CEO Tobi Lutke shares how Shopify got so big

Tobi Lutke, the chief executive officer of Shopify, has shared on Twitter how did his company get so big this decade and said that working “80 hours” a week is not required to be successful.

Ottawa, Canada-headquartered Shopify is a leading global commerce company offering tools to launch, develop, market and run a retail business of any size. It powers more than a million businesses in over 175 countries and is trusted by such brands as PepsiCo, Allbirds, Staples, Gymshark, and several others. Shopify merchants broke records with $2.9+ billion in global sales over the 2019 Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend earlier this month.

Through a Twitter thread on Thursday, Lutke said Shopify was founded “very far from the primary places where people build companies” and that it was the first real job for its founders.

He explained that it meant that first “by ignorance” and “later increasingly deliberate,” the team was able to build the company completely differently to how technology firms were built.

Lutke then went on to give some examples. He said he never worked through a night, and the only times he worked 40+-hour weeks were when he “had the burning desire to do so.”

“I need 8ish hours of sleep a night,” wrote Tobi Lutke. “Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not.”

He said that one cannot cheat when it comes to creative work.

“My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone’s day,” Lutke tweeted. “All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.”

Lutke said in the next thread people are not robots but are just people and they are “awesome.” He added that even better than people are teams.

Talking about his hiring decisions, Lutke said that he assumes all new hires will work with Shopify for a decade.

“We can hire on future potential and help people get there quickly,” stated Tobi Lutke. “Junior employees are put together with seasoned vets and sometimes coaches to help them get there.”

He wrote that his company tries to help a young engineer or designer to get 10 years of career advancement in a single year. The young employee, said Lutke, should be ready, and the teachers will be there.

In addition to hiring “(and sometimes sadly firing),” Tobi Lutke said he believes if the people in a company get better, they can only make that company better.

Lutke tweeted that a key ingredient of Shopify’s success was that they built a profitable lifestyle company before accepting investment.

After taking VC investment in 2010, Lutke noted that his company did not change any opinion on how to hire, work together or build teams.

He mentioned, “While we did work hard (whatever that means in tech) in the early days, we also always took time to play.”

Now, Lutke said, he is home at 5:30pm every evening. He said he does not travel on the weekend. Personal health and family rank higher in his priority list.

Talking about Shopify going public, Lutke stated that it didn’t change much. He said that nobody at the office bought a Lamborghini; rather, everybody “kept working on the problem we fell in love with.”

He said his company does not burn out employees; rather, gives them space.

“We love real teams with real friendship forming,” tweeted Lutke. “We understand the power of individual potential and proximity. Even our floor plan is designed to give small teams a pod all to themselves.”

Tobi Lutke’s Twitter thread can be read in its entirety here.

Image credit - Union Eleven (CC BY-SA 3.0)