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 14 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
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: 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?”
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?”
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 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 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”
Lütke: Shopify executives receive Parkinson's Law to help combat bureaucratic absurdity
“This is why one of the books I give to my, ah, executives is, like, is, is Parkinson's Law, which is a wonderful eighty-page read on, like, how silly companies end up being”
Lütke: Shopify interviews candidates on their life stories to predict mindsets
“Shopify hires through ah, we talk about just your life story a lot, and I feel like we can find a lot of predictive artifacts in, in a life story about which kind of type of pursuit you're on.”
Lütke: I delayed Shopify's transition to a growth company for 1.5 years
“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.”
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 …”
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…”
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…”