Tobi Lütke: preference

Transcript context

…It’s striking to me that Germans, contrary to stereotype — I think they have a quite good sense of humor, but a lot of it is irony or somewhat black. Maybe that’s bad for tech. I wonder: people in the Bay Area — do they have a great sense of humor? I’m not sure they do. Maybe there’s some correlations across those variables. I think they actually banned humor for a little while in the Bay Area. It might make a comeback now. I really do think it seems like an easy out, but it’s actually potentially . . . The optimism angle is load-bearing for this. You’ve got to believe that the future is going to be better than today to want to make the future come sooner, which is in your tiny, tiny, tiny little way. I’m not talking about every company’s changing the world, but every company — if you want it to work, it’s causing progress, both adding to the vector of progress, but also maybe just changing some trajectory in some space a little bit. If Shopify wouldn’t have happened, something like this might be highly distributed. Many, many pieces of software or something else would be there. It would not look like Shopify. The world of computing is extremely path-dependent, just like every other part of the world. You want to be able to add something. This is also why ignorance is usually useful because you should be ignorant to the low odds in the beginning, one of the reasons why at least some founders often are young. These things are important. Another aspect of the European Union: People study very long. I know this has gotten updated in the time since I was there, but man, in my trips home, I had a lot of 32-year-old student friends, and that’s just— cool. There’s a significant amount of Nobel Prizes awarded to people for their work in their 20s, and we should just have a clear cultural understanding that those are useful years to be out and building things. Nothing is single-causal, and I think there are a lot of contributing factors. I would have trouble weighting them, but lack of optimism is the one I would put on the top of the list. What is a German-language word that you still use when you think because there’s no close English-language equivalent?…

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