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

“But back then, and before that, I sometimes managed to do it via finding a chat room or form where experts talked amongst each other. It's something I was always seeking in this case. So then I was trying to learn about some technology, like some esoteric 3D rendering algorithm that I was found interesting. I used to try to find where people talk about optimizing these things. And then I just don't understand anything that they're talking about. But then I chip away at it. And I would come into the knowledge. And so I tried to replicate this and talking to venture capitalists ended up being sort of a way I figured out how to potentially do it. Because again, I had no background in business. I had no idea how this all worked. And I had to do it fast because 2008, Shopify wasn't doing it well, right? Like it was very...”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See, this is why I love podcasts. My favorite thing in the world is like books are definitely rank up there, but it's because one thing which is better, which is being a fly in a wall than two experts talk amongst each other, right? Which is one of those situations that was almost impossible to line up as an outsider and now suddenly is completely democratized for the wonderful invention of podcasting”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Evokes today and stitching these things together is absolutely fascinating, but just even in the sort of first, okay, let me start digging, it became pretty clear that there was a history before the shipping container and a history after the shipping container. And in these situations and there's a specific date where everything changes, like the Industrial Revolution or another example of that, what I tend to like doing is I like to find the players like the people who had a lot of input on this kind of thing or just at least who had the front row seat and then read their biographies because they don't tend to try to sell you anything other than that this person played an important role, but they tend to be the most critical witnesses to the actual outside events without so much bias towards convincing you that it was good or bad. And so in this particular case, it was very easy. There was actually a perfectly good book.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The box came because I usually have a topic and then just dive, right? Like I dive into it. In this case, I was like, hey, I'm running Shopify. Shopify causes billions, like tens of billions of dollars of commerce activity. And most of this is going to go through a logistics network that I don't understand. And I feel my job as a CEO is to have a most full stack understanding of every component at all related, which is frankly, given that we are working here in world trade is almost the entire human condition. So it's an endless source of interesting deep dives into topics. But in this case, I was more about the logistics world. It's a fascinating world because it's been built for millennia. And the Silk Road has still impact on the way the world economy.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I'm dyslexic. I actually read very slowly. I sort of overcome dyslexia, but I... I read books very slowly. I think it's actually an advantage, frankly. I have very high recollection, but because of this, I have to be very selective on the books I read. So I'm not one of those. Hundreds a year kind of people.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I came as my wife would dine out on this topic and just probably make fun of me for hours. But she always says I'm an immigrant to a human condition. So those two send me off to a good start. I just want to say, though, voracious reader? Veracious. Voracious, that's how you say that.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then inference was just the most mind bending book you can imagine because it essentially told you always humans are flawed and influential and how yes, computers are predictable and you can deal with it. But once you make things for people, you need to go into storytelling and framing matters, which were also news to me. I spent my teens with computers, not with people.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Andy's book is unapologetically almost a how to manual that kind of deconstructs the world of business into first principles. It's like, here's what matters, here's how to think about it. No one needs a degree. There's a little bit of circumstantial contextual understanding that you just have to have. But basically... It basically at the end of the day, making a business as an engineering exercise, which is brilliant for me because that actually connected, that made the whole thing about becoming a CEO significantly less scary to me because engineering, I understand.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So, because I run into this point, I was knee-deep in Martin Fowler and Ken Beck and all these kind of luminaries of a programming world, but I had no idea about business. And so the two books I read, which is funny because it tells you how good that selection process was, because I still think was probably they would rank in the top five books I've ever read. And I had a completely wrong view about how good business books were afterwards, where high output management by Andy Grove and influenced by Exactly. So that was a very fortuitous books to read.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'll take you back sort of to early days. I started at Shopify as, you know, hey, I only want to do the technology. I'm a programmer by trade, right? So this is my world. And I wanted to treat business as a black box for the first couple years. And then for various reasons, I was sort of thrust into also having to take over the business side of Shopify. Around that time actually we met. And I did a poll with people I knew for two books to read because I wanted to business.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We all live in Mecca's world because the shipping container has been a hugely influential in history. It's like a lot of people talk about free trade agreements and globalization. In reality, globalization happens from moment a shipping container opens in a country. And it's a fascinating rather underexposed story. What's so cool about this is the reason why he pulled this off is because again, the vendor builds and the train guys really loved the trains and the boat guys loved boats. And he was the only person who just cared about moving things. He wanted to solve the problem of moving things in the world and then you come to better solutions. And we need more of that kind of thing.