Quotes from Tobias Lutke

Products are a form of speech, and free speech must be fiercely protected, even if we disagree with some of the voices.

People say Facebook connects the world. Facebook has 5,000 Ph.D.s that think about how to make you click on ads you don't want to see. Their business model is about something that most people would not perceive as making the world better.

Our mantra has been, 'We will not buy a company unless we think the people that make up the company have a better job the day after the acquisition than before.'

A lot of the best technologists live and work in Canada, and every once in a while, they are aggregated by a Canadian company, and then suddenly, they're not anymore. But the people are still here - they're just working for American companies to the benefit of American bottom lines.

If you go into business school and suggest firing a customer, they'll kick you out of the building. But it's so true in my experience. It allows you to identify the customers you really want to work with.

Every phase of building a company is really hard.

Why do Canadians sell themselves short? I've never been able to answer that question.

I never cared a lot for school.

To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas and interfere with the free exchange of products at the core of commerce. When we kick off a merchant, we're asserting our own moral code as the superior one. But who gets to define that moral code?

I'm against exclusion of any kind - whether that's restricting people from Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. or kicking merchants off our platform if they're operating within the law.

Being part of something that's growing fast is better than being part of something that isn't growing fast because opportunities are essentially everywhere, and you're not competing for something.

I got my first computer when I was 6, and I was part of that early generation of children who grew up with computers always being around. I fell in love with them early on.

Given the success rate, if you want to get wealthy, entrepreneurship is a horrible way of doing it. There are significantly easier ways of doing it.

It is my strong belief that computer literacy should be part of our educational system's core curriculum.

E-commerce is not an industry; e-commerce is a tactic.

You have to put more of a well-rounded company together to make it in Canada, and I hope the Canadian market is going to be known for these well-performing, solid companies that people can rely on.

One of the most important tasks as a leader in a startup is to pick the right metric to track. This is often referred to as the 'compass metric' because it will be your compass for growth. It's important to note that 'compass metrics' will likely change over the lifetime of a business.

Computers add convenience to our everyday lives, but we are limited in what we can do with technology others have imagined. The ability for humans to teach machines entirely new things - coding - is nothing short of a superpower.

It's not a principle unless it costs you something.

Different people need different kinds of communication for it to have the same effect. That was something I had to learn.

I got my first computer at the age of 6. To me, it was magic. By the time I was 12, I wanted to know the secrets behind the wizardry, and that started my journey toward computer programming. This was the early 1990s, when computers weren't built for the mass market.

All of us in Canada have to be better at making a dollar count, because we have fewer dollars.

A lot of people have a great business idea; they just need a little push to make it a reality.

Change has to be fundamental to a company's culture, or there is no way it can survive.