How Shopify Differs: Internal Tools and R&D Culture

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