Wisdom from Tobi Lükte

Forget about Scale, Dollar-cost averaging

Hey Friends,

Tobi Lükte is one of the greatest CEO’s of our time and may go down as the G.O.A.T.

He founded Shopify 14 years ago, which became Canada’s most valuable company this year—their stock is up 4400% since their IPO in 2015.

If you’re not familiar with their business model, I highly recommend reading Ben Thompson’s Shopify and the Power of Platforms.

I gained a couple of key insights from Tobi’s latest interview. I’ll share them below:

Delete All Recurring Meetings

Shopify realized a lot of their standing meetings were no longer valued. The problem was that employees didn’t want to offend the organizer by telling them their meeting was pointless.

The solution: delete all recurring meetings.

Critical recurring meetings found a way to get back on the calendar. Other ones vanished.

You might think this is an extreme measure but think about all the useless meetings you attend every week.

2021 is a great time to stop doing things just for the sake of doing so. Evaluate your daily activities and ask yourself if your daily commitments are actually helping you achieve your goals.

Executive Coaching

At a hypergrowth company that is growing north of 30% annually, you can expect your job to become 30% harder every year as well. This means you have to improve significantly just to keep your current job.

Tobi Lükte doesn’t believe executives should tackle that learning curve without an instructor.

A coach is probably one of the highest returns on investment anyone can do with their attention. An hour spent with a coach has a 10x, 50x, 100x potential return on time spent.

Silicon Valley is crawling with coaches, but I’ve been largely skeptical. Shouldn’t you be able to figure out the job you were hired to do?

But, if I’m honest, there have been times throughout this year where I couldn’ve used some coaching. Maybe it’s time for me to seek out some professional help.

Vulnerability

How do you create an environment where employees are empowered to find solutions and openly admit when they don’t have the answers?

Here’s what Tobi had to say:

The first thing a VP or an executive or someone who's working with me gets is a note from me, which basically says, “Hey, the reason why you've got this job is not because of everything you know, but because you seem like the kind of person who can figure it out when you need to know something.”

You can check out the full interview with Tobi Lükte on The Observer Effect here.

Timing the market

What would happen if you had horrible market timing and only invested sums of money before crashes?

You would still get rich as long as you never sold. That’s the power of compounding. But, you could do much better simply by dollar-cost averaging.

The short video below explains how:

Forget about scale

Stop obsessing over efficiency and scale.

This can prevent you from achieving product-market fit, especially if you’re building a startup in B2B software.

Patrick Collison explains why you should “pursue unscalable strategies that get you to the next level.”

You can always scale later.

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Bardia