Shopify Inc. (SHOP) Goldman Sachs 2023 Communacopia & Technology Conference (Transcript)

Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP) Goldman Sachs 2023 Communacopia & Technology Conference September 7, 2023 4:45 PM ET

Company Participants

Jeff Hoffmeister - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Gabriela Borges - Goldman Sachs

Gabriela Borges

I'm Gabriela Borges, I cover emerging software here at Goldman. And I'm delighted to have on stage with me Jeff Hoffmeister, CFO of Shopify. Thank you for your time.

Jeff Hoffmeister

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Gabriela Borges

Jeff, I know you've known Shopify for a long time.

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes.

Gabriela Borges

And I'm curious now that you're seeing how the sausage is made from the inside out, what is it that stands out to you about the Company's strategy with data? And what I mean by that is, you'll have a unique ability to give SMBs the power of scale. And we can see some of that from the outside in, but I'd love to hear what you would communicate now having seen things from the inside out.

Jeff Hoffmeister

Well, I think the latest and most poignant manifestation about is what Tobi’s talked about with Sidekick and Magic, in terms of what we're doing on the AI side because what we're really trying to do with Sidekick is encapsulate all the data, all the learning, all the knowledge of what is Shopify and how do we make that disposable for -- at the disposal of the merchant in terms of how they want to use that. And more importantly, how does it accelerate everything her doing. And it's really meant -- we use the term Sidekick as in sidekick to a superhero, in terms of as an entrepreneur, you're there thinking about everything from is this the right layout of my website? Am I selling too many SKUs, too few? Should I go into this geography, not only what are the analytics, but which analytics should I be looking at that I'm maybe not even contemplating right now? And so all that data is really essentially fed into the Sidekick project. And so that's -- that, at the moment, is the greatest manifestation of what we're doing.

Gabriela Borges

And I can appreciate that there will be future iterations of Sidekick which become more powerful over time. Is there a broader vision on the next big technical milestones you're looking for, for that product ahead?

Jeff Hoffmeister

That's early days, and that's a Tobi question. But what I would say this, is that -- and like any machine learning algorithm, the more data you feed into it, the more you get it to learn, the practice, the more questions we get from merchants, the greater we'll iterate this. Tobi is spending a lot of time on this personally. This is really very important to him because he think this -- and as you know, we always talk about being merchant-obsessed and very focused on how do we help entrepreneurs do everything they can. This is something which we think is going to be a super power for them.

Gabriela Borges

Absolutely. So I want to spend a little bit of time on some of the other core product areas where you have a similar ability to allow merchants to be more than the sum of that product. And perhaps one of the areas that we can spend time on is the marketing automation space. And there are two pieces to that. One is Audiences. And the other I wanted to touch on is your investment with Klaviyo. So perhaps, first on Audiences. Would love to get an update on how your customer base is benefiting from that product and what you need to see to be able to turn on pricing?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. Audiences is something which you get as a Plus merchant. It's not something we offer in standard. And it's been really, really helpful in terms of giving merchants everything from guidance on, all right, so you're going to make a decision, I want to spend x millions of dollars. But I don't know, do I want to spend it over 6 months, a year? Do I want to spend in this geography? How much do I want to spend on social? How much do I want to do offline? All of that -- and this goes a little bit to your data question, Gabriela. It’s just how do we give the merchant the information to help them think about where they should be spending their money and what's going to have the highest impact.

And that's really what we're trying to do with Audiences because for us and going back to the merchant obsession, and Shopify is obviously known and Tobi personally is for kind of looking at what are the merchant pain points? What's the hardest thing for the merchant to do and how do we help them tackle that and advertising is just one of those areas. And so we obviously have not started monetizing Audiences directly. We're doing that through payments. And so, if you're a Plus merchant and you're using Audiences and obviously, that's -- and I can quote all the statistics in terms of what's that doing for uplift and customer and buyer attraction they obviously get on the platform, the merchant has more success. That flows through payments, and that's how that comes back to us.

