Tobi Lütke: evaluation

Transcript context

…Did you learn all this selling snowboards? Or it took until Shopify? The greatest thing about running Shopify is my customers are incredibly inspiring individuals. In a lot of places, it’s very hard to convince people to actually talk to their customers. Actually, sometimes, our problem is the opposite. We have too many people in conversations with our customers. They are super open to sharing what they see, and they’re delightfully discontented with what we give them. They will tell us how to do this better every single time, but they will also tell us, here’s why, because they’re entrepreneurs, and Shopify is honestly like a celebration of the small bits of capitalism. We love entrepreneurship. I should say that plenty of our customers have started on Shopify and are now absolutely massive billion-dollar-plus retailers. There’s a great variety. Pretty much the entire spectrum of a retail industry in size are represented on the system now, but a lot of largest people who started on the platform, which now has been around for 20 years. But we love entrepreneurship. We love founding the concept of companies as a self-expression. There’s glory in entrepreneurship, and it’s underappreciated. Everyone talks about it, and politicians are always pro–business formation, but often, the behavior doesn’t conform to this. It keeps getting harder policy-wise, as many have talked about; that’s certainly an aspect in Germany as well. It gets harder and harder to start companies in some places. Again, the United States is the opposite. We are not where we have APIs to start businesses, which is exactly how things should be. Friction changes the behavior a lot because everyone’s allowed to be an intelligent actor in their local incentive system, and if you are massively disincentivized of starting a company by just BS, you have to deal with what people want. We want to be a counterforce to that. We want to remove friction where we can, again, if we can potentially advocate against bad policies, but we can do a lot about what happens after the policies stop mattering, and the next step. Because every single time we’ve made Shopify more approachable, or things that were previously complex and gating for people’s success, every single time we made something significantly simpler, it actually caused more success. More people who otherwise didn’t make the hurdle ended up making it through it, and not stopping is actually the thing that really, really leads to success in a reductionist way. We find that to be a really, really important discovery. Again, when we are part of a journey, I like to create the incentive systems and the business system of Shopify in such a way that we are actually on the same side of the table with our customers. Best thing we can do to grow Shopify is make our customers more successful because we are in this together, economically speaking. They take an active role in talking to us. Every one of the product managers has hundreds of active WhatsApp conversations with fast-growing businesses. we are in this together, economically speaking. They take an active role in talking to us. Every one of the product managers has hundreds of active WhatsApp conversations with fast-growing businesses. That’s a really, really, really fun way to build a business. It’s a very, very, very rare thing that your customers are often the source of your inspiration.…

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