Uncapped with Jack Altman
· 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?
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: Marketing it correctly, getting the right sourcing, knowing what things to prioritize, does shipping matter? [00:00:00] S1: I think we are actually getting there. I want to be a supervisor role. You can obviously use Shopify without having products. We help you find manufacturers if that’s what you want. There’s an entire thing called Collective where manufacturers offer their products, which you can then use in your Shopify store. So if your particular skill set is marketing, you can come to Shopify and try your hand at entrepreneurship. Very often, I think about half of Shopify stores end up being created by people who have done an online store, or at least a business, before. People just try and build things. People should have a product that the world wants. Ideally come up with some unique take on something. There’s so much white space out there. [00:00:00] S0: But you think AI could do everything else? [00:00:00] S1: I think AI should then do absolutely everything else. In fact, it’s literally what our product’s ambition is—to be maybe the vessel for AI, the brain or the exoskeleton around a model—to basically conspire to do absolutely everything, so that if you show up with a product, you can start a business. [00:00:00] S0: Just to extend the idea a little bit more—not to go into too crazy of a sci-fi place—is it possible that it could also make the product? Let’s say I wanted to say, “Hey, just go make me a million dollars.” [00:00:00] S1: Anything in digital products— [00:00:00] S0: Go make me some e-books.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: Go make me some e-books. [00:00:00] S1: Exactly. Actually books, there’s print on demand for books, for T-shirts. Honestly, additive manufacturing is getting extraordinarily good now. There’s lots and lots of great contract manufacturers for this kind of thing, like CNC and 3D printing. And then we are looking at humanoid robotics, which… There’s a lot of tailwinds to the fact that making the products is going to become much more tractable. [00:00:00] S0: This will probably be 10 years till I’m asking guests this, but the prompt, “build me a house,” and then the robots just go dig up what they need and put it all together… [00:00:00] S1: I think it’s a world we’re looking at. I don’t see how it couldn’t get there. This is what I dislike about the doomer conversation, or the permanent underclass, or whatever people want to call it. [00:00:00] S0: How are we not headed to a world of abundance?