Shopify CEO by day, Dad in evening, hacker at night, Aspiring comprehensivist.
Canada
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Yea that was a fun one.
Thank you for celebrating the glory of entrepreneurship, David.
My conversation with Tobi Lütke (@tobi), co-founder and CEO of Shopify.
0:00 Companies as Social Technology
5:27 The Value of Reading Books: Cheat Codes for Life
7:28 Post-IPO Crisis: Cosplaying as a CEO
7:54 Competition vs Rivalry: The Power of Healthy Competition
16:02 COVID as a Turning Point: Rebuilding the Executive Team
18:21 Hiring Founders: Building a Team of High-Agency People
26:49 Shopify OS: Engineering the Company from First Principles
36:48 Compensation Innovation: Giving Employees Full Agency
40:41 The Psychology of Identity and Affirmations
48:43 Differentiation Over Perfection: Making It Your Own
50:31 Context Podcast: Documenting Decision-Making
1:26:36 The IPO Decision: Going Against Silicon Valley Orthodoxy
1:35:08 Building a Company Worth Working For
1:41:50 Hiring for Spikiness: Finding Non-Conformists
1:48:28 Office Design Philosophy: Creating Space for Excellence
1:58:54 Video Games as Business Training: StarCraft Lessons
2:07:06 AI Revolution: 2026 and Beyond
2:11:44 Focus on Craft: The Unquantifiable Elements of Excellence
2:21:08 Survivorship Bias: The Importance of Entrepreneurial Exposure
2:23:22 Closing
Includes paid partnerships.
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What Tobi is about to do today is one of the most insane things I’ve seen in athletic performance.
He will be racing for 2.5 hours straight. Before immersing myself in this sport for the past few days, I would have thought “oh that’s cool, he’ll be driving a fast car around a track.”
That is not what this is.
And why I have so much respect for him.
Tobi will be driving a car over 180 mph, experiencing up to 4.2 g of force. That will throw his body forward with 715 lbs of force and his head by 67 lbs.
Braking action requires up to 200 lbs of leg force.
The cockpit will average 104-122°F (40 to 50°C). His multi-layer suit barely allows for evaporation. This will cause his core body temperature to reach 102°F. I achieved this same body temp after 200°F of dry sauna for 34 min. It’s overwhelming. His heart rate will beat between 140-170 bpm.
He will sweat up to 170 fl oz (5 kg), losing 11 lbs of body weight. Some classes run driver cooling systems. His LMP2 doesn't.
Under these conditions, he will need to maintain perfect concentration for the entire 2.5 hours. He’s fighting for tenths of a second on every turn and every stretch.
One small slip up and trouble awaits.
Today it’s even more intense… it’s raining. The track is wet, scrambling everything.
He has to maintain spatial memory of every other car on the track, the complicated rules to avoid penalty, and constantly strategize overtaking other drivers, communicate with his team on the radio, watch for debris, be aware of slightest nuances of his car, and anticipate other drivers.
He did a practice run on Thursday and then a qualifying race yesterday, when he emerged from the car, he was a different human. Unrecognizable from the person who entered the car. Beaming with something like an omnipresence of reality.
We celebrate those who are especially good at kicking balls, shooting balls into baskets, and running with balls. What Tobi will do today is alien to those. I struggle to think of a sport equally as demanding.
Tobi and I have a lot in common. We’ve both built companies. We both spend a lot of time at the keyboard trying to organize the world in ways that we find beautiful. We both love data, method, and analysis. We both have a love for continuous improvement and will endure any pain required to achieve that next goal.
What I’ve not experienced is the unmatched flow state Tobi tells me he drops into when under these racing conditions.
I deeply understand what it means to achieve a 102°F core body temperature after 34 min in a 200°F dry sauna. I also know what 3 g’s feels like from being a pilot. These are extremely intense psychological states.
I know what it means to apply 200 lbs of pressure with my legs.
What I’ve never experienced is all these things, at the same time, for 2.5 hours straight, while maintaining perfect focus.
He is new to car racing. Late by racing standards. DHH got him into it a few years ago. During this first year of racing, he endured to overcome the extreme motion sickness that accompanies the physical and mental violence of the sport.
The race starts at noon eastern. Tobi will be driving for the first 2.5 hours and then @dhh will drop in, followed by Mathias Beche. The race will conclude at 10 pm.
I’ll be in the pit watching as all the data streams in from his car and body and imagining what it’s like to be in that car.
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Incredibly kind. It’s a hell of a hobby. An entire vacation in a weekend for me. My friend @johnhopebryant calls it Zen Buddhism at 180mps.
