A basketball floor is an awkward souvenir. It will not fit in a display cabinet. Moving it requires rather more commitment than buying a signed jersey. Scott Lake helped bring an entire one to Victoria: the court on which the Toronto Raptors clinched the 2019 NBA championship in Oakland. There were missing panels to recover, arrangements to make and a tournament to prepare for. A cherished memory was about to become working equipment again.
Lake and fellow organiser Nick Blasko pursued the purchase for an Olympic qualifying tournament in British Columbia. Lake put nearly $270,000 toward assembling the pieces. Asked about the ambition, he invoked Canada’s tradition of the lucky loonie, the coin placed beneath the ice before the country’s 2002 Olympic hockey triumphs. His preferred lucky charm occupied considerably more square footage.
That combination of practical effort and playful ambition makes a useful introduction to Lake. Shopify’s co-founder and first CEO has spent years helping things get started: businesses, partnerships, tournaments, places to play. Shopify began with snowboards. His subsequent work suggests that the beginning remained his favourite part.
The snowboard shop had other plans
In Ottawa in 2004, Lake and Tobias Lütke were trying to establish an online snowboard business called Snowdevil. They shared an interest in the sport, and their relationship grew through the family of Lütke’s partner, Fiona McKean. Lake handled vendor relationships and business setup. Lütke took responsibility for the technology. It was a recognisable small-business arrangement: one person making the shop run, another making sure customers could reach it.
The difficult part turned out to be the shop’s software. Existing products frustrated Lütke enough that he built his own storefront using Ruby on Rails. The equipment they meant to sell had acquired an unexpectedly interesting supporting act. Other people wanted the software. In 2006, Shopify launched as a product for merchants, with Daniel Weinand alongside Lake and Lütke as a co-founder.
Snowboards have a fairly clear purpose. Software presents an irritating number of possibilities. The founders had to decide which business they were actually in, and then persuade people to try an unfamiliar way of opening a shop. Getting the product built was only one of the jobs.
Someone had to invite the customers
Lake had already worked at Tomoye, the community software company, as vice-president of technical services. His experience included helping organisations such as John Deere and the US Army implement online communities. That background put him close to a practical question that follows software into almost every market: how do people actually use this together?
During Shopify’s development, he wrote on Pixelsoup, the Jaded Pixel company blog. His posts invited feedback, explained decisions and made the young company accessible to people outside it. In September 2005, he announced that he had left his day job to work on the venture full time. He was also learning to lead a fundraising effort.
The blog preserves the scale of those days. In May 2006, Lake reported more than 400 beta testers. He celebrated a first sale at Reorganize.ca as a milestone for the whole platform. A single merchant had made a transaction. Before anyone could discuss an economy of merchants, someone had to buy something.
Beta testers had tried Shopify by May 2006, according to Lake’s update at the time.
A founder can prefer the opening chapter
Lake left Shopify in 2008. The company’s future was still unsettled, and Lütke took over as CEO. Looking back, Lake put his own preference plainly: “I really enjoyed the starting of it.” As the work shifted toward managing the machinery of an established business, the appeal diminished for him.
Lütke’s recollection adds another dimension. He valued Lake’s ability to get people organised and identify what mattered. The two also had different instincts about the company’s direction and the work they wanted to do. Founding together had not obliged them to want identical careers forever.
It is easy to turn an early departure into a retrospective guessing game, particularly when the company later becomes familiar around the world. That game tells us very little about the job as it felt at the time. Lake went on to build another business. His account gives the decision a more ordinary explanation: he liked the work of starting.
“I really enjoyed the starting of it.”
Scott Lake, on his early Shopify years
All those clicks. What did they do?
His next company, SWIX, became Source Metrics. By 2012, the business was moving toward an integrated product for enterprise marketing teams. Customers had been asking for customised dashboards. Lake saw the case for bringing several related jobs into one place, rather than selling isolated features.
