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Tobi Lütke: Building lings, hydras, mutalisks (and Shopify) | Podcast Notes

 

Tobias Lutke is the founder of Shopify (and a hobbyist Starcraft player)

In this interview he goes pretty deep on the things he learned about life and business through Starcraft.

If, for some reason, you’ve decided to get all your life lessons by playing games, Starcraft is a good place to start. You might not end up with a multi-billion dollar company like Lutke, but you can still learn a bunch about systems, attention, and efficiency.

This episode is a great example of the unique content that podcasts provide. The founder of one of the most successful e-commerce companies in the world dedicates an hour talking about Starcraft and how he’s applied the concepts in his life and in business.

After listening to this, I re-installed Starcraft and have been quickly reminded of concepts I learned through Starcraft.

Let’s say you have a chaotic day to day…

… you have dozens of things that you could focus on.

Which of those things will you try to tackle first?

Well, let’s say most of those tasks are interceptors but a couple are carriers. If you destroy the carriers, the interceptors die with them. Things in your life can be similar. There are a few things that are way more important to take care of and can make the other things unnecessary.

(There are plenty of games where a boss has a weak point that you need to target, but something about RTS really just maps better to all the unpredictability of the day to day.)

Tobi Lutke offered a pro gamer an internship at Shopify based on the student’s success as a professional gamer. He talks about that on this episode. The way he sees it, there are just a ton of positive characteristics required to get that good at a game as difficult as Starcraft.

At the highest levels, there’s just an amount of mental grit involved. There aren’t many activities where you sit at a computer that have as much pressure as competitive gaming. Solving a programming problem can be mentally strenuous, sure, but you’re probably not under the same type of time pressure and there’s not someone on the other side actively trying to destroy you. (I mean, unless, I don’t know, you’re in a hacking scene in a movie.)

Don’t believe in the growth mindset? Play Starcraft for a few weeks.

Lutke calls out how Starcraft makes the growth mindset obvious.

It’s difficult to learn, but you can very clearly see yourself getting better if you stick with it long enough.1 Whatever your first RTS was, it can be an incredibly jarring genre to jump into. You’re in control of a whole bunch of stuff instead of the usual focus on one character.

Focus on attacking your opponent? Check your email? Check on your expansion that’s being attacked? Respond to that ping? Keep building units? (Learn to prioritize and shift your attention.)

One similarity (of many) that Tobi points out between Starcraft and running a business is that you very clearly have a limited amount of attention. If you’re paying too much attention to a battle and forget to continue producing units, then you can end up way behind when the battle ends.

If instead you’re just monitoring things at a high level and don’t pay enough focused attention and get sloppy on an attack, you can lose a battle you should’ve won based on the units you have.

Maybe that battle won’t matter.

Maybe it was the only battle that mattered.

Just understanding what the tradeoffs are when shifting your attention in different directions is important. And it’s invaluable to be able to do it over and over one after the other and learn to make those decisions.

Remember when you didn’t know anything? (You probably don’t!)

At least not really. An expert has a really hard time picturing what it’s like to be a beginner who doesn’t even know what they don’t know.

In 6th grade, I remember playing a bunch of Starcraft before learning there was even a concept of build orders. That seems silly at this point but it really is this thing that seems obvious and you might forget that beginners don’t know about build orders at all.

It reminds me of something Thomas Frank (of College Info Geek) said about students who take some of the productivity courses he’s made. He’s talked about overthinking things and considering teaching some advanced tactics that might be more useful.

But when the course is released, what do plenty of people say?

“Oh yeah… putting stuff on a calendar does make sense!”

The scary thing with this is that, ten years from now, there’s probably some things looking back that you’d do differently and probably think it should’ve looked so obvious.

Take the time to reflect on what you know now and what you would tell yourself from 6 months ago. 

Writing this reminded me of this old video I made about some life lessons from Starcraft.

Book Notes: “That Will Never Work” by Marc Randolph

Marc Randolph was one of the founders of Netflix. In That Will Never Work, he writes about the early days of Netflix, before they started their original content empire. (He left in 2002.) Near the end, he mentions some of the things that happened after he left:

As I write this, the company has just passed 150 million subscribers, with customers in nearly every country in the world. Netflix makes its own TV shows, produces its own movies, and has changed the way people consume entertainment.

(Shout out to the “Skip intro” button that I’ve pressed countless times before rewatching Arrested Development episodes.)

They started small (How do you get to 150 million subscribers? One at a time)

Here’s the first day:

We’d expected 15 or 20 people to use the site to order a DVD. We’d gotten 137—and potentially we’d gotten more than that, since we didn’t know how many people had tried to access the site when it was down.