You get into a deep flow state in the car. And you experience camaraderie with your fellow drivers and crew unlike anything else.
Best hobby in the world. And way more accessible than people think. I did much of my best racing in Mazda MX5 and in SR3 Radicals, which come a lot cheaper than LMP2!
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So fun to introduce old friends to the amazing world of endurance racing. Come by, or tune in tomorrow for Road Atlanta starting noon EST.
I’m watching three friends lose 11 lbs of body weight in a race car tomorrow
+ Tobias Lutke (founder shopify)
+ DHH (creator ruby on rails)
+ Mathias Beche (le mans podium)
Race car driving is insane…
+ 122°F cockpit
+ heart rate 170
+ 2.5 hours straight
+ 10 hr race
+ up to 4.2 g force (wild)
+ multi-layer fireproof suit
+ sweat barely evaporate
+ 600-900 calories per hour
The race is a 10-hour endurance track in atlanta. It’s called Motul Petit Le Mans.
Tomorrow is the season finale, where 54 cars across multiple classes run roughly 400 laps of the 2.54-mile road. The race doesn’t end till 10 pm.
They’ll be driving an LMP2:
+ 603 horsepower
+ 2,050 pounds
+ 9,000 rpm
I’ve personally experienced some of the above things:
> core body temp of 102°F
> 3 g force in my airplane
> non evaporative clothing
> stomping 200 lbs
> severe dehydration
But never all at once… inside a race car for 2.5 hours straight, competing for tenths of a second, and in a high risk environment.
I’m struggling to get my head around it.
Last week, Tobi and I were at a conference catching up. He and I have been friends for 15 years.
Tobi and DHH were my first customers at my payments startup Braintree. I’ll forever be grateful to them and DHH’s co-founder @jasonfried for giving my company life.
Tobi approaches racing as I do my body. Data, method and analysis. A closed loop game of continuous improvement.
Off the track, Tobi:
+ founder and ceo of Shopify
+ 6 million+ merchants
+ $195 billion market cap
+ 20 yrs building
Off the track, DHH:
+ created Ruby on Rails
+ co-founder 37signals
+ 20 yrs building
+ profitable, no outside capital
+ 24 Hours of Le Mans class winner
On the track, Mathias Beche:
+ 24 Hours of Le Mans podium finisher
+ European Le Mans Series LMP2
+ FIA Endurance Championship winner
+ 15+ career prototype victories
What a team of bad asses.
I’m excited to be in the pit on tomorrow and watch all of this go down.
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Good luck, will be rooting for #11! I've been putting in laps in my sim since Road Atlanta dropped in LMU. What an incredible track
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tobi lutke retweeted
Seeing what they were working on here is what really made me realize what a great home Shopify would be for our team.
Incredible work by everyone involved, and excited to help push stuff like this further 🙌🏻
When I built @kotn’s first store 12 years ago, I knew how to code and it still took me two weeks just to get to something OK, years to get to something I liked.
We built the tool I wish I had back then. Here’s Canvas.
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tobi lutke retweeted
🚨 side project alert 🚨
Announcing Muse Gadgets, an open source ESP32 firmware and Linux sdk so that you can make hardware devices that work with Muse.
Grab an API token from gadgets.muse.ai and point your favorite coding agent at the github repo to build your own peripherals for Muse.
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tobi lutke retweeted
I’m watching three friends lose 11 lbs of body weight in a race car tomorrow
+ Tobias Lutke (founder shopify)
+ DHH (creator ruby on rails)
+ Mathias Beche (le mans podium)
Race car driving is insane…
+ 122°F cockpit
+ heart rate 170
+ 2.5 hours straight
+ 10 hr race
+ up to 4.2 g force (wild)
+ multi-layer fireproof suit
+ sweat barely evaporate
+ 600-900 calories per hour
The race is a 10-hour endurance track in atlanta. It’s called Motul Petit Le Mans.
Tomorrow is the season finale, where 54 cars across multiple classes run roughly 400 laps of the 2.54-mile road. The race doesn’t end till 10 pm.
They’ll be driving an LMP2:
+ 603 horsepower
+ 2,050 pounds
+ 9,000 rpm
I’ve personally experienced some of the above things:
> core body temp of 102°F
> 3 g force in my airplane
> non evaporative clothing
> stomping 200 lbs
> severe dehydration
But never all at once… inside a race car for 2.5 hours straight, competing for tenths of a second, and in a high risk environment.
I’m struggling to get my head around it.
Last week, Tobi and I were at a conference catching up. He and I have been friends for 15 years.
