Uncapped with Jack Altman
· 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.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: Absolutely. It completely is. I think this is actually the missing ingredient. People talk about looking at the incredible infrastructure we used to build in the ‘60s, or just even before that. There’s the Hoover Dam and this kind of stuff. Lots of individual stories about these infrastructure projects, how quickly we built subways, and now it takes forever, and so on. There is an observed degradation of a lot of these projects. It’s multifactorial. There’s not one reason behind it. But one of them that really is true is because we are building the modern wonders, which are no less impressive, entirely in software. The web browser, Linux, all these kinds of things are projects at a scale beyond what the pyramids are, and easily so. Without compulsion and just by volunteers, sometimes people who have never met each other in the open source world, or at companies building things like Google or the social networks, they’re incredibly, incredibly impressive pieces. If they had physical manifestations— [00:00:00] S0: They would be the most impressive thing in the world. [00:00:00] S1: You go to something like a refinery and you see the pipes and so on. It’s so impressive. It’s not even in basis points territory in terms of complexity compared to a browser. We just don’t appreciate that. [00:00:00] S0: I don’t think I appreciate a browser. Is a browser near the top of complexity? [00:00:00] S1: I would put it… it’s one of the wonders of the world, for so many reasons. It could never, ever be introduced today.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: I would put it… it’s one of the wonders of the world, for so many reasons. It could never, ever be introduced today. [00:00:00] S0: Can you give a small flavor? I’m sure it’s hard to even explain why it’s so complicated, but can you give a flavor of what makes it such an unbelievable thing? [00:00:00] S1: In so many ways. Okay, you go to a website. We don’t trust that website. We just run code. It’s actually your computer in front of you magically reconfiguring itself into someone else’s vision for what should be there, without limits. You download software that then just exists for this one moment to do literally everything. It’s self-responsible. Shopify is an over $100 billion market cap company hosting millions and millions of businesses that might otherwise not exist, and all of this just happened because anyone can just put a server online, and get an IP address automatically. It’s insane. [00:00:00] S0: And it all hangs together. It doesn’t come down. Why doesn’t it all crash?