i'm extremely excited that everything's progress i can watch three four five different fields right now all of them are progressing at breakneck pace. especially machine learning is the first time i think i found my total capacity like they actually have to say this progress is so fast my model of what's possible is falling behind even though i'm trying to make that not true. sometimes i just don't notice that something is accelerating uh and fall behind but then i can catch up They are actually having trouble staying on top of it I mean maybe that's a statement about me being very busy at work where is a statement on me being my voice now, he says.
My guest today is Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke. We discuss the differences between founders and professional managers, how he’s scaled with Shopify, the constant fight against bureaucracy, how he thinks about innovation in a large company, and how he manages to keep his head when everyone else is losing theirs.
A coder at heart who emigrated from Germany to Canada two decades ago, Lütke co-founded the e-commerce giant Shopify in Ottawa in 2006. The Globe and Mail named Lütke "CEO of the Year" in November 2014, and in May 2021 the company reported that it had more than 1.7 million businesses in approximately 175 countries using its platform. As of July 2022, Shopify is among the top 20 largest publicly traded Canadian companies by market capitalization, and the company’s total revenue for 2021 was $4.611 billion. Lütke previously appeared on Episode 41 of The Knowledge Project.
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