Shopify: Tobias Lütke. How a snowboarder built a $150 billion business (2019)

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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Hey, everyone, so this week, we're revisiting one of our absolute favorite episodes from the Archive. It's my conversation with Tobi Lütke, co-founder and CEO of the e-commerce brand, Shopify. Since launching 20 years ago, sales on Shopify have topped over $1 trillion. But as you'll hear, it all started back when Tobi decided to move to Canada from Germany and start a snowboarding business. Here's my conversation with Tobi from August 2019 Enjoy the show.
So, how are you doing as the CEO of the company?

**Tobias Lütke** (3:33)
I'm not good. I mean, my team was very, very patient with me. There was a lot to learn.
It's a very subtle job. You know, one of the things about computers is when you tell them what to do, they'll keep doing it and they'll do it forever until you stop. It turns out humans are not like that.

**Guy Raz** (3:48)
Humans are different.

**Tobias Lütke** (3:49)
Yes. So there was a very large learning curve.

**Guy Raz** (4:01)
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a young programmer's ambition to sell some snowboards on the internet grew into Shopify, a platform that now powers billions of dollars of e-commerce every month.
Shopify is an e-commerce software platform that works behind the scene so that when you click add to cart or buy in an online store, that transaction is seamless from payment to fulfillment. And in 2015, when Shopify went public, many people outside of tech had never heard of it. But even so, lots of those people had already used it to buy something online, even if they didn't know it, which in a way fits the personality of the company's co-founder and CEO, Tobi Lütke. Tobi is a low-key guy, the kind of guy who literally rode his bike to VC pitch meetings. And at a time when Shopify had already raised well over $100 million in funding, Tobi was still living in a spare room at his in-law's house to save money. But before all of that, Tobi grew up in Koblenz, Germany. And as a kid, it was pretty clear to his parents that Tobi was bright, but he also struggled with learning.

**Tobias Lütke** (5:29)
I mean, I got diagnosed with all sorts of learning disabilities, and it was very hard for me to perform well in the tests and so on. And I don't think I ended up getting a full diagnosis of it, but now it was pretty clear-cut way of ADHD. I grew up with dyslexic, so just reading was hard.