The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 81 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
The next generation of humans will definitively achieve biological immortality
“Hey, the future's fantastic, and we'll probably become immortal relatively soon, and all these kind of things and maybe not us, but our children definitely will.”
Lütke: Traditional product roadmaps are overrated versus dynamic prioritization
“I actually think even concepts like roadmaps and just generally plans are actually overrated. I think like a road, the best possible roadmap is have a very clear guide view of what matters to your merchants. Have a super strong model of your own capabilities a…”
Lütke: The best thing founders can do is subtraction
“The best thing founders can do is subtraction. This is surprising, but, like, it's the reason, like, it's much, much, much easier to add things than it is to remove things.”
Satya Nadella executed subtraction at Microsoft better than most founders
“Nadella has done it at Microsoft in a phenomenal way, like, potentially better than many founder CEOs can. But it's about probably 10 times harder to do or a hundred times harder.”
Shopify intentionally manages out employees who fail to take risks
“People actually are performance mashed out, euphemism to if they don't take risks. So it's actually for your career, a job fair is actually more risky to not aim high.”
Lütke: Someone else should run Shopify if it only acquires innovation
“I, if Shopify would turn under my watch into that, I think someone else could do my job better.”
Lütke: Tech startup creation was easier during the mobile and SaaS convergence
“A lot of multi-billion dollar companies in, in technologies are, like, come from, there is sort of three, four, five year period of startup creation, right? Which was this, Extreme Goldilocks zone of everything was changing. Mobile, SaaS, internet, broadband r…”
Lütke: Commercializing internal ideas from large tech firms is great entrepreneurship
“I think a great entrepreneurship is actually extracting amazing innovative ideas out of now much, much, much more innovative larger companies than existed previously and bringing them to other fields, and I think that's a good form factor for entrepreneurship.”
Lütke: Tying employee lifetime earnings to stock grant timing is flawed
“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. F…”
Lütke: Prioritizing innovation makes every company problem 10x harder
“Everyone pays lip service to innovation, but innovation costs you a lot. Innovation is a, if you want this, every single, like, solving any single problem in a company is tenix as hard as it is if you don't.”
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…”
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?”
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…”
Tobi Lütke: Standard grant processes favor people with spare time over impact
“The problem is, in any other case, you reward the most prepared, and the most prepared are usually the people with the most time, and they with the most time are not usually people working on important things, right?”
Lütke: Charging for Shopify's best features would diminish the company over 10 years
“I think Shopify All In, like, over the next 10 years, we would be a very diminished company for not giving our best feature, like, to everyone to make it, like, a fundamental, like You know, like, flag in the ground about, hey, you come to Shopify because we w…”
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…”
Lütke: Entrepreneurship is declining across North America
“Entrepreneurship is actually tanking across North America.”
Shopify provides for $29 what Jeff Bezos built from scratch
“What Shopify allows People to do is like have, you know, for 29 dollars a month get something that gets them pretty close to having all the things that Jeff had to build for himself when he started Amazon, right?”
Secondary-market founders fail by copying Silicon Valley management books
“So the problem, I think, what makes it rarer that companies, great copies are created outside of them, is partly because then Secondary market people read the books from primary market people, they get the wrong lessons.”
Lütke: Secondary-market tech companies should hire for potential over current skill
“One of the most, like, biggest differences in primary, in secondary places is, if I hire someone, we are probably, like, the chance that we are gonna still work together in a decade from now is super high. It just, it's a different, it's just different in this…”
Training junior developers is a bad investment in Silicon Valley
“Where in Silicon Valley, where, you know, like, some companies are sort of pushing in their R&D teams, 12 months average tenure for staff, like, that is a silly investment to make.”
Lütke: Only complex problems remain for modern companies to solve
“I think the world we are actually spending our time in, like, we've almost built throughout the last hundred years, every company that solves a complicated problem. And so the only kinds of problems that are now left are what's usually referred to as complex p…”
Companies decline when they over-optimize for easily measurable operational metrics
“I found there's a lot of great companies that suddenly became not great because Through, especially when they are founder-led, they were comfortable in a world of complexity where things aren't so measurable and so clear but where you optimize for the holistic…”
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…”
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.”
Lütke: Root Causes Are Rare Because the World Operates in Feedback Loops
“Root causes are really rare, and again, events don't happen in sequence, and are cause and effect all the way through. The world is loopy it's not, you know, and everything, like, if something is bad, and you want to change it, there's usually something that r…”
Lütke: Internal focus on stock price indicates poor company health
“No one in a company works on the stock if things are going well. I think if people start working on stock, things are actually, like, that should be a sign that things are going pretty poorly in the company.”
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?”
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.”
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,…”
Lütke: Tech should not reflexively impose complex equity instruments on employees
“For something as important as compensation, I think we should not press into service reflexively such highly financialized derivative, like, the instruments of enormous complexity and huge Variance of outcome without there being an agreement with, between both…”
Shopify lets employees choose their own cash and equity compensation split
“These switch to a very simple system where everyone gets a number. This is what you make every year. And so everyone agrees what, like, the ground truth is of compensation. And then you can say, we want this in cache. Do you want this in store options?”
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…”
Lütke: Very few large companies have ever attempted sustained innovation
“I think it's not unique, but it's probably single, maybe low double digits of companies have ever attempted it. Most companies are just trying to be, like, build, like, find their market fit, their core competency, and then play a defensive game around this, w…”
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?”
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…”
Lütke: A company can never un-VC fund itself
“The problem is that the, you know, you can never un-VC fund yourself. So when a decision is something that you can't take back, then it's worth really, really understanding.”
Lütke learned the most about building businesses from playing StarCraft
“I think I actually learned most about building businesses from playing StarCraft.”
Lütke: Shopify exists as a counterforce to retail centralization
“Shopify is kind of the counterforce to this centralization, at least in the world of world of commerce. We want to make it so simple to partake in entrepreneurship, to like add your own voice to sort of what's going on in, in, in the world. And so, so we want …”
Lütke walked away from top VC term sheets requiring Silicon Valley relocation
“I had term sheets by all the dream venture capitalists that sort of however stipulated that I would have to relocate the company to, you know, Silicon Valley or a place like this, which I then walked away from.”
Lütke: Silicon Valley can support two to three breakout companies concurrently
“It seems like Silicon Valley can support, like, two to potentially three breakout companies at a time, which is not true about any other place, but that's the difference.”
Lütke: Shopify places domain experts in support roles, not group heads
“And if we bring in experts in, in, in topics that are important, like when we built a payment gateway, we really needed people who understood the payment, payments industry. They're not the people who run the group. They are the people who support those people…”
Lütke: Most corporate processes force people to act against common sense
“Like, there's three kinds of process. There's a kind of process that makes things that were previously impossible to do possible. That's good. And there's a kind of process that makes something that was previously possible significantly simpler, which is also …”