Lütke: Shopify Canceled 60% of Projects and Replaced Entire Executive Suite
Tobi Lütke · Tobi Lütke: 21 Years of Building Shopify · Jan 18, 2026 · at 16:02
Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke discusses auditing the entire 4,000-to-5,000-person company at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The moment I went through absolutely every project I did myself, took like many, like, 16 hour days, I canceled probably 60% of the projects, and over the course of the year, I turned over every one of my executives.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Tobi Lütke
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: 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…”
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.”
Lütke: First-principles products allow iteration beyond copied market solutions
“You can make a seven out of 10 solution to everything by copying the seven out of 10 that already outside in the market. But if you make from tabular erasers axions, your own version of it, you have mastery over, even if this is a six out of 10, you can iterat…”
Lütke: Bad software decisions are unpenalized externalities for the engineers responsible
“So the consequences of bad decisions in software engineering are an externality that doesn't accrue back to the engineers who cost it in almost all instances. So it's like a little bit like factories polluting the environment. It's just like, it doesn't cost b…”
Lütke: Trendy, bloated tech stacks drove several Shopify merchants out of business
“Some of our customers went out of business because they got talked, they talked themselves into their own stack. They hired a CTO who brought in their own team. They used a set of technologies that they wanted to use because they are currently the in thing tha…”