We are -- it's really still effectively early days. We're kind of roughly a year into this. And so this is part of, again, more data on the platform, improve the algorithms, better predictions and we'll reach a tipping point. I can't -- we've obviously not started monetizing it yet. I can't give you a time line when that will be. There was -- there's an initial ramp to this. It was a merchant that just opted in. So they've got to say, well, I want to contribute my data to this product. If they ever leave, they get their data back. But what they're quickly learning and so you kind of build this momentum around, all right, I realize that I'm contributing by data, it's actually a small percentage of the total pool. And so the learnings that I'm getting on the back end are significantly greater than my own pool data that I'm contributing, it's been very, very well received. And it's been one of the things that's been the greatest pull in terms of getting merchants from standard up to Plus.

Gabriela Borges

If you think about what's transpired in the marketing and advertising ecosystem over the last three years with changes to IDFA, changes in the privacy ecosystem. Do you think the average Shopify merchant has been able to now overcome those changes in part because of products like Audiences? Are we back to being ahead of what the last two or three quarters headwind have been?

Jeff Hoffmeister

We're getting there. And we're getting there in the context of obviously, Apple from a privacy perspective, wants to be very respectable of, obviously, people using the platform. But I also think what we want to do is make sure merchants have the information they need to be targeting their consumers, their end buyers in a much more effective way. And we're not the only ones that are doing that, that are trying to help entrepreneurs in any way, shape or form to get more customers. It's pretty simple. So we haven't -- I don't want to say we've rolled it back. That's not the intention. The intention is to help merchants be more successful.

Gabriela Borges

And it allows me to ask the buy versus build question, which is you have some of your own marketing automation tools in house like e-mail marketing for the core customers. And then you have Klaviyo as your preferred partner for the Plus customers. How do you think about the balance of that organic investment versus working with someone like a Klaviyo in the ecosystem?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. I think one of the things -- we're cheering Klaviyo on, and we're spending a lot of time with Andrew and Amanda and team as a kind of head for the public markets. And we're wishing them a lot of success. We've had a mission and alignment with them, almost from day one. Andrew and Tobi have known each other for a very long time. They have a phenomenal product.

From our vantage point, we as a company, just -- we partner really well. I think that's just one of our “superpowers”, if you will. And when you think about partnerships and everyone we have from Stripe and Adyen and Global-E, and Yotpo and Klaviyo, et cetera, like, we can go on down the list, Flexport. That's just something we do really well in terms of how do we make sure that our mission and our partner's mission is well aligned. So -- and we have that same approach with Klaviyo.

Gabriela Borges

Absolutely. So, I want to talk about the other big pain points that we see in the merchant ecosystem, which is logistics. So perhaps leading with the news from last week, the partnership with Amazon Buy with Prime. Talk to us about for merchants, what difference does that make today now that you have the partnership versus 10 days ago when you didn't?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. As merchant you're used to -- prior to the partnership announcement, the work we've been doing with Amazon, there was a way through a Javascript to kind of get a jury rig solution, which kind of gave you the effect of that. What we have now in coordination with Amazon, they obviously released the app in our ecosystem, and that allows a merchant to basically have this in a very seamless way, the ability to offer Buy with Prime to their customers. Some merchants want it, some merchants won't want to do it. For those that do, obviously, that now flow -- it all flows through the Shopify admin. And obviously, we're getting all the payments revenue from that. And so from a merchant's perspective, you have 100% in terms of the data, the view of the business, which is flowing through the Shopify admin, the dashboard, the single pane of glass, whatever, however you want to describe it.

And so as you think about analytics, as you think about knowing your customers, as you think about where everything is shipping that's all on one dashboard, which is not what you had before. So, and again, we're always going to be focused on making sure if a merchant could be more successful with having something at their fingertips, we want to get that to them. Obviously, we were working on the Amazon partnership for a while. I mean Harley had mentioned it on a bunch of quarterly calls. It's good to have it nailed down. Obviously, Harley has got a video out there. There's a press release from Amazon out there. I think it's pretty well documented at this point, but it's good to have that settled.

Gabriela Borges

Based on what you know about your customer base, what are the commonalities between the customers that you think will choose to use Amazon Buy with Prime versus those that don't need it?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Well, Buy with -- there's always been a certain type of merchant that's leaned a little bit more to kind of the Shopify view of the world versus the Amazon view of the world. One of the things that Amazon does really well for you as a marketplace, if you're a merchant selling in the marketplace, it gives you a lot of scale immediately. But that comes at certain costs and certain things as it relates to data and some other things, which are kind of well documented from a Shopify merchant perspective, you have all the data, you keep all the data, you know everything that you're shipping and where it's going. That's one of the things that our partnership with Amazon now does.

