YouSaid · the spoken record

Tobi Lütke

lines on the record: 123
first: 2019-02-07
most recent: 2019-02-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And this goes beyond the tools into the approach, I think. And this is actually where I feel like I learned the most from the entrepreneurs, because these are really the best who are coming. Actually, we had first-time entrepreneurs win categories, but they always had some kind of fantastic insight that they're kind of adding to this exploration about how to build companies in this digital age. So even the Kickstarter folks, one thing, the question I always had is like, was Kickstarter itself valuable or was it that they had to put a certain video on their website where the founders of a company had to explain why this product needed to exist? It seems like such a, like, why does not every product in the world have the inventor declare why they've”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just I think actually, which goes back to sort of a thing that really excites me about the effect that come from all these kind of things, not just was this an entrepreneurial success story for them. And they got a $100,000 check invent. They also quadrupled or even beyond the amount of professional bookbinders in the San Francisco Bay region. Again, like this was something like this is an area which had a lot of book binding talent when that was an industry and that's not an industry anymore because it's just not done manually anymore. But they got people out of retirement to come back making these iPad cases and just a little industry exists. And I think these are just the stories which I find so great.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Patrick and Craig, two brilliant entrepreneurs from San Francisco who Then they did, I think this was around the launch of iPad. And so they realized these iPads need cases just like the phones. And so they got together with some traditional book binders and made some mold skin looking beautiful. It was really just wood and whatever mold skin is a case for iPads. And I think they gave sort of flyers to everyone waiting in line around the Apple store before iPad got launched. So people wrote about it. And they were one of competitors in the competition. They wanted a fantastic story. There's a later picture of President Obama with his Dodo case, which of course they successfully and everyone, one of their marketing campaigns.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yeah, so we launched this in 2010 and we had an amazing winner at the end with DodoCase, right? It was so cool. Can you tell us?”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No joke, every state, even every province in Canada has completely different laws for this. Everyone will come and ask, hey, is this a game of chance here or is this a game of skill? Which is actually an interesting question for entrepreneurs. The intellectually honest answer is chance, I mean, I try to never get confused about this. Like Shopify is enormously successful, but it's like 99% chance, right? Like you can predict. So, but of course when you're talking to the lawyers,”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a huge success. Exactly. You were like super confident that it would be a big success from the beginning. I thank you for this because I want.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Startup in Canada putting up something that's beyond like every business plan competition in terms of price money, right? It was a pretty stunning amount.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's funny, yeah. Like sometimes these things are just brand in your mind because I think we both realized we were egging each other on to make something big. And what ended up, what we ended up doing is said, okay. Going to take the last $100,000 in the and just put it up as a competition and say whoever is going to build the biggest business, like from starting now in the next six months, is going to just get the check. Just at this point, I said, this is either going to work and then we'll make the money doing the competition to then give to people or companies bankrupt anyways, in which case I'll deal with that in some other way. But we did, and I think through some context of you, I think you introduced me to Laura. The New York Times ended up talking about it because it was surprising. It's like tiny.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's always all these kind of reasons. And I think our Welcome Theory was we just should test this by really incentivizing people and to which I said we should, I don't know, we should give away like a MacBook Pro or something like that. And then you did what you always did in our phone calls. It's like, like, Toby, first of all, it's way too nerdy and only you care about MacBook Pros. And then second, if you want anyone to notice you need to go like 100 expat in terms of price or something like this, which is probably easier to say on your side”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Explored form of what you can do online. People should know about this, that this is what some people do and we should obviously tell people that that's what people do on Shopify and Shopify is good for this kind of thing. We had this conversation. I was at my college. I was actually on a boat when we had this conversation. We're like, you know, how can we overcome this built-in fear of failure that everyone's running around with? So many people come to me, come to you and say one day I'm going to start my own business. It's like, okay, what about today? What's wrong with today?”