Tobi Lütke: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah, pretty much actually yes because again, I rerun over all the inputs and figure out what happens. And here's a couple of other things that were starting to fray on the decision to be in person as well. We started in Ottawa, Canada, which is a city of a million people, and it has some tech heritage and good universities. But at a million people, it's just not population dense enough and has a depth of talent pool that it can support a company that is going to 10,000 people. So anyone who runs this optimization function I'm talking about here about location strategy for a new startup will come to the conclusion if they do it right that everyone should be sitting around the same table. Only if you can't do that, do you say, "Okay, let's be all in the same couple of rooms." Only if that doesn't work anymore, you say, "Okay, let's be spread over one floor." If that doesn't work, in the same building. If that doesn't work, in the same city. If that doesn't work, at least stay in the same time zones or make sure that there's good hub connections between. This is how it works. It's just like some assumption somewhere along the line is invalidated. You end up in a different side of a decision tree. But what was happening to us was we already were in four or five cities. We were adhering to the same time zone at this point. But my experience was I went through, sometimes at the Ottawa office, through an entire day where I had 10 hours of meetings, which is fairly normal, but I do every single... I don't think I had a single other person sometimes with me because every one of them was with people in another office. Some people are dialing in remote and so on. So there was an awkward hybrid-ness which we ended up in making only good decisions along the way. This is actually the most dangerous thing. Most of the time you end up in a bad part of a tree, in a local maxima of a path-dependent environment, by only making good choices. People think that making a good choice inoculates you from making mistakes or that the presence of a downside of an idea ends up disqualifying the idea. Both of those things are incorrect. So what you need to do then is... So that was an overlay to decision. The moment COVID started, then we also had this thing of shoppers exploding because we were actually an asset to people during COVID, e-commerce for the local businesses. And we took that very, very seriously trying to make more businesses survive COVID, small businesses survive this particular calamity than otherwise won't which is important because small businesses tend to be wiped out first anytime the times turn fragile. And so we needed to staff up. And so there's a very weird question about where to staff up. So clearly the better input there would be if you could hire people everywhere. And so once that decision flipped, you can see how this is actually now super easy to say, "We are going to remote," because there is no turning back. ere would be if you could hire people everywhere. And so once that decision flipped, you can see how this is actually now super easy to say, "We are going to remote," because there is no turning back. There is no... Even with this decision, it's a better set of trade-offs for the future is to accept the vast additional difficulty of building a remote company. It's way harder. It's not something you should recommend to anyone to do this because it's the same as trying to run a world record marathon run in Aspen, Colorado. It's like there's not enough oxygen up there to do that. But if you end up pulling it off, you're a real Chad. That's very cool. So I find difficulty itself interesting. And again, I spent enough of my teenage years on the internet to know that there's amazing cultures that can be put together purely remote like, I don't know, Wikipedia, World of Warcraft, Raiding Guilds can at least have excellent cultures. And so we are like, "Okay, cool. Let's come to a new stable part." That stable part was don't port the office online. Let's port the internet into a company and then we are like, "Let's go." This episode is brought to you by Loom. Loom lets you record your screen, your camera, and your voice to share video messages easily. Record a Loom and send it out with just a link to gather feedback, add context, or share an update. So now you can delete that novel-length email that you are writing. Instead, you can record your screen and share your message faster. Loom can help you have fewer meetings and make the meetings that you do have much more productive. Meetings start with everyone on the same page and end early. Problem solved, time saved. We know that everyone is in a one-take wonder when it comes to recording videos. So Loom comes with easy editing and AI features to help you record once and get back to the work that counts. Save time, align your team, stay connected, and get more done with Loom. Now, part of Atlassian, the makers of Jira. Try Loom for free today at loom.com/lenny. That's L-O-O-M.com/lenny. I want to talk about this talent stack concept that you've touched on a couple of times that I think so much. But before we get there, I want to go in a different direction, which I think is an interesting foundational element to your ability to be successful in your first principles thinking, which is you getting to the metal, to the core of the problems you're solving by actually spending a lot of time coding. And I actually heard a story about how you all had this huge all-hands summit. You flew everyone in. You're all together. There was a three-day hackathon. And the way it was described is you're sitting at a table with headphones in, coding, just like any IC engineer. No one would've known you're the CEO of this company, the founder of this company. Why is coding and working in the code to you still so important?…

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