Shopify's 30% Growth in Year 22: A Glitch in the Matrix Nobody Can Explain

DHH joined Shopify's board about a year and a half ago, initially after arguing to Toby Lutke that boards are boring snoozefests. Toby convinced him otherwise, and DHH discovered he had just been bored because previous boards operated at scales too similar to his own. Shopify operates in a different universe.

The staggering fact: Shopify grew almost 30% year-over-year last year, from a base of billions in revenue. DHH says he would have been happy with 30% growth early in his own company's life cycle. For Shopify to do it in year 22, from already massive numbers, feels like finding a glitch in the matrix. The law of big numbers says this should not happen.

Here is the twist that fascinated DHH the most. Even sitting on the board, even talking to Toby directly, nobody actually knows why. They can come up with theories. The mission has been the same since Toby created Snow Devil: give people a toolkit to create a great-looking store rather than sell in the bazaar of Amazon. They have been chipping away at that for 20-plus years. And then suddenly the charts just go vertical.

DHH draws a broader lesson from this: nobody knows anything. Not about why Shopify is growing this fast, not about where AI will be in two years, not about any of the big questions. We have theories. Very little of it reduces to irrefutable proof. He calls it compounding determinism over 20 years, which adds up in irregular ways where the inflection point sometimes takes a very long time to arrive. Toby was early on AI, early on agents, and still a computer nerd at heart running the 17th largest company in the world.