Uncapped with Jack Altman
· 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?
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: How are we not headed to a world of abundance? [00:00:00] S1: Exactly. That then goes into this sort of, “we eliminated all the jobs.” You know how good we are at making up jobs? There are so many examples of things that are just delightful. I have friends… OpenClaw came around, which we didn’t think we needed, and then it ended up being one of the most compelling things. One thing led to another, and now they have a warehouse full of 3D printers and things. Suddenly you have a J.A.R.V.I.S. to whom you can say, “I would like to do this project, and I bought this crazy 3D scanner from Facebook Marketplace, and I just put it there. I don’t even have the software for it. Just go hack it and figure out how to help me.” It’s just like, “holy crap”.
· Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S0: I asked Kyle Vogt from Bot Co. I was like, “Will we get to a place where I can just text my robot to order Instacart, get the steak, prepare it, serve it, slice it up, clean it all up?” He’s like, “Yeah, that’ll happen.” At Benchmark, I spend probably three-quarters of my time in software land, but sometimes I do step back and think—and this is maybe a little easier for me when I’m not in San Francisco and I’m touching grass in some other city—”Okay, what’s actually going to raise the standard of living for everybody in the world? We need more and better houses. We need better transportation. We need better food. We need better healthcare. We need good education.” All these things that aren’t software. Sometimes I think about some alien watching us all and we’re just sitting behind our little boxes typing. Everything’s going better in typing land, and it’s all bopping about in software land. But we really do need it to get into the physical world. Because the standard of living, on some level, is all physical.