Tobi Lütke Quotes

“I think the best trick to pull off in life is to find your calling early and hone it into a craft, and then share it in some way.”

“The act of creating is sort of a conversion of energy...like passion for a field...or emotions such as anger or dissatisfaction. You take those and you channel them into making something.”

“Statistically, [entrepreneurship is] a very bad way to make money...you might actually lose money.”

“It is incredibly powerful if you solve the problem you actually have yourself.”

“At some point in life, you realize that everything around us is made by people who are no smarter or more talented than us.”

“Something that potential investors must understand: we do not chase revenue as the primary driver of our business. Shopify has been about empowering merchants since it was founded, and we have always prioritized long-term value over short-term revenue opportunities.”

“Every product in the world, at the end of the day, is simply a reflection of how much the people who created it gave a sh*t.”

“You don't even need to predict the future that well — if you just live in everyone else's relative future, you're ahead.”

“I work under the assumption that we have no idea how to build companies yet, and that 50 years from now people will look back at the companies of today and they will seem like the black-and-white footage of the first hockey games.”

“Your Audience is Your Lifeblood.”

“Time is energy that you can invest in things, and money is energy that you can invest. Time has significantly more leverage than money in terms of how much energy you get out of time.”

“I think focus of audience ends up being, amongst all the things that you could have focused on, one of the most significant predictors of the success of a company.”

“I really encourage people to find a place that sort of culturally aligns with what they're trying to accomplish, and then just go for it.”

“When we start new interns in our R&D team, we make sure that within their first week they actually make a change to Shopify that impacts our customers.”

“We work backwards from what makes it difficult to start these businesses. It's hard to run a small business and be responsible for payroll, for staff, et cetera, even at the best of times.”

“We can't help on the front line, we're not doctors and nurses. But there is a second wave coming, which is the economic crisis, which is going to derive from the humanitarian crisis. We can't solve it, but we can hopefully help.”

“I got so fascinated with my computer; it was more interesting than anything else and it was certainly more interesting than school.”

“Amazon's worldview is that merchants don't matter; factories and consumers matter. Everything in between is Jeff's opportunity.”

“The best gift in life is finding a beautiful problem that you can never solve. And even if you accidentally solve it, if you're so unfortunate to solve it, hopefully it has plenty of enlightened problem children.”

“Frankly, I don't think it's feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you're not climbing, you're sliding.”

“It's much, much, much easier to add things than it is to remove things. Adding things is a lot more expensive than removing things. However, it requires some measure of bravery and risk-taking. If you say no to a thing, you say no to one thing. If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done during this period of time.”