I brought a long list of questions to my conversation with Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke. Within minutes, I was setting them aside. Tobi thinks deeply about how technology works, the culture that inspires it, and what it means for the rest of us. He’s also a quote machine. This is one of my favorite podcasts I’ve ever done.
We recently met at Shopify’s Toronto office, where he described AI as “magical territory in which we teach sand to think.” In his words, “our computers now fulfill wishes.”
We discuss why pessimism sounds sophisticated and “optimism sounds naive,” how dystopian sci-fi shapes our expectations, and why agents could let people do things they couldn’t before. As he puts it, “dystopia is always just 30 years ago.”
There’s plenty of business in here, too: why Shopify welcomed Meta’s Muse when Amazon blocked it, how agents will make money, and the younger entrepreneurs he sees building businesses with AI and taking inspiration from MrBeast. We also discuss what founder control makes possible at companies like Shopify and Meta, where he sits on the board.
And, yes, I ask about the wine cellar in his house that he turned into a GPU server rack.
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Episode highlights
Tobi’s advice to AI startups is to focus on the value their agents create before settling on a business model. I pressed him on the assumption that agents will collect a cut of every transaction they handle, and whose margin that money comes out of? He sees several possibilities, including charging users directly, metering usage like electricity, and taking a share of transactions. “If you build something that’s better than a cup of coffee, you are going to probably endure,” he says. That comparison felt familiar: when I priced this newsletter, I was thinking in cups of coffee, too. Advertising adds another complication: an agent paid to steer your purchases can become “a breach of trust,” but he still sees an opportunity for a new kind of advertising format for agents that maybe works more like a discovery marketplace.
He says Shopify is seeing an explosion of new businesses, and the entrepreneurs are getting younger. “I think the new generation is extremely entrepreneurial,” he tells me. AI gives would-be founders a place to ask the questions they might once have emailed to a more experienced entrepreneur. But he also credits creators like MrBeast, whose young audience has watched him use money to build increasingly ambitious projects. The videos are entertainment, but Tobi sees an entrepreneurial education in how a creator reinvests in bigger ideas. For Shopify, he says he’d prefer to grow gross profit dollars by making entrepreneurship cheaper and more widespread than by taking a higher percentage from merchants. As he puts it, the goal is to give people “cruise control for their ambitions.”
His viral GPU wine cellar is powering an AI assistant that helps him figure out who stresses him out. He didn’t have enough wine to fill the room, and buying more just to fill it didn’t feel like him. “I sometimes consult my inner 16-year-old,” he tells me. The servers serve a practical purpose, too: running his OpenClaw agent locally lets him use information he can’t send to an outside AI lab as a public-company CEO. He’s saved years of his writing and computer logs, and he’s also using calendar and heart-rate data to identify his most stressful meetings. He says he told the people involved, who didn’t find it as funny as he did. I suggested he check his heart rate after our interview, too.
ICYMI
Sources is a newsletter and podcast by Alex Heath about the AI race, featuring conversations with leading founders and technologists. Every week, Sources reaches the inboxes of thousands of decision-makers in tech, finance, policy, and media.
