Tobi Lütke: Calm Progress #152
Celebrated entrepreneur and Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke discusses how Shopify endured through the COVID-10 pandemic, why he’s so optimistic about the future, the differences between founders and CEOs, how his job has changed as Shopify has grown over the years, how to fight bureaucracy, how he thinks about innovation in a large company, and how he manages to keep his head when everyone else is losing theirs, among other topics.
when you dig into the nuances of what the most important thing is, it’s usually not the current tactic, but it’s actually the overall strategy. And the North Star is the thing that you need to protect
I actually think, even concepts like roadmaps and generally, plans are actually overrated. The best possible roadmap is have a very clear guide view of what matters to your merchant, have a super strong model of your own capabilities as a company. And then we run the function of deciding what is the very best thing you can work on. Every moment, you have teams ready to pick the next task instead of everyone of doggedly working off a thing that, of course, gets interrupted by reality.
In every company, there’s a founding story. Everyone gets this clear sense that, hey, the reason why we have this job, the reason why we’re on this mission, the reason why we’re doing this thing is because at some point someone took the first step, wrote the first line of code. That story is imbued in the company