Tobi Lutke

Tobias 'Tobi' Lütke is the German-Canadian co-founder and CEO of Shopify, one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms. Born in 1980 in Koblenz, Germany, he received a computer at age six and left school after 10th grade to complete a programming apprenticeship, never attending university. After emigrating to Canada in 2003, he built an online snowboard shop called Snowdevil and — finding every existing e-commerce platform inadequate — coded his own solution in Ruby on Rails in two months. That solution became Shopify, which he launched as a standalone product in 2006. Shopify went public in 2015, and as of 2025 processes over $1.6 trillion in cumulative gross merchandise volume for millions of merchants across 175+ countries, commanding over 14% of the US e-commerce market. Lutke is known for his radical candor, his open-source roots, and his unusual interests for a tech CEO: competitive racing driver, avid skier, and serious gamer who credits strategy games with shaping his business thinking. His April 2025 internal memo mandating AI proficiency as a baseline expectation became one of the most widely-discussed corporate AI policy statements of the year.