The printers also jammed all day. And that’s just one many reminders of the state of the world back when Netflix started. DVDs weren’t the clear standard yet to take over VHS. You couldn’t start an online business in a weekend by connecting a few cloud services together.

He praises Reed Hastings throughout the book and knew he was the right CEO to get them to where they are today. That was pretty refreshing after reading Hatching Twitter earlier this year and seeing all the scheming, navigating, and backstabbing going on in their leadership. (Good drama for a book, though!)

Remember when you weren’t online, everywhere, at all times?

The most enjoyable parts are descriptions of the world before everyone was online, everywhere, at all times. It was great to learn how data and recommendations were core to their business, even in the earliest days.

As we talked, I learned that Mitch ran a small chain of video stores called Video Droid. He had ten locations and managed thousands of titles in each one of them. I was interested in the way he talked about the practical challenges of maintaining an inventory of both new and classic films, but what really fascinated me was his deep knowledge of movies and his even deeper connection with his renters. He paid attention to what they liked, what they asked for, and what they wanted. He was a movie buff, and he wanted to help his customers find the kinds of movies they’d love. That meant giving them not only what they thought they wanted but what they didn’t even know they wanted. Mitch was a walking, talking IMDb. He watched movies all day at the store, then went home and watched a movie while he was eating dinner, then stayed up late watching even more movies.

“Mitch” here is Mitch Lowe, who was also a part of Netflix and was later part of leadership at Redbox and MoviePass. Some people love movies. Some people really love movies.

Go home at 5 p.m. sharp (Well, at least once a week)

Another quote I highlighted while reading was about knowing yourself:

“As you get older, if you’re at all self-aware, you learn two important things about yourself: what you like, and what you’re good at. Anyone who gets to spend his day doing both of those things is a lucky man.”

If you do something you like that you’re not good at, there’s good reason to keep that as a hobby. If you’re do something you’re good at that you don’t like, you’re probably being paid for it right now. Once you’re aware of where you are on most days, you can build awareness around what aspects of the day you do like and make it a goal to add more things that you enjoy to your day.

And the last clipping is this quote about prioritizing time.

He always kept his date nights.

Why become a millionaire many times over if you can’t go home to your family when you want to?

Outline for a video about the iPad Magic Keyboard

Thought these questions cover the keyboard at a high level:

  • How’s the keyboard itself?
  • How’s the trackpad experience?
  • What about form factor? Lap? Size?

#1: How’s the keyboard itself?

I’ve seen a couple reviews of The Magic Keyboard that really throw the Smart Keyboard Folio under the bus. It wasn’t bad!
  • Okay so the keyboard feels pretty good. That said, I didn’t actually have too much of a problem with the butterfly switches on the last five or so years of MacBooks. And I didn’t think the Smart Keyboard Folio was terrible by any means. (Though I didn’t type a ton of stuff on it.) I was thinking about getting a MacBook Air for the keyboard and portability. But… that’d be stupid. Okay not really. Getting it would make my previous purchase stupid. I have a 16-inch MacBook Pro. There’s no reason to have both the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air really. The hedonic treadmill of devices. The perfect device combination is always the next device combination.
  • Oh yeah so the typing experience feels great. The keys feel great. I read a good review (maybe it was The Verge? Or TechCrunch?) where the writer definitely knew all the terms used to describe a keyboard. Squishiness and things like how much the keys move when you’re touching the different corners of the keyboard. I mean, this thing feels the same as the 16-inch MacBook Pro to me. BUT one thing that’s nice about the smaller trackpad is that the front of the device isn’t always cutting into my wrists.
  • What kind of caps lock person are you? I went with Esc after finding that I needed to press Esc somewhat often. (I switched it after trying to get out of a crop menu in Figma.) On the MacBook, I usually set caps lock to ctrl and will usually caps lock for any ctrl+tab input.
  • Yes, it’d be nice to have brightness and volume on the keyboard. Those are the things I miss on this thing.

#2: How’s the trackpad experience?

  • Clicking it down feels cheap compared to the glass/force touch MacBook trackpads. I haven’t used any other kind of laptop for years so I can’t really compare other trackpads. It’s fine though, because I usually just do a finger tap for clicking. But I do have to click all the way when clicking and dragging things (which I feel like I do a lot more in iPadOS than on MacOS but that’s probably a use case thing).
  • As for the OS stuff, it works pretty well but there are definitely times where I’m not sure exactly if a click will work as expected. I’m sure with time I’ll get a sense of when a click will or won’t work on something. It also took me a bit to figure out how to turn the page on a split screen view on the Kindle without popping up the multi-page preview each time. (Just click the edges of the split window and it’ll go next/previous. This was one of those things where I went “Oh, duh.” after.)