Tobi and DHH were my first customers at my payments startup Braintree. I’ll forever be grateful to them and DHH’s co-founder @jasonfried for giving my company life.
Tobi approaches racing as I do my body. Data, method and analysis. A closed loop game of continuous improvement.
Off the track, Tobi:
+ founder and ceo of Shopify
+ 6 million+ merchants
+ $195 billion market cap
+ 20 yrs building
Off the track, DHH:
+ created Ruby on Rails
+ co-founder 37signals
+ 20 yrs building
+ profitable, no outside capital
+ 24 Hours of Le Mans class winner
On the track, Mathias Beche:
+ 24 Hours of Le Mans podium finisher
+ European Le Mans Series LMP2
+ FIA Endurance Championship winner
+ 15+ career prototype victories
What a team of bad asses.
I’m excited to be in the pit on tomorrow and watch all of this go down.
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The team has really outdone themselves.
Canvas is so much fun. Never imagined we would be able to make online store design so fun and democratized when we started. And it’s all still powered by liquid!
When I built @kotn’s first store 12 years ago, I knew how to code and it still took me two weeks just to get to something OK, years to get to something I liked.
We built the tool I wish I had back then. Here’s Canvas.
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Two weeks of coding in 2014 to vibing a storefront into existence in 2026. The devs who wrote Liquid are somewhere watching like proud parents.
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tobi lutke retweeted
Shopify wants more beauty on the web. That’s why we over-invest in things like Editions.
The same ambition shaped Canvas. AI makes it easy to generate more of the same, so we spent a great deal of time guiding Sidekick to make good design decisions while giving you room to make something distinctly yours.
Meet Canvas. Jump in and start designing.
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The Shopify Racing #11 LMP2 is back in action for the final time of the year this weekend at Petit Le Mans / Road Atlanta. @tobi and I will share the car with @MathiasBeche for one last shot at the podium 🤘
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tobi lutke retweeted
Turns out the people at the most AI-forward company in the world like working there. @Shopify is #3 on @Forbes' World's Best Employers.
forbes.com/lists/worlds-best…
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That’s better
Now you can pin our plugin in @ChatGPT
Plugin extensions let you build interactive panels, file viewers, and a sidebar home in ChatGPT.
Get clearer feedback when submitting your plugin for review.
With support for the proposed MCP Events specification, events in connected apps can start automations in ChatGPT:
developers.openai.com/plugin…
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Trusted Infrastructure for Super Intelligence
Proud of the @Dell team. The first Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale system, fully integrated and shipping in volume. 🚀
Thank you @JensenHuang @nvidia. The pace of this partnership is unlike anything I've seen in 40+ years.
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Impressive. This set of talks, along with the new America dot gov website, has the unmistakable feel of an Apple launch event. They're rebooting the federal government as a tech startup. Several observations.
(1) First, with this new AI interface to the entire federal government, if it works as promised, there won't be a single American who can't say their life wasn't helped at least in part by AI, or that the benefits accrued solely to zillionaires. This in itself cannily mitigates anti-datacenter sentiment.
(2) Second, Joe Gebbia and Marco Rubio's talks on simplifying name changes and passport filings introduce a completely new era where the US government is actually launching tangible features that benefit users.
(3) Third, this launch event in and of itself may visibly drive reform. It could become much more important than the State of the Union. Unlike laws, code is user-visible, and can be instantly audited by the public, as Obama found out with the failed obamacare website launch. So: the annual America dot gov event may be substance, whereas SOTU is traditionally optics. I wouldn't be surprised to see the President present at the next one.
(4) Fourth, this kind of event is a perfect example of where tech and red cooperate best. They both hate bureaucracy. Automating paperwork with code reduces the power of statists over both capitalists and nationalists. It's also hard to undo by other admins: once you digitize a process, hard to turn it back to paper.
(5) Fifth, it's an obvious point perhaps, but think about how much influence YCombinator has had in 20 years. From Gebbia's Airbnb joining their 2009 batch to a complete overhaul of the user interface of the US bureaucracy, and thus the US government.
(6) Sixth, this is another take on the network state. The functional part of the US (the network, meaning tech) is merging with and partially reforming the dysfunctional part (the state, meaning bureaucracy) by automating 20th century paper forms.
As a tech startup, there will no doubt be bugs and user issues and so on, but unlike with paper laws those issues will be visible and the code fixes will be verifiable. A new era of AI America. Rooting for them.
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I'm presenting Flexport's latest release of AI and technology for global logistics this morning. Watch live at 9:00 am Pacific Time right here on X. x.lingyaoai.com/i/broadcasts/1YxNrbypD…
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