Tobi Lütke’s leadership playbook: Playing infinite games, operating from first principles, and maximizing human potential (founder and CEO of Shopify)

**Tobi Lütke** (0:00)
Your Podcast is a podcast by a builder for other builders. Here's the most interesting question I think people can ask builders. What is your energy source? My energy source is dissatisfaction with status quo. Like, so many books are about technology leading to a dystopia. Like, no one who really thinks about this would want to be born into a world 20 years before today. I think today is the dystopia of the future. It behooves us to try to build the kinds of progress that lead in towards progress.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:28)
There's a couple of quotes along these lines I've seen that describe the way you think about this stuff. If most people are doing it a certain way, I by default don't want to do it that way.

**Tobi Lütke** (0:34)
There's an aesthetic in the world that exists, which is that business people dress in suit and tie. They are speaking much more sophisticated than I do, usually without an accent. They usually have a stick and show dramatically at the chart that is behind them. How much is that aesthetic overlapped with outperformance? Pessimism sounds extremely sophisticated. Optimism always sounds dumb or at least naïve. The most powerful, unquantifiable things in the world of business are fun and delight.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:04)
I don't know of any other company that operates where the founder has this 100-year vision of where the product needs to go and working backwards from that.

**Tobi Lütke** (1:11)
I talk about look in the future and then think backwards a lot. It's like, what would we want to have done 20 years ago on this? We have very long-term plans. At 100 years, you can't talk about the software project, but you can't talk about the mission itself, whatever things that will survive for 80 years that are left on this particular time frame. Entrepreneurship is just precious. Shopify exists basically to make entrepreneurship more common.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:35)
Is there anything you want to leave listeners with?

**Tobi Lütke** (1:37)
I really think that there is not a single person on this planet who is even close to being at their maximum potential. Reminding people of their own potential constantly is actually a wonderful thing to do.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:53)
Today, my guest is Tobi Lütke. Tobi is a man who needs no introduction, so I'm going to keep this very short and get you right to this jam-packed conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Tobi Lütke. This episode is brought to you by Cinch, the customer communications cloud. Here's the thing about digital customer communications. Whether you're sending marketing campaigns, verification codes or account alerts, you need them to reach users reliably. That's where Cinch comes in. Over 150,000 businesses, including eight of the top ten largest tech companies globally, use Cinch's API to build messaging, email and calling into their products. And there's something big happening in messaging that product teams need to know about. Rich Communication Services, or RCS. Think of RCS as SMS 2.0. Instead of getting text from a random number, your users will see your verified company name and logo without needing to download anything new. It's a more secure and branded experience. Plus you get features like interactive carousels and suggested replies. And here's why this matters. US carriers are starting to adopt RCS. Cinch is already helping major brands send RCS messages around the world. And they're helping Lenny's Podcast listeners get registered first, before the rush hits the US market. Learn more and get started at cinch.com/lenny. That's sinch.com/lenny.
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Tobi, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Tobi Lütke** (4:23)
I'm glad to be here. I'm excited for our conversation.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:26)
I've listened to so many of your other interviews. I've talked to a bunch of people that work for you. I want to try to do something a little different. There's a couple of themes. There's basically two themes that emerged over and over and over as I've listened to you share advice and interview and in talking to people that work for you. One is thinking from first principles. The other is maximizing human potential. I'm just going to plant these seeds for now. I'm going to not ask about these directly. I'm going to come at these from the side with the many questions that I have for you. And the first question I have is something that I've heard people describe at Shopify called the Tobi Tornado.