Tobi Lütke

If they don't and purchase everything from the department store or supermarket, then they will go away over time.

And so it's actually a really, really, really important thing.

I remember everything about the day when I had my first sale.

Again, I built my snowboard business, and it was a gentleman from Pennsylvania who I've never met and I've never talked to and who purchased a snowboard for me.

know it's it's a i have a funny um specific or somewhat unique perspective there because of course when the person purchased from snow devil my snowboard store um he was interacting with software that i wrote so that soft like software you write will never do anything that you didn't um uh

tell it to do outside, unless it has bugs that you're trying to avoid.

After the purchase, the software sends an email to me that there is a purchase that I now have to deal with.

At some point, a couple months earlier, I wrote that email, hoping that at some point the software would have to send it.

You don't know.

It could have been a failure.

I didn't find any software in the market in 2004.

There was nothing for starting Snowdevil that was at all possible to use or that I could afford, so I built the software myself.

So I sit at a coffee shop,

you know staring an email inbox looking at an email that at some point a couple months before I wrote as a template but this time like with all the variables filled in like gentleman Pennsylvania buying this item and I just had this profound moment it's like holy shit I just went from being a builder to being an entrepreneur today right this moment right like it's like

my children think of me as an entrepreneur now and maybe my grandchildren will one day because of that day.

It's like, that's a long distance traveled due to staring at one email.

And so again, it's just been this, I think sort of in my mind,

I just couldn't get that moment out of my mind.

I wanted to share it, so I tried to tell people, but they're like, oh, that's good for you.

People are like, you can sort of describe it, but you can't take people back to that moment.