这台无形售货机将颠覆阿里和亚马逊霸权？

Shopify的隐身术相当了得。

2016年，超过一亿消费者在这家公司的电子商务平台上购物，但作为一种有意为之的设计，该平台自身是无形的，旨在帮助其客户（约40万个零售店和品牌）实现端到端运营。让Shopify尤为骄傲的是，其大本营并不是旧金山或家居办公室，而是位于渥太华一栋不显眼的写字楼，共占据6个楼层。这座城市最成功的品牌当属堪称万人迷的加拿大总理贾斯汀·特鲁多，其办公室距Shopify总部仅有10分钟路程。Shopify联合创始人兼CEO托拜厄斯·卢特克绰号托比，现年36岁，出生在德国，长着一双冰蓝色眼睛，喜欢戴报童帽，是一位崇尚自由思想，性格内向的计算机程序员。

然而，这家公司一直在悄无声息，但极其迅猛地蚕食亚马逊和eBay等零售巨头盘踞的疆域，进而开辟了一个利润丰厚的电子商务细分市场。Shopify成立于2004年，拥有近2000名员工（其中有1500名是在过去两年入职的），并在五个城市设有办事处。2016年，该公司斩获3.9亿美元，较2015年增长近100%，预计今年将增长50%。2016年亏损3720万美元，但预计今年将实现盈利。自2015年上市以来，其股价上涨了一倍多。Shopify拥有一支强大的顾问和合作伙伴团队，其中包括畅销书作者蒂姆·费里斯和激励大师托尼·罗宾斯。

卢特克怀抱着一个崇高的目标：为所有人提供更加方便的营商体验。就像WordPress使任何人都很容易开设一个博客或内容网站一样，Shopify可以让任何人随时开设和运营一家数字商店，并且对他或她的技术能力没有任何要求。商家每月只需支付低至29美元的订阅费，就可享受Shopify提供的全方位服务。这家电商平台会帮助他们决定如何开店，设置域名，卖什么，选择哪个设计模板。在线商店成立后，Shopify就充当起运营中心的角色，帮助商家跟踪库存、运输和销售，并进行营销分析。

大多数客户都是中小型企业。比如位于布鲁克林的临时纹身贴公司Tattly：其创始人蒂娜·罗斯·艾森伯格注意到，每次参加完生日派对回到家中时，她女儿的身上总是贴着一些拙劣的假纹身，于是她就萌生了开设一家纹身贴店面的想法。再比如克里斯·曾在多伦多经营的Mindzai玩具店：他最初是在自家公寓中经营这门生意，后来离开职场，全职销售玩具。

此外，Shopify正在为越来越多的大牌服务。德雷克、坎耶·维斯特和凯莉·詹娜等明星都在使用Shopify出售各自的产品线，电台司令乐队通过它来销售最新专辑。谷歌、通用电气和特斯拉等大牌公司使用每月起步价2000美元的企业版Shopify Plus，因为相较于维护自己的电商平台，这显然是一个更好、更实惠的选择。

如此多大名鼎鼎，极具市场价值的品牌选择Shopify这一事实说明，分销图景正在不断演变。企业不再需要花钱雇佣中间商出售产品，它们完全可以直接联系客户，以提供一种更加个性化的体验。根据这种思路，当博士音响可以通过自家数字商店直接联系客户的时候，为什么它还要死守零售店呢？Shopify让这一切成为可能。

大大小小的商家可以利用单一界面，通过各自的在线商店销售产品，也可以在销售过程的任何时点，利用Shopify应用商店提供的各种帮助：社交媒体、运输和制造、营销、库存跟踪等等——这是一组被Shopify称为“商家解决方案”的免费和付费工具。刚刚被Shopify收购的Kit公司提供一款由人工智能驱动，每月资费仅10美元的虚拟助手。它能够提供营销建议，接洽那些放弃在线购物车的客户，并推出Facebook广告。像Intuit、Houzz和MailChimp这类公司已经为Shopify的商家构建了许多自定义应用程序。

