Keep pulling the thread on Tobi Lütke.
Tobi Lütke hopes that in five years, Shopify will maintain its current headcount of 7,500-8,000 employees while achieving a 100x increase in productivity.
If Western governments restrict children's access to domestic AI models, those children will turn to Chinese-developed models, exposing them to a censored, pro-CCP worldview.
Tobi Lütke considers his biggest public mistake to be Shopify's strategic move into physical logistics and warehousing, which was abandoned because the company lacked the capacity to pursue both that and AI development simultaneously.
Shopify has developed an internal AI system named River that operates within Slack and now performs a significant amount of the company's engineering work.
Over 50% of the code at Shopify is now generated by AI.
Since the release of Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus model, many of Shopify's top engineers have stopped writing code manually and now primarily steer AI models.
An estimated 10 million people have jobs that involve working on the Shopify platform, including merchants and their employees.
Shopify is a public company with a valuation of $160 billion.
The trend of giving founders a longer runway and more control began after Apple brought back Steve Jobs, which created a precedent for investors and boards.
Shopify's strategy for its 2015 IPO was to go public when the company was still small to build long-term trust with public market investors by making their careers.
During an IPO pricing meeting, investment bankers are not primarily serving the company going public; their main customers are the investors in the order book, for whom they aim to secure the cheapest possible deal.
Shopify's current headcount is approximately 7,500 to 8,000 people.