#3: What about form factor? Lap? Size?

Started writing down the different setups that I’ve had ever since my brother got me a MacBook for Christmas in 2008. If I’m really thinking this through, I probably made the most stuff with that MacBook, the 15″ MacBook Pro, the iMac and the original 12.9″ iPad.
  • It’s heavy. My main devices before this were a 16-inch MacBook Pro and an 11-inch iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard Folio case. The weight of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard makes it feel mentally closer to the 16-inch MacBook Pro than the 11-inch iPad Pro. I have a hunch that it’s actually closer to the 11-inch iPad Pro. But I never stopped being delighted by the form factor of the 11-inch iPad Pro. It just felt like the right size to take everywhere.
  • I wrote about this (and a lot of the above stuff) in my rambling post, but I really want to see how portable this is when quarantine is over. I doubt I’d take this and the MacBook Pro. The more I’m using the iPad with trackpad support and the Magic Keyboard, the more I think I’d want to have the MacBook Pro when I’m on the go. The two apps I really, really need MacOS for: Screenflow and Descript. (And recently, Starcraft.) But for anything I’m doing that’s writing and static images, I’d really rather do on the iPad Pro. Especially with desktop-class browsing. Or whatever they call it.
  • In David Epstein‘s Range, there’s a chapter that’s about Nintendo’s success and one of the devices highlighted is the original Gameboy. There’s a phrase for the philosophy that they used when making it: lateral thinking with withered technology. (Which I’ve read is supposed to translate more like weathered technology.) Anyway, the Smart Keyboard Folio reminded me of the Gameboy in its durability. You could grab a Super Soaker and use it for target practice and it’d be fine. I’d take it everywhere and not worry at all about the surface I was putting it on. I’m somewhat worried about spilling on this but definitely not as much as I am with the MacBook Pro.

  • Oh yeah, one GREAT thing about the iPad and The Magic Keyboard (and really any keyboard case for it) is that the processor and whatever else gets hot in a computer isn’t right on your lap. So it doesn’t get hot. That’s a huge plus for longer writing sessions.

That’s probably long enough and I’m realizing I’m sort of just repeating a lot of the points I made with what I wrote this morning. I’ll try making this into a video. The timer on my camera says I’m at 22-minutes. Good writing session on this keyboard.

There are way too many other reviews and I don’t know if I have much of an interesting angle at this point. More thoughts to come as I continue using this.

Ramblings: Magic Keyboard first impressions

The other day, I wrote about the Bill Simmons interview on The Moment with Brian Koppelman. He mentioned The Ramblings, which I forgot about. I searched for a few of his older ramblings columns from Page 2. Zoomed completely out, they looked like this.

Bullets with captioned images to the right. An idea worth stealing! Except this will be about the Magic Keyboard and without any good jokes.

Reading them reminded me of the time he held off on joining Twitter. Which seemed odd because it was a perfect platform for firing off one-off ramblings. Anyway, here’s a bad imitation.

Okay it took me like 5 minutes to set the tripod up but I’m going to type some initial thoughts about this keyboard while using the keyboard.

My fiancé hates when I don’t clean up stuff in the background of frames. But I like the raw, rustic look that comes with leaving my books, a sweater, and a single ergonomic glove on the couch cushion
  • When angled all the way back and floating, it’s not the best thing for the lap. At first it felt like it would tip backward but that part ends up being okay. What happens, though, is that the front edge lifts a bit. So it can wobble while you type. Resting one palm on the keyboard fixes this. I’m guessing plenty of people type with their palms on the keyboard so it’s not an issue at all.

  • I’m always worried that when I upgrade WordPress, the real full screen mode will go away. (Open the visual editor and press ctrl+shift+f) It’s a view that gets me in the right mindset to write something to publish. Just having the formatting options there reminds me that this is for an external audience.
Ctrl+Shift+F — I have a feeling there are a lot more people who use WordPress that would find this editor view useful than there are people who actually know that this editor view exists. As far as I know, it’s only available through a keyboard shortcut.