So it can be shipped through Buy with Prime, but it's obviously still going through the Amazon -- or through the Shopify dashboard, and so we have a full view of what's happening. I don't think it fundamentally changes in any way, shape or form. The question that a merchant is going to have is do I want to offer Buy with Prime, do I not? And so far, the response has been good.

Gabriela Borges

And similar question for a merchant making a decision between working with Flexport and the Shop Promise badge versus choosing to work with Buy with Prime?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. Flexport remains clearly our preferred partner and just in terms of the relationship we have with them. And I guess I'll use the analogy a little bit is how we think about the payments space, like our primary partner in the payment space is Stripe, of course. And it's been that way for a long time. It will continue to be. They have the vast -- you look at any quarter, they have the vast majority of our volume. That doesn't mean we don't -- we obviously announced recently the relationship with Adyen which is we do more -- as we are doing more in enterprises, we're doing more in Europe, that was just given where Adyen strengths are, that was a natural partnership, working relationship for us.

We obviously have a relationship with PayPal. We've talked about what we do with PayPal in France. So it's just the nature of us wanting to make sure that the merchants have choice so that they can offer that choice of their consumers. We're doing the same thing on logistics, and we're doing the same thing on payments. But Flexport is our preferred partner. And what you're going to have with, as you alluded to, the ability to offer Promise, which again, for those of you that haven't -- that is essentially a badge, which tells the consumer which tells the buyer we’re on this website. I know that this merchant has a very strong track record of getting things delivered on time. So it gives you assurance that you're going to get it on time. And we've shown how that really increases conversion rates.

So, we want to continue to grow and enhance Promise, and that's doing really well, and we're partnering with Flexport to do that.

Gabriela Borges

I want to think through the implications stand model. You mentioned that all of the revenue that goes through Buy with Prime, most of the transactions that go with Buy with Prime will be captured by Shopify Payments. And in the past, I know you've talked about data that shows your conversion rates go up with things like Shop Promise, things where you can have a merchant guarantee a specific time frame for delivery. How do we think about the GMV going through Shopify expanding because of the partnership with Buy with Prime and something like Shop Promise?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. I think on the partnership with Amazon, it's obviously still early days. I think from our vantage point, we think about this as the more choice from the back to this theme, the more choice that we offer the merchants, the more compelling our platform is, this goes a little bit to our conversation around Sidekick too, in terms of how we think, if we can continue to build more and more functionality into our core offering, how does that drive more merchants onto the platform and have them stay on the platform. So I can't sit here and tell you we've modeled or because of Amazon, this has x impact on GMV. The partnership, I'm sure, over time, will grow. And -- but at this point, for us, it's offering that functionality, that optionality to our merchants, that we know some of them want.

Gabriela Borges

Absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about some of the insight you have into consumer spending trends in the broader demand environment. So perhaps I'll frame it as based on what you saw through COVID and the normalization that happened after COVID, there are some really good charts in the presentation online showing e-commerce above trend, e-commerce below trend. Do you think that we're back on trend today, do you think that the demand levels we're seeing in e-commerce are representative of a normalized level?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. We're obviously referring to the exact same charts that show the kind of continual study progression up into the right. And I think that trend -- the trend line other than the COVID period has been pretty consistent, and I don't have any reason to think otherwise. And so -- but one of the things that's great from a Shopify perspective is that even though online commerce has been our historical strength and starting point and still is, one of the things that we've had real success with and especially over the last year is our retailer point of sale. And so from our vantage point, while we remain more concentrated in online commerce, we're doing some really interesting things in retail, including for the first time really in the past few months, we're starting to win merchants that are retail only. And so, if you are a merchant, which is both, online and bricks and mortar, we offer a couple of things which historically you've never had before. I think our point-of-sale technology is really good.

And so, if you're a merchant, you got, all right. So I've clearly got the best platform in online commerce in Shopify. And now I have what I think is the best technology from a point-of-sale perspective in Shopify. And so I can do one stack instead of two. That's been really compelling. The other thing that we've seen, and I alluded to this on the last earnings call is we're taking some functionality that we have on our online platform like installments, and we're making that available on point of sale. And so, that's another piece, which has been really, really compelling.

