Top 35 Tobias Lutke Quotes

Everyone loves feeling comfortable. But it’s actually completely useless.

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.

I am a worrier. I tend to do something about what I worry about.

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.

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.

When the market turns down, a lot of people lose jobs… and that’s the time people become entrepreneurs. Downturns end up being the best times to start companies.

Commerce is a powerful, underestimated form of expression. We use it to cast a vote with every product we buy. It’s a direct expression of democracy. This is why our mission at Shopify is to protect that form of expression and make it better for everyone, not just for those we agree with.

My early interactions with VCs were really, really poor.

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

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 mantra has been, ‘We will not buy a company unless we think the people that make up the company have a better job the day after the acquisition than before.’

What could be more Canadian than working hard to figure out something new and sharing it with the world? The world wants to hear from us!

Sometimes, when you’re building a company, out of necessity there’s just a gazillion things you have to learn and figure out.

It is my strong belief that computer literacy should be part of our educational system‘s core curriculum.

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.

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.

I’m against exclusion of any kind – whether that’s restricting people from Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. or kicking merchants off our platform if they’re operating within the law.

At Shopify, we are trying to make things as simple as possible, but for the business owner, it’s not unlike starting your own little shop along Main Street somewhere.

I’m ridiculously lucky.

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.

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

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

A lot of the best technologists live and work in Canada, and every once in a while, they are aggregated by a Canadian company, and then suddenly, they’re not anymore. But the people are still here – they’re just working for American companies to the benefit of American bottom lines.

It’s not a principle unless it costs you something.

Every phase of building a company is really hard.

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.

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

We are at our best when we are at our proudest. Canadians need to harness that confidence in every arena, not just the ice rink. The Maple Leaf stands for quality, thoughtfulness, and innovation, so let’s brand it proudly on the things that we’ve invented, created, and figured out.

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.

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

A lot of people have a great business idea; they just need a little push to make it a reality.

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

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

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.

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.