Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: So one of the most important functions of a leader is to just compress time windows. [00:00:00] S1: Yes. To the plausible. It’s not that you just give any deadline and anything happens. This is why it’s really helpful to be very technical and understand all the tasks and skills. You can ask for something that has a 50th-percentile chance of being the right ship date. Then everyone gets to complain about the crazy founder, which is great. Do whatever venting you want. And then you do, very often, some of the best work of your careers. That’s why people actually flock to these types of companies, because you’re surrounded by the other people that you can go on such crazy journeys with. The main point here is, I run the company by the six-week review cycle, where we go through all the projects and spend the time with engineers and champions and PMs. That existed to set a pace, a pace floor, of a six-week cycle, which was faster than we instituted it. Because if you don’t do it, you are run by the quarter. The moment in a PowerPoint… First of all, first flag. Second flag is when someone uses the word H2 or H1, which means first and second half. You’re actually fucked. You actually really have to do something drastic. [00:00:00] S0: Like, what about Thursday? [00:00:00] S1: Exactly. So you do this, and now I think actually a six-week review is way too limiting. We can do so much more, and we are trying to figure out what is replacing this.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: Exactly. So you do this, and now I think actually a six-week review is way too limiting. We can do so much more, and we are trying to figure out what is replacing this. [00:00:00] S0: I want to talk about your customers and what AI means for them. We were talking a little bit earlier about how there’s a lot of young people right now who have fears of a permanent underclass. The idea being, you’re just entering the workforce, you don’t have any accumulated skills or credibility yet, and now you’ve got this AI thing, which in some ways is empowering, in some ways seems scary. The net is that there’s become this meme of people being afraid of ascending through the career and financial heights that they want to. You talked about how that’s not necessarily the experience your customers are feeling.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: No. Our customers are wonderful, and they are entrepreneurs. They are courageous people who are putting themselves out there. They build businesses. They create employment. In one way, it’s clearly a particular slice of people who would do this. But it’s actually much bigger than people think, first of all. It’s incredibly diverse. Shopify’s customers go exactly with a population map. It’s great businesses in the smallest communities. It’s point-of-sale stores in the town center of tiny little townships, as well as Alo Yoga. So it’s incredibly different, and it’s cosmopolitan. It’s big business, billion dollars of business. It’s the people who are trying to build a thing in their lunch breaks to make ends meet, or actually because they have an ambition that they want to become entrepreneurs. So what’s funny with the way the AI conversation is projected—how it’s reported on social media and so on—is it just doesn’t… We can’t access it anywhere we look. [00:00:00] S0: You’re saying Shopify’s data and experience doesn’t map to this doomer stuff. [00:00:00] S1: It absolutely doesn’t. What we hear from everyone is, “Hey, you guys fix computers.” You techies talked about computers being these incredible things that can do anything, and— [00:00:00] S0: And it was so complicated.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: And it was so complicated. [00:00:00] S1: And then we try this, and I don’t know what… You guys just sound unhinged. And now we can talk to it, and it just does the thing, and it’s incredible. It just works with me. I’ve expanded my business, and I’ve hired all these people now. So it fits into Shopify’s vision because we want lots and lots of small companies. By the way, 60-80%, depending on the country, of people in the economy work for small businesses. They are incredibly precious and important. [00:00:00] S0: So what should AI mean? If you’re a small business owner, you’re starting a new small company, logically, what should the change be as a result of AI from 2023 versus 2029? What’s the fundamental change?
· Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S1: I think you should sign up for more. You can follow your ambition. Further, if you would poll our customers, I think they believe in a permanent upper class. I think we’re going to get to a point where many, many poor people can self-actualize. There are two pieces of data that I find incredibly meaningful. One is that every 36 seconds, someone gets their first sale. While we are talking here, think about what that means for how many people just became entrepreneurs. The other is more of a higher-level observation: every single time we ship something where we know it meaningfully changes something about the early journey—the sign-up, the complexities, the questions, the friction in the business—each of them can be best thought of as a hurdle that someone has to jump over. Every single time we manage to make the hurdle slightly less high because we made something just vastly better—we now let you register domains or easily transfer them, or these days have an AI that can share your browser tab and help you set up GoDaddy—every single time we do this, more actual businesses come out of it, which then provide employment and so on. People churn out early in the process if something happens that ends up being a governor for them. They null out, they give up, they stop, and then the entire business doesn’t exist. AI is just… There has never, ever been such a thing that can be so supportive of people.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: It occurs to me that last year on this podcast, I asked somebody this question. They were a fun person to ask, but you’re probably the number one person in the world to ask this to. It’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about. What has to be true for us to be in a place where you can prompt, “Build me a business”? How far are we from, “Hey, I made this widget. Please go make me a million dollars. Thanks”? [00:00:00] S1: It’s my favorite idea as a replacement for a Turing test, which we of course sailed past with oddly very little notice. [00:00:00] S0: It is crazy. [00:00:00] S1: Acting in the real world, starting a business that people find meaningful enough to vote for to the tune of a million dollars, is a wonderful test. [00:00:00] S0: Marketing it correctly, getting the right sourcing, knowing what things to prioritize, does shipping matter?