Tobias Lütke
Tobias Lütke
Born/Date of Birth: 16 July 1980
Place of Birth: Koblenz, Germany
Nationality: German
Citizenship: Canada
Organizations founded: Shopify, JadedPixel
Occupation: CEO, Shopify
Net worth: US$9.3 billion (Aug 2020)
Height: 5'10"
Spouse(s): Fiona McKean
Children: 3
Website: tobi.lutke.com
Tobias "Tobi" Lütke is a German-born Canadian billionaire entrepreneur, and the founder and CEO of Shopify, a company based in Ottawa, Canada. He has been part of the core team of the Ruby on Rails framework and has created open source libraries such as Active Merchant.
Early life
Lütke was born in 1981. He received a Schneider CPC (German brand of the Amstrad CPC distributed by the Schneider Rundfunkwerke AG) from his parents at the age of six. By 11 or 12, he began rewriting the code of the games he played and modifying computer hardware as a hobby. Lütke dropped out of school and entered an apprenticeship program at the Koblenzer Carl-Benz-School to become a computer programmer after tenth grade. He moved from Germany to Canada in 2002.
Career
In 2004, Lütke, along with his partners, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, launched Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop. Lütke built a new e-commerce platform for the site, using Ruby on Rails. Soon after, the Snowdevil founders shifted their focus from snowboards to e-commerce and launched Shopify in 2006.
The Globe and Mail named Lütke "CEO of the Year" in November 2014. In 2019, Lütke donated 1,000,001 seedlings to Team Trees, the biggest donation as of October 17, 2020.
