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

“And here's a demo which we pointed people to Snow Devil, so I explained why we were doing this. BibleTime we launched in 2006. I think we had four or five thousand emails. So it's not that seemed like a lot.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I kept a weblog where I sort of talked about my experience building it. I also had a landing page. Collecting emails, which is now, of course, and the landing page was”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when people Here's the experience up to this point. This is valuable. I know it's valuable because I would have needed it and where more people like me.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, it's you know, there's so much to building business, there's so much complexity. If you get an order, how does this money make it to you? How do you get, where do you get shipping labels from? How do you make a truck show up to actually send it anywhere? Shop before it just does all these things for you. That was a goal because You know that moment that I described where I got my first sale, we got our first sale. From that point on, I can never get that again. But that was such a profound moment. Like what I want to spend my time. Became sort of a guiding principle of how we built the company.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a Scott's idea. We talked about what we wanted it and putting shop and simplify together was pretty straightforward. And when we went, I think on CodeDaddy and registered with.com. And there you go. Then take people back and saying, oh yeah, times were different.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we decided it's going to be software. And I called Daniel, who's a really good friend, my best friend, really, who was in Germany and said, hey, here's what I would like to do. And I think I need another half year to build this. Do you want to spend a summer in Canada and we do this together? We could work together and that would be fun.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Similar story What I needed was something that helps me in the journey of entrepreneurship from scratch. And I'm not that different from other people. Like if I needed this at some point, there's going to be at least a couple of thousand people who also need this. So this was like spring 2005. At some point, Scott and I just said, okay, skateboards or software. Pretty obvious that you should go with software.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and exactly because it was just different. It wasn't a normal grid. It told stories. It was clearly modern. It was sort of Web2OE. So people were saying, I would love to just build my business based on that foundation.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I really, doing the development of it, I was now spending all this time. Like I was tweaking the software. I did not stop programming. I was just, okay, now let me try things. Let me make it faster. Let me use different approaches. And so increasingly, I got people sending me emails and asking me if I would license Snowdle to them because they wanted to start something similar.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other things. Yeah, I mean, that would have been the natural thing. To go year round. Again, Scott and I said we wanted to start a location in town.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's what happened slowed obviously in spring. And we sort of began the conversations around to make this a really sustainable year around business, we need to either set skateboards, surfboards, kiteboards, or do something else.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did really well. Snobots have really good or had really good profit margins on them. And our biggest problem was keeping inventory and getting inventory back. And we were just basically out of stock the entire time. But we had an excellent season.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we tried to do basic promotion. We tried flyers and stuff like this, but Bethe of 2004 was so different, right? Like there was Google Adverts was a new product. In both days, it turns out that the minimum bid for an ad for click is 20 cents and we paid minimum bid for almost every search, which ended up converting on a $500 snowboard.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was a real order from a gentleman in Pennsylvania. No one I ever met. And it really felt like I think that's what makes you an entrepreneur, like the first time you sell something or first time someone hires you for when the phone rings or something like this. Because until then you're just someone who builds something, which is already great. But it's that moment. And it's something when I meet Shopify customers, I often ask them, hey, where were you when you got that first order? And everyone can remember it.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It took, let me just double click on this because I was working from coffee shops at this time. I had my first order. I actually remember almost everything about that day. This actually ended up being a really profound experience because I wrote the software. At some point doing writing the software, I actually had to type the email that the software would send to me. And so I went to a coffee shop, I opened my laptop”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We launched Nodev about two and a half months later. Was really good technology. I also admit I probably spent 16 hours a day doing that. So a lot of Coca-Cola and pizza and very unhealthy lifestyle. But it didn't feel like I was doing crazy hours or anything like this. And I would never recommend anyone to do this. But there was literally nothing more interesting in the world toward this time.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But exactly. So, and all the forums were in Japanese and all these kind of things. And like I remembered that, hey, I have a power to choose the tool. And so why don't I go and use Ruby? Because that would be way more fun.