#261 Tobi Lütke - CEO of Shopify: How Shopify Became a Cheat Code for Entrepreneurs

Tobi Lütke is a German born Canadian who built a multibillion-dollar company from a snowboard shop; champions economic freedom for regular people starting businesses; combines old-world craftsmanship with modern innovation. He is an entrepreneur, software developer, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Shopify, a leading e-commerce platform powering over 4 million merchants worldwide as of 2024, generating billions in annual revenue. Born in Germany, Lütke discovered his passion for coding at a young age with a Schneider CPC computer, rewriting game code by age 11. A self-taught programmer who dropped out of school after tenth grade to pursue a computer programming apprenticeship at Koblenzer Carl-Benz-School, he moved to Canada in the early 2000s. In 2004, as a snowboard enthusiast, Lütke co-founded Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop, but frustrations with existing e-commerce tools led him to build a custom platform using Ruby on Rails, which became Shopify in 2006 in Ottawa, ...