Tobi Lütke: belief

Transcript context

…I imagine if someone were to hear you describe this of focus on joy, and fun, and love, and delight, maybe ... It's easy to dismiss that. It sounds completely idiotic, right? Again, there's an aesthetic in the world that exists which is that business people dress in suit and tie, they are speaking much more sophisticated than I do usually without an accent, have a full head of hair. They talk about metrics, they are in front of PowerPoint presentations, they usually have a stick and show dramatically at the pie chart that is behind them. And highly charismatic, highly ... So that's our aesthetic. How much is that aesthetic overlapped with our performance? I don't know but some of them ... Some people pull it off who are like this. I think the world is sort of stacked to lead us astray based on our stories about what optimal looks like are just so incorrect in so many ways. Optimism always sounds dumb, or at least naive. Pessimism sounds extremely sophisticated. Metrics driven sounds extremely sophisticated. Talking about fun sounds like naive. Well, first of all, I've always ignored what people think generally. That came pretty natively to me somehow which I'm very lucky about. But I've now actually learned that almost all of the alpha in the world is now in the ... Exactly the things that are unobvious but true. And the things that people dismiss as naive or so. The most successful business person on planet Earth is Elon and he conforms to no idea of what the most sophisticated business person ought to be like in any which way you can imagine. I think we live in a world where the counterfactuals are winning because our ... Because aesthetics are just leading us astray. 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?…

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