Shopify允许商家在线销售，或者通过其他渠道销售产品：在一家实体店（它提供一系列与其软件同步的物理销售点设备）；通过诸如Facebook和Pinterest这类消费者聚集地。最近，Shopify的商家甚至可以进驻亚马逊。于Shopify而言，这是一场意义重大的胜利——多年来，这家在线零售巨头一直向中小型零售商提供自己的软件产品：Amazon Webstore。但它要贵得多，随着时间的推移，像Shopify和BigCommerce这类专注于提供这类服务，并优先考虑商家（而不是消费者）需要的初创公司越来越受欢迎。亚马逊去年关闭了Webstore，并建议客户们搬迁到竞争敌手的平台。1月份，Shopify宣布与亚马逊整合，允许商家们立足其Shopify店面，在这个庞大的在线市场上销售产品。Shopify的股票闻讯上涨近10%。这年头，一家公司不仅能夺走以“不计成本征服一切”著称的亚马逊的生意，甚至很可能促使这家电商巨头做出关停业务的决定，这的确极其罕见。

从滑雪板到电子商务解决方案

托比·卢特克坐在沙发上，对面是一排滑雪板。他一口德国口音——他是在位于法兰克福以西大约1小时车程的历史名城科布伦茨长大的——每句话似乎都经过仔细推敲。

他今天的成就，在很大程度上都是拜滑雪板所赐。

2002年，在不列颠哥伦比亚省惠斯勒市滑雪度假期间，卢特克遇到了他后来的伴侣菲奥娜·麦基恩。很快，他们搬到了麦基恩的家乡渥太华。在那里，卢特克结识了太太一家的朋友斯科特·莱克。没多久，这两位狂热的技术爱好者就产生相见恨晚之感——卢特克从小迷恋计算机，并在17岁那年从高中辍学，成为西门子公司一名编程学徒；莱克是一家中型科技公司的副总裁。两人最终决定一起创业。作为两位狂热的滑雪爱好者，他们选择在网上销售高端滑雪板，卢特克负责技术环节，莱克负责打理生意。

在构建网站期间，卢特克对微软Commerce和雅虎商店等流行软件感到沮丧。他认为这些软件过于笨拙，而且价格昂贵。于是，他决定从零开始构建自己的电子商务引擎。相较于竞争对手，它将更加简单，更加迅速，更具视觉冲击力。他选择利用极具创新性的新编程框架Ruby on Rails来构建这个电商平台。丹麦程序员大卫·海涅迈尔·汉森是该编程框架的发明人，他此前还曾创建基于网络的项目管理工具Basecamp。现已成为卢特克密友的汉森表示，卢特克在Ruby on Rails的开发过程中扮演了“极其重要”的角色，这种编程框架后来被用于构建Twitter、Airbnb、Groupon、Soundcloud和GitHub。

2004年，莱克和卢特克的公司Snowdevil正式上线。但尽管他们销售了一些滑雪板，但两人很快就相信，销售卢特克创建的软件可能是一个更好的机会。他已经将一些与电子商务相关的应用程序作为开源项目，发布在Ruby on Rails社区。这些应用正在赢得关注。

他们将公司名称改为Jaded Pixel——英语中还没有这种说法，卢特克把jaded和表示颜色的jade混淆了。卢特克给德国打了一个电话，邀请他15岁那年就相识的铁杆好友，擅长设计和用户体验的计算机程序员丹尼尔·魏南德一起创业，出任第三位共同创始人。随后，莱克将公司改名为Shopify。

万事开头难。尽管他们通过Ruby on Rails社区和设计界的口碑获得了几十个客户，但在2006年10月份，这家初创公司仅仅获得了区区8000美元的收入。卢特克夫妇住在麦基恩父母的家中。作为Shopify首批投资者之一，他的岳父偶尔需要写几张支票，帮助几位创始人给他们的小团队开工资。

