tobi lutke

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.

Last year, we invested in @Monumental_Labs. They use AI and robotics to reduce the cost of stone fabrication by 90%. Construction tech is our game and while I think what they are doing with art and sculpture fab is amazing, the bull case for ML imo was doing building scale construction with stone. Essentially, reviving a dormant material type for type I construction to compete directly with steel and concrete. Before investing, I had to answer a question that's been nagging me for years: exactly when and why did we stop building with natural materials like stone? Where did beauty in our built environment go to die? It's mostly always been an economic story.

Sidekick responses got so much better yesterday. s/o to @alxclrk for sweating all the details on this one.

The Hidden Lawful Access Tradeoff: How Bill C-22 Lowers the Evidentiary Standards for Police Access to Subscriber Information michaelgeist.ca/2026/03/the-hi…

Today we added statistical confidence on pi-autoresearch. Now the LLM gets a confidence metric that will guide it to re-run the experiment if there was noise detected during the measurement. Thanks @0xRkyd for bringing the idea.

We've been experimenting with pi-autoresearch to optimize the new canvas rendering engine. 10x improvement on the slowest test in couple hours. 🤯 While it did take some shortcuts that degraded rendering quality, it also came up with several great ideas that were easy to cherry pick. This is huge. HT to @karpathy for the original inspiration and @davebcn87 for the π extension.