Tobi Lütke
36 statements across 4 episodes · 15 bullish · 7 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Sep 18, 2018 by Tobi Lütke · said 24 times in 8 episodes since 2021 · 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 Shane Parrish (7), Lulu Cheng Meservey (5), Ryan Petersen (3), Kaz Nejatian (3), Balaji Srinivasan (2), Andrew Wilkinson (2), Neil Pasricha (1), Harley Finkelstein (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 3 mentions in 1 episode
2025 15 mentions in 3 episodes 5 per episode
2022 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Tobi Lütke, oldest first
Sep 18, 2018 positive
Lütke: System nudges drive consistent 1-on-1 meetings better than corporate policy
“There's nudges for people, like for people have, like, if people don't have one-on-ones for a long time, they're getting a nudge about it, right? Like, and suddenly you can universally have one-on-ones much better than having a policy with rights of you know, …”
Sep 18, 2018 positive
Sep 18, 2018 negative
Lütke calls Google's internal "Googliness" scoring concept super dystopian
“I think apparently, I, I've never worked for Google, obviously, but apparently people talk internally, talk about sort of a Googliness score, which to me sounds super dystopian, and I hope I score lowly, I score low in that.”
Sep 18, 2018
Sep 18, 2018
Lütke manually shut down random Shopify production servers to test resilience
“Long before this was a name, like we I locked her into our server farm and turned random servers off, right? Because I just wanted to make sure that we are not relying on, Memcached being up, you know, for, and this is, we did that in production”
Sep 18, 2018
A recession saved Shopify after Lütke borrowed payroll for 18 months
“I spent a year and a half being out of money and asking my father-in-law, who I was living with me and my wife for checks to meet payroll, and I don't, I never will figure out why he actually gave those checks to us, but, like, we were essentially dead on life…”
Sep 18, 2018 positive
Sep 18, 2018
Lütke: Whiteboard systems diagrams force team alignment on hidden assumptions
“Everyone in a room can talk about the same thing and mean completely different things, but if you're writing, like, a systems diagram on a whiteboard, afterwards there is, like, there's a sync. Like, people will, like, if someone has an assumption about that s…”
Sep 18, 2018
Companies must conserve employee willpower for customer problems over internal friction
“Everyone wants to do the right thing. It's just we ask people to Use to have to invest their willpower into doing the right thing. And that's not right. Like, I mean, it's, I mean, you can try to do it, but I want the maximum amount of people's willpower that …”
Sep 18, 2018 negative
Lütke: Building a company is very hard without an obvious enemy
“One thing that happened with Shopify which made actually, made making Shopify actually really hard, is that we did not really have competent competitors. It's really almost, it's really, really, really hard to build a company if you don't have an obvious enemy…”
Sep 18, 2018
Lütke: Rebuilt CFO spreadsheets from raw data until trust was verified
“After I hired my first CFO, I, every single spreadsheet I got from him looked really, really complicated, and was far beyond my Excel skill set, but I learned how to use the craziest Excel lookups, because I need, like, I just rebuilt the same spreadsheets fro…”
Sep 18, 2018
Lütke's "Trust Battery": Trust is a continuous gradient, not binary
“It's just a mental model for how to think about the relationship between people, right? It's you know, it's something that actually exists, but is rarely documented. People sort of think about trust as almost an on off kind of thing. Like I trust my mother. I …”
Sep 18, 2018
Lütke: 30-40% of Schedule Goes to Direct Reports, Rebalanced Quarterly
“I spent a good deal of time with my direct team and sort of the leadership team of Shopify. Like, it's probably a third or 40% of my schedule. I actually have full reports on this. My assistant called, we called my expansion pack here at Shopify to keep the vi…”
Sep 18, 2018 positive
Lütke: Getting a Merchant Account in 2004 Took Two and a Half Months
“I had to make a copy of my passport and fax it to American Fork Utah to get a merchant account. That process took two and a half months. Of course, after you sign up in Shopify, you just have a merchant account, and therefore you can take credit cards and thes…”
Sep 18, 2018 positive
Lütke: Shape workplace environments to guide behavior rather than making rules
“You change the environment to make it so that people just, their common sense compels them to do the right thing. Like, the shortest way of stating that is, like, water will always follow the easiest path down any kind of mountain, right? Obviously. So you can…”
Sep 18, 2018
Sep 18, 2018
Lütke: Autonomy cannot be bestowed; employees must earn 80-90% trust first
