20VC: Shopify's Tobi Lütke on How AI is a Scapegoat for Mass Layoffs & What Will Labour Markets Be in the Future | Why We Need More Scrutiny on Charitable Giving, Governments are Bad at What They Do and Trump Derangement Syndrome in Canada
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 693 Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2026
⏱️ 74 minutes
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Summary
Tobi Lütke is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify, the global e-commerce titan with a $160 billion market cap. Under his leadership, the company generates over $7 billion in annual revenue and has seen its valuation grow nearly 100x since its 2015 IPO. Today, Shopify has over 8,000 employees and AI now generates over 50% of the Shopify's code.
AGENDA:
00:10:36 - The $160 billion CEO who did not want to be CEO.
00:11:51 - Why don't companies become public? Because it is much worse to be an untrusted public company.
00:16:53 - Why we are about to enter a golden age of entrepreneurship.
00:17:54 - Why AI is being used as a scapegoat for mass layoffs.
00:17:41 - How will labor markets change in a world of AI?
00:24:43 - Why we should praise Elon Musk so much more than we do.
00:27:59 - Why we need to place more, not less, scrutiny on charitable giving.
00:31:56 - Why we have too many charity dollars and why they are inefficient.
00:34:57 - Why governments are so bad at what they do.
00:37:27 - The Trump derangement syndrome in Canada.
00:39:51 - Why will governments regulating technology push us into the hands of the Chinese?
00:41:59 - Europe has to get rid of the bullshit green parties and go back to Prussian economics.
00:48:29 - Why is looking at the ticker such bullshit?
00:50:48 - Why young coders are not as advantaged in AI as I thought they would be.
00:53:56 - The best engineers in Shopify are not writing code anymore and the AI does it for them.
00:56:40 - The cheat code for any career from the billionaire founder of Shopify.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | People who fear of losing and people who fear of winning are clearly going to look at things |
| 0:05.8 | much more short term. |
| 0:07.6 | The world really needs to understand that the people who build companies are fundamentally |
| 0:11.0 | crazy people. |
| 0:12.0 | Look, I'm a glorious mess. |
| 0:14.3 | All the aesthetics around what people believe to be good leadership comes from movies. |
| 0:19.8 | I have this job so other people can have |
| 0:22.4 | a job I wish I could have. There's nothing better in the world than being a trusted public company. |
| 0:26.5 | None of the people who are doing jobs that are just tasks for other people have good jobs. |
| 0:30.7 | The more wealth and resources an entity or even an individual has, the more deserving of scrutiny |
| 0:37.1 | they are. |
| 0:37.9 | What really sucks in the world is that we are prioritizing things that sound good over things |
| 0:42.5 | that work. |
| 0:43.4 | Like, giving money is not virtuous unless it causes the right things. |
| 0:46.9 | We have too much charity dollars. |
| 0:48.7 | The problem with charity dollars is they can't be given to anything that has a self-healing |
| 0:53.0 | fitness function. |
| 0:53.9 | I think great leaders must be exothermic and must be a heat source for the company. I have not looked at the ticker in April. Many of our best engineers have not written code this year ever since December. Like December changed everything. Like Opus changed everything. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I've known Toby Looker for years. He's the founder and |
| 1:11.9 | CEO of Shopify, $160 billion public company. Honestly, I've watched a load of his podcasts. They're |
| 1:17.7 | great. This podcast is a Toby you've never seen before. He was incredibly honest, very funny, |
| 1:25.0 | and pretty controversial. It's a spicy show. |
| 1:28.0 | Strap in, this is an absolute banger. |
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