Uncapped with Jack Altman
· 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.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[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. [00:00:00] S0: People who have been your customers in the past.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: People who have been your customers in the past. [00:00:00] S1: In many cases. There’s just something wonderful about… Shopify feels hopefully very fresh as a company. There are no tree rings that you can read about its age. But it has been around. So therefore when we do our annual summit where we all get together in Toronto for a week, there’s going to be people who work at Shopify who weren’t born when I started the company. It’s like, holy hell, has this been a little bit of an institution. [00:00:00] S0: Especially now, kids are so capable at young ages of being productive. [00:00:00] S1: Absolutely. I think finding the challenges is useful, and tapping into… I found it doesn’t work when I’m trying to be different. But what definitely works is if I take the energy that I have. I have such a deep discontent with bad products and software and so on. I want to solve this problem. You worked for a long time on HR software. We built HR software inside of Shopify because we can’t find the one that we want to use, and because we see ourselves as tool makers and we solve these types of problems. That also means I’m going to spend half a year learning everything there is about how to build this type of software, so I can work with a small team on the side to make something better. [00:00:00] S0: And I imagine now you’re able to do so much more of that with AI coding. I love it. [00:00:00] S1: Now it’s crazy.