Background:

Tobi was born in 1981 in Germany. At a very young age, he found a love for technology. Just at the age of 11, he began rewriting the code of the games he played and modifying computer hardware as a hobby.

Just after tenth grade, Lutke dropped out of school and entered an apprenticeship program at the Koblenzer Carl-Benz-School to become a computer programmer.

The Birth of Shopify:

A few years after moving to Canada in 2004, Tobi and his partners, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, launched Snowdevil, which was an online snowboard shop. Lutke built a new online business platform for the site, using Ruby on Rails. Then soon after, the Snowdevil founders shifted their focus from snowboards to e-commerce and launched Shopify in 2006.

Shopify is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company. It is an e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems.

Shopify Now:

The Globe and Mail named Lutke “CEO of the Year” in November 2014 and his company has been growing ever since.

Now, Shopify is worth over $1.8 billion and is very philanthropic. In 2019, Lutke donated over a million seedlings to Team Trees because as much as he loves technology, he also loves the environment.

Entrepreneurial Lessons:

It always amazes me when I hear stories of people dropping out of school to start businesses. I don’t think my parents would appreciate that too much and it sounds scary leaving your comfortable life to journey into the unknown at such a young age.

This is why Tobi Lutke was such a great entrepreneur, he wasn’t afraid of failure or the business world.