Tobi Lütke: uncertainty

Transcript context

…In the data I see right now, Canada seems to be having a per capita GDP recession, and I’m not sure how to interpret that. The US has been growing at a decent clip; Europe more or less steady, growing at a very slow pace. Why, in per capita terms, does Canada seem to be moving backwards? Is that a composition effect? How do you read that? Yes, this worries me a great deal. Comparing to the United States is a bad idea in general. Actually, it’s the best possible idea if you’re going for optimism, but it’s not the best idea if you are looking to stay sane. America is exceptional. It’s an unbelievable economic might. It’s an unbelievable country in so many ways. You hear in every country, “Well, if you compare to the United States in this one, things are bad.” I think the comparison of Germany to Netherlands makes a lot more sense, and I think that’s where you can figure out what might be actionable. America is just really, really, really different, so first of all, that. Every once in a while, there’s an economy that really can hang with America. I think 2014, ’15, it was looking really, really well. I think what happened there — again, nothing is singularly causal. The productivity numbers are really low, and I think the employment in the public sector having grown to the degree it has . . . I don’t know if it’s causally related or correlation with the same thing, but it’s just pretty clear to me that if the ratio of referees to builders or critics to builders is going out of whack, things grind to a halt. We saw this even in Shopify adoption. It just took a lot longer for Canada to want digital products, and Shopify is always selling and finding its best customers in the United States the first 10 years, easily. Believe me that Shopify is pretty good. Now there’s a compounding advantage for people who have adopted it earlier. That is a tiny zoom of a much bigger fractal that I think is at play there. How has Canada changed the most since you moved there?…

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