Tobi Lütke

It might be the law as background, or it might be an engineering background, or design, or anything.

I want to work with people who have been clearly excellent at something.

and then spend time adding more skills, like building range and perspective.

I want everyone in the team to be able to, at least in theory, do a reasonably good job switching roles with others in my executive team.

And I want people to be as little beholden to orthodoxy as possible.

In fact, I actually require for all my team members and leaders that at least once a year they go to some international conference or maybe a podcast and talk about how they do their area of the business differently from how other people do, and therefore better.

That's a good topic for me to talk with them about in a one-on-one, but also just keeps them thinking about what opportunities do we have to do things better?

Because nothing is ideal in companies.

We are not actually very good at building companies at this point in day and age.

It's understudied as a field.

And then through these conversations, I try to build trust with them and make this an actual thing we talk about.

We talk about trust as a battery, essentially.

It's something that you charge over time with every interaction.

We do something together, you solve a problem, or you do the thing that you said you would.

that's a small charge on the trust.

And then, I don't know, like you show up late for every single meeting or you kind of phone in on, you know, slides for whatever, whatever.

It loses some trust.

And so I found it very helpful to just go and like,

hey, here's, like, the things that added some trust, and here's the things that you lost some, so we're kind of even right now, and if you just eliminate the ones that lose trust... You say this?

Yeah, I say this.