When I write in Evernote, I usually have the mindset that I can write things that are really rough. The idea is that I’ll take it from that rough state and then revise it and shape it from there to something final. Reality: I do get a lot of thoughts down but then they just stay in there. This isn’t unique to me—when talking about quick entry in GTD, David Allen said some apps like Evernote can be very quick but also write-only in practice. This was on his Tim Ferriss interview, I think. Let me find the excerpt…

(While trying to find the excerpt, the clicks stopped registering and then I tried to fix that and 30 minutes later I remembered I was trying to find the quote. Here it is.)

David Allen: The Web Clipper. But I still don’t use it that much. I don’t have that much stuff that I want to do about that. The problem with things like Evernote, somebody described it as “write-only.” They spend all their time adding stuff in there and don’t even go in and look at what they’ve got.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s a risk with a lot of digital technology.

David Allen: Write-only, as opposed to read-only.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Addition and not sufficiently, well, at least subtraction from intentional perspective.

That’s more about research material but I really do just write a bunch of things into Evernote. It’s like something where I write one line on a post-it and then throw it into a bottomless drawer with the idea that I’ll do something with it.

  • I wish there was a keyboard shortcut in Safari for “Hide the toolbar”
Shortcut for this please!
  • While writing this post, there was a point where trackpad clicks just stopped registering for some reason. I’m guessing this is a pointer support issue, not at all something with the hardware. But then it does look like things got in a weird state where I couldn’t tap anymore in Safari. Quitting and re-opening fixed it. (Locking and unlocking the iPad did not.)
  • No lap heat! I watched and read a decent number of reviews and, while I’m sure it was mentioned in at least a few of them, it wasn’t a huge point that came across: there’s no lap heat. People did talk about whether or not it would tip over in your lap in different setups. But the biggest thing I’m noticing so far is that I used to just have an expectation that things would get warm and then uncomfortable when using my MacBook Pro on the couch. That will never be a problem with this keyboard. (Though it also wasn’t a problem with the Smart Keyboard either, if you’re comparing keyboards and not devices.)
  • Split screen tap registers: This was something I noticed when multitasking with Kindle in one half and a text editor in the other. There’s no way for me to switch pages without going into the zoomed out view because I need to tap to switch app focus but that also registers as a tap in the app.
  • Quick update on above bullet: I‘m a moron. You can just tap on the left and right side of that part of the screen. Probably working as intended. In hindsight, this is definitely working as intended because the opposite is. You would need to double tap everything in the other portion of the screen.
  • Non-floating setup for the lap: This has been good for splaying out on the couch. The weight distribution makes it difficult to tip over. The screen angle isn’t great since it’s 90 degrees. But it’s definitely useable, especially if you use an editor where you can keep the lines near the top of the screen. Ulysses and iA Writer make this possible.

And here’s a closer screenshot of what’s going on here:

  • The trackpad works well. Clicking into it is louder than I’d like but I usually just tap instead of doing the full click so it doesn’t matter that much.
  • If you pay for a gym membership and you’re not taking classes, a lot of that is going toward the cost of running those classes. (I remember learning this by reading that the reason Blink is so cheap is that they don’t have classes at all.) Anyway, I’ve been wondering how much cheaper this keyboard (and all keyboards) would be if there was no backlighting. I wonder what the split is for people who use backlighting vs. who don’t. (Quick guess is that I’m in the minority of people who don’t care for backlit keys but have no idea if it’s like a 90/10 split or 60/40.)
  • With the Magic Keyboard and desktop-class browsing, the iPad can really be the only computer for a lot of people.
  • It’s heavy. I have a 16-inch MacBook Pro and it doesn’t feel as hefty as that, I’d definitely say it feels closer to that than it does to the other thing I was using a lot, an 11-inch iPad with a folio cover (no keyboard).

That said, portability is really hard to judge during quarantine. Similar to reviewing a backpack, some of the portability quirks (both positive and negative) are revealed after day-in, day-out use.

  • What does this actually feel like when pulling it out and using it on an airplane tray?
  • Will I want to take this with me along with the MacBook Pro. Will I feel like I don’t need to bring both?

I used to always bring the 11-inch iPad Pro with me day to day. Sometimes with the MacBook Pro. I don’t imagine I’d bring the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard with the 16-inch MacBook Pro. I have a 20-lb ruck plate for that use case.

Okay maybe I’ll write a part 2 or something like that but those are some thoughts so far.

(And geez, no matter what device combo it is, I miss writing in the gym lobby after struggling through a lazy workout.)

 

Bill Simmons on developing your voice as a writer | Podcast Note

I’m always fired up when Bill Simmons gets to talking about his career and goes deep on his arc from writer to now having sold The Ringer to Spotify.

