Tobias Lütke

“Yeah we both put money into the company. I think we both took 20,000 Canadian dollars and put, that's the capital we had.”

“Like, up to this point, it was really just money from John Phillips, from my family, and then for the last year, from my father-in-law, who gave me money for, to meet payroll.”

“Even if you make the choice yourself to embark in entrepreneurship, kind of everyone around you is coming onto the trip. There's a lot of people who end up mattering a lot”

“There's no software that would make this easy, and especially the credit card part.”

“My intention was to build a twenty-people company. That's what I wanted to do.”

“I also think that the formative years of companies end up mattering a lot more than I think anyone's willing to admit. Like, I can absolutely see a supermarket chain founded right at the dawn of the Great Depression having a more sustainable attitude towards e…”

“The businesses that were More digitally native. Business that had retail, but also were online and on the different channels like Instagram or Pinterest. They have replaced over 90% of their lost sales.”

“I think the thing that changes as the company gets bigger is that the oscillation between those two things just keeps getting faster”

“And I'm not that different from other people. Like, if I needed this at some point, there's gonna be at least a couple thousand people who also need this.”

“I think that's what makes you an entrepreneur. Like, the first time you sell something, or first time someone hires you for, when the phone rings, or something like this. Because until then, you're just someone who builds something, which is already great, but…”

“Like, up till this point, it was really just, you know, money from John Phillips, from my family, and then for the last year, from my father-in-law, who gave me Money for, to meet payroll.”

“Working for Siemens has been probably one of the most important things I've ever done in my life because it kind of taught me what I don't want. It was, In so many ways, a strange company culture in the way that it felt exceptionally mistrusting of everyone, r…”

“Socks, mainly. It's my best seller.”

“I think we both took 20,000 Canadian dollars and put, that's the capital we had.”

“It turns out that the minimum bid for an ad for click is 20 cents, and we paid minimum bid for almost every search, which ended up converting on a 500 dollar snowboard.”

“And the model was, I think we charged like three and a half or 3.75% per, per sale. It was a complete failure of a business model because what basically everyone who didn't expect to have sales thought it was amazing and people who expect to sell a lot would T…”

“By the time we launched in 2006, I think we had four or 5000 emails, so it's not, but that seemed like a lot.”

“Even if you make the choice yourself to embark in entrepreneurship, kind of everyone around you is coming onto the trip. There's a lot of people who end up mattering a lot and I clearly was naive about it.”

“So basically, I got this around this time, notice that term sheets will no longer be honored, because everyone needs to tighten bells, and so on.”

“Open source Japanese. There's only Japanese documentation around this time for it. I learned the language by looking at the source code.”

“At this point, I intentionally slowed down the growth of the company a little bit just because I needed it to be manageable for me.”