Interview with Tobi Lütke

Lots of gold nuggets in this interview with Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke.

My attention is the most liquid and valuable resource that I have.

It’s okay that every day doesn’t look the same. Embrace the liquidity of your most valuable resource!

if those assumptions are faulty, the seemingly perfect decision is faulty too.

Challenge every assumption, especially your own, to arrive at good decisions.

One of my biggest beefs with engineers, in general, is that they love determinism. I think there’s very little determinism in engineering left that’s of value. An individual computer is deterministic; once you introduce even just a network connection into the mix, everything becomes unpredictable and you have to write code that’s resilient to the unknown. Most interesting things come from non-deterministic behaviors. People have a love for the predictable, but there is value in being able to build systems that can absorb whatever is being thrown at them and still have good outcomes.

Build systems that handle the unpredictable. This is why people with an emergency fund sleep better at night than those who assume nothing in their life will ever fail.