Building a $1-billion company with one person is now possible, but Tobi Lütke has no idea why anyone would do it.
The news: To kick off Toronto Tech Week’s Homecoming event on Wednesday, the Shopify CEO took the stage with Rostra founder and Shopify board member Lulu Cheng Meservey, in front of a packed crowd of more than 700 attendees. The discussion—in which both speakers pledged to stay away from “controversial” topics—touched on building new companies with AI and picking your problem as an entrepreneur.
From the source: “I think the one-person company is bullshit,” Lütke said. He acknowledged that with AI, he believes it’s now possible to build a billion-dollar company as a single founder, but added: “Why the fuck would you not spend some of that money to have someone else around?”
Following the thread: AI tools have allowed founders to spin up companies with fewer people than before, as they use the technology to code software, market products, and even to generate company ideas.
The Shopify founder agreed that startups with a handful of people can now scale to billion-dollar businesses. He mentioned Wispr, the AI voice dictation company that said it had seven employees just a year ago, has now scaled to roughly 60 employees and will reportedly be valued at $2 billion USD as of its next funding round.
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Lütke’s comments come amid large-scale layoffs in the broader tech world, which companies such as Intuit and Meta have attributed to an organizational shift toward AI. Shopify has itself initiated repeated waves of small layoffs, some of which the company said in November “removed layers that created complexity.”
“The shape of companies is going to change,” Lütke said on Wednesday. “Companies will be smaller, but there will be vastly more of them.”
Final thought: The fireside chat was introduced by a short video hyping up “The Era of the Entrepreneur,” adding to the event’s broader theme of building high-profile companies in Canada. Repeating past comments about the need to overcome Canada’s “go-for-bronze” culture, Lütke encouraged attendees—many of whom were founders—to instead go for gold because, he said, there isn’t that much competition at the top.
“There’s a meta game of global companies [that] exists, and you plug in from wherever you are,” he said. “There are some places which make it harder. Canada is not one of them.”
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Disclosure: BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.
Feature image courtesy Sarah Rieger for BetaKit.