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sorts of things didn't work like you asked me earlier things that didn't work, like the company kind of didn't work, right? It wasn't like I had the numbers and people were selling things and it was valuable to them, but there was no real business being built around it. And it kind of all just didn't function. My father-in-law was gracious enough to give me a check every week for running Paywall. So at that stage, and he said he would do that for a certain time. And by the end of it, we kind of have to figure out what the heck to do. At this point, we were talking, and the reason why, again, we see the world in a similar way. You wrote for work week. But what attracted me in this book is what you were talking about, you know, just building a business and then actually doing other things. I was seeing people doing this on Shopify, but was like, this is under”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's go back to where it's come from because this is, I mean, so relevant to, I think, two of us. Well, certainly to me, I don't know if it's relevant to you, but you were involved. So, this was 2009. So at this point, Shopify was completely running on Fumes. It's like my, we were completely, it just...”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had to post a $30,000 bond to get a merchant account when I started Snowdevil. That was all the capital I had, yeah But both kind of points of friction are everywhere. Like, I mean, I don't want to make this Nat, but Shopify is not the solution to this problem because it's a much more global and bigger problem. But the retail world is one of the most accessible parts of entrepreneurship. And that's really all Shopify is try to take the learning curve of partaking in entrepreneurship, building online businesses, and make it as flat as possible so as many people can succeed, right? That's what we've been working on for the last, what is it, 14 years now?”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I need to go for and there's quotas in many places and you can't because for all these reasons. So that's kind of one of our things that probably people have to have a look at. But the other one is just friction. How difficult is it? Like how many things do you have to understand to start an online business? You build a supplement business back in the day. Whatever the things you had to learn.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is actually a real problem in the United States, but it's actually a problem everywhere, is licensing. It's a crazy situation that I can get a laptop and start $15 billion Shopify and not need to ask no one. But if I want to become a hairdresser, I need to get a license for it, right?”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. Fitch, I think, should be studied. I mean, one thing if you look at this completely from an economics perspective, if you think that we need to provide employment to people, you should want a couple mega companies are not going to employ everyone, right? I think everyone understands this. We need millions of 10, 20 people companies, SMBs. Almost everyone is employed by small businesses if you look at the actual numbers. So with small business going away, that's definitely a force into the opposite direction. So, how would you do it? I mean, one thing is.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you kind of have to clock in in the top percentile of a field or at least an intersection of multiple fields to even partake in entrepreneurship. And I think that's not good. I mean, if you would give me like, hey, here's like two versions of a world choose one, one in which entrepreneurship is common and easy and straightforward. And one way it isn't, like, I mean, who does who takes the one where it isn't easy, right?”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I would knew. It's like, I know some contributing factors. Like one thing is we just don't need too many copies of everything anymore. Like back in the day, you probably... Visited, you lived in a smaller community, you visited Big One, you saw, hey, here's like. What, like certain kind of hardware store, you know, some kind of business you've never seen before, you say, hey, I might be able to do that back home and that's a new company, right? Now everything's franchised and like centralized and it's a lot harder to do these kind of businesses. But the same thing is going on on internet as well, right? The internet is as much as it can be a democratizing force, it really benefits centralization. We have one social network, it's one search engine and so on. It's just harder to start businesses.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just general companies that of all classes in the United States over time, once you look at the graphs, they're looking like their tank. Especially since 2005, sort of 2006, the beginning, very beginning of financial crisis suddenly fell off a cliff. So, why is that”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We see millions of success stories and attempts at success stories, right? This is honestly the most interesting part of Shopify is really we see this, right? Let's actually zoom out for a second here on an entrepreneurship topic because it's really dear to me, but it's also at a state that a lot of people don't really quite appreciate. Entrepreneurship is in big crisis right now. It's a complete counter-narrative to what most people think. Right now, new company formation is at the lowest points ever been. Gen X started a lot less companies, a lot fewer companies than its parents. And millennials are lower yet. So it's the least entrepreneurial generation so far. And the numbers are going, like companies that are, you know, like all numbers are downward spread.