Tobi Lütke
Co-Founder and CEO, Shopify. On 8 shows, 9 appearances, plus 2 compilation re-airs not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerinvestor@tobi ↗LinkedIn ↗tobi.lutke.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
He co-founded Shopify in 2004 and has led it as CEO through its 2015 IPO to become one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms. Beyond Shopify, he served on the Ruby on Rails core development team and joined Coinbase's board of directors in 2022.
8shows
9appearances
273statements
27resolved
17supported
4contradicted
63%fully supported
179said about them ↓ Everything Tobi Lütke said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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…”
Lütke: Prime Minister Trudeau's push toward socialism inevitably leads to poverty
“It's very much veered into socialism under, under Trudeau. He pushed that very, very hard I am very much hoping that, ah, Mark is helping all of Canada to figure out that that's a successful discovery of something that doesn't work, because obviously that kind…”
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…”
Lütke: Staying private sequesters growth gains to accredited investors
“All these accredited investors accredited investor laws and stuff like this all they do is, like, make it so that
Like, when you're rich, you can invest in private company stock.
And when you're not, you can't.
And, well, where are the returns?
Like, of co…”
Lütke: Software customer segmentation masks developer skill issues
“All these stories of software is for a certain segment of a market are skills issues, and that's exactly what they sounded like when I first heard about it. It's convenience to the company making the software to say, we are focused on one segment, and by the w…”
Lütke: Meta and Shopify created more businesses than any government policy
“I think the Meta Shopify LA group has created more businesses than like you know, any government policy in history.”
Lütke: Historically, crypto stablecoins were mostly 'gift certificates to scams'
“The utilitarian difference between a real US dollar and a US dollar crypto coin is like that the US dollar crypto coin is mostly like, it's sort of like gift certificates to scams. It's like, there's not that many things you can actually purchase with it that …”
Lütke: Coinbase endured near-unprecedented government and regulatory hostility
“And that was a company under brutal attack by the regulators in a way that, like, very few companies of all time have ever faced. That's, like, they threw, like, the government wanted them dead and pretty much said so, right?”
Lütke: Everyone should code because AI vibe coding only takes weekends
“We actually are under the opinion at this point that everyone should be able to code, at least sort of since Vibe coding is around. This is clearly, this has gone from a, you know, have to spend all of your teenage years in a dark room Cultivating a rare skill…”
Lütke: AI will solve all software technical debt
“I don't even think it's going to end up mattering because AI is going to solve all technical debt.”
Lütke: AI will not cause widespread technological unemployment
“I don't even believe in AI unemployment from, to begin with. It's not how things work. But if you were worried about it, F-One is kind of proving that we can just make up completely incredible pursuits, especially with AI and robotics, we can make it cheaper, …”
Tobi Lütke: Building a remote company is vastly harder and not recommended
“A better set of trade-offs for the future is to accept the vast additional difficulty of building a remote company. It's way harder. Like it's, Like, it's not something you should recommend to anyone to do this because you, it's the same as trying to run a wor…”
Lütke: Shopify will support any legal merchant regardless of political views
“As long as they do something legal, we support them. And in fact, we are just pushing them from behind via tool. Like, your screwdriver is not going to tell you that you can't screw in something into a wall because you're a Republican voter.”
The other half of the tape: Tobi Lütke's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 149 times in 50 episodes across the shows. 30 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most David Senra 41Harry Stebbings 16Chamath Palihapitiya 9Tooey Courtemanche 8Jason Lemkin 8Shane Parrish 7Jean-Michel Lemieux 7Lulu Cheng Meservey 5
Statements about Tobi Lütke, by other people (30)
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…”
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…”
Tobi Lütke: Extreme wealth only improves daily quality of life by 2-5%
“I would say it makes my days probably between two and five percent better. That's it.”
DHH: Shopify Uses Autonomous AI Agents to Complete Work and Open PRs
“River, the current system that they have for you. Employing agents to do work and open PRs and everything. Like, everyone is working towards that. Shopify is already there”
Shopify founders deleted incomplete code after one hour of pair programming
“You know, Toby famously built a lot of Shopify pair programming, and what he would do is he would actually set a timer And him and his, the CTO, Cody, would pair program for one hour, and if they did not finish the problem in one hour, they would delete all th…”
Internal data shows employee alignment degrades with distance from Shopify's CEO
“The farther you are from Toby, the, like we can see things in like the survey results, like the alignment gets out of whack. And so you do actually see that you want to be closer. You want to have a flatter org in general, and that can be achieved by just havi…”
Shopify Skips a CMO Because Its Founders Drive the Brand Story
“I think it only works because Toby, Harley have such amazing Intuition on what the brand is, needs to be, and all of that, that some of what the CMO does of kind of creating the cohesive story of Shopify, It's kind of held in, in their heads and they kind of, …”
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…”
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…”
Coates: Tobi Lütke is and will always be Shopify's head of product
“Toby, like all great CEO founders, is actually the head of product at Shopify, and will always be. I think the day that Toby's not running a product at Shopify is the day that he's not at Shopify.”