第二年，他们终于迎来援军——多伦多天使投资人约翰·菲利普斯从一位正在帮助他人设立电子商务网站的朋友那里听闻这家新生的公司。Shopify的产品，特别是卢特克，给他留下了深刻的印象。他认为Shopify价值300万美元，随即给该公司写了一张25万美元的支票。

不久之后，卢特克和莱克开始争辩他们究竟应该将这家公司带向何方：莱克认为Shopify应该成为一家风投支持的成长型公司，而向来厌恶大公司的卢特克则希望将Shopify打造成“世界上最好的25人公司。”但它持续增长。2008年，卢特克飞赴硅谷，拜会Benchmark、红杉资本和Accel等顶级风投机构。Benchmark和红杉资本有意投资，但他们建议卢特克将公司搬到硅谷。这位创始人表示，听闻此言，他顿时失去了兴趣。

卢特克不愿意推动公司成长，让莱克非常失望。此外，他也厌倦了后创业阶段。于是，他在那一年离开Shopify，创建了一个面向零售商的社交营销分析工具Source Metrics，但他仍然留任公司董事。卢特克不得不寻觅一位新的领导者，但菲利普斯敦促他亲自出任CEO。这位天使投资人回忆道，“我说，‘托比，你必须得自己运营这家公司。’他真的从未有过这种念头。”但卢特克同意了。菲利普斯也督促他寻找不同类型的领导者，卢特克很快就招募哈雷·芬克尔斯坦担任首席运营官。他是在一场企业家聚会上遇到这位雄心勃勃的外向型创业者的。芬克尔斯坦是Shopify的早期用户之一，依靠在网上卖T恤衫来支持他的法学院学业。

自我提升大师兼科技投资者蒂姆·费里斯是另一位重要援军。卢特克是费里斯经典著作《四小时工作周》(The 4-Hour Workweek)的万千粉丝之一。2009年，他建议费里斯在Ruby on Rails 年度大会上发表主旨演讲。两人因激励创业者这一共同爱好而产生了深厚的友谊。费里斯帮助他构想了一个名为Build a Business的创业竞赛——这是Shopify最重要的营销活动，旨在激励人们在8个月内创建一家商店。卢特克最初打算用一部MacBook Pro笔记本电脑作为奖品；被卢特克称为该公司“超级创意筛选器”的费里斯说服他拿出10万美元重奖获胜者。（费里斯说，“我希望他尽可能地往大处着想，提供一个让他心疼的奖品。”）现如今，这项比赛已经成为一个重要的活动；除费里斯之外，获胜者还将有机会接受激励大师托尼·罗宾斯、明星企业家戴蒙德·约翰、生活教练玛丽•弗里奥和罗素·西蒙斯的指导。

2010年，柏尚投资主动联系Shopify。这家风投机构一直在寻求投资有趣的电商企业。在柏尚投资长达数月的苦苦追求之后，卢特克终于确信他和公司做好了做大做强的准备。当年12月，柏尚投资领投了价值700万美元的A轮融资。在10个月后的B轮融资中，Shopify募集了1500万美元。2013年，该公司以高达9亿美元的估值，在一轮庞大的融资中募得1亿美元。

这为该公司在2015年4月上市奠定了坚实的基础。卢特克表示，他确信上市是Shopify实现其长期目标的必要前提。他在IPO申请文件包含的一封信中写道，“我希望Shopify成为一家百年老店。”在17美元IPO价格的基础上，这只股票迅速上涨至28美元。近两年后，其股价已达到60美元左右。

拥抱叛逆者

卢特克透露说，他从小就是一位敢于反抗权威的叛逆者。“当人们说，‘嘿，你需要这样做，’我通常会考虑反其道而行之。”他说。在西门子从事首份工作时，这是一个问题：他觉得自己被公司文化束缚住了。但他很快就注意到，有一位头发灰白，大腹便便，名叫尤尔根的员工总是骑着摩托车上班。这位五十多岁的资深程序员让卢特克觉得，不循规蹈矩的人也能在公司文化中生存下去。卢特克由此领悟到一个重要的教训：“叛逆者生存的秘诀是，只要你极其擅长本职工作，其他一切自然水到渠成。”从一开始，他就想让Shopify成为一个热情拥抱这类反传统者的地方。

