Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, we just started. I was in the office yesterday and it's absolutely full of interns. It's great. Oh, man. Love interns, so much energy. This idea that you shared about building one product, building towards one vision, this actually reminds me of something that came up basically every time I had someone from Shopify on, which is this idea of a 100-year vision that you keep. I don't know of any other company that operates in this way, where the founder has this 100-year vision of where the product needs to go and working backwards from that. Can you just speak to that, of that way of operating, why you find that helpful, how that actually works? I talk about look in the future and then think backwards a lot. What would we want to have done 20 years ago on this, or 10 or 5 years ago? What's the decision our future selves would want us to make, is useful. I find future casting to be generally extremely valuable. I definitely did not build Shopify to flip. I had lots of opportunities to sell Shopify to various people. I didn't consider it, because it's just too interesting of a journey and I think that's too... If a endpoint [inaudible 01:02:34] all companies is a convergence on a set of four or five people who can afford them, that just creates too much of a monoculture, I think, in thinking. I like that Shopify is different. I think this is good. I think it's a terrible place to work for many, many, many people. It's the best place in the world to work for some people. That's so good. That's what we want, I think. We want more of this. We want people to be able to window-shop for a place where they can be enormously successful, because the place's set of beliefs just fits you like a glove. 100 years. We have very long-term plans. 100 years, you can't talk about this software product, but you can talk about the mission itself, whatever things that will survive for 80 years that are left on this particular timeframe. Entrepreneurship is just precious. Shopify exists, basically you make entrepreneurship more common. That is the thing we wanted to cause in the world. We have had, I think, success doing this already, but again, there's no speed limit and no stopping point for this. As I keep saying, the word's unbelievably path dependent. And therefore, if we are part of a path, we can cause it to be more in adherence to the things that we value and would like to see. This is the wonderful thing about company building. They can have lasting impact. We are making decisions based on all the things that we can do. What are the things that will be most long-term valuable for the long-term pursuits we are on, and how can we normalize entrepreneurship? It's a thing that's really important to me, just because people don't spend enough time on it. It's all economics. Our [inaudible 01:04:44] living entirely depends on businesses. We are all part and tag of an environment that is extremely entrepreneurial and actually celebrates entrepreneurship as a courageous act and a glorious act even. But that's not true in most of the world. In fact, most people never encounter anyone who engages in doing that. It's not something people see as one of their options. I want us to make these choices. And I think the long-term focus matters. It's also really powerful for decision making. And I know this is potentially intuitive to most, but also rarely practiced. You've had a lot of people from Stripe on here. Stripe and Shopify have had a very long-term partnership.…

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