Technical Challenges: Transactions and Lock Contention

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

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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