An image from inside Shopify's Ottawa headquarters, 2018.
REUTERS / Alamy Stock Photo
Tobias Lütke
Tobias Lütke
The man who built Shopify
Date of birth
1981
Point of origin
Germany
Lutke started coding young, eventually leaving school for a programming apprenticeship.
Fiona McKean and Tobias Lutke with their children Fraser, Sam, and Tristan (left to right), 2015. They are seen here at the New York Stock Exchange just before the successful start of public trading of Shopify stock.
AP Photo/Richard Drew
Tobias Lütke founded Shopify in 2006 based on technology he had developed for a previous business. In 2015 the business expanded to new space in Waterloo, Ontario, pictured here.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Hannah Yoon
Tobias Lütke's Shopify eCommerce platform is popular in part because it dramatically simplifies the process of setting up an online store.
SOPA Images via Getty Images
Tobias Lütke, 1981- , West Germany, now Germany.
Lutke started coding young, eventually leaving school for a programming apprenticeship. He met his wife gaming online, visited Whistler with her, and then moved to Canada to be with her in 2002. Lacking a work permit, he started his own business: an online snowboard shop. In 2006, he used the e-commerce platform he built as the basis for Shopify. Shopify went public in 2015; as of 2018 it had more than 1 million business customers.
