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Tobias Lütke

Chief Executive Officer, Shopify

Search every verified Tobias Lütke interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, discussed the company's use of artificial intelligence in a September 2026 podcast with Shane Parrish. He stated that roughly 50% of Shopify's pull requests are now created from conversations with the company's AI system, River, rather than traditional engineering work. Lütke argued that taste, judgment, and responsibility become more valuable as AI capabilities grow, and he described using an "AI council" to examine difficult decisions. He also cautioned against what he called "slop grenades," referring to excessive or low-quality AI-generated output. At Shopify's DotDev event in July 2026, Lütke participated in fireside chats with Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and Shopify President Harley Finkelstein. He described Shopify and Vercel as being among companies fighting for an open web, and noted that if the web were invented today, it might be rejected by app store gatekeepers. Lütke also said entrepreneurs would benefit most from AI, calling it "the most AI safe job in the world," and emphasized that people "rise to your ambition but you will fall to your systems." In earlier appearances, he discussed the founding of Shopify, described entrepreneurship as being "in big crisis" due to declining new company formation, and attributed much of his success to luck.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“The concept of responsibility is like it's easy to skip past, right? Like it's like one thing that's definitely worse is the failure case. Now of lazy work is not lack of output. It's actually over output. Now internally we have come to call these things that people are lobbing slop grenades at each other which I think is a really fun term that we should push into industry because like it's fun to say. It's really ea”

“It's a crazy situation that I can get a laptop and start $15 billion Shopify and not need to ask no one, but if I want to become a hairdresser, I need to get a license for it. So, that's kind of one of those situations which probably people have to have a look at. But the other one is just friction. Like how difficult is it? Like how many things do you have to understand to start an online business?”

“Entrepreneurship is in big crisis right now. It's a complete counternarrative to what most people think but right now new company formation is at the lowest point it's ever been. Gen X started a lot fewer companies than its parents and millennials are lower yet. So, it's the least entrepreneurial generation so far.”

“I think these things should be available but not prescribed and so I mean we switch to a very simple system where everyone gets a number this is what you make every year and um so everyone agrees but like the ground truth is of compensation and then you can say we want this in cash do you want this in stock options.”

“It's just wrong this like it's just it's like it sounds smart but it's dumb like and it's been dumb for like I can show you newspaper articles from 1935 where people argued that we've invented everything that we need to invent and we will have to deal with a slower growth society and we will have to figure out how to like redistribute the things we have. It's dumb. Like you have like there's infinite value out there,”

“Society's society is as rich as how many members it has that are, you know, adding something to the common mission of society, right? Like every country is a project. Every the project the the core of a project is its economy. Its economy throws wealth of which then can be gainfully reinvested in social programs and all these other kind of things. But it's the economy which is the engine of the entire thing. And so l”

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