And so the fact that you can have the best technology in point of sale from our vantage point and the fact that you can do it with one stack and the fact that we're continuing to take more and more functionality from online and putting them at the point of sale, it's been really, really compelling, especially again for those that have both online and offline presence. But we're encouraged. And obviously, the Intuit partnership is helping and there's just a lot of things we're doing to help move the retail business forward. And we're winning some retail-only locations, merchants. That's good.

Gabriela Borges

Is it fair to say that the retail-only locations that you're winning are brownfield displacements rather than greenfield?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes, for the most part. It's a little bit -- it's some of both, and it's still very early days at this one, Gabriela, but, yes.

Gabriela Borges

And so for the brownfield opportunity, what is typically the catalyst that takes a retailer to say, okay, I can see the benefit of switching to Shopify?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes, part of it is us just getting our name out there. Like, we're not historically known for our point-of-sale solutions. And so we've got -- and again, the Intuit partnership has helped a lot in that regard. We have a team internally that's focused on that. So we have a separate go-to-market for that. And it's highlighting the technology, like, the technology on our point of sale has gotten really, really good. So, we're not doing some sort of price war where we're trying to be -- it's not about it, it's literally the quality of the technology and it will continue to get better and better as we take more functionality from online and put it into the point-of-sale solution.

Gabriela Borges

So the other piece to the demand picture is the visibility that you have into consumer spending. And the 2Q GMV results are strong, and I believe the commentary was around consumer generally being resilient. Would love to hear how that's progressed as you look at the data that you can see at a more granular level.

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. I'm obviously going to keep my comments tied back to what I said from a macroeconomic perspective on the last call. We talked about -- and I know there's news out there from some, whether it's just kind of commentators or other companies that are talking about, hey, are we seeing some headwinds as it relates to consumer spend. As I mentioned on our last earnings call, we continue to see strength in the U.S. We continue to see strength in Canada. I think we outperformed in Europe. I mentioned specifically Italy, Germany, France and Spain. Historically, we've had a very strong presence in the UK. It's just that those four countries this past quarter particularly outperformed. And our merchants are doing really well. So, I'm cognizant of everything that's going on in the macroeconomic environment, but we're obviously pleased that our merchants are doing as well as they are, and we're trying to do everything we can to give them the tools to accelerate that success.

Gabriela Borges

One of the other opportunities that I think is quite nascent in the e-commerce world is B2B. And if I think through the past decade, there has been this promise where B2B e-commerce experiences can meet or rise up to where the consumer commerce experience is. And it's been like pulling teeth. And so I'd love to hear what Shopify is doing to catalyze some of that B2B opportunity?

Jeff Hoffmeister

We're excited about B2B. We effectively -- it was our Editions, which for those of you who don't know Editions, we essentially twice a year will have I guess, I'd call it an online event to showcase all the recent releases that we've done across our full product taxonomy. And it was last year in June of the Editions where we unveiled essentially kind of the version of B2B, which we have right now. Harley on the last earnings call mentioned that we've got -- we've introduced 45 new key features to our B2B solution over the last year. It's become very compelling.

And exactly to the way you phrased the question, a lot of what we're seeing is just the usability of our B2B solution, like we have -- and I'll get to some of the feature sets, which we've been introducing, but the reality is a lot of the old B2B solutions, and then -- I don't want to use a term green screen, but it's descriptive in terms of it just as an older clunkier technology. And our solution is far from that. So just the usability of it has been super strong.

The other thing that we see, too, is the applicability of B2B for a lot of our existing D2C merchants, like you would think it's completely separate and it's only enterprise. But that's not true because you can have someone who basically sells primarily D2C then maybe what they're going to do is they're going to sell through a wholesale or something else, or just find more avenues to sell their product, and that enters a B2B element of the solution.

And so the existing -- we have some existing merchants that are looking at the B2B solution, they really want to use that. And then we have a lot of new merchants, generally, they fall into the enterprise bucket, they look at B2B and say, I really would like to use this. And this goes into collabs and some of the other things that Harley has talked about. And so as we do more in enterprise, that's just one of the key features to just how people think about us as a bigger, stronger enterprise solution than we've been historically, so.

