Lütke: I delayed Shopify's transition to a growth company for 1.5 years
Tobi Lütke · TKP Insights: Making (Even) Better Decisions · Oct 25, 2022 · at 1:12:22
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke reflects on his worst decision, hesitating for 18 months before pivoting Shopify from a lifestyle business to a venture-backed growth company.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The bottleneck on potential for Shopify for like a good year and a half period in which I just dragged my feet making this call.”
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.”