Oct 6, 2025 · 1 hr 43 min · 15 segments
Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke joins John Collison to discuss the philosophies driving one of the internet’s most foundational companies. Tobi shares his perspective on why companies are a form of…
Tobi LütkeGuest
John CollisonHost
And it's remarkable to think that that was probably good enough for probably 80 years or 90 years from this point on.
So you said the car industry with, exactly, Toyota and so on, there's some new ideas that came on.
The downside of a drive to efficiency is that it requires you to act on quantifiables, right? Like you can only measure what you can measure like somatically.
Well, not only that, because those are the obvious examples of unquantifiables, but the big one is, I'm curious, like, there's a team at Shopify that's doing a great job of their product, and there's a team that's lost and has kind of a woolly direction, and actually their dev tools suck, and so it's very hard for them to make forward progress, and they're thrashing, lots of keep-the-lights-on work.
Just how do you distinguish between the team that's struggling and the team that's executing really well?
Here's what I found works, is have rituals by which we talk every, I mean, at the latest every eight weeks.
It's our Wiki, it's our feeds and stuff like this, but it also has every project in it.
And so it's built around teams updating everyone else, registering like here's something we learned.
And it's remarkable to think that that was probably good enough for probably 80 years or 90 years from this point on.
So you said the car industry with, exactly, Toyota and so on, there's some new ideas that came on.
The downside of a drive to efficiency is that it requires you to act on quantifiables, right? Like you can only measure what you can measure like somatically.
Well, not only that, because those are the obvious examples of unquantifiables, but the big one is, I'm curious, like, there's a team at Shopify that's doing a great job of their product, and there's a team that's lost and has kind of a woolly direction, and actually their dev tools suck, and so it's very hard for them to make forward progress, and they're thrashing, lots of keep-the-lights-on work.
Just how do you distinguish between the team that's struggling and the team that's executing really well?
Here's what I found works, is have rituals by which we talk every, I mean, at the latest every eight weeks.
It's our Wiki, it's our feeds and stuff like this, but it also has every project in it.
And so it's built around teams updating everyone else, registering like here's something we learned.
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