例如，这家公司的招聘策略并不关注应聘者已经做过的工作，而是关注他们将来可能做什么工作。Shopify采用这种哲学——它意味着冒险聘用一些能力未经核实，但极富激情的人选——在很大程度上也是权宜之计：他们没有财力聘用那些符合所有条件的精英。但时至今日，这家公司仍然恪守这一原则，并由此拥有了一支拥有不同背景和性情的员工团队。

Shopify公司上下都很反感形形色色的工作“角色”。他们看重真实性，自由思想，并且能够非常坦然地对待不适感。另一个重要信条是所谓的“信任电池”。这是评判一个人成功和失败的内在尺度，它将决定他们拥有多少自由度去追寻新创意。员工们几乎都是从字面上理解其含义的。

但这些原则有其局限性。卢特克对真实性的早期表述是“冷酷的坦承”。他说，“我犯的错误是，我认为每个人都适用于同一种原则。但事实上，不同的人不需要不同的沟通方式，才能起到同样的效果。这是我不得不学习的东西。”

此外，Shopify陷入了一场与唐纳德·特朗普有关的争议，也可以归咎于该公司倡导的自由思想。曾经由特朗普首席战略家史蒂夫·班农执掌的布赖特巴特新闻网，在网上兜售各种粉丝商品，比如布赖特巴特咖啡杯、T恤衫、啤酒保温套、徽章，以及写有“恨美国？我们将帮你搬迁”这类字样的帽子。你猜的没错，这家许多人可能从未听闻的极右翼媒体，使用Shopify作为其在线销售平台。

去年年底，几位秉承自由思想原则的Shopify员工揭露了这种联系，并要求卢特克与布赖特巴特新闻网划清界限。许多博客公开谴责Shopify，这起事件还在社交媒体上引发了一场声势浩大的#删除Shopify运动——这不免让人联想起#删除优步运动。

作为一种回应，卢特克在Medium发表了一篇题为“支持自由言论”的博文。他表示，尽管他收到了超过一万封电子邮件、推文和消息，但鉴于这样做并不违法，Shopify必须保持中立。他写道，“赶走商家无异于审查思想，有违自由交换这一核心商业原则。”布赖特巴特新闻网仍然是Shopify的客户。

少数商家取消了订阅;两名员工辞职。卢特克对他们表示钦佩。“我在发送给他们的电邮中写道，‘嘿，嘿，我真的很尊重你的决定。做人重要的是要有原则。如果你没有因坚持某种信仰而蒙受损失，那么它就不是原则。”

Shopify的未来

尽管他的工作量不断增长，卢特克仍然在极富纪律性地追求自由思想。每个季度，他总会进行长达一周的深度学习，要么把自己隔离在渥太华周围的办公室撰写代码，要么带一堆书走到树林中。这种被他称为“工作室周”的做法，启发自音乐圈朋友长期形成的实践。

他花了很多时间思考Shopify的未来。该公司的投资者和顾问表示，这是卢特克最大的优势之一。费里斯表示，“他具有一种无与伦比的确定长期优先事项的内努力。”这位自我提升大师认为，他在这方面的能力绝对不输给杰夫·贝索斯。“很多人声称自己能够确定长期优先事项，但在现实中，很少有人能做到这一点。”

对于Shopify来说，这样一个未来包括全情投入数据和机器学习。通过追踪成千上万的商家，Shopify很快就能了解一家公司成功和增长的原因，并利用这些洞见向其推荐该公司的附加产品和服务。

