Tobi Lütke: belief

Transcript context

…Do you agree with the stereotype that Canada is especially weak when it comes to branding? There’s Shopify. There’s Molson. You could say there’s hockey, NHL, but not that many Canadian brands. Why is that? Or do you challenge the premise? Because Canada exports no products. Shopify and Lululemon export. I’m sure I’m forgetting . . . Molson, sure, but I don’t think it’s not the ability to do branding. It’s just, Canada does not appreciate commercialization of any kind. Canada wants to invent. It’s remarkable how many papers that are foundational to the current revolution of the AI boom — University of Toronto and Waterloo papers, Geoff Hinton and his lab, and so on. Bengio and so on. Canada loves to have a eureka moment, but it’s seen as a low-status thing to then go and try to build a business around it, which is probably amazing from the perspective of our neighbors, [laughs] but probably not so good for the wealth of a country. We are not metabolizing any kind of innovation. Shopify is very much an operation here as like, let’s make something that at least was a brand of businesses initially, and increasingly people beyond businesses recognize it. I think that is an important thing. It’s the same thing as we don’t refine the oil, or we don’t make the hats from the beavers, or we just don’t create the final product. We send the raw materials everywhere. If I could change one thing, I would do that. By the way, this is deeply encoded in policy. There’s a thing called SR&ED tax credits. I’m not going to bore you with the details there, but you can claim those if you do research and development and try to claim them for anything that’s commercially related. It’s remarkable. I, at various points, just stopped applying for them because we were just too commercial in lots of ways. You’re being paid for doing original research, which I think is a great policy because often original research could need a boost. But then going and turning this into a product — you’re completely left out. If you want to claim anything, you will have to ask every one of your people on the staff to have meticulous time sheets and submit an ungodly burden of documentation, which literally makes the commercialization jobs terrible. Therefore, the good people don’t want to work in this environment and so on, so on, so on. Do you think in Canada there will be an enduring backlash against immigration? I don’t mean the phony student visas. Let’s assume that’s taken care of, but immigration as it had been proceeding. Is that the standing equilibrium? Or is that going to dwindle and asymptote?…

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