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, you know, if you have an amazing landscape and they give you crayons, it's possible to make a masterpiece of crayons, but it will always be a crayons painting. So this is sort of in the way Java and others, they just didn't match the way my brain ended up constructing the relationships that make up software. And so Ruby was this thing I sometimes played with. Open source. And an open source Japanese, there's only Japanese documentation around this time for it. I learned the language by looking at the source code.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had this realization that I'm probably going to be the only program we'll ever work on this. So I don't actually have to choose something that lots of people know I can actually choose just the best tool for the job. And so I've always, there's been this program language called Ruby, which I just absolutely loved. People don't usually talk about programming languages like this, but I find... I really, really love the process of constructing something in your brain, having this idea. It's a little bit also like painting. You have an idea for something. And then the programming language ends up being the mechanism for translating this perfect picture you have in your head onto a canvas.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or I'm going to fall back on my programming skills and I would build something that hopefully would be able to power this business.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So exactly. I was like, there's only two ways forward. I compromise my idea and do something that's very undifferentiated except with snowboards.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Various coffee shops. I tried to explore my new city of Ottawa by just taking random buses and walking onto the founder shop and walking from there.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we both put money into the company. I think we both took 20,000 Canadian dollars and put that's the capital we had.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And There's no software that would make this easy, and especially the credit card part. We also had, I think, novel or at least modern ideas about how we wanted the website to look. We wanted to tell stories. Every snowboard that we sold, we actually took on a mountain and we would chronicle the way we spent the day. This is also the time of emergence of blogging. So what we had in mind was something that wrapped good storytelling around products that people are excited about, like trying to break away from the CS catalog metaphor.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and first I started with open source software and again this 2004 we are talking about. So I looked at some commercial software but mostly we couldn't afford it and I just got really confused because I in 2004 was sitting in front of my computer absolutely stunned realizing that we haven't figured out how to build online store software yet.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To start it. And so we were saying start online first, partly because it's cheaper. We didn't have a capital for signing a long-term lease. But we wanted to also have a physical store later on. And I budgeted maybe a week to get the online store online. This was my expectation.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, step number one was let's go find technology. This ended up being a really, really important moment and I didn't anticipate it because technology.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now we had the inventory, Ren was pretty old school in that way. We really wanted to build a brand, right? We wanted to build something which we hope would become big.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You, yeah, we went snowboarding together. So he became the person I was saying, hey, here's what I'm thinking. And he loved the idea and was super supportive. It was really Scott who ended up developing the relationships with the vendors and doing a lot of the business setup and all these kind of things. This is a classical co-founder situation. I was looking after the technology. Even”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is exactly my mother in law, and she ended up being our after we had an office, which is a bit later, she did all the payroll and accounting and everything. And Bruce ended up saving the company later. So entrepreneurship is messy, right? And it's a journey that you, like even if you make the choice yourself to embark in entrepreneurship. Kind of everyone around you is coming onto the trip. There's a lot of people who end up mattering a lot I clearly was naive about it. I probably would never have committed my surrounding towards the craziness that ended up the journey of Shopify, but it worked out.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean It's been a little weird. They were amazingly supportive. And honestly, here's the reality. I don't think I could live with anyone's parents, but I can live with Dale and Bruce. They made it incredibly easy. They are just the most kind, genuine. And played massive roles. Like Dale, she was a diplomat for the Canadian government.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How'd you meet him? So Scott worked for that company, I almost got hired for, and so we kept talking, and he was a friend of a family.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This company But basically, it was my only option. I could try to work remotely again for German companies or something like this, oddly enough, that's okay. But I couldn't work for a local company. And so what I ended up doing is... I use my technical skills. I was thinking of setting up some online store software because I figured that would exist and then use that as a way to Now what's make money while snowboarding, hopefully, and have a good life.