Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S1: It’s fascinating. This is actually really changing all the time, and I’ve had to change my mind a couple of times. I think the best distinction point is… Shopify is 20 years old. The average age at Shopify is somewhere in the late 30s, which I think is still pretty good. This is one thing you have to look out for as a company. There are some companies which just age themselves 12 months a year, for various reasons. That’s probably a problem at some point when a lot of new things happen. So massively restarting the internship program has been really helpful. We take 1,000 interns a year. We’re close to Waterloo and work with Waterloo, so it’s great. Making sure that the interns are not just the students now, but also the teachers, because they are just so AI-native that it was really helpful. It’s also interesting because initially I had the thought that… There’s fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence, basically knowledge and curiosity-driven willingness to learn. Often early in your career you have no knowledge, therefore you’re all fluid. And then AI was super new. The first people would just flock to it and immediately got value out of it, and that was super exciting. I had the thought that maybe that really tilts in their direction. But then as the system got firmed up around the coding harnesses, Claude Code, Pi, and all these kinds of things. Programming is not so much the task of typing. It’s really understanding the problem deeply. I think every programmer in the world massively underestimates how much they’re doing when steering an AI right now, and how much of that was really them being creative. It’s uniquely theirs what they’re coming up with. They’ve seen the movie before. You can spot the AI going the wrong path, and one or two words can completely change everything. That’s a very long answer to say, I kind of don’t know, but I actually just think good people are good. There’s a bit of variance in how quickly people adopted the tools, but once they did, everyone just falls back onto their level.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: That’s the “what do you like” side of the question. To flip it to what candidates are like, have you felt any change in competing for talent in this market? You’ve got a lot of variables at play here. You’re public. Many of your competing-for-talent companies are probably private. You’re in Canada, not in Silicon Valley. There are all these different factors, but I’m curious how the AI wave changes what you do to attract and retain the very best people? [00:00:00] S1: I think the best way to deal with recruiting is to build a company worth working for, for the best. People are thinking about it too much as selling and not enough as marketing, or at least just information. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah. It’s like, “How do I look super healthy? You could use this angle, you could turn to this angle, you could do…” Or you could also just try to be healthy. [00:00:00] S1: Exactly. Things are just simpler sometimes than they seem. [00:00:00] S0: So what goes into that then? Obviously there’s being a good business, but— [00:00:00] S1: Just don’t mire people in bureaucracy. Give people the space to be creative, allow them to fall in love with the mission, have them understand what problems people care about and what impact the work has. Shopify has a lot of intrinsic advantages here, but the best way to attract talent is to make it so that when people try on the idea of maybe coming to Shopify, they come by, they meet everyone they will work with, and also the really impressive people that they will work with together.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: Just don’t mire people in bureaucracy. Give people the space to be creative, allow them to fall in love with the mission, have them understand what problems people care about and what impact the work has. Shopify has a lot of intrinsic advantages here, but the best way to attract talent is to make it so that when people try on the idea of maybe coming to Shopify, they come by, they meet everyone they will work with, and also the really impressive people that they will work with together. [00:00:00] S0: As a CEO of a public company for, I think, over 10 years, how do you feel about companies being private for so long? Obviously it’s more possible than ever. Venture markets are a lot bigger than they were back when you were going public. What do you think? [00:00:00] S1: I find it a little bit sad. I totally understand why the individual companies do it. I just find it, man, I’m so glad that so many people end up— [00:00:00] S0: Buying Shopify stock. [00:00:00] S1: Buying Shopify early. [00:00:00] S0: It’s gone well for them. A lot of retail investors have done really well with it.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: It’s gone well for them. A lot of retail investors have done really well with it. [00:00:00] S1: Exactly. It’s remarkable. I can go basically anywhere and meet people, and they tell me that they bought some shares at some point and it was really important to them. It’s cool. I want people to make money with Shopify because I’m very much not… The sort of “one share, one vote” kind of thing, the influence part I’m like, “Totally what the fuck is that all about? Just like founder shares, let’s go.” But I think they are tickets to participate in something you believe in. My view of money is, it’s how you vote for the world you want. When you buy a product, you’re voting for that product and everything that caused that product to exist. That works with shares too. If you want to hop on a company because it does things that you agree with, then you can buy them, and you can go to another company if someone else captures your imagination better. I think that’s a wonderful institution. I just also feel like it came from a meme. Because I have lived the other side of this… It was kind of easy to go public, wasn’t it? [00:00:00] S0: You’re saying the “stay private is much better” came from a meme? The argument is you don’t have the quarterly public scrutiny. Not everybody can see all your financials all the time. Your employees aren’t seeing their stock move up and down.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: You’re saying the “stay private is much better” came from a meme? The argument is you don’t have the quarterly public scrutiny. Not everybody can see all your financials all the time. Your employees aren’t seeing their stock move up and down. [00:00:00] S1: Fair enough. I just never really saw these things as bad things. They induce a diligence and a data-drivenness and a set of responsibilities which I think are worth having, because you’re responsible for thousands of people’s jobs and an important product. [00:00:00] S0: What are the other benefits? You just shared one about the joy of a lot of people getting to share in your success. [00:00:00] S1: It helped us in a way that maybe is not always the case. Especially as a Canadian company listing in New York, we were just very small. When Shopify IPO’d, it was like a $1.5 billion valuation. [00:00:00] S0: So you’ve had 100x in the public markets.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: So you’ve had 100x in the public markets. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, and that’s cool. Therefore I find lots of people who tell me that was a good investment for them. It gave us legitimacy. We never wanted to go upmarket, but we always wanted to have a product that can work well for people at all parts of the scale. That just sounds like words. It’s about 100x harder from building a product. Building a product that actually scales across the entire thing is insanely difficult to do and has been one of our most fun challenges to pursue. Bigger customers were just like, “Yeah, you’re a public company. That’s cool.” That’s different. Then frankly, there’s really, really good people who would only work for a public company, so that’s also helpful. [00:00:00] S0: Makes sense. My last question. I know you have at least been a big reader. Do you still have time to read a lot? You got any books I should read? [00:00:00] S1: There’s so many books I love. I’m a huge fan of short, incredible books like Parkinson’s Law and Lessons of History. When people distill all of their knowledge into under 100 pages, I think that’s great. I recently read a really good book called What Is Intelligence? It re-explains basically all of biology from a perspective of how important prediction is and how it probably emerged just in a sequence. It felt existentially profound in a way that I don’t quite know if that was… Because it felt like all this part was just to support an argument later that wasn’t actually that important to make, I think. So this is interesting.