20VC: Shopify's Tobi Lütke on How AI is a Scapegoat for Mass Layoffs & What Will Labour Markets Be in the Future | Why We Need More Scrutiny on Charitable Giving, Governments are Bad at What They Do and Trump Derangement Syndrome in Canada

**Tobi Lütke** (0:00)
People who fear of losing and people who fear of winning are clearly going to look at things much more short term. The world really needs to understand that the people who build companies are fundamentally crazy people. Look, I'm a glorious mess. All the aesthetics around what people believe to be good leadership comes from movies. I have this job, so other people can have the jobs I wish I could have. There's nothing better in the world than being a trusted public company. None of the people who are doing jobs that are just tasks for other people have good jobs. The more wealth and resources an entity or even an individual has, the more deserving of scrutiny they are. What really sucks in the world is that we are prioritizing things that sound good over things that work. Giving money is not virtuous unless it causes the right things. We have too much charity dollars. The problem with charity dollars is they can't be given to anything that has a self-healing fitness function. I think great leaders must be exothermic and must be a heat source for the company. I have not looked at the ticker in April. Many of our best engineers have not written court this year, ever since December. Like December changed everything. Like Opus changed everything.

**Harry Stebbings** (1:07)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now I've known Tobi Lütke for years. He's the founder and CEO of Shopify, $160 billion public company. Honestly, I've watched a load of his podcasts. They're great. This podcast is a Tobi you've never seen before. He was incredibly honest, very funny, and pretty controversial. It's a spicy show. Strap in. This is an absolute banger. But before we dive into the show today, did you know the industry average for booking a business trip is 45 minutes? That's a massive waste of your team's time. Well, with Nivan, your employees can book a trip in just seven on average. Nivan is the AI-powered travel and expense platform designed for companies that value efficiency. It drives real business impact through high employee adoption and automated policy control. Now, the built-in AI approves in-policy bookings and blocks the rest automatically. This allows finance teams to stop chasing receipts and skip the month and chaos. And you get this real-time visibility that can save your company up to 15% on your travel budget. And that's why leaders like Visa, Stripe, Figma and even Anthropic rely on Nivan these days. Go to nivan.com/20vctoday to see for yourself. And you'll get a chance to win two business class flights anywhere in continental US. No purchase necessary, rules apply. Head over to nivan.com/20vc now. Once Nivan simplifies the travel, Airwally simplifies the spend behind it. Founders, let's get real about the growth tax. You've raised VC funding and you're scaling globally. And it's no longer about shipping product. It's about orchestrating operations across continents. But suddenly, your payments and finance stack is choking your growth. You're logging into lots of different banking portals, waiting days for transfers and reporting across entities. It's operational drag and it's at your scale. Airwallets costing millions. That's why I'm so excited to partner with Airwallets. Airwallets are more than just a banking alternative to HSBC or Citi. Airwallets brings you an intelligent financial operating system that powers how global businesses operate and grow, allowing you to manage and automate banking, treasury, payments and spend. The most exciting part for me, they're heavily investing in agentic finance. If you're scaling globally, you need a banking and finance platform that's borderless, real-time and intelligent. Check out Airwallets today and see how they're helping thousands of businesses like Canva, McLaren and Deal. Scale at airwallets.com/20vc.
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**Tobi Lütke** (4:38)
You have now arrived at your destination.