Tobi Lütke: “The best gift in life is finding a beautiful problem that you can never solve”

Shopify founder Tobi Lütke comments on his obsession with removing friction from e-commerce and why Shopify hasn’t taken an Amazon-like approach in expanding to new markets:

“The best gift in life is finding a beautiful problem that you can never solve, and if you’re so unfortunate to solve it, hopefully it has plenty of enlightened problem children that you can then tackle. Finding one of those is good, and not having to meander into some complete adjacency to support it is actually wonderful.”

Stripe founder John Collison agrees:

“I think second acts are a bit over-valorized in Silicon Valley where everyone talks about how ‘a new AWS’ is kind of the coolest thing ever where you do a second thing that is completely unrelated to the first. Versus Nvidia, which is the largest company in the world — they just started making GPUs in the 1990s and it turns out a lot of people want GPUs.”

John believes an MBA-like approach to business continually underestimates the size of how large markets for truly great products can be:

“If one was trying to raise money for Shopify when it was 1,000 times smaller, it would sound ludicrous to say, ‘We’re just going to do e-commerce software, and it turns out that’s a really big market. And here’s our current projection where it’s 1,000 times larger.’ It’d be like, ‘Get out of here!’ or “Come on!’ Whereas if you say, ‘Oh, we’ll expand to do this and build a CRM or whatever’ it’s easier to justify.”

Tobi comments that this is exactly why he was rejected by lots of VCs in 2008 when he was trying to raise seed capital for Shopify. They all thought the 40,000 online stores at the time was too small of market. But it turns out that Shopify was the solution to this problem, and there was actually demand for millions of online stores if it was easier to create them.

Today Shopify is an almost $200 billion company.

Tobi concludes:

“The best products in the world come from people just really, really, really being deep on something.”

He gives computer scientist Erich Gamma as an example:

“In the programming world, we are using Cursor which is basically VS Code. VS Code is Erich Gamma’s fourth editor. He spent his entire life making these things. He wrote the design patterns book that many of us read some point, literally about programming text editors. Sometimes you just need to dedicate a career to a field and get deeper into it than anyone else and celebrate craftsmanship along the way. and try to build the best thing.”

Full video: Stripe “Tobi Lütke is still captivated by internet commerce, 20 years later“ (Oct 2025)