Uncapped with Jack Altman
· 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.
· Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S1: Look, you can’t help but be affected by what you see around you. The best and the worst about the Valley is that everyone’s working on interesting things. But of course, that causes priors to be pre-installed when you start on a project. What’s amazing is when you see children interact with things like AI. They will use it so differently from how you imagine. It’s worth aspiring to have this free mindset of just trying to take orthodoxy or the obvious path off the table when you start, because the forces of, especially teamwork, will always cause a convergence on the safest path. I think it is an advantage to be outside of the Valley. You just have fewer prearranged priors. In fact, a really funny effect was when I went to the Valley as a visitor and met with people and took them for coffee. I was trying to figure out how a company should work, and I asked questions. Then I went home, and I had the entire flight to make my notes. I, again, have sort of a bias towards doing it differently. So I take what I hear and try to figure out, “Okay, what would a Shopify version look like, and what would be better of this system?” And make it different, because I felt that’s what you have to do. But then I realized, only very late in my career, that I never actually got the real story from everyone about how they work internally. I got everyone’s ambition or highlight reel, because that’s what they really share. That plus the ability to then make edits to try to improve it further meant that very often we actually found ourselves doing the things that we thought someone else invented, actually. They might never have implemented it. Maybe that was just the thing that they had the most recent meeting over. So I think that helps a little bit, distance. Additionally, I should say, I think the world fundamentally, Silicon Valley specifically, has now for a decade and a bit declared war on any kind of distinction. All the talk about diversity was very much about eradicating, kind of, eccentricities and distinction. People are not allowed to be just quirky or funny with off-color humor. I think in the rest of the world that is a little bit more intact, and you just encounter characters. There’s often more appreciation of, “So and so is just a little bit crazy, and you know what?
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
That’s really good.” I think that’s coming back again a bit, and so that’s going to, I think, help a lot. [00:00:00] S0: There was a big moment where all tech leaders had to go through the sort of political back and forth, and “What are we talking about at work, and are we focused on work, are we focused on other things?” That was not easy for anybody. It wasn’t easy for employees. It was hard for everybody. [00:00:00] S1: It was hard because everyone, literally everyone, wanted to do the right thing, and we generally all agreed even on the identified problems, but just not the solutions that were peddled. They just caused distraction, or an erosion of this thing. A company, I think, should resemble an island of misfit toys much more than a convergence on one preordained truth. It’s totally worth exploring any alternative on this idea, on the spectrum, and then the results will tell us what works best. I just didn’t like when people were saying, “Hey, we are deciding for you if you can have distinction in this company.” That didn’t work for me. [00:00:00] S0: You’ve gone through another employee mindset change in the last couple of years with AI. From what I recall, you were one of the first CEOs to say, “Everybody, however hard you think you’re adapting, triple it, quadruple it.” I’m curious about that journey. How did it go? Is it still going on? Do you have it where it needs to be? Is there an end to how AI-pilled we should be?
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: You’ve gone through another employee mindset change in the last couple of years with AI. From what I recall, you were one of the first CEOs to say, “Everybody, however hard you think you’re adapting, triple it, quadruple it.” I’m curious about that journey. How did it go? Is it still going on? Do you have it where it needs to be? Is there an end to how AI-pilled we should be? [00:00:00] S1: I’m actually really proud of how Shopify is with this. I think this worked extremely well. I made a choice. There’s a type of situation you get in running companies, or any large group, where something becomes clearly true and then you need to make a decision. First of all, do you act on it? Sometimes people are already feeling bad. In fact, very often people fail the figure-out-what’s-true part. I’m sure BlackBerry thought they were doing really well. I think they had their best year of sales ever the year the iPhone was released, and they thought they were pretty safe. [00:00:00] S0: Sometimes it’s not that people aren’t smart enough to see it. Sometimes they don’t want to believe it or see it, because the implications are— [00:00:00] S1: They’re not predisposed for it. They maybe, through no fault of their own, create an organization where every layer inside of a conversation prioritizes kind lies over hard truths, often because there’s a culture of everyone being nice to each other.