Tobi Lütke's Top Insights | E1184

Top Insights

Removing friction creates new opportunities and increases market size.
Shared priorities of some of the best companies in the world:
- Priority #1: Go build the best product you can possibly build
- Priority #2: Make some revenue so that you can do more of Priority #1
- Priority #3: Never do #2 at the expense of #1
Important technologies of the future look trivial today (like games or toys), just like the Internet did in the '90s.
- Examples: Crypto, NFTs, Biohacking sensors
Software innovation compounds.
Going forward, the best companies in the world will be built fully-remote, with in-person events deliberately distributed (all-hands gatherings, etc.)

Tobi created Shopify to solve his own problem: running his online snowboard store was really hard, and the only reason he could do it successfully was due to his coding background.
Jason first interviewed Tobi on TWiST at Accelerate Ottawa in 2013
- At the time, Shopify had ~200 employees with a "crazy" thesis: Amazon would not win it all, and some retailers would want to run their own online stores
- Jason was originally in Canada to interview Chamath Palihapitiya
In their initial interview, Jason was struck by Tobi's laser-like focus and thought Shopify had huge potential
- He remembered:
  
  “...in that interview [Jason made] some statements about the potential size of [Shopify] being hundreds of millions. I thought ‘I'm gonna roll with this but I'm not entirely sure if Jason is serious or not.’”

**“I have an unbroken track record of underestimating the potential of my own company, which I hope will continue.”