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" 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. "

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" We are reluctant to do these bigger acquisitions that are then integrated, especially if they are committed to a certain product that they want to build that we can't guarantee we will keep evolving. "

Tobias Lutke

Bigger

Will

Want

" 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. "

" I always loved retail. I love the ideas behind it. I think small-business retail is one of the areas where capitalism works so wonderfully well. "

" Computers are the most powerful tools that humanity has ever created. Yet, we treat them largely as a black box; as if it were an alien artifact that magically appeared on desks, in homes, and in our pockets. "

" Once you've made peace with the fact that you're hardly ever going to work on anything that you're actually good at, the only thing that you can do is get good very fast on everything you have to do. "

" Everyone loves feeling comfortable. But it's actually completely useless. "

" One of the most important tasks as a leader in a startup is to pick the right metric to track. This is often referred to as the 'compass metric' because it will be your compass for growth. It's important to note that 'compass metrics' will likely change over the lifetime of a business. "

" 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. "

" Computers add convenience to our everyday lives, but we are limited in what we can do with technology others have imagined. The ability for humans to teach machines entirely new things - coding - is nothing short of a superpower. "

" 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. "

" Our hiring is almost completely built around just going through someone's life story, and we look for moments when they had to make important decisions, and we go deep on those. "

" No one benefits from us not taking credit for our successes. There is no virtue in allowing kudos to go unclaimed or elsewhere. "

Tobias Lutke

Credit

Benefits

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

" It took about 10 years' time for Shopify to be an overnight success. "

" You have to put more of a well-rounded company together to make it in Canada, and I hope the Canadian market is going to be known for these well-performing, solid companies that people can rely on. "

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

" More and more people are opening online stores and online retail businesses. This market is expanding very, very quickly. "

Tobias Lutke

Retail

Market

" If you go into business school and suggest firing a customer, they'll kick you out of the building. But it's so true in my experience. It allows you to identify the customers you really want to work with. "

" 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. "

" To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas and interfere with the free exchange of products at the core of commerce. When we kick off a merchant, we're asserting our own moral code as the superior one. But who gets to define that moral code? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It's this concept of 'just fill up a building of smart people.' It sounds so basic, but honestly it might just be the secret behind Shopify's success. We just do that and get out of the way. "

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

" I'm ridiculously lucky. "

Tobias Lutke

Ridiculously

Lucky

" Being a start-up has nothing to do with the numbers. It's that everyone who works there has the chance to do everything and have an impact. "

" Growing up, I spent my time doing useless stuff looking at computers. "

" I care about working on interesting problems, and Shopify is this gift that keeps on giving for working on interesting problems with amazing people. "

" We're trying to build the largest start-up ever without becoming a big company. "