Gabriela Borges

It loops nicely into a conversation around Plus.

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes.

Gabriela Borges

So if I think about some of the product enhancements that have been announced, to make Shopify more successful and Plus, things like Hydrogen and Oxygen. Where are you in the journey of realizing more conversions up market? What are some of the limiting factors to getting those next big customers on the Shopify platform?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. But let's talk about it, you're absolutely right on Hydrogen and Oxygen, let's talk about it from a full enterprise perspective. One of the beauties that we have is when we go to an enterprise customer, we can approach them with 1 of 3 angles. And so the first thing we need to do is figure out what's the right angle. Is it Plus? Is it Hydrogen and Oxygen, or is it CCS?

And part of -- we talked about point of sale before, we now can do point-of-sale up to 1,000 locations. And there's a bunch of other things that we can talk about in all the feature sets of Plus, the Plus can handle the largest of the largest merchants out there. So there's no -- I think historically, there's been a little bit of a perception issue around can Plus really scale to do everything that a true multinational retailer would want. We're eliminating any of those concerns. And part of it is just dealing with some of the legacy perception that we've had around this, but Plus in its capabilities can do anything that the largest retailer wants.

Having said that, for a lot of retailers, especially if we have an existing commerce stack to go in and basically say, I'm going to kind of take this whole thing and rip it out and put in Plus. That's a tall order. We understand that. Some people take that approach. The others take the Hydrogen and Oxygen approach, which, for those of you that know, it's basically the way to do a headless customizable solution. And the third is to do CCS. And just basically say, I look at -- if you're a retailer and say, I've got my own stack, I -- bill, I don't know, depending on how they want to identify it or think about it, I've got 12 different components internally. I love these 10, these 2, like, check out for e-mail marketing or whatever, Shopify can you help me on those?

And obviously, from our vantage point, the goal is to have that be the starting point of a broader relationship to -- it starts with these 2 and it grows from there. But our ability to sit down with a merchant for the first time and say, take an enterprise merchant, say, take any 1 of these 3, you do Hydrogen and Oxygen, you do Plus or you do CCS, and then we go from there. And it's worked really, really well. And the success in large enterprises and the SIs have been extremely helpful to us, and we can talk about that in a second.

The success of CCS, some of the logos and again, Harley's kind of runs through the litany of logos we've won in the last couple of quarterly calls, he's talked about it. That's pulling up Plus. Because if there was any historical perception around Plus being something which is a mid-market solution and not a large enterprise solution, the success with some of the logos in the large enterprise has taken away any concerns there.

Gabriela Borges

And the large enterprise wins, and this ties a little bit to the perception on the legacy side. Are you able to fully integrate with other ecosystem pieces that they may have that may predate you by 10, 20 years. Is that all fully fleshed out?

Jeff Hoffmeister

It is. Yes. We feel really good about the feature sets that we have on enterprise.

Gabriela Borges

It leads me to a little bit of a conversation on unit economics, which is, if I think through the first derivative, the churn rate of larger customers directionally is less than the churn rate of small customers. And so the analysis that you look at, the large customers versus your smaller customers, how does the LTV-to-CAC differ? And what are the implications for your margin model as you think through your mix coming from the high end of the time?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. It's early -- what I don't want to do is get ahead of ourselves on enterprise because they're longer sales cycles, they're large -- longer implementation cycles, but we are seeing the early signs of success. I don't have enough data for you at this point to say, here's how we think about the LTV-to-CAC on large enterprise versus SMB. I can tell you that we feel really good about the technology that we're offering, and we're going to continue to win more enterprise customers. I don't have anything internally where I’d say, well, I hear you on the churn and you're absolutely right, the large enterprises generally have lower churn rates than you do on some of the small businesses. But from our vantage point, the TAM, the opportunity across the full stack from the largest of the large, the SMBs is -- it's excellent especially with where we are from a tech platform perspective. So, we're growing the pie in all three, kind of small, medium, large.

