management 11
- A company cannot be led by machines, because nobody would have recourse against them.
- Companies are short-term focused not because executives are, but because executives are incentivised to prove results at quarterly intervals.
Tobias Lütke
Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.
Tobias Lütke did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
What Tobias Lütke says most about
design 6
- Someone may soon build (or already has built) an embeddable, sqlite-style execution environment that parses bash, TypeScript, or tool calls into a security-checkable IL plan.
- The hard part of a decision is choosing among several valid solutions, not finding a right one.
innovation 4
- When there is an orthodox way to solve a problem, that solution deserves suspicion.
- Collaborative multiplayer software is the future.
LLMs 4
- Without an execution environment, LLMs cannot properly act on their understanding of how to forward evolve a system.
- With AI, the failure mode of lazy work is no longer too little output but too much.
coding agents 3
- Requiring two parallel agent instruction files in a monorepo is a complexity tax that leaves some developers working with a lobotomised agent.
- Coding agents should read the shared AGENTS.md convention; insisting on a tool-specific CLAUDE.md creates split-brain problems across a team.
motivation 3
- Companies are short-term focused not because executives are, but because executives are incentivised to prove results at quarterly intervals.
- Affirmations are the easiest way to reshape your own mind, the way willpower turns behaviour into habit.
AI alignment 2
- Machines cannot take responsibility, which is the most overlooked limit of AI; humans take responsibility and machines can only inform them.
- Humans have been living in the presence of a superintelligence their entire lives.
AI slop 2
- Code should be accepted based on its merit and accountability for it should be assigned.
- With AI, the failure mode of lazy work is no longer too little output but too much.
behavioural science 2
- People are drawn to complex answers, and complex answers tend to be incorrect.
- Intuition is most valuable precisely where there is no direct feedback.
energy 2
- Being strong, sovereign, hard-working and deeply competent, ideally also finishing ambitious infrastructure on budget and on time, makes every other problem melt away.
- In a managerially run company legitimacy lives in the plan rather than in any person, which is why changing anything takes enormous activation energy.
infrastructure 2
- A good tool raises the floor of what people can build without lowering the ceiling, and almost every tool quietly lowers the ceiling.
- Being strong, sovereign, hard-working and deeply competent, ideally also finishing ambitious infrastructure on budget and on time, makes every other problem melt away.
politics 2
- Most of what people call politics inside a company is really bad context engineering.
- A politician's plan to fund a program by taking some people's money is driven by an incentive to buy votes rather than make things better.
product management 2
- Companies that constantly retune their pricing cheapen the product, because customers learn to wait for the next discount.
- A store that closes on Shopify because it found no product-market fit is not bad churn, because the same entrepreneurs will probably try again.
simplicity 2
- People are drawn to complex answers, and complex answers tend to be incorrect.
- You cannot keep making things better by adding to them; you must prune.
software quality 2
- Code should be accepted based on its merit and accountability for it should be assigned.
- An abstraction chosen wrongly at the start means a team can never make its software great, however good that team is.
startups 2
- Everything you dislike doing is somebody else's dream job, so a founder should delegate the work they hate rather than the work they enjoy.
- The right path for a company tends to be the option without a rapid feedback loop attached.
taste 2
- Taste and judgment will be the most valuable skills over the next decade, and teenagers should spend their time now cultivating taste.
- Beauty is how intuition communicates with us.
writing 2
- Recently written non-fiction is mostly a product of its time; books that have stood the test of time are the ones worth reading.
- No great book has been written by a group; books are as good as they are because they always have a single author.