另一大赌注是面向中小企业的融资机制Shopify Capital。如果Shopify看到一个客户有机会扩张，它将为这家商户提供一笔现金预付款。不收利息，但Shopify将以一定的贴现率从未来的销售额中提成。2016年，该公司向商家提供了超过3000万美元的融资。

当然，Shopify需要鼓励更多的人开设店面。它的核心市场（加拿大，美国，英国和澳大利亚）共有大约1000万家中小企业，其中只有不到4%使用其平台。卢特克和他的团队希望，他们能够推动更多的人走上创业之路，从而扩大这个潜在市场。

Shopify首席运营官芬克尔斯坦表示，“接下来的挑战是，我们如何才能鼓励每个人创业，而不仅仅是那些早就把自己定位成企业家的人？我如何才能让一位正在为孙女做珠宝的人产生这样的想法：‘你知道吗？也许其他人也想要这款珠宝，我会创建一家网上商店，开始向全世界销售。’”

柏尚投资合伙人杰里米·莱文对Shopify的未来抱有极高的雄心。“在未来的某个时点，有一半的电子商务可能流经Shopify，这种可能性当然是存在的。”他信心满满地说道。“我的理由是，每个商家最终都想开设自己的在线店面，而Shopify迄今为止最好的电商平台。”

卢特克更多的是从一位伤痕累累的创始人的角度来思考问题的。他说，“在它的每一个历史时点，Shopify始终是一家被低估的公司。”

“我觉得这种状况正在改变。”（财富中文网）

原文刊载于2017年3月15日发布的《财富》杂志。

译者：Kevin

Shopify has done a pretty good job hiding itself from the world.

The company’s e-commerce platform was involved in purchases by more than 100 million individual shoppers in 2016, yet it is invisible by design, enabling the end-to-end operation of its customers, some 400,000 individual retail shops and brands. It proudly operates not from San Francisco or SoHo but from six floors of an inconspicuous office tower in Ottawa, a city whose much bigger success story is Justin Trudeau, the heartthrob Prime Minister whose office is a 10-minute walk away. Shopify’s cofounder and CEO, Tobias “Tobi” Lütke, a 36-year-old German-born computer programmer with ice-blue eyes and a penchant for newsboy hats and free thinking, is an introvert with a shy demeanor.

And yet the company has quietly but aggressively encroached on territory occupied by retail giants like Amazon (amzn, +0.20%) and eBay (ebay, -1.22%) to carve out a lucrative niche in e-commerce. Founded in 2004, Shopify (shop, -0.17%) has close to 2,000 employees—1,500 of them added in the past two years—and offices in five cities. Revenue in 2016 was $390 million, up almost 100% from 2015; it’s projected to grow 50% this year (it had a $37.2 million operating loss in 2016 but expects to be profitable this year). Since it went public in 2015, its stock has more than doubled. It has advisers and partners including Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins.

Lütke’s goal is a lofty one: to make commerce easier for everybody. Just as WordPress made it easy for anyone to set up a blog or content website, Shopify lets anyone set up and run a digital store immediately, without needing any technical prowess. With subscriptions starting at $29 per month, Shopify helps merchants decide on a store and domain name, what to sell, and which design template to choose. Once the store is set up, Shopify acts as a hub for tracking inventory, shipping, sales, and marketing analytics.

Most of its customers are small and midsize businesses like Tattly, a Brooklyn-based temporary-tattoo company founded by Tina Roth Eisenberg, who noticed her daughters coming home from birthday parties with shoddy fake tattoos, and Mindzai, a Toronto-based designer toy store run by Chris Tsang, who ran his business out of his condo before leaving the corporate world to sell full-time.

Increasingly, it’s serving big names too. Celebrities like Drake, Kanye West, and Kylie Jenner use Shopify to sell their product lines, and Radiohead used it to sell its most recent album. Google (googl, -0.13%), GE (ge, +0.67%), and Tesla (tsla, -0.39%) use the company’s enterprise version, Shopify Plus, which starts at $2,000 per month, because it’s cheaper and better than building and maintaining their own e-commerce platform.