Social media gave marketers plenty to count. Followers, mentions and clicks were readily available; connecting them to a useful business outcome was harder. Source Metrics aimed to follow the route from a particular post or campaign to website activity, leads and purchases. A popular message could be entertaining. A merchant still needed to know whether it helped sell anything.
“Which is driving the most conversions?” Lake asked. The question is less glamorous than a rising follower count, and rather more helpful when a budget comes due. Source Metrics tracked individual links and landing pages so marketers could compare what happened after people arrived.
The platform combined publishing, campaign management, monitoring and analytics. In 2012, it had raised $1.6 million in seed funding. It faced established competitors, including offerings assembled by Salesforce. Bringing the information together was the proposition: the person composing a message ought to be able to learn from its results without becoming an amateur archaeologist of disconnected dashboards.
A simplified view of the campaign measurement the company set out to provide.
An editor’s spreadsheet catches his eye
Lake subsequently founded Hello Ventures and became an investor and adviser. One revealing example of that work is Fictionary, the writing software business developed by Kristina and Mathew Stanley with Michael Conn. Kristina, a novelist, had been using a spreadsheet to keep track of her fiction. The team built software around the problem.
There is an obvious family resemblance to the snowboard shop: people doing a real job discover that their tools could be better. Fictionary helped writers see characters, scenes and the shape of a manuscript. Lake worked with the business on marketing and partnerships, and joined its investors.
He particularly valued Stanley’s experience as an author. Here was someone who had spent the hours learning the work her product addressed. Lake’s enthusiasm was specific to that experience, rather than to software as an abstract category. His hope was that Fictionary would keep developing as writers and editors recognised the problems a dedicated tool could solve.
Advising also let him return to an earlier stage of company building without occupying every chair himself. A founder working through customers and partnerships could draw on someone who had already spent years doing both.
Giving the game somewhere to happen
Basketball became another substantial part of his working life. Lake co-founded Friends of Victoria Basketball, whose remit includes bringing major tournaments to Vancouver Island and supporting youth, Indigenous and wheelchair basketball in British Columbia. Canada Basketball elected him a director in 2020. Its current board listing identifies him as vice-chair.
The championship floor belongs in that larger effort. Friends of Victoria Basketball began pursuing it after securing the bid to host the Olympic qualifier. The idea gave the event a connection to a moment Canadian fans already treasured, while leaving the region with a court for future games.
There is a pleasingly literal quality to this form of backing. A tournament needs people who can organise it. Players need a surface. The romance of sporting history eventually comes down to logistics, and logistics is where an enthusiastic proposal either becomes useful or stays a pleasant conversation.
The same concrete emphasis appears in the Jess and Scott Lake Foundation’s support for Giants of Africa. In 2022, the organisation thanked the foundation for helping make possible a court at the Samuel Mutombo Institute of Science in Mbuji-Mayi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A place to play was the result.
In July 2025, Jess and Scott were also reported at a Giants of Africa gathering with young women at ENDP Karubanda in Huye, Rwanda. Their family had sponsored that school’s court, built in May 2024. These projects give his basketball interests a geography well beyond the Canadian teams on the television.
Another team, another beginning
In March 2026, the Toronto Tempo named Lake among its owners in the announcement welcoming Masai Ujiri to the ownership group. The WNBA franchise brings another kind of institution into his portfolio of commitments. His connection to basketball now includes national governance, local organising, court construction and professional team ownership.
Back in Victoria, the Lake Family Office lists Scott and Jess as principals. Its team includes a director of philanthropy alongside financial and operational roles. The public outline is of several projects with people responsible for carrying them forward.
Seen together, these chapters make Lake’s early departure from Shopify less defining than it first appears. He kept finding work near the beginning of things, where a useful idea still needs customers, allies, money or a floor beneath it. The objects changed. The practical demands remained wonderfully stubborn. Even a lucky charm, if it is large enough, needs someone to arrange delivery.