I just finished listening to the episode and will give it another listen and probably write at least 1 or 2 more podcast notes posts about it.

Here are some previous posts I wrote about Simmons.

  • Podcast Notes: John Skipper and the early days of ESPN.com — On the interview with Koppelman above, Simmons mentions that he pushed to have a spot on the homepage when he was renegotiating one of his early ESPN contracts. He’s always had an eye on things broader than just his writing. He knew the importance of placement. The reason I mention that when linking to this earlier podcast note is that (A) his relationship with John Skipper is mentioned in the Koppelman interview and (B) the podcast with John Skipper has a nice dive into what the state of the (world wide!) web was like back then. People weren’t reading on phones. Resizing your browser window didn’t rearrange and resize things on most sites. (“Above the fold” still kind of meant above the fold.) You probably weren’t using browser tabs back then
  • How to succeed as a writer (What I’ve learned by reading Bill Simmons) — Not that I’ve succeeded as a writer, but I enjoy posting here and do it somewhat regularly. Beating resistance a few times a week is a small success. Some people get inspired by Stephen King’s desk or a DIY backyard writing shack. Personally, I get my inspiration from the image of Simmons handwriting drafts of his column in Dunkin’ Donuts then re-typing them to post in AOL’s walled garden.

Took me 10 minutes to find this but here’s a photo with the filename 20091117 BlackBerry 9700.jpg

20091117 BlackBerry 9700 20091117 BlackBerry 9700 IMG00040 20091117 1759

This is from a 2009 Book of Basketball signing in Seattle. You can guess with what phone.

On the interview with Koppelman, Simmons talks about going to a book signing and telling someone that they’re his hero. Then that’s that. You step away and the next person gets their book signed and life goes on. There’s no back and forth banter. (“That’s great to hear I’m your hero because you’re my hero also!”)

Anyway, I didn’t even get that far. I got star struck and couldn’t really even cough up a “Yes, thanks” when asked “C-E-S?”

c-e-s

Anyway, go listen to the interview. Koppelman is a great interviewer and digs into the transition from writer to multi-hyphenate podcaster-tv-business guy. (Also check out this previous convo between them in memory of William Goldman, who’s mentioned in this post’s notecard image.)

I’ll continue going through more old photos.

And writing.

What to do if you can’t type an apostrophe

I very clearly can’t just sit down and write without being distracted the entire time.

Some distractions from this morning:

  • My apostrophe key wasn’t working. I’m using an old Magic Keyboard plugged into the iPad Pro. (Like the one that you’d get with an iMac, not the new iPad accessory.) I was starting to suspect that the keyboard was broken after using it a few times in the past couple months. That just didn’t seem right. These things have always felt pretty rugged. Keys sometimes didn’t register and I thought it was a battery or bluetooth issue or something like that but this time it was plugged in. In the past I couldn’t really reproduce the issue but this time I noticed I very clearly couldn’t type a single apostrophe. Okay the key is broken. But then I held shift to try the right quote and it worked. And it worked again every time. Long story medium: had to change a keyboard setting from Automatic to US and it worked.
  • I made a date shortcut in Shortcuts. I started typing in iA Writer with Evernote open in the side panel. Which I think could be good when I need my notes but then I got distracted because I wanted to add a date to the writing in iA Writer and there’s no shortcut for that. Then I remembered Evernote has shortcuts to insert date and time so I did that in there and copied it and pasted to iA Writer but that felt clunky so then I made a two step shortcut to copy the date to the clipboard. I’m guessing there are text expansion apps to do things like this or something like Drafts could be used to do this. But I know how to do it in Shortcuts so I used Shortcuts.

And now, to paste…

Apr 21, 2020 at 8:04 AM

Eat that!

I was listening to an Automators episode a couple days ago where they walk through shortcuts they have for daily briefs.

I think this would be a cool use case to anchor around if you’re learning Shortcuts. There’s plenty of people who probably see Shortcuts in a video, think it’s cool, but then don’t really have anything to use it for.

In that case it can very much be a solution looking for a problem.

But here’s the problem it solves really well: there’s so much resistance in the morning and being groggy isn’t quite the peak condition to be in to fight it.

I wrote about a BJ Fogg episode yesterday and finished reading his book Tiny Habits in the past week. In the episode, he says something along the lines of:

  • Design your habit for when your motivation is at its lowest

I can always tap an icon on my phone.

It’s usually one of the first things I do anyway. I’m just going to try to swap out Instagram for a daily brief shortcut. And I won’t even have to sprint through a cave running away from a giant rolling boulder.