Tobi Lütke: preference

Transcript context

…This remote work example is something I definitely wanted to touch on, which is I'm glad you got there. So in this decision, is there anything more you could share about how you got to that place of like, "Oh this Boolean changed so we should rethink this?" Because I know you probably, you weren't... I don't know. Were you in the shower and just like, "Oh wow, we should really go remote because of this"? How did that actually come about? And then I wanted to ask on another part- Yeah, pretty much actually yes because again, I rerun over all the inputs and figure out what happens. And here's a couple of other things that were starting to fray on the decision to be in person as well. We started in Ottawa, Canada, which is a city of a million people, and it has some tech heritage and good universities. But at a million people, it's just not population dense enough and has a depth of talent pool that it can support a company that is going to 10,000 people. So anyone who runs this optimization function I'm talking about here about location strategy for a new startup will come to the conclusion if they do it right that everyone should be sitting around the same table. Only if you can't do that, do you say, "Okay, let's be all in the same couple of rooms." Only if that doesn't work anymore, you say, "Okay, let's be spread over one floor." If that doesn't work, in the same building. If that doesn't work, in the same city. If that doesn't work, at least stay in the same time zones or make sure that there's good hub connections between. This is how it works. It's just like some assumption somewhere along the line is invalidated. You end up in a different side of a decision tree. But what was happening to us was we already were in four or five cities. We were adhering to the same time zone at this point. But my experience was I went through, sometimes at the Ottawa office, through an entire day where I had 10 hours of meetings, which is fairly normal, but I do every single... I don't think I had a single other person sometimes with me because every one of them was with people in another office. Some people are dialing in remote and so on. So there was an awkward hybrid-ness which we ended up in making only good decisions along the way. This is actually the most dangerous thing. Most of the time you end up in a bad part of a tree, in a local maxima of a path-dependent environment, by only making good choices. People think that making a good choice inoculates you from making mistakes or that the presence of a downside of an idea ends up disqualifying the idea. Both of those things are incorrect. So what you need to do then is... So that was an overlay to decision. The moment COVID started, then we also had this thing of shoppers exploding because we were actually an asset to people during COVID, e-commerce for the local businesses. And we took that very, very seriously trying to make more businesses survive COVID, small businesses survive this particular calamity than otherwise won't which is important because small businesses tend to be wiped out first anytime the times turn fragile. And so we needed to staff up. And so there's a very weird question about where to staff up. So clearly the better input there would be if you could hire people everywhere. And so once that decision flipped, you can see how this is actually now super easy to say, "We are going to remote," because there is no turning back. ere would be if you could hire people everywhere. And so once that decision flipped, you can see how this is actually now super easy to say, "We are going to remote," because there is no turning back. There is no... Even with this decision, it's a better set of trade-offs for the future is to accept the vast additional difficulty of building a remote company. It's way harder. It's not something you should recommend to anyone to do this because it's the same as trying to run a world record marathon run in Aspen, Colorado. It's like there's not enough oxygen up there to do that. But if you end up pulling it off, you're a real Chad. That's very cool. So I find difficulty itself interesting. And again, I spent enough of my teenage years on the internet to know that there's amazing cultures that can be put together purely remote like, I don't know, Wikipedia, World of Warcraft, Raiding Guilds can at least have excellent cultures. And so we are like, "Okay, cool. Let's come to a new stable part." That stable part was don't port the office online. Let's port the internet into a company and then we are like, "Let's go."…

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