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The person's name you said? His name was Malcolm McLean. He's one of us entrepreneurs who would absolutely be on your podcast if he would be alive right now, right? Because spend the first money out of college on buying a truck started a trucking company and tried to get things shipped across the country or even to Europe and realized like we can make the most efficient trucking system or the train guys have the most efficient trains and the boat guys that have ships all over the world but getting something through multiple stations is impossible. Like you have to unload everything, load index. So he ended up just buying a bunch of tankers from the US Navy which had surplus tankers at the end of World War II and just came up with this idea of putting a shipping container together which you can put things in a factory in Maine and then bring ship them all the way to Berlin. And the moment he did that, the cost of”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because a word has sort of sorted itself into solutions based on a word that's long gone in a way, like why, I mean, just looking back at my industry, why was there a Online store industry and a point of sale system industry and all these eBay power seller tools, like each of those instances, someone has a product and wants to sell it through whatever channel like do you want to go to like three, four, five different vendors to get software to participate in all these channels? No, you just want to do it, right? And so I think it's really worth going for live and just saying Well, hold on a second like what are people actually trying to accomplish? What is the actual problem here? I think the most impressive story along those lines that I've ever sort of come across is you familiar with Malcolm McLean's story around the invention of a shipping container.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Online retail is one of the biggest entrepreneurial opportunities of our lifetime. It's like 1.9 trillion dollar industry now. It's going to be 4 trillion soon. Online stores need to be something that people can create. Okay, cool. But do people really care about online stores? They care about selling, right? They care about becoming successful entrepreneurs. They become of, they care about reaching for independence and the success of that. pretty quickly sent us into a direction saying okay well we do the online store thing but let's actually build the software that actually supports people in the activity of reaching for independence and and because of this it became something else and success came through that”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, because I would like to come to a conclusion, like, and often this is the same conclusion that orthodoxy would have just sent me to myself because I want to say, okay, I'm going to do these following things because I from first principle argued that this is the right thing to do. And I think this more often than not actually leads to very interesting insights where you can say, okay, because I understand what's at play here, I can disagree with someone's suggestion and I can maybe improve something slightly. And I think in an interesting way, Shopify is a very long exercise in doing this over and over and over again rather than saying, okay, well, the internet needs online stores. They are super important. Entrepreneurship is one of the biggest economic”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That phrase applied to Harley. Exactly. Which I'm decidedly not. So Holly loved it. I wanted to automate it all the way through. But just taking us back there because I think this is a good example of this kind of thinking. One thing I did very early in the process of actually taking a company public was to not just understand like how could Shopify become a good public company, but there was this sort of obvious agency problem that exists on the investment banker side, right? And so I spent a good couple months talking to people, figuring out what kind of things happen in the performance review of investment bankers? Like how do they make their money? How do they make their bonuses? How do they string together career? What's good? What's bad? If they get a lot of these kind of fees, is that good for them or is that neutral?”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grab me in any particular way. And so what I've sort of determined for myself is I really want to understand the situation and the various pressures acting on the situation that I might get myself into. So you were taking us back with a little coin that you found, which is one of those artifacts the New York Stock Exchange gives you when you take a company public. And so we got to do this together. Before that date, when you actually ring the bell, you at least traditionally like companies like Spotify and Slack are now doing the direct listing, which I think is really...”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I've. Wow, this is already going in interesting places, isn't it? Like, okay, we are talking about my authority problem and my obsession with optimization. So where do we go from here? Here's one thing which is what the authority problem thing has morphed into. And I think this is exactly the sort of pivot point from which it went from problematic to very useful. And that is, I have a serious problem just of accepting autotoxy. Here's how things are done. That doesn't...”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think we talked in the green room. It's like, hey, I love everything about your book. But the worst part about it is you keep talking about using Yahoo stores for your supplement business. And you really should have used Shopify. And what can I do to convince you of I wasn't that direct? I was probably really shy.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We met at a conference called RubyConf, right? It might have been Railsconf. RailsConf by Rails Conference, right? Rails, Ruby and Rails being the technology Shopify has been programmed in. And you were invited as a keynote speaker. I think you did an interview with David.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So as you said, Shopify started in 2004 and became sort of, we released in 2006, which again, that's almost like 100 internet years ago, right? It's been a long time. And the company now is a public company. It's about four and a half thousand people work at Shopify. We have offices in largely across Canada, but also in Berlin and Australia and so on and all sorts of other places. We have about, I don't know, the newest official number is. I think it's called more than 700,000 customers and are all around the world, 175 countries and so on and so on.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. It's probably one of those unexplained kind of quirks which after probably many, many years where it's annoying everyone around me suddenly starts becoming useful because especially as a programmer, it's been wonderful, right?”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? It's one of our situations, you know, like where I think I was together with my mom, my sister, and my sister was complaining about me trying to optimize something. I think we were talking about going for a walk. And I'm like, well, you know, if a place we are starting from is the same as a destination, why don't we just not go? And my mom immediately said, you realize you did this form when you were like four or something and told me the story and it kind of sort of unfortunately probably tells people way too much about me. So I don't know why this made it into the New York Times. I'm actually kind of unhappy about this right now, but here we are.”
2019-02-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #359: Tobi Lütke — From Snowboard Shop to Billion-Dollar Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT