YouSaid · the spoken record

Tobias Lütke

lines on the record: 100
first: 2019-08-05
most recent: 2019-08-05
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

“I think it's, I don't know, you know what? I can't quantify it. It's a huge component. I would say it's 90%. Basically, all I can do is enjoy it and be honest about what happened here. And it's definitely the best idea I've ever had. And I hope that I can run this to the end of my career because I think that would be amazing.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. Honestly, even now that you talk about this, it sounds crazy to me. I probably try to just not think too much about it. It's hugely gratifying, but it's also... I think the important thing is just that I remind myself how much of this was luck. The most amazing welcoming, wonderful family here in Canada to support us along the way. The incredible timing of when we started. Like this is not a kind of company that could have been started even two years later, right? It needed to be started right then and it needed to be ready. All these things when we went public and luck is such a major component of entire journey. So why am I the person who ended up winning the lottery five times in a row? I don't know.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so because of that significantly more people succeed in building businesses because they are just not these Discouraging experiences which make you give up even though you shouldn't have. And so what we have found is the best thing we can do for the business of Shopify is find another one of those things which is an incline and just flatten it as much as we can and every single time we do it more people succeed and more businesses get created.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I wouldn't have that specialized tool with me, I would have had to turn around because some walls I just couldn't have overcome. And then what Shopify really is, it's a software I wish they would have found, right? Like it takes all these vertical walls and turns them into inclines. It's not flat. It's still hard to build a business. But at no point do you need”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And since we're talking about stats, here's the most gratifying of all the numbers related to Shopify. And it's actually the north star of a company. Every 52 seconds someone has that experience of getting a first sale. The one which I described. And in so many cases, someone is going from being a builder to now being an entrepreneur. You know, it's like there's so few things that you can do that actually change your identity to a meaningful degree, right? And this company's Hardest really, really befall entrepreneurial process and trying to make this simpler. What's been so fascinating is that this initial idea behind Snowdle, the idea that being able to write computer software is like a specialized tool on a climbing trip.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It probably would have become the reason eventually, but not at this point of time because the investments only happened five years before that. And I took the investments knowing that I'm going to be raising the clock To either go public or get sold. That was the duality of outcome. And by the way, this is true for every person who sells shares in their company. Just most people don't realize that that's happening. But I went into the venture world pretty clear-eyed about what it means. And so I really wanted to set up a company to become an independent public company because My private investors have all seen Shopify perform under promise, over deliver, month after month and board meeting after board meeting, all of them fully trusted the company and further good performance was not really buying us anything new.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No matter what we're gonna learn a lot, this is gonna be part of all of our life's journeys and all of our stories, and we will be able for rest of our lives to do things we couldn't do if we wouldn't embark on this journey, because there's no way that the residue learning office is not going to be significant for all of us.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What would happen if this just doesn't work? This was before investments and so on. So we felt a little bit easier to even think and conceptualize these kind of issues. And we said that would be okay because you know what?”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I love, and this is something I and Daniel talked about, and Scott, we all talked about this in the early days of going for beer after a week of programming. He said,”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly, you perfectly summarize my experience, honestly. We didn't quite know what they were writing, so it was a little bit of a surprise to me what came out of it.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was by design. So here my board members always said Shopify was turned out to be a company only Canadians could have built because we said our job is to make our merchants look good. Like this is why we exist. So we wouldn't put Shopify on the merchant's stores. At this point these investors we would meet would ask me, you know, like I'm looking at these numbers. This is a significant company. How come I've never heard of you? And I said you bought something from Shopify over the last half year. Amazing. Because basically everyone did. If you bought something online and it wasn't on Amazon and you liked the experience, it was Shopify. So it just doesn't say Shopify. You don't go to Shopify.com. It's other people's where other people build their home on the internet.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was making basically minimum wage. It would have given me more money. I would have probably given it back because I figured shop if I could use it better than I did. So, yeah, and fionet income. So that happened”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think I want to say it must have been 2014 that we actually moved out. So we were living, I think, for 13 years actually now to think of it.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I was looking at what I had to do, like the HR problems, the systems I had to build. All the decisions. And I thought if I also would be sitting on a perpetually exploding rocket ship right now on top of all that that's happening, I could not deal with it. I needed to take another year of a breather before I could actually. The first thing simultaneously”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was just so obvious. And this is why I said earlier that I had the company back because I knew this would happen”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great examples of a kind of business that are coming out. Ten months after the series A, Jeremy and Trevor from Bessema came to me and said, you are still massively constrained by money. How about instead of you spending a bunch of months on fundraising, we'll just quadruple the evaluation of a company and put much more money into this thing because you can grow this way faster. They basically said me from doing a fundraising round”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the indirect businesses, new businesses like sunglass business, watch business, New ideas, boosted boards, like, you know, all birds. Yeah, all”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought it was very helpful. I've always had a fantastic relationship with all the people who invested in the company, partly because I told them straight off the bat, like saying, I'm not going to pretend I know things I don't know. And I really hope you're going to help me in this journey. And so I think our relationship has always been we were all on the same side of a table trying to build this thing. And I hope at any way so that I'm fairly quick study. And so. Bit by bit while running Shopify, it provided all the kinds of situations I needed to learn the skills I needed.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did adverts. This took a little bit longer, but we released a book on the concept. We just tried, like we sponsored Actually, a podcast, you know, like every one of us, we tracked and it's like these were directly mathematically trackable. Like we made the money back in like five, six months of these investments. And then we were like, okay Now we're not talking about fundraising anymore based on isn't it cool that we're going after his market? Now we are talking about I have a formula and I need to plug bigger numbers into a formula. And so then picked up a phone called ventricabilis, which really impressed me and said, okay, you were right, this is a venture. I have data.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I would look at my bank account multiple times a month and just compare what it was last time. And if it was going up, basically we said, okay. Should we invest this in another team member, or should we attempt marketing? So I finally said, okay, I'm going to save and try five different ideas for marketing programs. We said if any of those meaningfully accelerate our growth, then I have to go fundraising again and actually go on the clock towards an IPO or to eventually exit.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty often, yeah. You know, like, so one thing I found about the entrepreneurial journey, or at least mine, is you basically exist in two different states. There's the state of things are coming together, and I think if we do this, we are unbeatable. And the state of complete dread and weird dead. We're dead tonight. And I don't think that actually ever went away. I still to this day have this. The thing that changed is it used to be like a month in one state and in a month in another. And then eventually became a week and now a day. And now this can happen. I can sneak feet three times before breakfast. But at the bottoms, like the bottoms are deep and the implications of what failure means Just means so much, it changes everyone's life story to a significant degree, right?”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were living together and had dinner together. It's amazing that this worked. I mean, I just couldn't believe he was doing that because he was a bureaucrat. This was his savings. Basically, he was putting his life savings into this money bonfire. Everyone was just unbelievably supportive because they somehow believed in this idea.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bled families, people, kids. My family, it's not a wealthy family. People gave me money that didn't really have. Up till this point, it was really just money from John Phillips, from my family, and then for the last year from my father-in-law who gave me money to meet payroll.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you come from engineering, you know something is always a bottleneck. And the moment you remove that, something else becomes a bottleneck. And same goes for companies. At this point, I intentionally slow down the growth of a company a little bit just because I needed it to be manageable for me. And I was wavering on the most important decision, which was, is this a lifestyle business or is this actually a venture?”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So it was a very large learning curve. And I would say 2009 to 2010, I truly helped the company back from what I could have and should have probably become.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not good. I mean, my team was very, very patient with me. There was a lot to learn. It's a very subtle job. Wonderful things about computers is when you tell them what to do, they'll keep doing it and they'll do it forever until you stop. Turns out humans are not like humans.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I was ready to think about how to Tell people that I can't meet payroll at some point. And instead, basically in 2009, the company now hit first time sort of cash flow neutral. We can write out whatever downturn this is. Start thinking about long term investment, like infrastructure projects and so on again.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who lost their jobs could reach for their own independence and engage in entrepreneurship using Shopify. And they said, why don't I give this a go? I'm going to try this thing I always wanted to try, right?”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So basically, I got around this time noticed that term sheaths will no longer be honored because everyone needs tighten bells and so on. Basically, initially I thought we were toast.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's about just five people. I had someone for customer support. I was doing all customer support initially, and then eventually the rest of my team told me my English wasn't good enough.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I wanted to play with technology. That was what I was good at. That was my identity So I said, okay, clearly, if you want to do this now and if I get good numbers, you're going to give me this latest eventually.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So I got the offers, I got term sheets, and some of them referred me to potentially CEOs. I had a bunch of late night meetings with people who could take over as CEO. Because you cannot want to be.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so basically, this is how I went through these meetings. I remember that, I mean, I ended up getting the kinds of term sheets people actually frankly dream about, which I got benchmark office.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would have the first meeting and I had my notepad, and they would ask me, it started out, I was sort of explaining the business. But then they would ask me some questions about usage and market size kind of things. And some of us I could answer. And they would get really interested. But the problem was that very quickly, they asked me questions I couldn't answer. There was questions around CAC ratios and lifetime value and all these kind of things. I would write down the terms. I would then look up what they meant. Usually I would get an equation back because it's some equation that you're supposed to apply to a business. I would then go to our database and get all the relevant data, plug them into the equation, I would get the numbers. So I had one more question I could answer for the next meeting.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was scheduled to be there for a week. I ended up staying, I think, two and a half maybe. What happened pretty quickly is I would have my first meeting. And again, this is me biking from the youth house. From youth hospital to down center the road and showing up and they probably already thought, who is this? And so I...”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had a roommate. Incidentally, who was also a computer programmer, so it was actually great. I actually bought a bicycle on Craigslist.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't need the money because I didn't think this was a venture I was building. And so I went not really being too worried about the results. I was more worried about the amount of money it would cost for me to fly to and back to Bay Area and accommodations and so on.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a couple of appointments and just drinks with friends and people I knew and second. That was the first time I came to Silicon Valley.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was hugely worried about it because I was not convinced that I should have a CEO job. But someone gave me, told me that if a great VC invests in your company, they would have a network to find CEO, the right kind of CEO And so I was like, okay, well, maybe I really should talk to venture capitalists. And that was a time I traveled to Silicon Valley to talk with VCs.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, He had the job of CEO. I think he just realized at some point that where the software industry was going is most of the people who were CEOs were actually highly technical parts of the founding teams. I think he also realized that I will end up being the person who will care most about this company in the long run. And so, you know, that was okay. We decided to part wise. Were you?”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was, we had paying customers, but we were going trending towards zero fast. Like we eventually, I mean, we did basically run out of money around this time. We luckily met an Angel investor who ended up putting, I think, $400,000 around 2007, and that saved us as an individual by the name of John Phillips. I think part of the reason why Invested is because his parents were in Ottawa, and I think he wanted something else to do in town rather than just visit his parents, but he also really liked the business, so he ended up becoming our investor and basically mentor to the company.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, these events started accumulating. People were kind of experimenting more with online retail. The new businesses were starting instead of people coming to us saying, hey, we want to reduce costs and switch to you.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was like a stunning experience for us because there was so like someone just had a really good idea in an office and turned it into a real economic.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or a local newspaper actually had a Shopify store created, which they started like two days before Super Bowl. And it just was selling t-shirts with the front page saying we won the Super Bowl, like a picture of what the newspaper would look like if I actually happened to win. And then I ended up winning.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there was a couple of thousand accounts, and I would say like maybe 100 active. And in the year two, we had an interesting event. I mean, this is, I think the Indianapolis team won the Super Bowl around that time, and they actually had a”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my grandfathered everyone, but suddenly everyone called us and said, hey, I promised my so-and-so that they can use this for free. And suddenly it costs money. And so I got all these phone calls during my branding. This is sort of a bit stressful.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Switching it a year after launch, actually even night before my wedding for a reason I will never figure out why I did that. The night before your wedding, you switched to”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It started out free. The first year we decided against the multiple tier monthly cost. Because we figured that it's going to be so hard to get people to trust us that making it cheaper would be more likely for people to give it a try. And the model was, I think we charged like three and a half or 3.75% per sale. It was a complete failure of a business model because what basically everyone who didn't expect to have sales thought it was amazing and people who expected to sell a lot would that was way too much money. So we ended up”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, people signed up to just try it out, which was really, really exciting. And frankly, there are still business running on Shopify, but that actually started on that day, which is remarkable. But it was a lot. I mean, think about what an online store is. It's to most of our customers, this is their livelihood. If that thing is not there suddenly or something goes wrong, the business is defunct. Is huge responsibility, and people were trusting free guys in Canada.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A small office, we ended up taking a very small office space. We actually moved above the Coffee shop, I got that first sale. We never got internet, like we always use their Wi Fi, built some desks, and that's from where we worked.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT