Tobi Lütke
38 statements across 3 episodes · 18 bullish · 10 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Jan 18, 2026 by Tobi Lütke · said 46 times in 9 episodes since 2026 · 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 David Senra (41), Jason Fried (4), Ivanka Trump (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 46 mentions in 9 episodes 5 per episode
- Sam Altman on Building OpenAI & Betting on the Impossible
- Jason Fried: Your Only Competition Is Your Costs
- Rick Rubin on Finding Your Life’s Work
- Tony Xu of DoorDash: Surviving 1,000 Days of Startup Hell
- Roblox’s David Baszucki Built the Biggest Playground on Earth
- Evan Spiegel, Snapchat: Building a Multi-Billion Dollar Company
- The Company Apple Couldn't Kill | Spotify Co-CEO Gustav Söderström
- Ivanka Trump on Building an Authentic Life
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2026 →
Everything said about Tobi Lütke, oldest first
Jan 18, 2026 neutral
Lütke: Employment is an exclusive subscription sold by an individual entrepreneur
“I think of everyone as an entrepreneur, really. Your capabilities, like you are the entrepreneur of your own work output. Your product is what you can do and what you can accomplish. Your market is the companies that exist, and you are selling a exclusive subs…”
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Lütke: Exploiting compensation loopholes is a leadership design failure, not employee fault
“I never begrudge anyone being an intelligent actor in the local incentive system. That is just, like, everyone's allowed. That's pretty much my morality at this point... You get too much out of the incentive system, or the incentive system tells you to behave …”
Jan 18, 2026
Lütke: Vetocracies kill good ideas because status quo flaws go unexamined
“Most of people spend their entire life, sadly in a vitocracy, right? Like where you need everyone to agree to do something, but you only need one person to vote against it to not do something. And again, good companies overcome this in, in, in important ways. …”
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Jan 18, 2026 negative
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…”
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Lütke: Shopify executives must present annual conference talks on operational differentiation
“I require my executives to I mean, at least tell me, but actually do it. Go to a podcast, some international conference, and talk about how Shopify does. The thing the conference is about differently, and why that's better every year. If they don't have a good…”
Jan 18, 2026 neutral
Lütke: Shopify came within one week of running out of money multiple times
“We got like within a week of running out of money so many times, and sometimes we were bailed out. Many times it was like, just like the clearance of the one-time try hurdles that shop went through was like millimeters at times”
Jan 18, 2026 negative
Lütke: Writing down hiring criteria leads to performative hires and company decline
“The people who read it are the people who are very, very good at following lists. So the people that you probably described, not the people who go look for the cheat sheet, the people you are Trying to avoid hiring other people who would study the cheat sheet …”
Jan 18, 2026
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Lütke: Only one Shopify executive had public company experience at IPO
“When Shopify IPO'd We had one member of executive team who ever worked for a public company. That's it. We had no one who took a company public. We had no one who was an executive at a public company. We had one executive who worked at a public company once.”
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Lütke: Companies exist as engines to test counterfactuals against the market
“What a company fundamentally allows you to do is like, just run the counterfactual to the world you see around you, right? Like you get to try to build a thing that you think ought to be there, and then you means test it against the market, and if the market a…”
Jan 18, 2026
Jan 18, 2026 negative
Lütke: Corporate policies protect downside while limiting top talent
“They often, policies and processes are sort of downside protection. You're trying very hard to make to avoid the people who do things wrong to be of you know, causing so much damage. That's like the downside protection, but you're also really limiting what the…”
Jan 18, 2026 negative
Jan 18, 2026
Lütke: Product is Just Millions of Composed Details, Not an Entity
“Product is not a thing. Product is an abstraction. Product is a name, like a handle that you put on some totality of a body of work. From the perspective of the people creating product, product doesn't exist. It's what other people call your work. A product is…”
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Jan 18, 2026 negative
Lütke: Lacking competition harms businesses by removing rivalry benchmarks
“It was a time we didn't have a lot of competition, so which is also really, really hard for businesses. It's not a good thing at all because again, you don't get, you don't have good rivalry, and you can't sort of Like, even if something seems really good, you…”
Jan 18, 2026 negative
Jan 18, 2026 negative
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Jan 18, 2026 negative
Lütke: Most business books are written by people with time, not builders
“I got really dismayed with the quality of business books pretty quickly, because frankly, I think the business books are largely written by the people who have time. Well, not the people who actually built companies, frankly.”
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Lütke: Promoting acquired startup founders to executive roles all succeeded
“I asked a lot of the founders to become my executives. In some cases, I took people from individual contributors in an engineering team and put them in charge of a very large thing. And you know what? At all, every one of those things worked.”
Jan 18, 2026 negative
Lütke: Conventional executive delegation almost killed Shopify post-IPO
“I really tried everything and learning like you know, just how to, you know, build the team in such a way that I delegate everything, and I have my different business lines and you know, arrange things. This is sort of after the IPO, and I realized I have to b…”
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Shopify deploys AI trained on Lütke's past reviews for mock meetings
“There's software that manages all this kind of thing. They can use an AI to preview what the transition will like, be like, because it's trained on all the other reviews I've ever done. So they can sort of mock do it and figure out what I will probably say. Th…”
Jan 18, 2026
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Lütke: Attacking competitor attention is more effective than attacking their base
“Attacking other people's attention is much more profitable very often in a game of Starcraft than it is to actually attack the base. Because if you overtax their ability to pay attention to things, They will make mistakes.”
Jan 18, 2026 bullish
Jan 18, 2026 negative
Lütke: Stripe's effort to stay private is not a valuable use of time
“Friends of mine, like, you know, Stripe are running this experiment. Like they've managed what they put off in terms of figuring out how to stay private for such a long time is actually remarkable. I just think they spend a lot of time figuring out how to
Sta…”
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Lütke: Company worthiness attracts elite talent more than recruiting teams
“My job is to make a company worthy for the best and brightest to work for. Like this is the part everyone skips. Everyone's like, oh, we need to hire a better recruiting team. Well, maybe you need to also just, like be worthy of a kind of talent that you would…”
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Lütke: Companies serve as social permission for obsessive 14-hour workdays
“A lot of, like, companies are social technology in, in the sense that they allow us to go all in. Like, the only time you're really allowed to spend, I don't know, eight, I'm gonna say eight because that's the right number to say, really, like, fucking 14 hour…”
Jan 18, 2026 neutral
Jan 18, 2026
Lütke: I annually roleplay as a corporate raider turning around Shopify
“I love to take the view that, like, I'm a
corporate raider.
And Shopify went bankrupt, and I bought it on a fire sale, and I, I'm like marching in on day one here, and previous management was crazy, and we need to turn this place around, right?
Like, that's …”
Jan 18, 2026 positive
Jan 18, 2026
Lütke: Solo Work Reaches Unmatchable High Notes, Five-Person Teams Are Optimal
“Shopify loves the five person team. We increased to eight. Sometimes, but we think the best team size is one because like a single offer can do things that is impossible to do for teams and hit high notes that are unreachable.”
Jan 18, 2026 bullish
Lütke: Robotics and 3D Printing Will Dramatically Simplify Physical Manufacturing
“I think making things will be much simpler in the world of just in time manufacturing and three D printing and additive and resin printing and obviously like products, just humanoid robotics, dreadnought, lights off factories, making anything on demand and thr…”
Jul 26, 2026 bullish