Tobi Lütke: preference

Transcript context

…To be clear, the reason this is unusual is, and why someone told me this story, is most CEOs do not do this, don't just sit there and code along with the team. And the reason I thought this story was important is and the reason I think your first principle approach works is you're actually in the engineering details, similar to Elon if you think about it, of just in the weeds doing the thing, understanding how the thing works, not just coming up with ideas out of pontifications. And so I guess is there anything there of just how important it is, if you want to approach thinking from first principles, it is to be really close to the metal, to the bare metal? Well, yeah. First principles thinking starts from, I think Elon puts it as physics, which I think is a little bit atoms-coded. I think just from the atomic building blocks really is a right starting point. Atomic building blocks are the computers we are using. Computers are our instruments. We use them to create the music that when people appreciate to receive in the form of software. So you've got to understand how they work, at least to work the way I do. Now, is the way I work optimal? Of course not. This is my point about the aesthetics of how to behave, how to work. I probably don't conform to the traditional view of what the most of public companies should be like or even should spend their time, but I think I'm successful because I don't try to conform to anything other than what I've learned works. And so what I learned works is be in as many details as you can. Really, really, really just understand the stuff that we are making decisions about and be willing to don't put too much stake into the sunk cost fallacy. Try to inoculate business or your parts of a company from a sunk cost fallacy as much as possible because that allows you to just see better solutions and so on. And I think what we were doing, if I remember right, is at hack dates is we were working through pros or cons of just merging all of Shopify into one huge monorepo and we are sketching out directory structures and tooling that we would need, and... ... tooling that we would need and... Again, monorepo, now for companies, it's a very much one of those door A, door B kind of things. It's a very consequential choice that is incorrect to go say yes to at a certain size, and then it becomes very correct in my mind to say yes to, but at that point it's an enormous amount of effort. So, it's a kind of thing that actually is something I'm uniquely positioned to be involved with because it's actually a business strategy thing as well. That's an investment, a very real investment to say, "Hey, let's change the way we are building system. Let's figure out what the best way is." There's going to be change management. There's going to be some people that have very strong opinions on yes or no. And frankly, "Tobi said so. ", helps. It also compresses a lot of time, because everyone knows the way I book. Everyone can come to me with better ideas about anything, and if you're right, I will change my mind. But I will hold my opinions very strongly until the point of being convinced that they're not the correct ideas. Maybe that's another aspect of this Tobi Tornado thing you talked about earlier, people do fight. Again, the aesthetics of our times put a lot of stake into consistency. I remember various politicians losing campaigns because they were called flip-floppers at times, which I... Although, I'm more of a Maynard Keynes school of... "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?" It sounds like a better OS to go by. It's awesome, because I'm extracting more of your algorithm of how you think about stuff. A few things you just shared are, ( 1. ), you need to be in the details. This is thinking about to be successful as a first principles thinker is (B. ), you need to be in the details in your case code. In Elon's case, it's like, build the thing and be at the factory, sleeping on the floor. As you said, he's very Adams based. You're more digitally native. And then also, don't be so reliant on some costs. Like you said in this Tobi Tornado case, "I know you've been working on this project, we're going to kill it, because it's not going to work better if we do that now versus this. Just keep going, because we've been going." And then, coming back to the stuff you've shared previously is, analyze the path that you've been on, that the previous products and solutions have assumed the path dependence of them, and then don't look at what they've overfit potentially, that isn't correct. Love it. Okay. This actually is a good segue to something else that someone that you work with suggested I ask you, Farhan, your head of engineering. I asked him, "What's the best way to get a glimpse into Tobi's mind?" And it's actually along the lines of what you just described, which is, the question is just, what's the best way to disagree with you?…

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