My Conversation With Tobi Lütke, Co-founder & CEO of Shopify | David Senra

[static] One of the things I admire most about you-

Yeah

... is like you've been running your company for twenty-one years, something like that. I love people that do things for a long time, people that chase excellence, that try to be great. My entire life is founders, right? So during the day, I read biographies of history's greatest founders. I've read, like, four hundred and ten of them, and then at night I hang out with founders. I don't think I have a single friend-

[chuckles]

-that's not an entrepreneur. And then-

Love it

... I'm always asking the founders I most admire-

Yeah

... who are the founders they most admire, and your goddamn name comes up over [chuckles] and over and over again. And what they talk about is that you have very unique ideas on company building and management, and you're, uh, they-

Yeah

... use the word singular a lot. So I wanna kind of like lay out how you think about building companies, building products, building technology, and then, you know, spreading the gospel of, uh, of entrepreneurship. I want to start with one thing that you said. You said, "Companies are technologies themselves." What do you mean by that?

In a lot of ways, like, I mean, uh, like, take the social angle. Like, um, a lot of, like, companies are social technology in, in the sense that they allow us to go all in. Like, the only time you're really allowed to, uh, spend, I don't know, eight-- I, I'm gonna say eight, because that's the right number to say, really, like fucking fourteen hours a day, right? Um, just singularly pursuing a thing is like, um, I, I mean, we want kids to spend this time in school, and that's okay, and then university, you know, dedicate yourself. Um, other than that, like, you can't just, like, n- not have a job, uh, but just be, like, really, really in, into, into things. It's socially not acceptable. So, like, company building turns out to be the perfect excuse. Once you call it a company, it's not like tinkering around anymore with a few ideas, and, um, you get to, you get to explore things. What a company fundamentally allows you to do is, like, just run the counterfactual to the world you see around you, right? Like, you, you, you get to, um, try to build a thing that you think ought to be there, and, um, then you means test it against the market, and if, if the market, uh, um, agrees with you that this thing needs to exist, it, it, it moves energy in the form of money back to you, so you can do more of the thing that, uh, you, you were pursuing all along. And not only that, it's like self-financing. Like, if you find out-- Like, again, I started a company which I didn't think was gonna be, um, uh, like, h- have this very, very big market, and along the way, it just like, the market sort, like, pulled Shopify out of the project I started, essentially. You know, that's an incredible intelligence to, uh, to, to tap into. So you put all these things together, and, um, you say, like, "Well, look, t- companies, the concept of company is not that old." It's like, um, we, we are on a five-hundred-year run and sort of, kind of extra- extracted from things called companies, which weren't, which were actually more like quasi-governments, like the East India Company. And so, um, the modern company is not that old. I find that if you take that mindset that, like, companies are just sort of a path-dependent solution to a social and somewhat legal problems, they allow thousands of people to join the th- your project, and, um, it's called a job, and therefore, everyone accepts this. Um, [chuckles] and, uh, um, uh, you, like, obviously, you can make money, so it's a good deal. And, um, then, um, you can figure out if this counterfactual of yours m- might be correct or needs updating along the way, or any of these kind of things. And you could, at the end of the day, if you are lucky, you, um, work with other people who are really all in and, like, inspiring and, like, taking it further than you ever think. And I just like the whole thing, it's just like, I, I just like, I, I marvel at the institution of a company in a way, like, because if it wouldn't exist for some reason, and someone would propose the whole idea now, it would sound insane. Like, from first principles, none of this makes sense, really.