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wasn't illegal in the country, but my status didn't give me work permit. And I talk with a friend of family, an employment lawyer, and he said, that's going to take you a while basically until you get your employment residency until you get this. But just so you know, you can start a business.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I did get a job offer from a fun, small local company that I was actually really interested in working for. But then I went to basically to sign the papers. And one of the topics that came up was the topic of a work permit, which I found out at this point, but I needed a work permit.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you can't run a strategy of waiting for summer. You really have to do something with a winter. And for me, there was go to hills and snowboard, and I got increasingly into that. And as I do, I researched everything that was about snowboarding. I wanted to know every option that existed and build these big spreadsheets of every technology that you can use to build a snowboard And at some point it clicked and said maybe using my technical skills to start an internet business settings. Nobody's being a way to do it.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work for Siemens has been probably one of the most important things I've ever done in my life because it kind of taught me what I don't want It was in so many ways a strange company culture in the way that it felt exceptionally mistrusting of everyone, right? Like even fairly strict dress codes, which is basically... Company saying, Hey, we don't trust you guys to trust yourself. And it was so much of that, which just felt wrong. 20 year old Toby would not have a career there. And so over time, it's up in Canada. We are in Ottawa, very cold place in the winter. Nine months ago.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey boss, I would be lying if I wasn't. I knew I had very valuable skills. I could always do more of a thing I was doing recently or was doing for Siemens. I was just hoping I kind of didn't have to in some way.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an attempt at writing a different browser. But it sort of... I basically ran out the clock. We knew it wasn't going to do anything. People were starting to leave. We're talking like after the dot-com crash.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was working still with people from the startup remotely. That was doomed to failure because the tools weren't there. There was no slack. There was no email contact right now.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason why I went is because I grew up on American media. Everything cool in the world came from the United States. I always sort of figured that's where I want to end up. I would like to move. And then, you know, you arrive there and you figure out, oh, you know what? Canada is America for Europeans. And this is great.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She ended up getting a job editing academic writing. We lived together for 10 months and she said, okay, well, I need to go back and start my master's program in Ottawa. And she asked me if I want to come. I said, yes.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you stayed in contact afterwards, and she just said, you know what, I'm done with my bachelor's degree. Why don't I just come to Germany?”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is around 2000. Yeah. And so this was the first time I said, okay, I'm just going to snowboard. I'm not going to take skis. This is spent all our time there. That's really when I fell in love with snowboarding. And also on that same trip, met my now wife.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, my parents had a place in the Alps we often drove to. There was a five-hour drive and we skied. Fast forward a little bit, took some friends, we took this vacation, initially tried to go to the United States, but then the Canadian dollar was so low that we decided to go to”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Loved it, and I still love it. Its computer programming is, you can forget all time around you. You just can I can turn everything off if I'm working on an interesting problem.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so like total rabble, but so good that no one could complain. And I just immediately gravitated to him and his little group of rebels. They were working on really interesting things. They were often prototyping new things for customers and so on. And so I wanted to be part of their group. And so, starting with 16 or rather 17 in year two of my apprenticeship, I started getting paid to program all day. And that's all I did.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found this one team that just seemed really fun. They were sort of in the basement. I was run by this wonderful guy. His name is J ⁇ rgenstahr, who's like fantastic engineer, programmer And he would always come on this BMW motorcycle to book and he would have long hair and he was not being a suit. Like you were supposed to.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I got diagnosed with all sorts of learning disabilities, and it was very hard for me to perform well in the tests and so on. And I don't think I ended up getting a full diagnosis of it, but now it was a pretty clear-cut way of ADHD. ADHD. I grew up with dyslexic. So just reading was hard. And it was always a big question about what exactly was going on, but basically I was bored. Back then, the way the curriculum in Germany was taught, it was really basically here's all these solutions you might find useful later in life with very, very little time spent talking about a particular problem that those solutions would help you with. And if I don't understand the problem I'm trying to solve, it's very hard for me to learn a solution to a problem. And so that just particularly didn't work well for me.”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm 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”
2019-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shopify: Tobias Lütke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT