopify’s Harley Finkelstein, Daniel Weinand and their gutsy team
Harley Finkelstein bounces into the cavernous space that serves as Shopify’s lounge, stopping to chat with employees while moving around tables and chairs.
He’s dressed in a T-shirt, blue jeans, comfortable sneakers and he is a man on the move. Finkelstein is the chief platform officer of Shopify, the seven-year-old e-commerce Ottawa company that recently obtained $100 million in venture capital financing.
Following him into the lounge is Daniel Weinand, the company’s web designer, who is also in charge of human resources. Decked out in a newscap, casual shirt and crisp jeans, he exudes a quiet confidence and demeanour.
The duo, along with Tobi Luetke, are among Ottawa’s most influential businessmen. The company that Luetke, Weinand and Scott Lake founded seven years ago has been one of Ottawa’s top success stories. (Lake has since gone on to other projects.) Shopify offers online templates and tools to help people quickly set up online shops.
The venture capital will allow the company to expand, and plans are to hire hun- dreds of employees in the coming year and move to bigger offices.
Chatter pours out of the Shopify offices over the hum of computers as employees who are mostly in their 20s get to work. In years to come, when people talk about startup companies that hit the big time, Shopify will probably be mentioned alongside Facebook and Twitter.
“Commerce has been around for thousands of years. What we believe we are doing is changing commerce for the better,” says Finkelstein, 30, who left a Toronto law firm to join Shopify in 2009.
The company, which has its headquarters in Ottawa and offices in Montreal and Toronto, has captured the attention of some of the biggest firms in the world. Its platform serves more than 80,000 customers in 100 countries, including clients like Google Inc., General Electric, Budweiser and Gatorade. It was named Canada’s third-fasting-growing tech company in a recent Deloitte survey and for the week of Cyber Monday and Black Friday, Shopify’s stores sold more than $100 million worth of products.
Not bad for a company that was cooked up by three budding entrepreneurs over cof- fee in a small apartment.
Finkelstein, who handles Shopify’s business development, first ventured into the business world as a teenager.
Born in Montreal, Finkelstein’s family moved to Boca Raton, Fla., when he was 12 years old. A mover and shaker at an early age, Finkelstein started a DJ company, spinning records for neighbourhood birthday parties and bar mitzvahs.
“It taught me a lot about responsibility and customer service,” says Finkelstein, about his first business venture. At age 17, he moved back to Montreal to study economics at McGill University. In his first semester, his parents went through a public bankruptcy of their clothing business. He was given an ultimatum: either return to Florida or fend for yourself in Montreal.
He remained in Montreal, and started a T-shirt business that eventually put him through school. In 2005, he moved to Ottawa to do a joint law and MBA degree at the University of Ottawa.
Yet, the allure of business always stayed with him. He lasted only 10 months as a lawyer with a Toronto firm before returning to Ottawa in search of the next big thing.
He heard about a group of entrepreneurs who hung out at a coffee shop in the Glebe and decided to drop in on them. One of the entrepreneurs was Luetke, who along with Weinand were transforming a snowboard business, Snowdevil, into a soft-ware business.
“I just thought they were brilliant, and their vision about democratizing retail was nothing short of inspir--
“The future of retail isn’t just online and isn’t just off-line; it’s sort of everywhere.”
SHOPIFY’S HARLEY FINKELSTEIN
ing. They wanted to provide small businesses with the same tools that only big businesses were able to afford,” says Finkelstein.
Daniel Weinand came to Shopify from his native Germany, bringing a distinct European sensibility and vast computer knowledge to the company.
Born in Andernach, a small town about 90 kilometres south of Cologne, Weinand moved to Dortmund where he studied computer science and music. As a teenager, he had aspirations to be a composer and write music for movie soundtracks, and was part of a “demo scene” that consisted of groups of musicians and a graphic designer performing at music events.
In 2003, he came to Canada to visit Luetke, whom he had met before in Germany.
“I was talking to Tobi a lot about the company and wanted to work with him. I dropped out of school and moved to Canada. It was a big step for me,” says Weinand, 34, who moved here in 2005.
“I wasn’t afraid of taking any risks, so at the beginning, I worked as a developer and programmer. Tobi was the visionary, he always talked about the bigger picture. He has this amazing ability to inspire people, and when he started talking about this idea, it contributed to the fact that I dropped out of the school to come here. I wouldn’t have done it for anyone else.”
Weinand says he looks at businesses pragmatically, counting on the positive aspects of launching a new company rather than dwelling on the drawbacks.
“I don’t like to think of failure. It’s a naïve way of thinking. If I had spent a lot of time worrying, I don’t know if I would have made it. You have to stay optimistic and focus all your energy towards getting the work done instead of coming up with a Plan B.
”I never had any doubts of us succeeding. Even today, I feel it is kind of surreal. We were there at the right time, that definitely helped us, and having the right people is so important. And having people who really love working on the product and are not full of egos and do for those reasons was really important to us.”
Finkelstein says the company will continue to grow just as the retail world will evolve and expand.
“The future of retail isn’t just online and isn’t just offline; it’s sort of everywhere. It’s about consumer choice, a consumer wants to be able to go into a store, buy it and have the package shipped to them. Or they may want to go to an online store, buy it and go pick it up at a brick-andmortar location,” he says.
“For the first time in the history of retail, we’re seeing consumers demanding that they want to buy something the way they want it, how they want it and when they want it without restrictions. There’s sort of an artificial separation between online and off-line retail and we don’t think that should exist.”