Tobi Lütke: evaluation

Transcript context

…This is an awesome segue to the other theme that I wanted to spend some time on which is thinking from first principles, Elon is the classic example of that. Honestly, I think you're the other most classic example of that these days. And we'll keep talking about all the ways you operate very differently from other companies which are examples of this. But I want to read a quote from Glen Coates, he shared with me, of how he sees you that gives an interesting lens into your first principles thinking. So here's what he said about you. "Tobi is at his heart a true futurist, he's obsessed with the way things should be in the future. Being data-driven is innately being anchored in the way users and technology are behaving today. He's never really said this to me explicitly, but knowing him I think any design that is drawn primarily from the way things are or were is one that he sees as inferior to one that is skating to the puck of the way things could or should be." Does that resonate? Yeah. I mean, I think that's correct. That's actually really interesting. Your podcast is a podcast by a- Your podcast is a podcast by a builder for other builders. Here's the most interesting question I think people can ask builders is like, "What is your energy source? Where are you getting energy from?" I think fundamentally the world exists at room temperature. Almost all companies are running at that, humming along, doesn't do anything. There are certain individuals who can inject heat into businesses. Founders do this very well. All the startups anyone's ever heard of have people who are injecting heat because if no one would inject heat into the business, at room temperature, you cannot outperform anyone else. You can't be hotter than everyone else if no one's injecting heat into the concern. So fundamentally, there is a injection of energy into companies that comes from founders and the best leaders, like all the people you've had on the podcast from Shopify have a perfect set of cast of characters of people who are just exothermic. They are just like wellsprings of energy that leads to all the amazing results that we get to enjoy. So the question is where does energy comes from? And that's another one of our discussions which very quickly goes into the emotions. Actually, there's a really... So I watched The Last Dance, the Netflix special of Michael Jordan a while ago, of course, but there was one scene where he just, I'm sure this is a super famous story and he just made up an insight that someone told him so that he would then go and just want to destroy them afterwards, which he then of course proceeded to do because it's hard to imagine anyone more exothermic than him. So we know what his energy source is. It's rivalry. It's potentially it's insight or it's anger, something like this. I am not... My energy source is dissatisfaction with status quo. My fundamental belief is all this talk about technology where all... So many books are about just technology leading to dystopia. You know what dystopia is? Today, compared to what it will be in 20 years ago or any. And you can play this for any part of human history. I'm not making a future statement. I'm making a almost totalical statement about the experience on planet Earth. No one who really thinks about this would want to be born into a world 20 years before today rather than today. And so I think today is the dystopia of future, and I think it behooves us to try to build the kinds of products that lead in towards progress in a small way or a big way. But yes, I think if someone comes to me and says, "Hey, let's go do this thing. And we've looked around and here's how people solve this problem, let's make a good version of that," I'm like, "That was not the job." k if someone comes to me and says, "Hey, let's go do this thing. And we've looked around and here's how people solve this problem, let's make a good version of that," I'm like, "That was not the job." Because everything that you encounter, that every solution, every product, everything that exists is path-dependent, highly, highly, highly path-dependent, and often path-dependent based on having to make compromises, based on things that were true at the time a decision was made but are no longer true. The entire field of... What was it? I forgot the name of a field. Chomsky's field, the linguistic research field. It's cool. We now have autoregressive models that are just like, we don't actually need to set up a complete... We don't need to research the structure of grammar to be able to make machines also engage in the spoken word. We actually can just train on the internet, it turns out. So that was not possible back then because you didn't have the right architecture for this, but now it is. So I think what you have to do is to actually have, when you come up with a new product or you discuss a new product, you have to derive it from first principles. You have to say, "How would we solve this problem given every fundamental building block that we have available right now?" For that, to do that, you actually have to understand the power and the composability of all the building blocks that exist right now, which is a tall order and no one is perfect at this. But so this way, you go ahead and say, "Okay, cool, so this is how we are implementing this thing. This is how it will be implemented today." And now we can talk ourselves in taking shortcuts. "Maybe we should actually start up doing it the way everyone else does. Maybe we derived exactly what everyone else does as the correct thing to do." Sometimes there was a lot more wisdom encoded in the status quo than you expect, which is I think is super delightful. Then you figure that out and so when you act on it. But what isn't okay is skipping the exercise and doing the same thing everyone else does because that is again a abdication of product leadership. And so yeah, I would say I become extremely suspicious if I get a pitch to do a good version of the same thing everyone else does because I just find that in our space specifically very rarely to be the best solution.…

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