That many of these bigger, more marketable names are opting for Shopify speaks to the changing face of distribution. Businesses no longer have to pay middlemen to sell their products and can provide a more personal experience by connecting with customers directly. Why would Bose, the thinking goes, pay to sell its products only at retail when it can connect with customers directly through its own digital store? Shopify makes it possible.

Merchants large and small can use a single interface to sell through their online store, and can also avail themselves of all kinds of help with any point in the selling process—social media, shipping and manufacturing, marketing, inventory tracking—in Shopify’s app store, a selection of free and paid tools it calls Merchant Solutions. Kit, a company recently acquired by Shopify, offers an AI-driven virtual assistant that, for $10 a month, makes marketing suggestions, engages with customers who abandon their online carts, and pushes out Facebook ads. Companies like Intuit (intu, +0.60%), Houzz, and MailChimp have built custom apps for Shopify’s merchants. (Shopify takes a cut of the revenue.)

Shopify allows merchants to sell online and through other channels: in a brick-and-mortar setting (it offers a line of physical point-of-sale devices that sync with its software), through consumer hubs like Facebook and Pinterest, and, more recently, on Amazon. The latter was a big win: For years the online retail giant had its own software product for small and midsize retailers, Amazon Webstore. But it was more expensive, and over time startups like Shopify and BigCommerce, which focused exclusively on these services and prioritized the merchant rather than the consumer, gained ground. Amazon shut down Webstore last year, recommending its customers migrate to its competitors. In January, Shopify announced an integration with Amazon that would allow Shopify merchants to sell on its massive marketplace from their Shopify stores. Shopify’s stock jumped nearly 10% on the news. It became the rare example of a company not just taking business away from the conquer-everything-at-all-costs Amazon, but likely playing a role in its decision to pack up and go home.

Tobi Lütke sits on a couch that faces a row of snowboards in his office. He speaks thoughtfully in his native German accent—he grew up in Koblenz, a historic town about an hour west of Frankfurt.

He owes much in his life to snowboards.

In 2002, while on a snowboarding trip to Whistler, British Columbia, he met his wife, Fiona McKean. They soon moved to McKean’s native Ottawa, where Lütke connected with McKean’s family friend, Scott Lake. The two bonded over a shared love of technology—Lütke had fallen in love with computers as a child and left high school at age 17 to work as a programming apprentice at Siemens, and Lake was a vice president at a midsize tech company—and eventually decided to start a company together. Both avid snowboarders, they chose to sell high-end boards online, with Lütke handling the tech side and Lake handling the business side.

While building the site, Lütke grew frustrated with popular software options like Microsoft Commerce and Yahoo Stores, which were clunky and expensive, so he decided to build his own e-commerce engine from scratch. It would be simpler, faster, and more visually pleasing than the competitors, and he would build it using Ruby on Rails, an innovative new programming framework invented by David Heinemeier Hansson, the Danish programmer who had founded the web-based project-management tool Basecamp. Hansson, now a close friend of Lütke’s, says Lütke was “instrumental” in the development of Ruby on Rails, which would ultimately be used to build Twitter, Airbnb, Groupon, Soundcloud, GitHub, and more.

Lake and Lütke launched their company, Snowdevil, in 2004. But while they made a few sales, they soon came to believe that the better opportunity might be in selling the software Lütke had built. He had released some of his e-commerce-related applications to the Ruby on Rails community as open-source projects, and they were gaining notice.

They changed the name to Jaded Pixel (new to English, Lütke confused “jaded” with the color “jade”). Lütke made a call to Germany to bring aboard Daniel Weinand, his best friend since age 15 and a computer programmer with a gift for design and user experience, as its third cofounder. Lake renamed it Shopify.

