Toby Lütke

Extracted Attributes

• Role

  CEO and Co-founder of Shopify

• Net Worth

  US$12.3 billion (as of August 2025)

• Residence

  Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

• Birth Year

  1980

• Birthplace

  Germany

• Nationality

  German, Canadian

• Wealth Ranking

  11th richest Canadian (as of 2022)

• Technical Contributions

  Ruby on Rails core team member; creator of Active Merchant open source library

Timeline

• Born in Germany. (Source: Tobias Lütke - Wikipedia)

  1980-01-01

• Moved from Germany to Canada to be with his future wife. (Source: Tobi Lütke: From Passionate Coder and Snowboarder to Shopify CEO)

  2002-01-01

• Co-founded Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop, with Scott Lake. (Source: Tobi Lütke: From Passionate Coder and Snowboarder to Shopify CEO)

  2004-01-01

• Launched Shopify as a software platform for e-commerce. (Source: Tobi Lütke: From Passionate Coder and Snowboarder to Shopify CEO)

  2006-01-01

• Ranked as the 11th richest Canadian. (Source: Tobias Lütke - Wikipedia)

  2022-01-01

• Featured as a speaker at the All-In Summit, receiving praise for his entrepreneurial genius. (Source: Document 0ec8558c-54ac-4c28-a128-3d525017e6c2)

  2023-09-01

• Began competing in the IMSA SportsCar Championship driving in LMP2 for Era Motorsport. (Source: Tobias Lütke - Wikipedia)

  2025-01-01

• Net worth estimated at US$12.3 billion. (Source: Tobias Lütke - Wikipedia)

  2025-08-01

Toby Sowery

Toby Sowery (born 30 June 1996 in Melbourn) is a British racing driver who currently competes in the GT World Challenge Endurance Cup for Paradine Motorsport. He also previously competed in the IndyCar Series for Dale Coyne Racing in the No. 51 Honda.

Web Search Results

• Tobi Lütke

  Jürgen was a long-haired, 50-something, grizzled rocker who would have been right at home in any Hell’s Angels gang. He was a rebel. He refused to wear the company attire, refusing to use the formal language, called people out on bad ideas when he saw them in plain language. Despite of all this, everyone respected him. I tried my best to make it absolutely obvious that I wanted to work for him. I borrowed the Delphi manuals and committed them to memory in my downtime between coffee runs. [...] the “steady state” revenue of the business based on all the known information today. This is the single most important metric for a cloud business to monitor, as the change in CMRR provides the clearest visibility into the health of any cloud business. [...] The best way I can explain it to you is with a story from the early days of Shopify, the software company I started in 2006. We were a group of friends, crammed into our first office on top of a coffee shop. Our team was still small enough to sit around a table and share a pizza while we worked late into the night. We were solving problems that had never been solved before. The energy was exhilarating.

• Tobi Lütke on Creating Shopify for Americans as a German ...

  LÜTKE: Thinking we have to build products that other people like. I think this is the silent killer. Shopify — someone’s called it Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” essay applied at scale. Yes, everyone’s different, but actually, there are clear clusters, [laughs] and the people who are willing to dedicate themselves to build a product and go through that entire rigamarole and put themselves out there . . . [...] novels teach business principles, what he’s learning next, and more. [...] LÜTKE: We have new primitives on which we can . . . sometimes also philosophies, but I’m not saying we’re going to build a perfect company. Everything is a set of tradeoffs. If the best soccer team on planet Earth gets 80 percent of perfection . . . You freeze-frame the replay. Very few people use a muscle incorrectly while actually approaching the role, and then beautiful orchestration of corporation without zero communication, and that’s . . .

• Tobias Lütke - Wikipedia

  Tobias Lütke (born 1980) is a German Canadian entrepreneur and racing driver who is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify, an e-commerce company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He competes in the 2025 IMSA SportsCar Championship driving in LMP2 for Era Motorsport. Lütke has been part of the core team of the Ruby on Rails framework and has created open source libraries such as Active Merchant. As of 2022, he was the 11th richest Canadian. As of August 2025, his net worth was US$12.3 billion. ## Early life [edit]

• Tobi Lütke, the Founder Who Believes In Arming the Rebels

  On scaling Shopify into a global business: Putting small things together to act big is at the heart of platform thinking. In this episode, Lütke explains that the secret to gaining massive scale is to be a platform. It goes like this: Build a virtuous cycle where everyone wins, and you’ll emerge the biggest winner of all. Here's how Lütke built Shopify and why he decided to open it up to the world. [...] Build systems that help in times of uncertainty: Lütke has a great piece of advice: "Always understand the system of how you got to where you are." Entrepreneurship, he says, is about the ability to step back and look at the whole picture. "It’s a beautiful thing as an early company – if you have 10 people, and one product, and one potential market, you can actually draw the entire systems diagram on one blackboard," he says. "Once you have that modeled out, try to reason about the whole situation and pick out how you got to the point. That’s what the trick is." Systems act like a map that can you guide you out of moments of adversity. [...] ### LISTEN. On staying disciplined in business: Lütke has built Shopify into a behemoth powering so much of the internet’s digital commerce. In this conversation, Lutke discusses business focus, why video games can help you learn the power of attention, what design means for products and organizations, and how he uses mental models to stay disciplined. (Check out this Twitter thread on the mental models Lutke uses.)

• Tobi Lütke: From Passionate Coder and Snowboarder to ...

  When Lütke and Lake co-founded what would later become Shopify in 2004, the one grandiose mission was: sell a bunch of snowboards that they already had in their garages. And despite the unwillingness of the time to start online stores – coming out of the dot-com crash – Snowdevil, as the company was called, set up shop. [...] Get curated quality company deep dives every other week. In 2002, 22-year old Tobi Lütke moved from Germany to Canada to be closer to his future wife, whom he met there during a snowboarding trip. Having no formal degree, he found it challenging to secure a job in his new home country, eventually leading him to start his own business. Combining his newfound hobby of snowboarding with his interest in e-commerce, he started an online snowboard shop. But lacking knowledge and capital he needed help, and luckily met Scott Lake at a family event, who had experience of startups. [...] In the podcast episode, Tobi touches on the importance of focus, and in a Bezos-like fashion he emphasizes the importance of focusing on the end customers: “I think focus of audience ends up being, amongst all the things that you could have focused on, one of the most significant predictors of the success of a company because it’s very, very easy to get diffused between different stakeholders that you're building something for.”