Tobi Lütke: belief

Transcript context

…I think this is really interesting because what I'm looking for is like the Tobi algorithm of first principles thinking. Elon's got these famous ways of thinking he shared. One is start with the cost of metal to help you understand how much a rocket should cost. And then he's got this five-step. First, decide, do we need this thing? Then figure out how to optimize it, then automate it. What I'm hearing so far, and I'm curious if you've thought about this? And if not, this feels like a really good blog post in your futures, the Tobi first principles algorithm, but I'll share a couple of things I've heard so far as you've described it. One is analyze the path that existing solution has relied on, almost like the assumptions that were true for it to be built back and it was built. And the other is this overfit, what is it overfit for? What is it over solving that maybe isn't necessary? Is there anything along those lines of just how you approach problems? This is probably too nerdy technical. You are right, but I should figure myself out a little bit. My brain runs on a meter language but isn't directly something I can translate into words, I suppose. I think more about things like this in terms of programming constructs, pure functions, overstate. And I think in any moment, the best decision to do is I think the perfect product lead is almost like a thermostat for high quality product. It's like you're setting, saying, "I would like to build something really, really great and I'm going to go through a series which is much, much more complex than what a thermostat does," which basically checks the temperature and then makes a decision of air con or heating. You make you re-derive literally every decision that is valuable, every foundational assumption, every foundational ABC direction. And you want to see the observation you've made in the meantime since you last derived the next step. Re-running the entire function over the state that is now updated, the higher fidelity information, would you come to the very same thing? Sometimes fairly early in the construct in the tree of foundational assumptions, change is made. An example we all had was beginning of COVID when we suddenly had shelter in place. So Shopify has that incredibly good office spaces and we were very in-person company and we've... Our floor plans because I think we really added something to the understanding of how to put great... I got a lot of founder energy from my co-founder, Daniel, to build great collaborative spaces for creative work with lots of happy accidents, people running into each other and so on. Anyway, we were very, very, very, very determined on doing that. But somewhere in this construct of nesting functions, you have to rerun and foundational assumptions. It's in the stack is the fairly basic Boolean of are people allowed to leave a house? Which was yes. The moment that flips, it's not that just like, "Okay, over here let's do the best what we can do." It's actually that the entire tree now moves into a different place. And it can be a very far place, different, that you land because you will make the same quality of decision on every step, but you need to rerun something that takes you to a completely different landing zone. And so then this is also easy for us to say, "Cool, we are going to be remote only forever? Let's go." And because we realized that the temporal shelter in place would cause a series of events that would make that for optimal best set of trade-offs for the company. And so I think this is... Can I put this into a piffy five-step? I wouldn't know, but maybe it resonates with someone who can help me figure out the coded English language for this because it has been nerdy way the I explained it, even to me. This remote work example is something I definitely wanted to touch on, which is I'm glad you got there. So in this decision, is there anything more you could share about how you got to that place of like, "Oh this Boolean changed so we should rethink this?" Because I know you probably, you weren't... I don't know. Were you in the shower and just like, "Oh wow, we should really go remote because of this"? How did that actually come about? And then I wanted to ask on another part-…

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