Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S1: Look, I certainly collected barnacles around certain times in my career too, where I fell into the trap of trying to live up to people’s particular expectations, more in the department of aesthetics. I can only call it an aesthetic because people say things like, “This is what CEOs are like. This is the behavior that a CEO should display. You’re supposed to be a statesman. You should travel and kiss babies and whatnot.” That sounded pretty inefficient from my perspective. But I guess at some point, you just get whittled down and you try all these kinds of things, and my life was miserable too. Again, this is sort of junk science, a little bit. But what I’m pursuing here is trying to make a beautiful product. I just think we need to create products that are joyful. One of my favorite quotes is by Kathy Sierra: “Don’t make better cameras. Make better photographers.” That’s very deep to my psyche. I feel through beautiful tools you can inspire people to be the best version of themselves. Induce more ambition, induce more skill, or at least induce more ambition for yourself to develop skill beyond what you otherwise would do. So I want this to exist, and this is just my guiding post here. It throws off all these problem children which are interesting, which then challenge me. You’re talking a little bit about calm. I’m not a terribly calm person either, but I actually don’t want to dial down my calmness. I want to channel it into building something. I’ve just found that almost all the mediocre products in the world remind me of room temperature. It’s the middle temperature you get when no one really cares. It’s the default setting of a thermostat. Almost every great product is forged in some kind of furnace, some kind of temperature. You’ve got to put in every energy source to produce that kind of heat.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: Do you think that basically has to start from love for the customer? You seem to love your customer. [00:00:00] S1: I don’t know. The greatest gift… people make great products, I think, without that crutch. I think if you have it, it should be an incredible boon. [00:00:00] S0: You think you can be a great CEO and not love your customer? [00:00:00] S1: It depends on what great CEO… I don’t know. I’m an engineer. I read lots and lots of books about how to make great software. You know what? Many of these books, it’s really funny. When you actually check what was the project that they all worked on when they figured out the design patterns of modern software, it’s like the… Pennsylvania payroll system. It’s just not the most inspiring project. But it turns out, I think work is what you make out of it. If you just default to, “Hey, let’s actually build something that is really meaningful, and we all learn a lot about,” I think it can be done in any realm. I have a massive benefit, and really one of the greatest things. I tell people this in interviews when people are thinking about coming to Shopify, I point this out. One of the greatest gifts that this company has is that all of our customers are inspiring. They are just remarkable people, doing an incredibly courageous act of starting a company themselves. The people who flock to come to work for Shopify are people who actually have experience starting a company, or have maybe a family member or at least a deep appreciation, or in fact want to do it in the future.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: It depends on what great CEO… I don’t know. I’m an engineer. I read lots and lots of books about how to make great software. You know what? Many of these books, it’s really funny. When you actually check what was the project that they all worked on when they figured out the design patterns of modern software, it’s like the… Pennsylvania payroll system. It’s just not the most inspiring project. But it turns out, I think work is what you make out of it. If you just default to, “Hey, let’s actually build something that is really meaningful, and we all learn a lot about,” I think it can be done in any realm. I have a massive benefit, and really one of the greatest things. I tell people this in interviews when people are thinking about coming to Shopify, I point this out. One of the greatest gifts that this company has is that all of our customers are inspiring. They are just remarkable people, doing an incredibly courageous act of starting a company themselves. The people who flock to come to work for Shopify are people who actually have experience starting a company, or have maybe a family member or at least a deep appreciation, or in fact want to do it in the future. [00:00:00] S0: People who have been your customers in the past.
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: People who have been your customers in the past. [00:00:00] S1: In many cases. There’s just something wonderful about… Shopify feels hopefully very fresh as a company. There are no tree rings that you can read about its age. But it has been around. So therefore when we do our annual summit where we all get together in Toronto for a week, there’s going to be people who work at Shopify who weren’t born when I started the company. It’s like, holy hell, has this been a little bit of an institution. [00:00:00] S0: Especially now, kids are so capable at young ages of being productive. [00:00:00] S1: Absolutely. I think finding the challenges is useful, and tapping into… I found it doesn’t work when I’m trying to be different. But what definitely works is if I take the energy that I have. I have such a deep discontent with bad products and software and so on. I want to solve this problem. You worked for a long time on HR software. We built HR software inside of Shopify because we can’t find the one that we want to use, and because we see ourselves as tool makers and we solve these types of problems. That also means I’m going to spend half a year learning everything there is about how to build this type of software, so I can work with a small team on the side to make something better. [00:00:00] S0: And I imagine now you’re able to do so much more of that with AI coding. I love it. [00:00:00] S1: Now it’s crazy.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: Now it’s crazy. [00:00:00] S0: One last thing here. You talk about wanting to build great products, but you’ve also spoken about wanting to be original, probably to a degree where I imagine you’d rather be original and good rather than mimicking and great. [00:00:00] S1: 100%. In fact, what’s even better is: be different. Because, axiomatically, if you are building the same thing other people build, it can only be similarly good. It can’t actually be much better. It can maybe look slightly nicer, but you’re bounded a couple percentage points in either direction. If you want to build something great or much better, it has to be different. So this has to be your starting position. If it then converges on the same thing, you have learned something potentially from first principles about why the solution is the one that everyone has converged on. If it gets worse, you actually learned something more important, because now you know, “Hey, your theory here was wrong.” You had an assumption which now has been validated. That learning is the thing from which you’re going to pull so much value in every other realm now, because you have a clearer idea about how things actually work. I think the null results in science are massively underrated. Ideally then you don’t ship it, because the world needs better, not worse. We have tried to eliminate the term “failure” in Shopify and just call it the successful discovery of something that didn’t work.
· Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S0: I’m curious if you’ve experienced this. You obviously spend a lot of time in the Bay Area, but I wonder if it’s different for you being in Canada. For me, over the last 13 or 14 years in the Bay Area, I have definitely felt a trend towards herd mentality. I think there was more originality in 2013 when I moved than there is now. I imagine there was more in 2003. I bet you there was more in 1995. It feels like the trend line is professionalization of the industry and the mindset. I’m curious if you experienced it the same way, and if there are things that people can cultivate to free themselves from the sort of mimicry shackles.