Altman: Tobi Lütke gives the best cutting-edge AI feedback among large company CEOs
“He is the only person at the intersection of like CEO of a large company and extremely accurate detailed on the cutting edge feedback.”
Rivera: Tobi Lütke effectively acts as Chief Product Officer at Shopify
“It's not even a question of whether we agree with it or not. This is as close to a fact as we can possibly get on anything.”
Finkelstein: Companies Should Skill-Match Leaders to World-Class Strengths Rather Than Tenure
“I really think that most companies end up looking at a buffet of their leaders and looking at the slots that are available and just go like, go here, go there. And I think it takes a very thoughtful and very often a founder CEO or founder leader like Toby, som…”
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke starts every new employee at fifty percent trust
“I've seen people use it as a, like, I'm pretty sure Toby says he starts everyone at 50%
and then he gets to know you.”
Thawar: Billionaire tech founders share irrational multi-decade visions for the world
“They're mostly different people, but they're similar in one thing is that they have an irrational view of what the world should look like over the next decade or so. They're very long-term thinkers, very rational in that they'll look and say, Hey, 1015, 2025 y…”
Nejatian: My most frequent Slack phrase to Tobi Lütke was 'I disagree'
“I actually once looked at my Slack history with Toby. And the most common phrase I had told him was, I disagree.”
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…”
Senkut: Early Shopify dedicated two top engineers to an internal data warehouse
“When I showed up in Ottawa, Toby told me that, hey, they had these amazing engineers and the team was by the way, like less than 50 people or barely 50 people. And he said, I took two of my best engineers and we're building a real time data warehouse.”
Tobi Lütke: The best teams are 'greedy for constraints'
“This is, I think what the best teams do everywhere. They are greedy for constraints. They want to understand what is, like, how can we restrict our space so that we get to get started, develop something”
Tobi Lütke: The hedonistic treadmill is the primary engine of human progress
“The hedonistic treadmill is, is, is a, is the engine of humanity. It's the thing that drives us to do everything that we actually value.”
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…”
Tobi Lütke: Failing to actively remove processes gums up company systems
“It's much easier to add something to a company than it is to remove something from a company. And so if you can only add, never remove, you're gumming up the system after a while.”
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”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 52
David Senra 46
the Knowledge Project 24
All-In 19
Lenny's Podcast 5
A Product Market Fit Show 3
2026 57 mentions in 15 episodes 4 per episode
- Sam Altman on Building OpenAI & Betting on the Impossible
- Jason Fried: Your Only Competition Is Your Costs
- Excellence Is the Capacity to Take Pain
- Rick Rubin on Finding Your Life’s Work
- Tony Xu of DoorDash: Surviving 1,000 Days of Startup Hell
- Anthropic's Digital God, Pope vs AI, Job Loss Narrative Flips, Open Source Crackdown Coming?
- Roblox’s David Baszucki Built the Biggest Playground on Earth
- Evan Spiegel, Snapchat: Building a Multi-Billion Dollar Company
- 7 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 33 mentions in 13 episodes 3 per episode
- Harley Finkelstein: You Must Requalify for Your Role, Every Year
- 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
- How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey
- Sam Altman's Masterplan or a Gift to Anthropic? Palantir & Shopify Crush Earnings · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport
- 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
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 24 mentions in 8 episodes 3 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
- Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, and prioritizes intuition
- 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
- Ex-Squarespace CEO on how to sell to SMBs, build tight feedback loops, & stay close to customers ... · PMF Show
- Every VC Rejected Him. So He Bootstrapped From $0 to $10M in 3 years | Kyle Braatz, founder of Fu... · PMF Show
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 18 mentions in 5 episodes 4 per episode
- Tooey Courtemanche: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO | E1090 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- E146: Did the Fed break the VC model? Plus IPOs, M&A, revaluing unicorns & more
- E137: Inflation cools, market rips, Ripple/MSFT beat regulators, NATO summit, cocktails of youth
- 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 12 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- E89: GDP growth negative in Q2, $SHOP layoffs, Alzheimer's fraud, Ginkgo acquires Zymergen & more
- Andrew Wilkinson: Tiny Holdings
- Balaji Srinivasan: The Network State
- Neil Pasricha: Simple Rules for Happiness
- E77: Tech work culture, crypto regulation, stablecoins, $NFLX & more w/ Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong
- 20VC: Sweetgreen Founder Jonathan Neman on Leadership Lessons from Managing Through COVID, The Importance of Failing Fast and Iterating & How the Best Leaders Bring Together Brand, Capital Allocation and Strategy
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Tobi's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Shopify | 3 | 81 | 100% 3/3 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Shopify | 2 +1 | 63 | 43% 3/7 | full record on 20VC → |
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Shopify | 0 | 0 | 71% 5/7 | full record on How I Built This → |
| DAVID SENRALEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Shopify | 1 | 50 | 33% 1/3 | full record on David Senra → |
 CHEEKY PINTLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Shopify | 1 | 39 | 60% 3/5 | full record on Cheeky Pint → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Shopify | 1 | 26 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| ALL-INLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Shopify | 1 | 13 | 100% 1/1 | full record on All-In → |
| PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Shopify | 0 +1 | 1 | — | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |