I really enjoyed this discussion with Tobi Lütke, the founder of Shopify.
I’ve always admired him for leading and building Shopify into the business it is today — one that is both financially successful, strives to build truly great products, and champions entrepreneurship itself.
Tobi shares the ups and downs of how they’ve been using AI as a company of thousands. They appear to have developed an incredibly valuable “team agent” that assists their team members in their daily tasks, and continuously evolves based on feedback.
This talk introduced me to the concept of “slop grenades” — huge and thoughtlessly verbose documents generated by fellow team members that get dumped on your desk to wade through.
Perhaps most interesting to me was Tobi’s remarkably simple answer to whether AI would ever take his job as CEO of Shopify: “no”. Tobi argues that AI cannot lead because it cannot take responsibility for its actions. Only humans can do that, and that’s a huge part of what makes any leader.
This talk seems to have been picked up by a lot of tech community thanks to its discussion around AI, but it’s well worth a watch regardless to get an insight into the brain of someone running a highly successful and large software business in its prime.