tobi lutke

Shopify CEO by day, Dad in evening, hacker at night, Aspiring comprehensivist.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Yea that was a fun one.

Thank you for celebrating the glory of entrepreneurship, David.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

My conversation with Tobi Lütke (@tobi), co-founder and CEO of Shopify.

0:00 Companies as Social Technology
5:27 The Value of Reading Books: Cheat Codes for Life
7:28 Post-IPO Crisis: Cosplaying as a CEO
7:54 Competition vs Rivalry: The Power of Healthy Competition
16:02 COVID as a Turning Point: Rebuilding the Executive Team
18:21 Hiring Founders: Building a Team of High-Agency People
26:49 Shopify OS: Engineering the Company from First Principles
36:48 Compensation Innovation: Giving Employees Full Agency
40:41 The Psychology of Identity and Affirmations
48:43 Differentiation Over Perfection: Making It Your Own
50:31 Context Podcast: Documenting Decision-Making
1:26:36 The IPO Decision: Going Against Silicon Valley Orthodoxy
1:35:08 Building a Company Worth Working For
1:41:50 Hiring for Spikiness: Finding Non-Conformists
1:48:28 Office Design Philosophy: Creating Space for Excellence
1:58:54 Video Games as Business Training: StarCraft Lessons
2:07:06 AI Revolution: 2026 and Beyond
2:11:44 Focus on Craft: The Unquantifiable Elements of Excellence
2:21:08 Survivorship Bias: The Importance of Entrepreneurial Exposure
2:23:22 Closing

Includes paid partnerships.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Best design team in the world

[Jared Tredly @JaredTredly]

Crew's here cooking! Nice to have a few fresh faces in the STUDIO from out of town. Shopify Design in NYC.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

@rnrmediagrp 👀

[tobi lutke @tobi]

@darrenjr It’s so good

[Taras @tar_uniqueee]

One of the coolest details on the new https://t.co/PUBAemljTm homepage is a Cart card that adapts to merchant and product counts, makes the most of its space, and fits naturally alongside recently viewed items on any screen.

[Adam Wathan @adamwathan]

This Slack agent we have at Shopify is incredible. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to onboard at a company this size without something like this.

It knows everything.

[Kane 謝凱堯 @kane]

Bloomington, Indiana city council

[0xMarioNawfal @RoundtableSpace]

Shopify's CEO gives his AI agents their own computer.

Tobi Lütke just shared wrapvm: a full desktop VM built for agents.

•⁠ ⁠A real Linux desktop your agent can see and control
•⁠ ⁠Its own Chrome, already wired up for browser automation
•⁠ ⁠Computer-use tools so it can click through any app
•⁠ ⁠One machine per project folder, so agents never touch your real computer
•⁠ ⁠You watch everything live from your browser, and sound can be recorded too

Your agent gets a sandbox to break things in. Your laptop stays yours.

https://t.co/76uAw4Uf0V

[Davi Strazza @davistrazza]

.@Shopify is hands down the best and most future-proof commerce platform out there

[Juozas Kaziukėnas @juokaz]

Shopify can now do multi-merchant shopping carts. Agents can build carts from the total universe of Shopify merchants and users can pay in a single checkout click. Not live anywhere yet, but big step for turning Shopify's billion-plus catalog into a quasi-marketplace.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Love this

[John Fewell @johnfewell]

The whole City of Toronto, isometric, and now you can turn it.

All 630 km², drawn from four angles. Hit rotate and walk around the CN Tower, or your own street. 🧵

https://t.co/Y9AGlg3F82

[tobi lutke @tobi]

@lanceawhite naturally

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

SpaceX and Tesla have prospered in Texas, because we were not constantly operating under an oppressive and extractive state government.

And I need to be close to the factories, so that I can walk the floor in person. That’s why the first major SpaceX factory was in LA and first major Tesla factory was in SF Bay Area.

As California became increasingly difficult, due to extreme taxes and overregulation, we moved our major domestic expansions and HQ to Texas.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Tell your agent to be more like Alexis' one!

[Alexis Ohanian 🗽 @alexisohanian]

My agent is buying a LOT more from Shopify-powered stores. Not investment advice, but if I were running an e-commerce business that didn’t support agentic commerce, I’d feel like I was making a big mistake.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

It works

[Steve Ruiz @steveruizok]

good prompt "find all of the implicit state machines in my app"

[Michelle Phillips @Michphil1998]

Only in Canada can a person who works their ass off 40 hours a week pay more in taxes than an “artist” who tells “stories”!

Work your ass off to paint a houses = pay FULL taxes
Paint a picture of a maple leaf = $45k tax break

[Owen Lewis @is_OwenLewis]

"For all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean 'spaceship.'"

–Arthur C. Clarke

[JIMMIE @jimmieX07]

🚨 BREAKING: GINA HINOJOSA ISSUES ELON MUSK WITH AN ULTIMATUM OVER TESLA’S OPERATIONS IN TEXAS.

Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has announced plans to introduce significantly higher tax rates targeting Elon Musk’s companies operating in Texas, insisting that Tesla must comply with the state’s new tax requirements or reconsider its continued manufacturing operations in the state.

Under the proposed terms, Tesla would be required to pay the increased tax rate to maintain its production operations, including Cybertruck manufacturing at its Texas Gigafactory, or face the possibility of having production halted.

The development would mark a significant escalation in the political and business tensions surrounding Musk’s relationship with Texas’ incoming Democratic leadership.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

more true than ever

[tobi lutke @tobi]

A huge amount of the Anti-AI code sentiment massively overestimates the quality of human code outside of a very small set of open source and high quality company codebases. Human Slop is everywhere and can trivially be improved on by any opus level model.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

This I can get excited about

[Build Canada @buildcanada]

New (amazing) cabinet directive:

For every $1 in regulatory costs a new rule adds, regulators must cut $2 elsewhere. 👏

They’ll also have to test new rules for competitiveness, default to national or international standards, and review rules regularly.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Ok Browsers: It’s time for you to just accept typescript files. No type checking, but you ought to load them now.