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But of course, you can't understand the 80% of every field. There's too many. So you'll follow your interest pretty automatically. And then you find out exactly what you just said. And this is something it's worth looking into the Shopify universe. The people were really successful are the people who usually have some multiple skill sets and combine them into some kind of new product. It's like sort of an obvious example is like boosted bots, right? Like, hey, here's like electric engineers who also like skateboarding. Let's combine those two things by putting a battery into the skateboards. And so it's really, really, really hard to be the best in the world at a single discipline. But as soon as you start overlaying like three different interests, you make Pokemon inspired jewelry or something. You can make the best Pokemon inspired jewelry in the world pretty quickly.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, doesn't take that long to. I mean, you wrote an entire book on this, so I'm obviously not trying to convince you on this. But it doesn't take long to understand the first 80% of any number of fields, right?”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I could not agree more with you. And it's interesting because I almost have two phases to my life in this regard, right? Because I really was trying to become Don't know if I was trying to become the best programmer in the world, but I certainly was making a bid for it. My life was completely revolved around writing code, understanding more of it, and just being very, very good at it. I was going for mastery anyways. And then this situation that happened where, again, I had to pause that word and have to go into business and I ended up really, really liking so many aspects of it. I really pivoted to someone who's going to try to get, I would like to understand 100% of a field as quickly as possible understand 80% of every field, right? And that's, I like it way better on this side. And I'm internally thankful for having realized visits at some point because it is...”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going on a journey doing hard things surrounded by friends, right? Company building is one of those things. Often travel is another one. Sports are really good at these kind of things. I would love Jocko's opinion on if war is like that.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which gets really weird. But that's never one of us kind of things. There's sort of awakening to a growth mindset is another one of us life events, I think. And so these events matter because what you're building eventually is like some kind of path that allows you to wake up smarter every day. And if you get there, really, really powerful things happen. Suddenly, jumping into like a completely new job that you have no qualification for suddenly doesn't sound scary anymore. I mean, it probably still does a little bit. But the challenge and the thrill of it, of this sounds real, I could fail. I now have to grow to make this work actually become hugely motivating. And I think... That one of the most amazing things that anyone can go through can do in their lives is to variation on the theme of”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think that one of a really, really fun things about an experience like an entrepreneurial journey, if a company, the careers we have, the books we read, if they end up being pointed in sort of a direction that allows us to minimize the difference between that person we will meet and the person we are at that point of time, I think that's time well spent. And there are some key, I think, events in one's life that have to go through it. Like at some point, hopefully you realize that the people around you are very different, that you have some unexplained traits in you, which some of them being becoming big strengths and some of them are weaknesses and you double down on your strengths and you try to work around your weaknesses. And by the way, later in life, it might actually flip which ones is.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That makes sense. Yeah, because here's why all these things matter. I once read that I don't particularly believe in hell, but I like this definition of it. Hell is meeting the best version that you could have become at the end of your life.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not something you can overcompletely overcome, but it's something that just having the awareness is really powerful. And also, if you have direct reports in a company, even if that book does nothing for you, it will allow you to be a much better lead to those people. Because it's like just priming you to detect fixed mindset talk in other people and pointing it out is hugely beneficial.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a big fan of a book. It at least talks you for the theory. And what I've observed is even with very, very high, super successful executives who come to Shopify or have worked at Shopify for a very long time. And they end up reading the book. And they said, you know what? I was actually a fixed mindset on all these three things. And it's like it really irks me now. It's just really funny the way it just sort of wakes you up to this reality that we kind of all have it.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that it's a really, really good question. I wish I had a better answer. I do find that Carol Direct's original book called Mindset is probably still the best source.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Teacher appearing, right? And once people acquire this growth mindset on at least a number of different trades. Usually they arrive to like they make it very, very far and they can have these like 10 years of a career in one year on the war clock. And it's a wonderful kind of thing when it happens.