Shopify: The Big Winner of Agentic Commerce?

(00:00) So, a year and a half ago, I pitched Shopify to you and called it one of the best businesses we'd ever studied and then told everyone not to buy it. And the stock has nearly doubled since. — And that's because the business has done absolutely phenomenal since then. We're talking five straight quarters of 30% plus growth at a $115 billion GMB per quarter scale. (00:23) And along the way, it's become a big part of how AI agents shop online.

So, today we're going to do something a little bit uncomfortable. We're going to go back and reflect on our analysis, what we got right, we got wrong, and then try to ask ourselves if it was priced for perfection the last time we looked at Shopify, and is it possible that the stock is still worth owning at double the price today?

One of the hardest things in investing is to, you know, just soberly look back at the information you had available at (00:57) the time of a decision and then ask whether you actually made a mistake, like, you know, missing something important or valuing the company too low, which arguably has been the case. You all right, as you said, since stocks are always being priced on new information, it's also possible that when we factor in a bull case, reality simply landed on an outlier outcome that was not the most likely to occur but did nevertheless. (01:20) And we actually thought about the range of outcomes pretty well, and reality just landed on one of those less likely outcomes.

And that happens to us all the time. We've looked at about 100 companies, and I would say there's easily 10 of those that worked out that way.