Tobias Lutke Quotes

What could be more Canadian than working hard to figure out something new and sharing it with the world? The world wants to hear from us!

I’m a liberally minded immigrant, leading a predominantly liberal workforce hailing from predominantly liberal cities and countries.

I’m always trying to think of ways to make something more efficient. If I have to do something once, that’s fine. If I have to do it twice, I’m kind of annoyed. And if I have to do it three times, I’m going to try to automate it.

I spent my time, growing up, essentially between two things: technology and retail. I was fascinated by selling and loved the idea of making a profit, but I also spent a lot of time on technology.

Change has to be fundamental to a company’s culture, or there is no way it can survive.

All of us in Canada have to be better at making a dollar count, because we have fewer dollars.

People say Facebook connects the world. Facebook has 5,000 Ph.D.s that think about how to make you click on ads you don’t want to see. Their business model is about something that most people would not perceive as making the world better.

A lot of the best technologists live and work in Canada, and every once in a while, they are aggregated by a Canadian company, and then suddenly, they’re not anymore. But the people are still here – they’re just working for American companies to the benefit of American bottom lines.

When the market turns down, a lot of people lose jobs… and that’s the time people become entrepreneurs. Downturns end up being the best times to start companies.

I am a worrier. I tend to do something about what I worry about.

Being part of something that’s growing fast is better than being part of something that isn’t growing fast because opportunities are essentially everywhere, and you’re not competing for something.

I’m against exclusion of any kind – whether that’s restricting people from Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. or kicking merchants off our platform if they’re operating within the law.

I never cared a lot for school.

Given the success rate, if you want to get wealthy, entrepreneurship is a horrible way of doing it. There are significantly easier ways of doing it.

Products are a form of speech, and free speech must be fiercely protected, even if we disagree with some of the voices.

We are at our best when we are at our proudest. Canadians need to harness that confidence in every arena, not just the ice rink. The Maple Leaf stands for quality, thoughtfulness, and innovation, so let’s brand it proudly on the things that we’ve invented, created, and figured out.

Our mantra has been, ‘We will not buy a company unless we think the people that make up the company have a better job the day after the acquisition than before.’

I find the strongest predictor of people who do well at Shopify is whether they see opportunity as something to compete for, or do they see opportunity as essentially everywhere and unlimited? It’s a rough proxy for pessimism and optimism.

In my worldview, 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.

It’s not a principle unless it costs you something.

Different people need different kinds of communication for it to have the same effect. That was something I had to learn.

E-commerce is not an industry; e-commerce is a tactic.

I think I probably had to start a company, because I don’t think I can work for other people.

Shopify has been a perpetually underestimated company at every point of its history.

If you believe something needs to exist, if it’s something you want to use yourself, don’t let anyone ever stop you from doing it.

A lot of people have a great business idea; they just need a little push to make it a reality.

At Shopify, we are trying to make things as simple as possible, but for the business owner, it’s not unlike starting your own little shop along Main Street somewhere.

I got my first computer at the age of 6. To me, it was magic. By the time I was 12, I wanted to know the secrets behind the wizardry, and that started my journey toward computer programming. This was the early 1990s, when computers weren’t built for the mass market.

We need a lot more technically literate people. The computers are the tools that are going to solve essentially all problems, and the people who can use them better will be more effective.

It is incredibly powerful if you solve the problem you actually have yourself. It’s really tough to develop a good product when you don’t have very close proximity to the people who actually use your product. The closest proximity you can have to those people is to be that person.