Tobi Lütke’s leadership playbook: Playing infinite games, operating from first principles, and maximizing human potential (founder and CEO of Shopify)

Your podcast is a podcast by a builder for other builders. Here's the most interesting question I think people can ask builders. What is your energy source? My energy source is dissatisfaction with status quo. Like so many books are about dis Technology leading to dystopia? Like no one who really thinks about this would want to be born into a world twenty years before today. I think today is the dystopia of the future. It behooves us to try to build the kinds of problems that lead in towards progress. There's a couple quotes along these lines I've seen that describe the way you think about this stuff. If most people are doing it a certain way, I by default don't want to do it that way. in the world that exists, which is that business people dress in suit and tie. They are speaking much more sophisticated than I do, usually without an accent. They usually stick and show dramatically at the chart that is behind them. How much is that a static? overlap with our performance. Pessimism sounds extremely sophisticated. Optimism always sounds dumb, or at least naive. The most powerful, unquantifiable things.

In the word of business are fun and delight. I don't know of any other company that operates where the founder has this hundred year vision of where the product needs to go and working backwards from that. I I talk about look in the future and then think backwards uh a lot, right? Like it's like what would we want to have done? twenty years ago on this. We have very long term plans. At hundred years you can't talk about the sort of software project, but you can't talk about the mission itself. What are the things that will survive? For 80 years when I left on this particular timeframe. Like entrepreneurship is just precious. Shopify exists basically to make entrepreneurship more common. Is there anything you want to leave listeners with? I really, really, really think that there is not a single person on this planet who is even close to being at their maximum potential. Reminding people of their own potential. Constantly is actually a wonderful thing to do.

Today my guest is Toby Ludcut. Toby is a man who needs no introduction. So I'm gonna keep this very short and get you right to this jam packed conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.

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