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think this is so fruitful of a discovery, especially early in your career, right? Because again, a lot of the people we hire, like average age of Shopify is 30, 29, I think. We get to people very early in their career. And because the thing that we want to accomplish, and this is really the goal of all of internal programs, is we want to take people from a find out what parts of what kind of areas they have a fixed mindset on and try to get people to become, to acquire growth mindset, right? Just think of their intelligence as something that can be trained. Think of their skill as a programmer, not as something static. And when someone comes and tells you that there's something you could have done better, that's not someone finding out that you're not as good as you thought. That's actually...”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that interesting? Well, but Enneagram has worked very, very well for us. In our internal system, you can actually see the enneagram of everyone else and it tells you what nuances that means for how to work together, for instance So that's one. But the other thing, I think why personality tests are interesting is they, it doesn't even matter which one it is. After you kind of do one, it already kind of teaches you, hey, wait a second. The way I'm wired is different from the people around me.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If a company, like different companies have different sort of personality trade testing kind of things that they like Shopify is very partial to a system called Eniagram.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so I mean, this is the executive team which is directly my team of the people who have the highest requirements of and we have worked together for the longest. So I think I don't think it's like this everywhere in Shopify.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feedback is a gift because it is, it clearly is. It's not meant to hurt. It's meant to move things forward, right? Like to demystify something for you. I want Frank feedback from everyone. I get it over, funny enough, I don't know if you know, like you might have a thought about this. I tend to get it from the Germans at Shopify more frequently than anyone else. So there might be a cultural component in here too. So, but yeah, so this like. Did this call it crusher of egos, or get your ego crushed? That sounds so dramatic.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we have a lot of these opportunities because of that to make some slight edits to the normal psyche, right? So feedback is a gift. It's not a simple sentence, but really is not the way most people think about feedback, right?”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so in a place like this ends up for better or for worse in a world where people don't actually go having careers at companies anymore because the way to have a career is actually jumping between companies so your new position is always like slightly higher. And so while our cities aren't like that, we assume that we have these long tenure relationships and therefore Shopify can invest in the people who are part of Shopify in a completely different way. So we have a big amount of, we probably hired all business coaches in Canada and beyond at this point to be full-time employees of Shopify because we're investing so much in the people. We hire people on future high potential and then try to get them there as fast as possible because that actually works for us for people and works for Shopify fantastic.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gets longer. If I hire someone through this very intricate hiring process that we have, there's sort of an understanding that the chance of us still working together in 10 years is actually really high, right? I mean, it's a commitment from both sides and the company needs to be worth working for for 10 years. That's what I work on day in, day out. But because of that, We can have a very different relationship than in a place where the expected tenure is 18 months. In an 18 months place, I really have to kind of access every good idea and the productive power of, let's say, an engineer or so immediately. They need to be productive.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's hugely important. So one thing that's so neat about Shopify is again, let's get a little bit back to this AutobahCAD, I think, right? Clearly, as you said, this is off the beaten track of startup world. Ended up being a phenomenally good place to build a world-class company, but for reasons that were also not clear to me when I started there. Couple of things that happen when you're not in Silicon Valley, right? Or in a nod, let's call it a primary company creation city.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is like a big game, right? Like we need to be very good at what we are doing, otherwise, we cannot build Shopify. And so I think these things are in the way. So yes, I want people to be impactful. Again, if a hard object collides with a soft object, then suddenly there's no crater to prove it. And so I want people to take their sort of mental state in their own hands and just say, okay, I'm going to learn how to be intrinsically reminded that I'm good at what I'm doing and not have to rely on other people constantly telling me.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Productive character traits, then talk about the thing you want to talk about and then figure out some way of afterwards talking about something highly positive again. So, you know, that's the sort of standard formula. And I can do it, but I don't think that the highest performing teams in the world should spend time doing this to each other. I think there's a level of progression that comes if you're part of one of the teams. And again, we are one of the bigger technology companies in the world. Certainly, I think we're fastest growing SaaS company on the market. And so, you know, it's not like I want to compare too much to sports because sports is sports as sports.