Gabriela Borges

Well, perhaps instead of asking it, as the unit economics question, I can ask it as a pricing question, which is, I think about your recent increases in subscription pricing for core merchants. And we've gotten feedback on from your customers on the value you deliver relative to the pricing charges is incredible. And so how do you think about a more consistent approach to pulling the pricing lever over time?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. We -- historically, I think one of the things that's changed for us versus historically is just thinking about monetization differently. It's something that we had not really as proactively and regularly thought about is, I think we're doing now. Obviously, the change in the standard pricing is literally just a few months in the rear view mirror.

I mentioned on the last earnings call that the reception from merchants was clear in terms of how much they valued it. And it's a little bit of an amorphous calculation to say kind of the value is X dollars per month and the price is Y dollars per month. Value is a little bit harder to define, but we have done our best to do that, and we think of the value versus price ratio that we're providing versus everything else in the market. We're pretty focused on that, not even being a close comparison. And that's what was one of the things that led us to our standard -- our thinking on pricing changes and standard. We talked about Audiences. We've talked a little bit about B2B. We will continue to think about monetization across all of our products. What I don't think we'll do any time in the near future is get to the point where you say, all right, so it's January 1st, there's an automatic price escalation, which I know you see sometimes in software. I think the way to think about it is we'll continue to periodically look at all of our products. We get asked a lot about Plus. It's one of the logical next starting points. I get it. We've not made any decisions there. But across the board to just say, we think about the value we're delivering and maybe this is an area for a price change.

Gabriela Borges

So that's the apples-to-apples pricing piece of this and then there's the cross-sell piece of this. And I know this time last year speaking with Harley, there was a motion with CAC [ph] to be much more intentional about the cross-sell into the installed base. How is it going? We can obviously see some of the GMV take rates from the outside? But what is the next phase of unlocking the cross-sell piece of this?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. We're excited about the cross-sell piece because candidly, we didn't -- we knew we had to do it, and we were doing it, but not in a particularly systematized way. And we're being much more thoughtful, methodical around. And we've done, along with our data team internally, we've done a lot of work around when you look at the cohorts of merchants what are the things, what's the mix of products that keeps them on platform the longest, yields the largest revenues back to us, leads to the large success rate of merchants. We spend a lot of time thinking about that.

And especially when you look over the last couple of years, all the products we've introduced just in kind of thinking of all those connection points, like, this bundle or collection of products if they're buying these 3 products or these 2 or these 5. What does that mean in terms of how sticky they are on the platform. And so if that's the conclusion that this mix of products is the one that is stickiest and best for us, then we know where to cross-sell. And we know how to set up our sales team to be incented and focused on, all right, so do we focus earlier on selling this bundle or do we focus earlier on kind of incentives of one versus the other? We're still in the early days of that, but I think it's good that we're really in the last couple of quarters, starting to think about that in a very systematic way.

Gabriela Borges

So I know we talked on the last earnings call about it being too early for a long-term operating margin target.

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes.

Gabriela Borges

Instead of asking that question, I'm going to ask a question on, give us the guiding principles that you think are going to move the needle longer term between, let's say, a 20% operating margin target or a 30% operating margin target?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. Well, I think you've seen over the last few quarters from a growth -- let's talk at the top line and kind of work our way a little bit down the income statement. You've seen over the last few quarters the growth rates that we've been delivering, kind of in the last quarter, I talked about what it is with and without Deliverr. And you've seen pretty consistent growth for us. And we've talked about all the products that we have, some of which we've had for a long time with like payments and capital and obviously, our subscription plans. And some others which are new, which are having a lot of success, like tax and markets and installments and we're talking about B2B and all those.

So we have this great collection of a bunch of really good products in various stages of growth that will contribute to the top line. So, we feel good about the durability, the sustainability of our long-term growth. Our gross margins have been pretty consistent over time. And so then the question becomes, all right, so how do you get leverage on the operating margin side.

And the -- I've talked -- I didn't do it in this most recent quarter, I talked in prior quarters about the movement in operating expense dollars on a sequential quarterly basis. Pulling out -- like, for example, this last quarter, we had some onetime charges, of course, to how we handle Deliverr in the head count change. But if you remove any onetime charges and you look at Q3 to Q4 of last year and Q4 to Q1 of this year, Q3 of last year, we were $888 million, we went to $903 million in Q4, we -- and then in Q1 of this year, we were $910 million.

