Serving Small Businesses at Scale

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 technology, how internal tools and "opinionated software" shape an organization's culture and accelerate its evolution, and why the best gift is finding a beautiful, unsolvable problem.

Show notes

• [Buy] Momax: 140W Universal Travel Adapter
• [Read] Benjamin Bloom: The 2 Sigma Problem
• [Buy] Ikigai: vitamin cases 
• [Read] Kevin Kelly: 1,000 True Fans
• [Read] Erich Gamma: Design Patterns 
• [Read] Charles Calomiris: Fragile by Design
• [Listen] Business Breakdowns: Formula One
• [Watch] Netflix: Formula 1: Drive to Survive
• [Read] Mark Robichaux: Cable Cowboy

Key Moments

(00:00) Intro

(07:07) How internal software shapes culture

(16:32) The Shopify vision

(27:49) Peak transaction capacity

(34:36) Agentic commerce

(49:15) Shop Pay

(55:29) Stablecoins

(59:20) Stripe + Shopify

(1:12:23) Learning from the Coinbase board

(1:17:23) Is Tobi ungovernable?

(1:25:02) Entrepreneurship

(1:31:50) Advice for Mark Carney

(1:36:40) Motor racing