Tobi Lütke: observation

Transcript context

…You’re from Koblenz, right? I’m from Koblenz, right. I celebrated 2,000 years when I was a teenager there. Julius Caesar might have come through, and that was probably the most exciting thing that ever happened there. I think it goes back into the stereotypes culture. Again, I’m German. I started a company with another German, both in Canada, for Americans. Shopify is an interesting milieu of different cultures. Straight off the bat, Germans are just blunt. There’s just no shit-sandwich configuration that needs to be constructed to say if something is bad. I think Germans have a more innately higher quality bar and less tolerance for underperformance on that quality bar. Products are either below it or good, great, world-class above it. Below that, nothing else registers as anything of value, which is totally different in North America. I think there’s good and bad that comes from this. I think a cultural appreciation for good products, craftsmanship done right, and so on is something that’s more associated with Europe. But the quick iteration, be embarrassed by the first version, and then build from there, is something that North America does better. It’s interesting. I’ve seen this in meetings where people fell along cultural lines of, should we ship this? Should we not ship this? Is it valuable to build it this way? Or should we spend months and months and months trying to figure out exactly what to build and then build that and try to get it as close to perfect as possible? Or should we just iterate very, very quickly? Yes, they go differently. Are Canadians different in meetings than US Americans?…

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