So we just -- you saw operating expense dollars on a sequential quarterly basis move a little, but this is at the same time, the top line in any given quarter, depending on the quarter you're looking at is going kind of the mid- to high-20s. So if you can continue to deliver growth rates on those lines and deliver the same -- no pun intended, the same consistency on operating expense dollars, with scale, there will be some upward pressure on operating expenses. But we're not -- for example, we obviously had the headcount reduction. We're not turning around there -- and then all of a sudden looking to hire a bunch of additional people and kind of -- for lack of a better way of saying it, change or alter some of the work we did before. So, if we can continue to grow the top line well and if we can continue to keep operating expenses in line, then those two lines will continue to perform well over time.

Gabriela Borges

What are the areas where you're still prioritizing hiring? And what would you need to see to say, okay, we have a more significant opportunity ahead of us than we originally realized. Therefore, we need to aggressively hire, or hire more aggressively?

Jeff Hoffmeister

I don't -- we put so much time analysis, thought, data into the numbers we got to, I feel good about -- I'm not expecting any surprises of, oh, we've significantly underestimated what we need to do here. Certainly, AI is a category, which everyone talks about how do you increase your skill set. But it's not -- as you know, AI is not an area where you have R&D personnel, engineers that have -- you can't go on a job search website and basically say this is someone who's been doing AI for 10 years. It's not really how it works. And so part of this, I think for every enterprise software company is continuing to up-level the skills you have internally with your team, and turn all of your engineers to AI experts to varying degrees. And so some of it is finding very, very talented people externally, but I think a lot of it has actually taken the people we have and continuing to advance their capabilities. And so, we're doing a lot of that. We will have -- we will continue to add headcount but in a very measured, cautious manner.

Gabriela Borges

I want to pause for a moment and go to questions from the audience.

Unidentified Analyst

So, with the partnership with Flexport, do you have any comments regarding their recent management change?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. So we obviously do -- we -- as you pointed out, we've had a partnership with them. We had a partnership -- we were an investor in them before we partnered with them on Deliverr. We've known them for a long time. Our two co-founders, Tobi and Ryan have known each other for years, there's been mission alignment. There's -- in very similar ways of looking at the world. We wish the best for Dave. We obviously are going to remain very strong partners of Flexport. We've known Ryan for a long time, and we're anxious to continue working with Ryan.

So, I'll leave it to -- there's been a lot of stuff in the public press, if you will, between the two of them, I'll leave it at that.

Gabriela Borges

Through your investment banking experience, you worked with a lot of fairly interesting technology companies. And you're now 9 months to a year into your time with Shopify. We've talked about a lot of different things where there is value to be unlocked over the medium term. If you were to crystallize that to one or two priorities where you think your experience is truly differentiated and can add value in the context of the already very strong leadership team, what would you say those one or two things are?

Jeff Hoffmeister

I want to sidestep the question a little bit, only because I think the greatest opportunity for value creation for Shopify continues to be all the products we continue to introduce. Like, I feel really good about all that we are doing in that regard. Yes, from my vantage point, one of the things we want to continue to do is make sure we're thoughtful on expenses, make sure we're thoughtful on how we're doing quarterly budgeting and thinking and planning, how we're doing the annual budget, like all the things that you would expect a CFO to do. So that's where I'm trying to add my value in addition to, obviously, making sure helping the team and my -- the R&D team in my own way, build more products, but that's one of the things we do really well. Like, we have an incredible product development team, so supporting them.

Gabriela Borges

How do you think about allocating the incremental dollar to that incredible R&D team?

Jeff Hoffmeister

Yes. We spend a lot -- because of all the products that we've introduced, we definitely spend a lot of time thinking about R&D time and effort on existing products versus new products. And so that's a constant exercise for us. And we're always going to be thoughtful around the types of talent we have, where is that talent located, and what can we do to make sure we're enhancing existing products and building new. I don't have some metric where I can say to you, well, this is how we think about the ratio and kind of where we spend dollars in one versus the other, to be repetitive. We're pretty good at the product development thing. And so I think we have an ability to accomplish a lot more quicker and with fewer resources than most do. And so we're continuing to focus on that.

Gabriela Borges

Fantastic. Jeff, thank you for your time. We appreciate it.

Jeff Hoffmeister

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.