Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S0: I am so excited to be here today with Tobi, the CEO and founder of Shopify. Tobi, before we start, I will say that when I was running my company Lattice, and now, you were one of the founders that I most looked up to. So many things about the way you operate, the way you’ve run your company, the changes you’ve made over time… It’s the top of the top for me, and I feel super lucky to be doing this with you. Before we get into AI and Shopify, I want to learn a little bit about you and your psychology. You’ve been running Shopify for over 20 years, and from what I see, it seems like you love what you do, and you’re as energized by it as ever. It seems you’re as passionate about the future as ever, and I think that’s really hard. Having a life’s work is this romantic dream for a lot of people, and I just think it’s very hard to do in practice, because people either fall out of love with their work, they get bored, they get tired. On top of that, being a founder CEO of a big company is not even the easiest type of thing to have as life’s work. My work now as a VC would be much easier to do for 30 years. So I’m interested in how you are able to bring, and seemingly grow, your love for what you’re doing after two decades.
· Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S1: That’s such a wonderful question. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast. I’m super excited we get to do this. Part of the reason I wanted to start a company is because I found in my teens that I have an extraordinarily hard time learning things where I haven’t basically experienced the problem they solve. The way math was taught in school—here are the steps, here’s the formula—I actually had to go and figure out, “Okay, what exactly is trigonometry useful for?” I started by tricking myself into finding a useful problem that involved trigonometry, after which I felt I could learn it significantly faster than everyone else because I was so motivated. Karl Popper said one of the joys of life, and one of the best things in life, is to find a beautiful problem that might occupy you all of your life, trying to solve it. And if you’re so unlucky to at some point solve it, it will have plenty of delightful problem children that you can dig into. First of all, I think this is a beautiful way of thinking about life’s work. But it also just works specifically well for me, because I love learning things. I love challenging myself. I find myself, to myself, very interesting. Almost my favorite thing is when I want to do something and I can’t. Because you find the limits, and then you can have this conversation with yourself. There’s a very simple recipe to success that everyone intuits or knows, but maybe hasn’t spent enough time following through on. Success is really simple. You have to figure out what it costs, and then you have to be willing to pay it. Very rarely does this come in the form of money. It usually comes in the form of time commitment and
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: Discomfort. [00:00:00] S1: Discomfort and these kinds of things. So I seek problems. I love computers. To stay with the example of trigonometry, it turns out that the very early video games like Wolfenstein 3D are basically just trigonometry. Once you realize this and play with these things, they become delightful, and you learn the next thing and the next thing. I wanted to start a company because it was the right time of my life. I had just moved to Canada from Germany. I didn’t have a work permit, so I couldn’t work for anyone. I needed something to do. My wife needed lots of time for her degree. I thought, this is a good time to try it. It’s probably not going to work, but I will learn a lot. This has been a powerful way for me to motivate myself.
· Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S0: As you think about this, are there things other people can do to more likely stick with and enjoy their life’s work? There are a lot of people who enter a career, a profession, whatever, and they love what they’re doing. As time goes on, barnacles kind of attach to the ship, and cruft builds, and responsibilities grow, and your job evolves, and you end up doing something that you didn’t start doing. People sometimes don’t know how to shed all of that weight. You, as much as probably anybody in the world, have the potential to have all of that around you. You’re a public company CEO, you’ve got tons of employees, you’ve got all these responsibilities. So it’s possible that you could be encumbered by all these things, but you somehow haven’t been. I’m curious if there are learnings for everybody, no matter how many or few barnacles they have. What can you do to keep loving what you do?
· Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S1: Look, I certainly collected barnacles around certain times in my career too, where I fell into the trap of trying to live up to people’s particular expectations, more in the department of aesthetics. I can only call it an aesthetic because people say things like, “This is what CEOs are like. This is the behavior that a CEO should display. You’re supposed to be a statesman. You should travel and kiss babies and whatnot.” That sounded pretty inefficient from my perspective. But I guess at some point, you just get whittled down and you try all these kinds of things, and my life was miserable too. Again, this is sort of junk science, a little bit. But what I’m pursuing here is trying to make a beautiful product. I just think we need to create products that are joyful. One of my favorite quotes is by Kathy Sierra: “Don’t make better cameras. Make better photographers.” That’s very deep to my psyche. I feel through beautiful tools you can inspire people to be the best version of themselves. Induce more ambition, induce more skill, or at least induce more ambition for yourself to develop skill beyond what you otherwise would do. So I want this to exist, and this is just my guiding post here. It throws off all these problem children which are interesting, which then challenge me. You’re talking a little bit about calm. I’m not a terribly calm person either, but I actually don’t want to dial down my calmness. I want to channel it into building something. I’ve just found that almost all the mediocre products in the world remind me of room temperature. It’s the middle temperature you get when no one really cares. It’s the default setting of a thermostat. Almost every great product is forged in some kind of furnace, some kind of temperature. You’ve got to put in every energy source to produce that kind of heat.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: Do you think that basically has to start from love for the customer? You seem to love your customer. [00:00:00] S1: I don’t know. The greatest gift… people make great products, I think, without that crutch. I think if you have it, it should be an incredible boon. [00:00:00] S0: You think you can be a great CEO and not love your customer? [00:00:00] S1: It depends on what great CEO… I don’t know. I’m an engineer. I read lots and lots of books about how to make great software. You know what? Many of these books, it’s really funny. When you actually check what was the project that they all worked on when they figured out the design patterns of modern software, it’s like the… Pennsylvania payroll system. It’s just not the most inspiring project. But it turns out, I think work is what you make out of it. If you just default to, “Hey, let’s actually build something that is really meaningful, and we all learn a lot about,” I think it can be done in any realm. I have a massive benefit, and really one of the greatest things. I tell people this in interviews when people are thinking about coming to Shopify, I point this out. One of the greatest gifts that this company has is that all of our customers are inspiring. They are just remarkable people, doing an incredibly courageous act of starting a company themselves. The people who flock to come to work for Shopify are people who actually have experience starting a company, or have maybe a family member or at least a deep appreciation, or in fact want to do it in the future.