Tobi Lütke: belief

Transcript context

…The skill, obviously, is finding the balance between these two things of short-term, not get margin calls, as you described, but also think ahead. Is there any kind of heuristic for founders listening to this who are like, "How do I do this? How much should I be thinking about the future versus now? ", I guess? How do you try to create this pie chart of driving goals immediately and show investors we're killing it, while also thinking ahead? Is there a good heuristic? Objective number one is: Don't die. Again, in the end, for companies that become historic companies are the ones which did not die. It also sounds very basic, but actually it's more actionable than it might seem. Past that point, I would argue: Just focus on the positional game. I think this is where a bit of a discrepancy of the founder and the rest of the company sometimes lies. I think the founders create finite, winnable games for people, that are very much serving the infinite game of developing, that the mission implies, the quality of position on the board. By the way, it's an infinite board. Just picture the chess board as the initial terrain, but there's, I don't know, fog on the board and it's a terrain that's much larger that you will explore over time. I think that's the most prettiest way of mentally thinking about the experience of building a company. It's an exploration and a collaborative inquiry into a question that is implied by the mission. And you will get to explore how correct your mission is and how good your decision making is along the way. And you get to learn a lot, and this is why I think it's a valuable thing to do. But they often, the founders, and the mission of a company are in alignment, but they are, again, non-quantifiable things. They are pursuits. Maybe as time horizons that go past, all of our time horizons of our careers, therefore that makes it hard for people to care deeply yet. But they do care about the instances, the games along the way, the [inaudible 01:15:24] that have to be done to explore a part of a map, the tactics that have to be executed. I'm not going to take us here, but I know you're a big fan of this book, Finite and Infinite Games. I actually had it once at a book club and it blew my mind open. I'm going to link to it. People should check it out. You've talked about this on another podcast. I'm not going to [inaudible 01:15:40].…

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