Tobi Lutke – Building a Modern Business

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:28)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:53)
My guest today is Tobi Lutke, the co-founder and CEO of Shopify. This is both a timely and evergreen conversation. Timely as the world has moved aggressively digital in the past two months and Shopify powers so much of digital commerce.
Evergreen because while we touch on Covid and the Shopify business, this is much more a conversation on business and personal principles, learning, design and growth. Tobi is one of the CEOs I look up to most for the type of company he is building and for the way he conducts himself. We discuss business focus, why video games help you learn the power of attention, what design means for products and organizations and much more. Please enjoy my conversation with Tobi Lutke.
Tobi, thank you so much for joining me today. I've been so excited for this conversation. You along with some of the other public CEOs I've had on like Daniel Ek and Jeff Lawson are the kind of builder that I aspire to be. And so I'm going to bombard you with business strategy, video game, life questions all over the map because it is Tuesday, 28th of April and Shopify just as of this morning has launched a new initiative, a new app on the phone called the Shop app. I just think that would be a neat place to explore and begin to discuss some of your principles and ideas. Maybe you could begin by just telling us what that app is and how it continues your mission of serving merchants.

**Tobi Lutke** (3:15)
Yeah. Thanks, Patrick. Thanks for having me. I love the podcast. So a great honor to have me, but I get to be on here. So we launched this shop app this morning and it's a very new thing for us because it's a brand for first time is a brand for consumers from Shopify. Like Shopify was a very business to business focused company. Our core audience is of course entrepreneurs. The company exists because we are trying to massively increase the success rate of new form businesses and especially in the retail space. That's our mission.
And because of that, we worked with entrepreneurs going through a process of building businesses a lot. Most of the people we understand.
And shop now is an app on your phone. It came out of an app that's already been very popular. It was called Arrive, which had about 16 million installs. It's a package tracker. And we took Arrive and merged it with a couple of other things at the same time. Probably one of our most popular products is a product now called ShopPay. You might see we're sort of renaming a whole lot of things underneath shop something.
And ShopPay is like if you've ever bought something from an independent online store, that was in Amazon, and you might have gotten like a code at the beginning of checkout, the phone told you to enter and then it skipped right through the entire checkout. That's ShopPay.