It was slow going at first. While they got a few dozen customers through the Rails community and word of mouth from the design world, the company pulled in just $8,000 in October 2006. Lütke and McKean were living in her parents’ house, and his father-in-law, who was one of the company’s first investors, occasionally had to write checks to help the cofounders make their small payroll.

Help came the following year, when Toronto-based angel investor John Phillips heard about the nascent company through a friend who was helping someone set up an e-commerce site. He was impressed by the product and even more by Lütke. He wrote the company a check for $250,000 at a $3 million valuation.

Soon after, Lütke and Lake began engaging in debates over where to take the company: Lake felt they should become a venture-backed growth company; Lütke, who had a distaste for large corporations, aspired to instead make Shopify the “best 25-person company in the world.” But it continued to grow, and in 2008, Lütke flew to Silicon Valley to meet with major venture capital firms Benchmark, Sequoia, and Accel. Benchmark and Sequoia were interested, but they discussed moving the company to Silicon Valley with Lütke, at which point, he says, he lost interest.

Frustrated with Lütke’s reluctance to grow and tired of the post-startup phase, Lake left that year to launch Source Metrics, a social marketing analytics tool for retailers, but remained on the board. Lütke went on a hunt for a new leader, but Phillips pushed him to run the company himself. “I said, ‘Tobi, you gotta run the company.’ And he’d never thought of it, really,” Phillips says. But Lütke agreed. Phillips also pressed him to find different kinds of leaders, and Lütke soon tapped as COO Harley Finkelstein, an ambitious extrovert and an early Shopify user who had sold T-shirts to pay for law school and whom Lütke met at an entrepreneurs meet-up.

Another critical assist came from Tim Ferriss, the self-improvement guru and tech investor. Lütke, a fan of Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek, suggested he be the keynote speaker at the annual Ruby on Rails RailsConf in 2009, and the two bonded over a shared passion for inspiring entrepreneurs. Ferriss helped conceive the Build a Business competition, Shopify’s flagship marketing event that challenges people to start a store over an eight-month period. Lütke initially wanted the prize to be a MacBook Pro; Ferriss, whom Lütke calls Shopify’s “idea supersizer,” convinced him to make it $100,000. (“I wanted him to think as big as possible,” Ferriss says, “to the point that it would make him uncomfortable.”) The contest is now a major event; along with Ferriss, winners receive mentorship from Tony Robbins, celebrity entrepreneur Daymond John, life coach Marie Forleo, and Russell Simmons.

In 2010 the company was contacted by Bessemer Ventures, which was looking to invest in interesting e-commerce businesses. After a months-long courtship, Lütke decided he and the company were ready to grow. In December of that year, Bessemer led a $7 million Series A funding round. Ten months later, Shopify raised a $15 million Series B. In 2013 the company raised a mega-round, $100 million at a valuation of $900 million.

That set the stage for the company’s April 2015 IPO, a move Lütke says he’s confident was necessary for Shopify to achieve its long-term goals. “I want Shopify to be a company that sees the next century,” he wrote in a letter included in the IPO filing. After setting an offering price of $17, the stock began trading at $28. Nearly two years later, it sits at around $60.

Lütke describes himself as being disobedient and antiauthoritarian from a young age. “When people said, ‘Hey, you need to do this,’ I would usually think about doing the opposite,” he says. This was a problem in his first job, at Siemens, when he felt restricted by the corporate environment. But one colleague, a grizzled, potbellied senior programmer in his fifties named Jürgen who rode to work on his motorcycle, showed Lütke that people outside the norm could survive in the corporate culture. Lütke gleaned an important lesson. “The secret,” he says, “was be exceptionally good at what you do, and everything else will fall into place.” From the start, he wanted to make Shopify a place that would embrace such iconoclasts.

The company’s hiring strategy, for example, is to focus not on what candidates have done already, but on what they might do in the future. That philosophy, which means betting on uncredentialed but motivated applicants, was adopted largely out of necessity—they couldn’t afford the candidates who checked all the boxes—but it’s one the company still follows, and it has led to a workforce of varying backgrounds and dispositions.