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which said that he wanted everyone to edit his pages just to make them better. And he didn't want people to apologize for it and try to politically give him credit or something. He said, I'm going to take 100% responsibility for my own mental state. You cannot make me unhappy by just giving me feedback in some way. So just give me the raw feedback without all the shit sandwich around. And I love that. I just would like to run my team on Cronkas Rules because I think it's just there's so much time spent. Like first you have to talk about weather and then, you know, like a really nice sweater. Exactly. So you have to find something. And then ideally address some very...”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I want to register that quote came up in 2015. And since then, I have learned. But Levetta should translate something like this is shit into, is this really the best way we can do this? But it's the same thing in a different form, really. Here's something I've always a Wikipedia, right? Like, I hope I get the name right. A specific editor from the early days of Wikipedia who I think he had a handle called Cronker. And he declared something called Cronker's Rules.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would be good to have some sort of obvious examples here. But I mean, at almost every good decision starts somehow bad first, right? There have been we've made almost every mistake in the book, but we are also the kind of company that wants to in a way. It's been so important to me to build a company that is unafraid of experimentation and where failure. Within Shopify, we don't even, I think we succeeded in this. We eliminated the talk of the term failure. We call it the successful discovery of something that did not work. Because I think it really changes people's disposition to it. So what did we do wrong?”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is exactly the situation. You're just adding to the picture. That's perfectly accurate. Um... Yeah, so I talk for FEM, I learned a lot. I thought Somehow I was endearing in some way because I actually did keep contact with a lot of them. They didn't actually run me out of their offices, which also speaks to Silicon Valley. It's an amazing place where you can take meetings with people who will give you the time and advice. And I puzzled it out, right? Like I figured it out. It turns out I needed to learn a lot about certain terms and so on. But yeah.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, this is the right time in my life. I was 24 when I started. This is the right time of my life to give us a go. I will learn a ton. Like there's no way this could be a failure on a personal level other than in the way that maybe people lose money. Failure was a very real thing. I knew I would learn a lot. And so that I reconnected with this and said, okay, there's another challenge to become the business side of a business as well. And I'm going to learn a lot again. And so I traveled to Silicon Valley. It's funny because I found this hostel close to Sandhill Road where all VCs were back then. Bought a bike on Craigslist and just biked to all these things. They even see, like, if you look at Central Road, it's not made for bikes.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It kind of makes no sense, right? And with a very especially such a minor chance of actually getting any kind of returns on it. And so you don't do this for, at least certainly, well, I can't only speak for myself. I certainly did not do this for monetary reasons. Reason why I did it is because I thought it sounded amazing not having to answer to anyone, back to our authority problems. And I wanted to make my own sort of technology decisions and these kind of things. And I want to see what I can do. I want to challenge myself. And I said,”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this is the situation. It just arose. And I actually looked for CEO for a long time. I met with a lot of people who came recommended as potential CEO replacements. And it was one of my early investors, actually Boni investor, frankly, who at some point took me aside and said, Toby, you will never find anyone who will care about Shopify as much as you do. And so you should just give this a go. And that was pretty scary advice. But I like the challenge. I mean, why do we entrepreneurs do this thing? Why do we even build companies? It's such a silly idea, right? Like think about how irrational this is. This is not my fault, but like someone said you spend 100 hours a week. Avoiding working 40 hours a week for someone else.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Circumstances. The circumstance that's simple and probably fairly common, I had a co-founder for Snow Devil, which was a Snowboard store. And we did the, like I did the technology, he did ran the store and did a million other things, like find us an office at some point and so on. But as the company pivoted much more to being a software company and started growing and requiring more and more people, at some point it was just a different situation. And so he sort of came to me and said, decided that he wanted to transition out. And that really was very surprising because, again, I really wanted to treat business as a black box. I fought business. Just, I mean, it was a programmer. We don't like business.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT