The Observer Effect – Tobi Lütke

Silicon Valley famously underestimated commerce as a business model. I don't think I would have a career if Silicon Valley had understood sooner just how good transactions are as a business model and how important they are.

We want to make it so that for $29, for our basic plan, you get most of the things that Amazon built for itself, right off the bat.

I find that going wide and learning the best lessons from the people who have dedicated their entire lives to a certain pursuit gets you really, really close to mastery.

When you just watch the game, it looks like you make decisions between extracting resources, investing in expansion, et cetera. By the way, that alone is a lesson that I think Starcraft players are already better at than a lot of people who end up getting MBAs

If people agree that's potentially an issue, the best way to counteract it is to build business models that actually reinforce the opposite, and give people the ability to do their own things online or participate in production. Shopify is that to me.

one of the best things that happened in the last ten years are podcasts. Now, I can listen to experts talking amongst each other and be a fly on the wall to the most interesting conversations ever.

The two best examples of spontaneous organization that led to world class results are Wikipedia and Linux kernel.

It is really my core value. I believe that the job we all have in life is to acquire knowledge and wisdom and then share it.

John Wanamaker, and he said something really smart related to advertising. He said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” That's sort of a special theory of decision making. I think there's a general theory of decision making, which is that 50% of what anyone does is important; we just don't know... See more