Tobi Lütke: preference

Transcript context

…No. I mean, maybe if you wanted it, you could also not get it, but we don't need to explore that because we actually, literally don't want the credit. Shopify is a company that pushes from behind. We don't want to be written into the story. We want to just... ... want to be written into the story, we want to just kind of have you do your thing. There's just too much grandeur in wanting to front it all. This is also what caused us to go and help people build their own things rather than start with a marketplace that everyone gets to lease a little component of at prices that corresponds to magically exactly your margin, as this usually goes in marketplaces. And so yeah, I think we don't want it. I'm proud of it, but that's intrinsic. I don't need very extrinsic appreciation for it, I suppose. There's millions, millions and millions of people that use Shopify daily and that represents the business and it causes major amount of employment around the world actually, definitely in North America specifically and Europe. And so I think that's really gratifying. I'm sure there's a way of saying that many of us businesses might actually have existed without Shopify. I also think you can make a case that a good number exists because of Shopify, because what we've observed is that this was actually, it's my favorite thing in the entire Shopify journey that we sort of rigorously determined, which is that because I really, really, really prioritize good UX, legible interfaces. You can tame enormous complexity with great UX in a way that makes sense to people. I think this is actually almost a moral obligation to do for software because when software goes bad, it makes people feel dumb and machines do not get to negatively influence people in my mind. That is the inversion of the priority of the hierarchy of how machines are tools wielded by people to be more powerful at the things that they're already great at than they might imagine. That's when this all needs to fit together, but beyond the moral point, which is 10 years, and you could definitely take the other side of what we have determined is that every single time we make a complex thing simpler. It is actually that more businesses will exist on a platform. So I think this is intuitive or at least directional, but sometimes people are not like, "Well, don't you just need to have all these features?" This is the RFP view of a world of software, right? "Don't you need to just have all the features then people can implement their plan?" Well, no. Think about the mental state and entrepreneurship entrepreneurs, they are, I mean especially if you're first entrepreneurs, they're unsophisticated. They don't know what to do. They're kind of scared. By the way, engaging in building something again is an act of pure courage and usually one which is very hard to hide from others. The people around you will know that you're doing this thing. Ask any entrepreneur. gaging in building something again is an act of pure courage and usually one which is very hard to hide from others. The people around you will know that you're doing this thing. Ask any entrepreneur. The amount of people who tell you to not do this is actually stunning. People do not want people to just step out of a box that exists that they sort of explain to themselves around them and have a chance of reaching higher because that would sort of invalidate their own life story in some meaningful way. So there's actually a whole lot of nay saying that discourages people already, which is not super helpful. So now you have a situation where people are telling you to quit potentially, you don't have a lot of money presumably, you're asking yourself, are you even doing the right thing? Hopefully there's some elements of encouragement. Hopefully there's a passion. Hopefully you're trying to create a thing. Then comes to a situation that stuns you in some way, somewhere where suddenly the software starts talking about APIs where this is something you've never encountered in your life before or that just the option that you think it should have on the text configuration screen doesn't make sense given what we know about local taxes and so on. Here's the thing that happens. So the beautiful thing with Shopify is there's basically no tax configuration screen. It's just correct. The amazing thing about software is we can actually just overtake this piece of complexity. We know what the taxes are everywhere and we are just doing it for you. You don't have to think about taxes. In this case we have someone encountered something that stunned them, that stopped them in their tracks. On the wrong day, what that means, it's like they are going to close a browser and they say, "You know what? Fuck it. I'm not cut out for this." Or, "This piece of software I use sucks and it's too dumb for understanding the thing I have in my head," or something else. Everyone has a different rendering of the same thing, but just like progress stops. It is not just the businesses that shouldn't exist anyway that stop in this way. In fact, it's actually, and this is again what the data says, so many businesses get very close to this point many, many times. I can tell you Shopify did many times and I have more tools on entrepreneurial journey than most. I'm a computer programmer and I love those things. You tell me I can spend 14 hours programming for the next couple of years. I'm like, "Holy shit, let's go." Most people aren't like that. So I've had unfair advantages that allowed me to overcome very technical climbs on this learning curve, but I know that's like most people can't have these advantages and therefore will churn out of a test. And so in other words, lowering complexity, making good UX, creating software that just autopilots taxes or payments or any of these kinds of things, fraud, actually causes more entrepreneurship. That is the best thing, the best answer to the most important question of my life that I've encountered because up to this point it was an intuition that doing the Shopify thing would be valuable in absolute sense, in a hundred-year sense.…

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