There is a companywide aversion to workplace “personas” and an emphasis on authenticity, free thinking, and the ability to be comfortable with discomfort. Another key tenet is the “trust battery,” an internal gauge of one’s successes and failures that determines how much freedom they have to pursue new ideas for the company. Employees take this almost literally.

But such principles have their limits. An early expression of Lütke’s authenticity was brutal honesty. “The mistake I made is, I thought everyone had signed up for the same thing,” he says. “Different people need different kinds of communication for it to have the same effect. That was something I had to learn.”

Free thinking could also be blamed for Shopify getting pulled into a Donald Trump–related controversy. Unbeknown to many, the Breitbart News Network, the alt-right online publication formerly headed by Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon, hawks fan merchandise. And to sell Breitbart coffee mugs, T-shirts, beer cozies, badges, and hats that say things like: “Hate America? We’ll help you relocate,” Breitbart uses—you guessed it—Shopify.

Several of those freethinking Shopify employees uncovered the connection late last year and demanded Lütke cut off Breitbart. That led to public condemnations from bloggers and a #DeleteShopify campaign—an echo of the #DeleteUber campaign—that spread across social media.

Lütke responded with a Medium post titled “In Support of Free Speech.” In it he said that, despite receiving more than 10,000 emails, tweets, and messages on the matter, in the absence of illegal activity, Shopify had to remain neutral. “To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas and interfere with the free exchange of products at the core of commerce,” he wrote. Breitbart remains a customer.

A handful of merchants canceled their subscriptions; two employees quit. Lütke expressed admiration for them. “I sent them emails saying, ‘Hey, I really, really respect that,’” he says. “The thing that’s important is people have principles. It’s not a principle unless it costs you something.”

Despite his growing workload, Lütke has remained disciplined in his pursuit of freethinking. Every quarter, he takes a weeklong deep-learning retreat in which he secludes himself in office spaces around Ottawa to write code or takes a stack of books into the woods. The practice, which he calls “studio weeks,” was inspired by a practice established by musician friends.

He spends much of this time thinking about Shopify’s future, something the company’s investors and advisers say is one of Lütke’s biggest strengths. “He has an unrivaled ability to prioritize in the long term,” says Ferriss, comparing Lütke to Jeff Bezos in that regard. “I think a lot of people claim to be able to do that; in reality, very few people are able to do that.”

For Shopify, that future includes a big commitment to data and machine learning. Through tracking hundreds of thousands of merchants, Shopify will soon be able to learn what makes a company succeed and grow, and use that insight to make recommendations from its menu of add-on products and services.

Another big bet is Shopify Capital, a funding mechanism for small and midsize businesses. If Shopify sees an opportunity for one of its customers to expand, it will offer the merchant a cash advance. There’s no interest rate, but Shopify keeps a percentage of future sales at a discounted rate. In 2016, it seeded merchants with more than $30 million.

And, of course, Shopify needs to get more people to set up shop. There are some 10 million small and midsize businesses across its core markets (Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia). Less than 4% use its platform. Lütke and his team believe they can expand that potential market by pushing more people toward entrepreneurship.

“The next challenge is, how do we encourage not just the people that self-identify as entrepreneurs to do it, but everybody?” says Finkelstein. “How do I get people that are making jewelry for their granddaughter to be like, ‘You know what? Maybe other people want this jewelry and I’m gonna create an online store and start selling jewelry to the whole world.’”

Bessemer’s Jeremy Levine has lofty ambitions for what Shopify could become. “It is certainly plausible that half of all e-commerce transactions could flow through Shopify at some point,” he says. “My rationale is that every merchant will eventually want its own storefront, and Shopify offers, by far, the best platform for storefronts.”

Lütke speaks more from the perspective of battle-scarred founder. “Shopify has been a perpetually underestimated company at every point of its history,” he says.

“I feel that changing.”

A version of this article appears in the March 15, 2017 issue of Fortune.