Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S1: Look, you can’t help but be affected by what you see around you. The best and the worst about the Valley is that everyone’s working on interesting things. But of course, that causes priors to be pre-installed when you start on a project. What’s amazing is when you see children interact with things like AI. They will use it so differently from how you imagine. It’s worth aspiring to have this free mindset of just trying to take orthodoxy or the obvious path off the table when you start, because the forces of, especially teamwork, will always cause a convergence on the safest path. I think it is an advantage to be outside of the Valley. You just have fewer prearranged priors. In fact, a really funny effect was when I went to the Valley as a visitor and met with people and took them for coffee. I was trying to figure out how a company should work, and I asked questions. Then I went home, and I had the entire flight to make my notes. I, again, have sort of a bias towards doing it differently. So I take what I hear and try to figure out, “Okay, what would a Shopify version look like, and what would be better of this system?” And make it different, because I felt that’s what you have to do. But then I realized, only very late in my career, that I never actually got the real story from everyone about how they work internally. I got everyone’s ambition or highlight reel, because that’s what they really share. That plus the ability to then make edits to try to improve it further meant that very often we actually found ourselves doing the things that we thought someone else invented, actually. They might never have implemented it. Maybe that was just the thing that they had the most recent meeting over. So I think that helps a little bit, distance. Additionally, I should say, I think the world fundamentally, Silicon Valley specifically, has now for a decade and a bit declared war on any kind of distinction. All the talk about diversity was very much about eradicating, kind of, eccentricities and distinction. People are not allowed to be just quirky or funny with off-color humor. I think in the rest of the world that is a little bit more intact, and you just encounter characters. There’s often more appreciation of, “So and so is just a little bit crazy, and you know what?
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
That’s really good.” I think that’s coming back again a bit, and so that’s going to, I think, help a lot. [00:00:00] S0: There was a big moment where all tech leaders had to go through the sort of political back and forth, and “What are we talking about at work, and are we focused on work, are we focused on other things?” That was not easy for anybody. It wasn’t easy for employees. It was hard for everybody. [00:00:00] S1: It was hard because everyone, literally everyone, wanted to do the right thing, and we generally all agreed even on the identified problems, but just not the solutions that were peddled. They just caused distraction, or an erosion of this thing. A company, I think, should resemble an island of misfit toys much more than a convergence on one preordained truth. It’s totally worth exploring any alternative on this idea, on the spectrum, and then the results will tell us what works best. I just didn’t like when people were saying, “Hey, we are deciding for you if you can have distinction in this company.” That didn’t work for me. [00:00:00] S0: You’ve gone through another employee mindset change in the last couple of years with AI. From what I recall, you were one of the first CEOs to say, “Everybody, however hard you think you’re adapting, triple it, quadruple it.” I’m curious about that journey. How did it go? Is it still going on? Do you have it where it needs to be? Is there an end to how AI-pilled we should be?
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: You’ve gone through another employee mindset change in the last couple of years with AI. From what I recall, you were one of the first CEOs to say, “Everybody, however hard you think you’re adapting, triple it, quadruple it.” I’m curious about that journey. How did it go? Is it still going on? Do you have it where it needs to be? Is there an end to how AI-pilled we should be? [00:00:00] S1: I’m actually really proud of how Shopify is with this. I think this worked extremely well. I made a choice. There’s a type of situation you get in running companies, or any large group, where something becomes clearly true and then you need to make a decision. First of all, do you act on it? Sometimes people are already feeling bad. In fact, very often people fail the figure-out-what’s-true part. I’m sure BlackBerry thought they were doing really well. I think they had their best year of sales ever the year the iPhone was released, and they thought they were pretty safe. [00:00:00] S0: Sometimes it’s not that people aren’t smart enough to see it. Sometimes they don’t want to believe it or see it, because the implications are— [00:00:00] S1: They’re not predisposed for it. They maybe, through no fault of their own, create an organization where every layer inside of a conversation prioritizes kind lies over hard truths, often because there’s a culture of everyone being nice to each other.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: They’re not predisposed for it. They maybe, through no fault of their own, create an organization where every layer inside of a conversation prioritizes kind lies over hard truths, often because there’s a culture of everyone being nice to each other. [00:00:00] S0: There’s also, when you have a big enough organization—you talked about this with how teams make originality difficult—with big groups of people, it’s hard to get everybody to agree to go through an uncomfortable change. [00:00:00] S1: In a way, people are somewhat overestimating the founders of companies, and then they are massively underestimating what you can do when the founder is still present and in charge. It’s not so much about the individual as it is about the piece of infrastructure, the slot of having the founder-slot filled. It’s an odd distinction, but as the founder, you get so much social credit for having started the company. You can just invest this. [00:00:00] S0: It’s a bank. [00:00:00] S1: It’s like a bank. Every time someone onboards, they hear how the company was created, and that deposits a little bit of credibility, tokens I suppose, into a virtual bank account that is hard to reason about but sort of virtually exists. And then I get to cash that in. [00:00:00] S0: You can spend it on big, important changes.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: You can spend it on big, important changes. [00:00:00] S1: And change management, that’s one of the best ways. I can speed up something that would take years of small culture change or internal training with sometimes a memo. I take that really seriously. It’s not the easiest thing. It leads to more work or sometimes unpleasantness. But I find that is what I owe the company. It’s my best way to help the mission. So when something like the AI thing becomes true, we are saying, “Hey, we have two people. They were both equally good programmers 15 minutes ago, but one of them has completely jumped onto the AI train.” Back when I wrote this, it was really hard to actually get real value out of AI. It was more that the premise of AI was important. What do we do in performance reviews? The moment we said it… It’s an impact rating. It’s called net impact reviews at Shopify. What’s your net impact on the company and the mission? It’s just very demonstrably true that one of the people was of more impact. The moment that is said, it feels incredibly unkind not to tell people. So, “Hey, let’s write it out and send it to everyone.” [00:00:00] S0: It’s really unfair if you’re like, “This person has the exoskeleton on, and I’m not going to point out that the exoskeleton’s making him 10 times faster.”
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: It’s really unfair if you’re like, “This person has the exoskeleton on, and I’m not going to point out that the exoskeleton’s making him 10 times faster.” [00:00:00] S1: If we act on this thing, we should tell people. And so we did. I included a bunch of other things that are true. I’ve invested lots in making sure that everyone has everything they need. We have an unlimited token policy that I’m sure your brother is thrilled with. We want people to tinker. We want people to play with this. We want people to use it a lot. It’s super good. It skyrocketed the second this message came along. What Shopify did with this, the speed of diffusion of this tool was remarkable. I’d like to think Shopify is predisposed for this. We have “thriving on change” as one of our core values, and we really mean it. [00:00:00] S0: It’s good that you talked about net impact. One of the blunter instruments that’s getting used a lot right now is just tracking token consumption. People are like, “I want to see token consumption go up 20% a month.” There are founders who say that. It’s not an obviously terrible idea, in the same way that judging people by lines of code… We could debate, is there anything to it? Probably something, but…