Lütke: Tying employee lifetime earnings to stock grant timing is flawed
Tobi Lütke · Tobi Lütke: Calm Progress · Nov 15, 2022 · at 46:45
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke argues against conventional multi-year equity vesting schedules where market timing determines employee compensation.
0:00 / 0:41exact quote · 41.9s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Shopify's stock price is like this crazy function over time based on, again, sentiment, market value. So tying everyone's lifetime earnings, really, but like to this other thing, which is like wildly swinging compared to the thing that we are all working on. Feels like just such a Pattern violation I think. Right? Like, it's just like a steel man, why this, steel, steel man me the argument that it should affect what, ah, ah, ah, you, like a Shopify employee, ah, makes as lifetime earnings whether or not Russia invaded the Ukraine the week before the grant or not.”
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
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…”
Legacy media holds a structural grudge against technology due to disruption
“Media has a grudge against technology for, frankly, understandable reasons. Like everyone in media works for an institution that probably was negatively affected by tech.”
Lütke: Anti-Nuclear Environmentalism Drove Global Reliance on Fossil Fuels
“A lot of our carbon issue in the world comes from the environmentalists convincing the world that even though we're building a
economy that required nuclear power, we could somehow do it with coal instead, and oil.”
The European energy crisis sparked by Russia may solve climate change
“Europe's dependence on Russia for natural gas pipelines plus the act of aggression by Russia may actually cause climate change to be solved, which is, like, an unbelievable story when you're looking at this.”
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.”