Uncapped #50 | Tobi Lütke from Shopify
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What is the story behind Tobi Lütke’s early years and why did he start Shopify?
I think in a way like people are o somewhat overestimating the founders of companies. And then they are really massively underestimating what you can do when the founder is still present in a charge. It's my best way to help the mission. Everyone gets to complain about uh uh you know uh a crazy founder, which is like great. Um it's like do do whatever venting you want and then you do uh uh uh very often some of the best work of your uh careers, you know, that's why. why people actually flock to these type of companies because you're surrounded by the other people that you can go on such crazy journeys with.
I am so excited to be here today with Toby, the CEO founder of Shopify. Toby, before we start, I will say um when I was running my company Lattice, and now you were one of the founders that I sort of most looked up to. And so many things about the way you operate, the way you've run your company, the changes you've made over time. It's the top of the top for me. And so I feel super lucky to be doing this with you. Before we get into AI and Shopify, I want to like learn a little bit about you, just and more like your psychology. You've been running Shopify for over 20 years. And from what I see about you, it seems like you love what you do. And it seems like you're as energized by it as ever. It seems like you are as passionate about the future as ever.
And I think that's really hard. Like I think having like life's work is sort of like this romantic dream for a lot of people. And I just think it's very hard to do in practice because people either fall out of love with their work, they get bored, they get tired. And on top of that, I think being a founder, CEO of like a, you know, a big company is not even the easiest type of thing to have life's work. You know, like my work now as a VC would be much easier to do for 30 years. So I guess I'm interested in how you are able to bring and seemingly grow sort of your love for what you're doing after two decades.
That's such a wonderful question. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast. I'm super excited for you to get to get to do this. Um part of the reason why I wanted to start a company is because I have found before in my teens that I have an extraordinarily hard uh time learning um things that I don't have basically experienced the problem that they solve. Like it's just like the way in like in school, how Marv was taught basically here's just sort of like the The steps for to like I actually had to really go and like figure out, okay, well, um, what exactly is uh trigonometry useful for? Yeah.
Um, and uh I I just had to like I started with um tricking myself into finding uh like a useful uh problem that involved trigonometry, after which I felt I could learn it significantly faster than uh Like everyone else, because I just was so motivated, right? Like Karl Poppers said, one of the joys of life and one of the best things in life is like to find a beautiful problem that uh might occupy you all your of your life um trying to solve it. And if you're so unlucky to um uh at some point do solve it, that it will have uh plenty of uh delightful problem children that you can dig into, right? First of all, I think that's a beautiful way of thinking about um. um lives work. But also it just works specifically well to uh for me because I love learning things.
I love challenging myself. I find myself to myself very, very interesting. I just like because almost my favorite thing is when I want to do something and I can't because it just like you kind of find the limits. And then you can have this con conversation with yourself about What you know, because there's a very simple recipe to success. It just that everyone I think sort of intuits or or or knows, but maybe not spend too much enough time sort of following through on, which is success is really, really simple. It's just you have to figure out what it costs and then you have to be willing to pay it, right? Like and very rarely is this comes in the form of um um uh money.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the story behind Tobi Lütke’s early years and why did he start Shopify?
0:00–7:28
2
How did Tobi and his team learn to build products that people love?
7:28–15:15
3
Why does originality matter to Shopify’s product philosophy?
15:15–22:00
4
How do founder‑led companies move faster through big technological shifts?
22:00–29:30
5
What does the AI transition look like at Shopify and how is it changing the business?
29:30–36:49
6
How is Shopify using AI to raise the global standard of living for entrepreneurs?
36:49–43:58
7
What impact does AI have on talent perception and hiring at Shopify?
43:58–51:07
8
What books and habits keep Tobi curious and continuously learning?
51:07–57:58