Tobi Lütke
also referred to as: tobi l–tke
45 statements across 8 episodes · 14 bullish · 10 bearish · 6 people on the record · first statement May 12, 2017 by Harley Finkelstein · said 52 times in 21 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Tobi Lütke's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (16), Tooey Courtemanche (8), Jason Lemkin (8), Jean-Michel Lemieux (7), Carl Rivera (5), Kyle Norton (2), Kaz Nejatian (2), Mike Cannon-Brookes (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- Anthropic vs The Pentagon: Who Wins? | OpenAI's $110BN Mega Round | Cursor Hits $2BN in ARR · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Elon Musk vs Sam Altman | The Implosion of Thinking Machines | Can VC Survive Public Pricing? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Citrini Research Breakdown: Agents, "Ghost GDP", Consumer Spend | Figma Earnings Beat · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 16 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- 20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify
- Sam Altman's Masterplan or a Gift to Anthropic? Palantir & Shopify Crush Earnings · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20Sales: From $2M ARR to $40M ARR: The Playbook | How to Use AI To Supercharge Your Sales Team | Why Pipeline Reviews are BS | The Sales Call Script that Closes 99% of Prospects and How to Hire the Best Sales Reps with Kyle Norton, CRO @ Owner
- Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Are Burn Multiples BS in an AI World? & Sam Altman Needs $1TRN of Energy · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- BVP Partner, Byron Deeter: The Future of Venture - Why Chanel vs Walmart is BS · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Eran Zinman, Co-Founder & Co-CEO @Monday.com: Going Upmarket, International and Multi-Product |E1247 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Victor Riparbelli, CEO @Synthesia: OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai - Who Wins and Why | E1246 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 19 mentions in 5 episodes 4 per episode
- Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify Built a $90BN Business to Last 100 Years | E1189 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jean-Michel Lemieux: Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | E1129 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Dax Dasilva: $900M ARR at $2.6BN Market Cap?! Lightspeed, The Most Undervalued Public Company |E1188 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Bret Taylor: Why Pre-Training is for Morons & Companies Will Build Their Own Software | E1209 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Ara Mahdessian: ServiceTitan Would Not Be the Success if We Raised VC Earlier | E1175 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 10 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- Tooey Courtemanche: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO | E1090 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Dominik Richter: You Only Have Two Options With VC Funding | E1089 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Dara Khosrowshahi: How I Became CEO of Uber; Uber Eats vs DoorDash; The Postmates Acquisition | E994 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Tobi Lütke, oldest first
May 12, 2017
May 12, 2017
Finkelstein: Shopify warned IPO investors against expecting short-term revenue chasing
“In fact, if you read our Toby's letter to shareholders when we filed our IPO, we made it very clear that if you're looking for sort of quick wins, and you're looking for a company that is going to chase revenue, we're probably not the right company. To invest …”
Mar 11, 2022 positive
Mar 8, 2023
Shopify's previous org structure required product escalations to go directly to CEO Tobi Lütke
“In the old org structure, the first point in the org chart where all those 14 teams actually, like, joined at the top was Tobii. So anytime someone has an escalation, the first point in the escalation tree was Toby”
Mar 8, 2023 positive
Mar 8, 2023
Apr 3, 2023 positive
Apr 3, 2023
Apr 3, 2023
Tobi Lütke: Life's work is minimizing the gap between actual and potential self
“I know it sounds like super fortune cookie, but like I describe it like I you know, it's as if at the end of life you meet the person you could have become and the work of life is really try to minimize the diff between that person and the one that actually sh…”
Apr 3, 2023
Apr 3, 2023
Tobi Lütke: Great CEOs succeed through accurate world models, not resource allocation
“I think I think it's a heuristic by which. People can explain to themselves why certain people are great CEOs, but it's not the reason. It's not causal. It's correlated. I think the causal, causality runs by, I think the best CEOs are people who have a more co…”
Apr 3, 2023 negative
Tobi Lütke's core parenting principle: no 'black boxes' in the house
“I hate black boxes. I don't, I really, really dislike black boxes. It's actually like a parroting principle in our house. Like we talk about this with my kids. It's like, we do not like black boxes in the house. Everyone, everything is understandable and every…”
Apr 3, 2023
Apr 3, 2023
Tobi Lütke: The optimal team size for fast execution is six people
“The best team in the world, the fastest moving team in the world is one person that has all the skills needed. The second best is a team of six people that are very, like intellectually diverse and can bring a lot of new different information together, but, li…”
Apr 3, 2023
Tobi Lütke tests new ideas in a single afternoon before committing
“So this is usually when I'm, when my objective is to find out if something is of value, I try to figure out with everything I already got, and an afternoon of time, how can I get basically a scorecard for this before, before, before you go deeper into this.”
Apr 3, 2023 positive
Tobi Lütke: Shopify caps prototype projects at three people and six weeks
“In Shopify, like every project goes to multiple phases. There's a prototype phase, there's like there's a proposal phase before that. If proposal is accepted, you go to prototype phase, build, and then releasing. The prototype phase Is ideally time constraints…”
Apr 3, 2023
Jun 9, 2023 positive
Tobi Lütke: Tech leaders must understand AI models, not use black boxes
“I need to not treat transformer models as a black box. Like I need to understand those because otherwise I cannot show up to a meeting with my teams and have a good chance of reasoning with them about not just what is sort of a convenient next task, but what's…”
Jun 9, 2023
Aug 14, 2024 neutral
Aug 14, 2024 positive
Nejatian: Tobi Lütke overruled my opposition to remote culture software
“We were starting to build internal software. Shopify is a remote company. We're starting to build software to manage our culture remotely. I thought this was just the nuttiest thing to do. Like, this is just, like, total waste of code. Like, this is a bad idea…”
Nov 14, 2025 neutral
Rivera: Tobi Lütke will be the reason I eventually leave Shopify
“This I probably shouldn't say on a podcast, but he's the reason I'm here, and he's the reason that I one day leave. And I say that in a very loving way in that I also appreciate that at some point there might be a rift where we think so differently about the f…”
Nov 14, 2025 positive
May 4, 2026 negative
May 4, 2026 negative
Tobi Lütke: Restricting youth AI access will drive kids to Chinese models
“AI has so many naysayers, like, we are gonna tell kids they can't use AI. Kids will not stop using AI. What they will do is they will download Chinese models, and you will never, ever, ever get another high school essay about Tiananmen Square as a consequence …”
May 4, 2026
Tobi Lütke: Great leaders must be exothermic heat sources for innovation
“It's very hard to forge anything new at room temperature. So like, I think great leaders must be exothermic and must be a heat source for the company. It's very different opinion than the custodial idea of leadership, which is also a valid position to take.”
May 4, 2026 negative
May 4, 2026 negative
May 4, 2026 bullish
May 4, 2026
Tobi Lütke: Stock tickers reflect external market trades, not company building
“The ticker has nothing to do with the company I'm building. The ticker is a is guessing at the fair market value of a company. I work on a fair market value of a company. I like the ticker is just other people's game to make trades based on their assumptions o…”
May 4, 2026
Tobi Lütke: My children do not have smartphones or social media accounts
“My kids are totally uninterested in social media. Like they just don't, they completely don't give a shit. They follow links to social media sometimes, but they have no interest in being, having accounts and they don't have phones.”
May 4, 2026 negative
Tobi Lütke: Blunt Enneagram Type Eights get pushed out to found companies
“I don't think eights, like eights are basically conspired against in companies. They, because they are paying their asses. They just say, they say a thing. They say like, this is It's a shit. Like if something, if our shit does not smell better than other peop…”
May 4, 2026
May 4, 2026 bullish
Tobi Lütke: Steve Jobs' return to Apple normalized long-term founder control
“Apple brought Steve back. It just creates, created the boundary conditions for more financiers, capital boards to actually just give founders like a longer run, right? Like a long, longer run rate. And so and then the results were pretty good because now you h…”
May 4, 2026 negative
May 4, 2026 negative
May 4, 2026
May 4, 2026 neutral
May 4, 2026 positive
Tobi Lütke: Building companies is more democratic than voting in elections
“Specifically like the people who get their wealth by building companies. Have not stolen anything. They have created a product that people voted for. It's actually the most democratic thing that exists. It's vastly more democratic than any of the elections tha…”
May 4, 2026 positive
May 4, 2026 positive
Tobi Lütke: Government's sole role is setting rules and stepping aside
“The role of government is very simple. It's to define games that have as externalities societal thriving. And then completely get out of the game to then let the players in this game cause, through means of competition extremely positive externalities to accru…”
May 4, 2026 positive
May 4, 2026 positive
May 4, 2026 negative
Tobi Lütke: Fear-based motivation creates a limiting short-term focus
“People who fear of losing and people who fear of winning clearly going to look at things much more short term. It's like, it's the next iteration matters the most. And I find that this a kind of, I think that's a limiting thing in a lot of cases, especially wi…”
May 4, 2026 negative
Tobi Lütke: Shopify's logistics fulfillment pivot was my most public mistake
“I think my most public mistake was going into Full on logistics and physical warehouse building just before AI got really good and not like, and we didn't have the ability to you know, do both of those things at the same time. So we actually had to like abando…”