Tobias Lütke on economic growth
From The Era of the Entrepreneur — Tobi Lütke (Shopify) & Lulu Cheng Meservey (Rostra) · · Toronto Tech Week
“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, you know, like the marginal value of any beach is its weight in Nvidia H100 chips. Like there's there's trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of value we can bring into economies by just entrepreneurial action to remix the raw materials or the ideas into things that other people care about.”
On , Tobias Lütke, Chief Executive Officer at Shopify, spoke about economic growth during The Era of the Entrepreneur — Tobi Lütke (Shopify) & Lulu Cheng Meservey (Rostra) on Toronto Tech Week.
About Tobias Lütke
Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, has been active in public discussions about the impact of artificial intelligence on entrepreneurship and company structure. In a May 2026 fireside chat, he argued that "we don't have a jobs shortage coming, we have a companies shortage," stating that engineering is no longer scarce and that individuals can now act as "the CEO of a data center of agents." He suggested that a billion-dollar one-person company may already exist. On a podcast in March 2026, Lütke said that people are "overestimating the founders of companies" and "massively underestimating what you can do when the founder is still present and in charge." He also described the "killer feature" of early Shopify as its aesthetic appeal, saying it "looked beautiful" and "tamed the complexity of starting a real business." Lütke has also discussed Shopify's development of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which he described in a May 2026 conversation as an attempt to "retain the variety of the bazaar" in commerce. He characterized protocol design as "the highest form of software engineering." In a separate interview, Lütke stated that "every existing piece of software on planet Earth is now just a prompt for a better version," and that companies will become smaller but more numerous. He also commented on corporate layoffs, saying that "what you see right now is not AI layoffs" but rather companies that "overhire just like everyone else," and that AI is being used as a "scapegoat." During Shopify's Q1 2026 earnings call, Lütke reported that weekly active users of the company's AI assistant, Sidekick, had increased 385% year-over-year.