The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 63 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Tobi Lütke calls the climate movement one of the most evil things
“Well, you have to get rid of the climate cult, first of all because it's just like, I mean, it's one of the most evil things that's been wrought on on, on, on population.”
Tobi Lütke: Everyone should be deeply suspicious of non-profit organizations
“The problem with charity dollars is they can't be given to anything that has a self healing fitness function, like, which is very fancy way of saying the words. For profit. Like markets voting of if a thing should exist. And like a not for profit, like the wor…”
Tobi Lütke: Study World of Warcraft guilds over corporations for organizational mastery
“I think you can learn more by studying World of Warcraft raiding guilds than you can learn from studying companies about coordination and what great looks like.”
Tobi Lütke: Tech layoffs are driven by pandemic overhiring, not AI
“What you see right now is not AI layoffs. It's also just like the companies that are really slow that like overhired just like everyone else doing it now.”
Tobi Lütke: At least half the population fundamentally misunderstands wealth creation
“There's an enormous amount, at least half of population is utterly confused about how this all works and makes very, very bad choices due to this.”
Tobi Lütke: Society should be daily thankful for Elon Musk
“There's just simply no chance that we shouldn't be sort of deeply, deeply, deeply, in fact, daily thankful for what Elon is doing on Planet Earth. Like, he's so singular.”
Tobi Lütke: Philanthropic funding is being captured by bad actors
“Money is being captured by really bad actors in these systems.”
Tobi Lütke: Non-profits attract smooth talkers rather than true builders
“It replaces merit of organization with pull of individuals. Who is attracted to these places? The people who want to do something that for which you have to use You know, pull. And you know, the smoothest talkers, the people who, it's not the builders who are …”
Tobi Lütke: Over 60% of Canadians view US as top national risk
“60% of people, more than 60, I think the numbers have gone up since, and people think that the United States is the largest risk to Canada, like, much larger than, like, Russia or China would be.”
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 …”
Tobi Lütke: Nepotism beats ideological academic hiring; double-blind merit is gold standard
“So merit double blind is the gold standard. Unfortunately, merit double blind is not the standard, right? Like it's like very, very rare. I think never does might be better than some of the crazy shit people are doing to decide who should be appointed into, es…”
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…”
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…”
Tobi Lütke: Running a product-driven company requires full operational control
“You can't run a product driven company without also being in control of a company.”
Tobi Lütke: Stripe is a bad proxy for IPO timing strategy
“I think they are really bad proxy for what you should be doing. Because most people aren't. So I think it's a much saner strategy to, like, do the flip to public as a minor financing.”
Tobi Lütke: Investment bankers treat IPO companies as crop, not customers
“Now the advice comes from the investment bankers and you are not their customers. You, you're their crop. Their customers are actually the people in the book, right? Like, so their job is to get everyone in the book the cheapest possible deal.”
Tobi Lütke aims to keep Shopify headcount flat with 100x AI productivity
“My real hope is seven and a half to 8000, right? Like at a hundred x productivity level, right?”
Tobi Lütke: Entrepreneurship is the most AI-safe and AI-benefiting job
“I just think we're gonna go into the golden age of entrepreneurship. It's by far the most AI-safe job. It's by far the most AI-benefiting job.”
Tobi Lütke: AI will be used as a corporate scapegoat for everything
“What you will see is like AI is going to be blamed for absolutely everything, right? Like, because it's like, it's the perfect scapegoat.”
Tobi Lütke: Government operations cost 10x as much as private enterprise
“Governments are extremely bad at what they do. Everyone needs to know that like the moment a government takes over anything, it will cost 10 times as much, which is really, really, really bad”
Tobi Lütke: Canada's obsession with niceness leads to harmful lies by omission
“I think Canadians massively overfit to niceness. Like it's kind of a best thing and a worst thing in a country is like to prioritize niceness. Because it's like, I mean, it's certainly pleasant, but the problem is it leads to unkind lies, right? Like it's like…”
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…”
Tobi Lütke: Senior engineers leverage AI better than junior engineers via steering
“Turns out that just having, having done a lot of reps and having seen a lot of those just means senior engineers just steer these things in such a way that like they can accomplish incredible feats in their little time.”
Tobi Lütke: Engineering managers make excellent AI programmers because managing is prompting
“Honestly it turns out, I think people who've done like engineering management and management in general are actually excellent AI programmers because they actually have been prompting intelligent agents for much longer than cloud code existed.”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify's internal AI 'River' performs a ludicrous amount of engineering
“If you're building a large scale AI system like we have one, which they think what river, which lives in Slack and does some Ludicrous amount of Shopify's engineering now.”
Tobi Lütke: Top Shopify engineers haven't written raw code since December
“Many of our best engineers have not written code this year ever since December.”
Tobi Lütke: North American software engineering has the wrong architectural priorities
“I think North America is wrong. I think you should think about how data is persisted on, on, on disk above everything else in your databases or so, and then you can plan the system with this.”
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…”
Tobi Lütke: Humanity scores only 3/10 at building companies and teams
“We're not that good at building companies. We're not that good at building products. We're not that good at making teams. We're not, like that earth is like maybe a three out of 10 on, on, on, on, on, on, on the score of this.”
Tobi Lütke: Society prioritizes sounding good over practical results
“What really sucks in the world is that we are prioritizing things that sound good over things that work.”
Tobi Lütke: Philanthropy is only virtuous if it yields effective outcomes
“Giving money is not virtuous unless it causes the right things.”
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…”
Tobi Lütke: People who build companies are fundamentally crazy
“The world really needs to understand that the people who build companies are, like, fundamentally crazy people, right? It's an unreasonable thing to do.”
Tobi Lütke: Product and business needs diverge unless planned three years out
“The needs of product and companies are extremely divergent unless you're taking a perspective three years out, at which point they kind of become to come to the same point and actually augment each other.”
Tobi Lütke: Teaching guitar is vastly more productive than cashier work
“Lots of people, what they do on a weekend or what they do in the evening or for some extra dollar, like give guitar lessons or so is vastly more productive for society than the cashier job at the supermarket, right?”
Tobi Lütke: Every person on the world's richest list built something
“When you go through the list of the richest people on planet earth, all of them have built something.”
Tobi Lütke: Inheritors of unearned wealth are custodians obligated to serve society
“It's okay to be to have a lot of questions of rich people who would like inherited their wealth and then use it poorly or come to it by divorce, for instance, or like if you have not created for wealth, you very much are custodian of a wealth and you need to u…”
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…”
Tobi Lütke: Canada's sole historical winning strategy is helping America win
“There's been one winning strategy in Canada's history which is win by helping America win.”
Tobi Lütke: All politics is ultimately collectivism versus individualism
“Like, all politics is just collectivism versus individualism, right? Like, it's everything else is people smokescreening this stuff.”
Tobi Lütke: Europe must adopt Prussian economic theory to grow
“Again, I think Europe, especially now that the UK has left the European Union, needs to double down on Prussian economic theory of Friedrich List and his co-conspirators and just define excellent games that create internal markets.”
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.”
Tobi Lütke: Context engineering will become a standard corporate role
“There's something about this context engineering, which I had a hand in popularizing term of I think that will become more recognizably a, like a role in companies that will potentially subsume a bunch of other more specialized roles right now.”
Tobi Lütke: Direct action outside systems generates vital information at low cost
“You can just do things. It's just like, At any point of time, the system is, exists to try to get to good outcomes. If you know what good outcomes are, you can step out of system and give it a go. The cost is lower than ever, and action causes information.”
Tobi Lütke: 10 million people work daily on Shopify
“There's probably ten million people working day to day on Shopify.”