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 39 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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…”
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, …”
Lütke: Using third-party software forces adoption of vendor worldviews
“If you use software by others, you have to buy into their vision.”
Lütke: Internal software shapes companies faster and more effectively than policy
“It's the sort of missing ingredient people talk about, you know, people talk about incentives shaping companies, and then policies shaping companies. So, those tend to be the two tools. And I think then, sort of generally, like, if people are really insightful…”
Lütke: Outperforming products come from places that reject consensus decision-making
“It's when something outperforms, it's usually the product of a place that doesn't make decisions by consensus, right, as we know.”
Lütke: Functional org structures produce vastly better products despite executive friction
“It is significantly harder for executives. It's very unpopular for executives because obviously they just don't own, like, the entire shebang that they can, you know, make all decisions in, and that's requires a lot more collaboration, which feels strong and f…”
Lütke: Advantages of any org structure occur immediately; disadvantages emerge over time
“Well, and the advantages of any organization structure occur immediately. The disadvantages only appear over time.”
Lütke: Canada ranks top three globally in every critical manufacturing resource
“It has in the ground basically as much, like, it's number one, two, or three on every single resource that is of value in, in the in, in the next manufacturing buildup age”
Lütke: Canada could be the richest country in the world
“I think it can be richest country in the world if it chose so, and it just needs to make a decision that it wants that”
Lütke: Efficiency drives ignore crucial unquantifiable qualities like taste
“The downside of a drive to efficiency is that it requires you to act on, on, on quantifiable, right? Like, you can only measure what you can measure, or for, like, somatically. So, that's not the entire, like, the space of how to make better companies. Like, t…”
Lütke: Shop Pay delivers a 16% conversion rate increase for merchants
“It's a 16% conversion increase by it being robbed, right?”
Lütke: Tech industry is bad at partnerships due to prisoner's dilemma thinking
“Tech is extraordinarily bad at partnerships. It's and I mean, it, it's always treated as a prisoner's dilemma that at some point, someone in the company realizes defecting gives you five points on the map, and that sounds really, really good with the short-ter…”
Lütke: VCs rejected Shopify in 2008 because market friction disguised potential TAM
“The reason why you didn't invest is like you said, like there's 40,000 online stores in the world right now in 2008. And Well, you can get half of them, but that's not actually that big of a business. And what we miss is, like, well, Shopify itself was the sol…”
Lütke: Great entrepreneurs are fundamentally ungovernable
“I think great entrepreneurs are ungovernable, and it's the problems often arise when people somehow manage to figure out how to, yeah.”
Lütke: Programming is a vocational craft, not computer science
“We have significant science envy. We even attempt to call it computer science. There are some people who do computer science in the machine learning world, so that it's a real thing, but clearly that's not, It's a vocational art.”
Lütke: Teaching kids the world is built beats most school curriculums
“If you can teach that to students, it's worth more than most of the entire curriculums of subjects.”
Lütke: Ontario has the cleanest power grid in the world
“Like if it's like where I live in Ontario, it's like the grid is entirely clean. It's like the Bruce nuclear power plant, which are constantly built more reactors for, which is like, Every time under budget and before schedule, like six, seven gigawatts now, a…”
Lütke: Shopify has 20M lines of Ruby and 8-10M lines of TypeScript
“I think the sort of core part of Shopify with all the like, minor stuff like the identity system and all these kind of things is like, 20 million lines of code, and then the TypeScript written admin interface is like another, I think eight, nine, 10 every reas…”
Lütke: Companies are social technology that legitimize collective mission pursuit
“Companies are technology themselves they are technology by which You create part of what they create is social acceptance for, you know, people, maybe tens of people, hundreds of people, 1010 of thousands of people, depending to spend all their day pursuing a …”
Lütke predicts Shopify's internal workflow system becomes a standard software category
“And I think there's going to be some productizations of GSD that'll be available to everyone. That's probably going to be renamed 15 times or whatever, become a category of software that's going to exist. And then everyone's going to be wondering how the hell …”
Lütke: Shopify built custom HR software because Workday lacked needed features
“In, in, in our case, in HRS, we had some things that were not doable with Workday and all these systems, and so we built it ourselves.”
Lütke: 80% of every e-commerce business requires identical software infrastructure
“The first 80% of every e-commerce business are the same. It's like, you need a checkout, you need credit cards, and you're taking credit cards for us, and you know, like, you need the hosting, and the checkout, and all this got fixed, and admin interface. So, …”
Lütke: Synthetic load testing for e-commerce infrastructure is exceptionally difficult
“It's tremendously difficult to synthetically test the, all the pieces that go into commerce, because it's just like so complex with so many things. There's so many APIs, there's so much we have to, like, the shipping to, of course, all the payments, and paymen…”
Lütke: Shopify is building software to connect stores directly to AI platforms
“What we want to do is make sure that like, Everyone's plugged into the various chat systems, and there's an MCP connected to every Shopify store, and you know, global catalog that's really nicely presented, so it's we're building software specifically for the …”
Lütke: Top search engineers historically focused on papers rather than product search
“The people who worked in search are, like, much more interested, they're fundamentally more interested in searching for papers than for products. And so, there's very few of the best people in search in, in, in a world of people who know most have actually end…”
Lütke: Online impulse purchases actually reflect long latent consideration phases
“They sort of feel like input purchases, but they tend to be, like, very few people part with money unless they are like, holy shit, this is the thing I always wanted. Like, this is actually usually the longest. ... When you look at log files, you're gonna get …”
Lütke: Companies should make original mistakes to generate unique alpha
“You will make mistakes, make them original, so there's alpha in it, so that you accrue some additional knowledge that now is unique to you.”
Lütke prioritizes hiring electrical engineers for software roles due to efficiency mindset
“I personally really deeply appreciate and have hired, always prioritized hiring electrical engineers into programming worlds, just because they just have a better idea for the costs of aid efficiency.”
Lütke: The warehouse wooden pallet industry generates $60 billion annually
“The industry supplying wooden pallets to warehouses is a sixty billion dollar a year industry, right?”
Lütke: The Chive's 2010 Bill Murray flash sales repeatedly crashed Shopify
“The one that did it for us first it was like some, something in 2010, it was a this is called The Chive, which was like some, I mean, it's a website, it was like some community. Some t-shirt with Bill Murray on it. And that thing, every single time it went on …”
Lütke: Database lock contention is the fundamental bottleneck in scaling flash sales
“You really deal with log contention, and log contention is difficult. You, it's very, very hard to scale if everyone at the same time wants to decrement an integer in the database just actually then also the transaction involves Having to go to interchange and…”