“I want Shopify to be a company where people have an enormous amount of personal autonomy. But it's not possible to just bestow that on everyone. So, like, because like, you, like, trust needs to be earned. And so, when you have a concept like this, where you c…”
Sep 18, 2018
Lütke records major decisions in a log and reviews them biannually
“When I have to do a major decision, I have a small log file where I just put one paragraph in about the decision I made, and
what information I considered to be the most important one which pushed me into the direction, and then I just sort of revisit that …”
Oct 13, 2020 positive
Nov 15, 2022 bullish
Lütke: Tech History Books Will Be Seen as Mainline Human History
“I think in a 102 hundred years from now, when we talk about human history like, these books that, like, Hackers by Stephen Levy, and The Dream Machine, and like, Code by Petzold, and, you know, all these kind of, these books are actually going to be referenced…”
Nov 15, 2022 positive
Software systems design is 100 years ahead of traditional corporate management
“Engineering involves applied systems design. It has a discipline of systems design that is just vastly, like, we're not talking about slightly ahead. We're talking about a hundred years ahead in, in, in, to everything else. It is not a contest when you hold it…”
Nov 15, 2022 negative
Matthew Walker's 'Why We Sleep' promotes anxiety and makes false claims
“There's a book, which initially I thought was good, called Why We Sleep, which is actually very bad from everything I now know. I mean, it's not that the book is, Incorrect. In the macro sense. But it gives you it, it, I think the book itself is anxiety induci…”
Nov 15, 2022 negative
The adage 'hire smart people and get out of their way' is ineffective
“Hire smart people and then get out of their way. I think that's a waste of everyone's time. It's not even good for the, like, it's a nice story, but it's, like, dumb. It's, like, one of those would be nice if that would work, but doesn't.”
Nov 15, 2022 positive
Lütke: Generalists can reach 80% mastery in five fields simultaneously
“Pareto principle alone tells you that first 80% of every field can be done 20% of the time. You can develop easily five fields for in to a degree of eight out of 10 While the specialist is just looking at primary topic, right? So and frankly, this is even inco…”
Nov 15, 2022 negative
Nov 15, 2022 negative
Lütke: 'Best practices' simply mean risk aversion and average performance
“Best practices actually just simply means don't take risk and do with what everyone else is saying you should be doing. Best practices are not that, like, good. Like, they should be best, no their average risk adjustment. Yeah, exactly. It's just average.”
Nov 15, 2022 positive
Lütke: Job requisitions exist only as lures for great talent
“The only reason why we create roles and recs is because they are, like, lures to great people. The interview process is not a process of thinking, can you do this role? Can we slot you into this role? It is, will the job fair be better for you being here?”
Nov 15, 2022 neutral
Lütke: Societal sentiment tracks reality like stock prices track fair value
“The actual experience of planet Earth in the same way a comp, like a stock tracks the fair market value of a company. It's maybe eventually convergent, but sometimes vastly swinging up and down based on... And driven, driven a lot by media, right?”
Nov 15, 2022 positive
Lütke: Global polling shows people are personally thriving while assuming society suffers
“What you get back everywhere in the world is, like, I'm doing great. Everyone's anxiety is based on their understanding of everyone else. Which everyone else literally disagrees with. Like, so, we all think everyone else is doing bad, and everything else is ge…”
Nov 15, 2022
Lütke: Most high-value modern opportunities require coordinated teams, not solo builders
“There's very few very, very important things that can be done by individuals anymore on, on, just, we, we've almost mined the entire value space. Like all, basically all the minerals that are, like on the surface have been mined out, right? Like, so, Oh, like,…”
Nov 15, 2022 positive
Nov 15, 2022 negative
Nov 15, 2022
Shopify canceled 60% of active internal projects in early 2022
“And I think we ended up Stopping to work on canceling or not yetting. 60% of the things we were working on which I think everyone was ready for because it was very obvious in first half of twenty-twenty-two that we are going into very different times, right?”
Nov 15, 2022 positive
Lütke: Most professionals should develop range instead of specialization
“Most people should opt for range. Specialists will, like, everyone who knows that there should be a specialist knows they should. You know, like, it's like everyone should be a specialist knows they should be. Like, they, this is a very particular set of chara…”
Nov 15, 2022 positive
Jul 8, 2025 positive
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…”