Tobi Lütke: Subtraction Is the Best Founder Skill

Tobi Lütke is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify. In January 2023, he authorized the most aggressive corporate-calendar reset of the modern era: deleting ~12,000 recurring meetings overnight, freeing an estimated 76,500 hours, and re-upping a company-wide rule that no meetings happen on Wednesdays.

He gave Fortune the one-line rationale that became the case study quote of the year. Here it is, what it means, and what most companies miss about it.

The Quote

From Fortune's coverage of Shopify's calendar purge, January 3, 2023:

"The best thing founders can do is subtraction. It's much easier to add things than to remove things. If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done with that period of time. As people add things, the set of things that can be done becomes smaller. Then, you end up with more and more people just maintaining the status quo."

The same quote ran in the LA Times, Bloomberg, and Slashdot. Lütke originally surfaced the "subtraction" framing in an interview on Shane Parrish's The Knowledge Project podcast, referenced inline by Fortune.

What Shopify Actually Did

The mechanics of the purge, per Fortune, LA Times, and UNLEASH:

• Deleted every recurring meeting with three or more attendees, in perpetuity. ~12,000 events removed.
• Two-week cooling-off period. Nobody could recreate a cancelled meeting until at least two weeks had passed, and only with a written justification.
• No-meeting Wednesdays re-affirmed. A standing company-wide rule, no exceptions.
• Large meetings (50+ people) restricted to a six-hour window on Thursdays. Maximum one per week.
• A bot enforced the policy. Auto-pushback on calendar invites that violated the new rules.
• Internal messaging consolidated to Slack. Large group chats reserved for announcements only.

The COO, Kaz Nejatian, ran the operational side and delivered the more memorable line in the same memo:

"Meetings are a bug."

(See our standalone profile of Nejatian's role in the purge.)

The Reported Outcomes

Per WorkLife News coverage published March 29, 2023, Shopify shared internal research with the publication:

• 33% drop in meeting time per employee in the first two months of 2023 vs. the same period of 2022.
• 25% projected increase in completed projects.
• ~12,000 calendar events deleted across the ~11,600-person workforce.

Deann Evans, Shopify's director of EMEA partnerships, told WorkLife:

"It was intense and uncomfortable. I had to sit with it for a minute. But it made sense and felt liberating once Kaz and Tobi explained the rationale behind the chaos monkey."

Notably, Evans said she did not restart her weekly meeting with her direct reports after the purge.

What "Subtraction" Actually Means

Lütke's framing is doing a lot of work in that quote. Three layers worth unpacking.

Layer 1: Opportunity cost is a meeting problem

"If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done with that period of time."

This is the classic opportunity-cost argument applied to calendar slots. A 30-minute meeting is not just a 30-minute cost. It is the next-best alternative use of those 30 minutes, multiplied across everyone in the meeting.

Bain & Company's research on meeting cost found that 31% of meetings are unproductive, costing US organizations roughly $259 billion annually. The Lütke quote is the founder-level intuition behind that number.

Layer 2: Companies drift toward maintenance

"As people add things, the set of things that can be done becomes smaller. Then, you end up with more and more people just maintaining the status quo."

The Lütke claim is that meeting density is a leading indicator of organizational stagnation. As process accumulates, time spent on the process grows; time spent on novel work shrinks; new initiatives get crowded out.

This is the diagnosis under the purge. Shopify did not delete meetings because they were boring. They deleted meetings because the meeting density was making the company slower.

Layer 3: Subtraction is structurally hard

"It's much easier to add things than to remove things."

Adding a meeting is a low-friction decision (anyone can do it). Removing one requires explicit consensus from everyone attending. The default mode of any large organization is therefore accretion, not subtraction.

The Shopify purge is the rare instance of a CEO using unilateral authority to subtract at scale. Most executives cannot do this even when they want to.

The Honest Limits of the Lütke Approach

Shopify's purge is the maximum-leverage version of meeting reduction. It is also not available to most people. Three honest caveats.

Most executives cannot delete 12,000 meetings

The Shopify intervention required CEO-level authority across an 11,600-person org. A VP or Director cannot do this. A senior IC certainly cannot. The Lütke approach scales down only as far as your authority does.

Two weeks of organizational discomfort

Even at Shopify, the purge was disorienting. The "chaos monkey" framing was their own. Many teams had to rebuild coordination patterns from scratch. The transition cost is real and most companies will not accept it.

Lunch was not part of the policy

Notably absent from Shopify's intervention: any specific protection of the lunch hour. The purge eliminated recurring meetings of 3+ attendees. It did not stop ad-hoc 1:1s, peer-to-peer pings, or "quick syncs" during lunch.

This is the gap. Even after a Shopify-style purge, an individual still has to defend lunch personally.

The Lesson for the Rest of Us

Three takeaways for everyone who does not have Lütke's organizational authority.

1. Subtraction is more valuable than addition

When a calendar slot opens up, the default temptation is to fill it with another meeting. Lütke's framing argues the opposite: an empty slot is the most valuable slot. Treat it that way.

2. The status quo is the enemy

Recurring meetings are the default mode of a stagnating organization. Audit them quarterly. Bain's rule of thumb: 30% can be cancelled with no measurable impact.

3. Camouflage works where authority does not

You cannot delete 12,000 meetings. You can delete the meaning of one meeting on your calendar: a block titled "Lunch" reads as a personal preference. A block titled "Vendor Sync" reads as a business commitment. The block does not change. The signal does.

The camouflage technique is what Wall Street partner Jeff Akers admitted to Business Insider, what people on Reddit have been doing manually for a decade, and what CovertLunch automates for the lunch hour specifically.

A Note on the Original Source

Lütke's "best thing founders can do is subtraction" quote first appeared on Shane Parrish's The Knowledge Project podcast, then was given to Fortune as a stand-alone statement. Both versions circulate. The Fortune version is the most cited; the Knowledge Project version has more context.

The podcast also documents Lütke's broader philosophy on time, attention, and remote work. Worth a listen if you want the full case.

Related Reading

• Kaz Nejatian and "Meetings Are a Bug" — the COO who ran the operational side
• Meetings Are a Bug: What Shopify, Microsoft, and Wall Street Admit — synthesis
• Meeting Overload Solutions — applied playbook for executives without Lütke's authority
• The Lunch Protection Playbook

Frequently Asked Questions

How many meetings did Shopify actually delete?

~12,000 recurring meetings with three or more attendees were deleted in January 2023. The figure was reported by Fortune (which described it as "10,000 company events or the equivalent of more than 76,500 hours") and Shopify's director of EMEA partnerships told WorkLife News the company-wide estimate was ~12,000.

Did employees push back?

Reportedly yes, in the first two weeks. Then most adapted. Per WorkLife News, several executives did not restart cancelled meetings, including some that had been on the calendar for years.

Has any other company done this since?

Variations of the no-meeting-day rule have been adopted at Meta, Citigroup, Asana (the originator), Clorox, and Twilio. The unilateral mass-delete at Shopify's scale is less common.

What's the "subtraction" framing in plain English?

Saying yes to a meeting is also saying no to whatever else you would have done with that time. Most organizations track the yes; few track the implicit no. The implicit no is where most companies lose.

How does this apply to lunch?

Shopify's purge did not specifically protect lunch. The same logic applies, though: every meeting that ends up at 12:30 PM is a yes that says no to lunch. The individual fix is camouflage; the organizational fix is a culture rule.