Tobi Lütke, Shopify

**David Senra** (0:02)
One of the things I admire most about you is that you've been running your company for 21 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 410 of them. And then at night, I hang out with founders. I don't think I have a single friend that's not an entrepreneur. And then I'm always asking the founders I most admire, who are the founders they most admire? And your goddamn name comes up over and over and over again. And what they talk about is that you have very unique ideas on company building and management. And they use the word singular a lot. So I want to kind of like lay out how you think about building companies, building products, building technology, and then, you know, spreading the gospel of entrepreneurship. I want to start with one thing that you said. You said companies are technologies themselves. What do you mean by that?

**Tobi Lütke** (0:53)
In a lot of ways, like, I mean, like, take the social angle. Like, a lot of the companies are social technology in the sense that they allow us to go all in. Like, the only time you are really allowed to spend, I don't know, eight, I'm going to say eight because that's the right number to say, really, like fucking 14 hours a day, right? Just singularly pursuing a thing is like, I mean, we want kids to spend this time in school and that's okay. And then university, you know, dedicate yourself. Other than that, like, you can't just like not have a job, but just be like really, really into things. It's socially not acceptable. So like company building turns out to be a perfect excuse. Once you call it a company, it's not like tinkering around anymore with your ideas. And you get to explore things. Well, a company fundamentally allows you to do this, like just run the counterfactual to the world you see around you, right? Like you get to try to build a thing that you think ought to be there. And then you mean to test it against the market. And if the market agrees with you that this thing needs to exist, it moves energy in the form of money back to you. So you can do more of the thing that you were pursuing all along. And normally that it's like self-financing. Like if you find out, like again, I started a company which I didn't think was going to be like, I have this very, very big market and along the way, it just like the market pulled Shopify out of the project I started essentially. You know, that's an incredible intelligence to tap into. So you put all these things together and you say like, well, look, companies, the concept of companies is not that old. It's like we are on a 500 year run and sort of kind of extracted from things called companies, which were actually more like quasi governments, like the East India Company. And so 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 social and somewhat legal problems, they allow thousands of people to join your project and it's called a job and therefore everyone accepts this.
And obviously you can make money, so it's a good deal. And then you can figure out if this counterfactual of yours 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 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 is just like I just like 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.

**David Senra** (3:41)
Well, I heard you say something that was fascinating, really piqued my interest when you're like, we do not know how to build companies yet. All companies are terrible, including mine, which you said, and you know, that's hilarious when somebody's, you're running a 200 billion plus dollar company. And you think that in the next 20 years, we're going to look back at what we were doing at this point and be embarrassed by what we were doing. Why do you think that?