Tobi Lütke built Shopify because selling snowboards online was too hard
Shopify’s CEO turned the software behind his own store into a platform for millions of merchants.
In 2004, Tobi Lütke, a German-born programmer living in Ottawa, wanted to sell snowboards online. The e-commerce software available at the time frustrated him, so he wrote his own. The store was small. The software became Shopify.
Lütke, an early contributor to the Ruby on Rails web framework, launched Shopify in 2006 and has been its CEO since 2008. The company went public in 2015.
Arming the rebels
Shopify’s pitch has always been to give independent merchants the tools that large retailers have: online stores, payments through Shop Pay, point-of-sale systems and access to marketplaces and social channels. It grew into one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world.
Not every bet worked. After expanding into warehousing and delivery during the pandemic, Shopify sold its logistics business to Flexport in 2023 and refocused on software.
AI as a baseline
In April 2025, Lütke published an internal memo saying that using AI well was now a basic expectation for everyone at Shopify, and that teams should show why AI could not do a job before asking for more people. The memo was widely shared as a sign of how tech companies were changing how they work.
Outside Shopify, Lütke sits on the board of Coinbase and races sports cars.
What to watch
Shopify is betting that AI shopping assistants will become a major sales channel, and wants its merchants to be easy for them to find and buy from.
- Company
- Shopify
- Role
- Founder & CEO
- HQ
- Ottawa, Canada
- Founded
- 2006
- Section
- Software
This profile draws on public reporting and company materials.
Sources: Wikipedia: Tobias Lütke · Bloomberg Billionaires: Tobias Lütke
Photo: Benjamin Forrest, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
