Tobias Lütke

Tobias Lütke is a German Canadian billionaire entrepreneur, and the founder and CEO of Shopify, a company which is based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Tobi Lütke has been part of the core team of the Ruby on Rails framework and has created open source libraries such as Active Merchant.  

 

Tobi Lütke was born on July 16, 1981. Lütke received a Schneider CPC, a German brand of the Amstrad CPC distributed by Schneider Rundfunkwerke AG, from his parents at the age of six. When he was 11 or 12 years old, Tobi Lütke began rewriting the code of the games he played and modifying computer hardware as a hobby. Tobi Lütke dropped out of school and entered an apprenticeship program at the Koblenzer Carl Benz School to become a computer programmer after tenth grade. Tobi moved from Germany to Canada back in 2002.

Tobi Lütke cites John Carmack’s plan files from the mid 1990’s as “ making a huge impression” on him as a teenager and calls them “ a master class in systems design”.  

In 2004, Tobi Lütke, along with his parents, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, launched Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop. He built a new ecommerce platform for the site, using Ruby on Rails. Soon after, the Snowdevil founders shifted their focus from snowboards to ecommerce and soon they launched SHopify in 2006. Tobi Lütke currently owns about 7% of Shopify. 

In November 2014, The Globe and Mail named Tobi Lütke “ CEO of the Year”. In 2019, Tobi Lütke donated more than 1 million seedings to Team Trees, the biggest donation as of November 2, 2021. In 2021, Lütke donated over 1 million dollars to Team Seas which is the biggest donation as of November 2021. 

On September 8, 2021 it was announced that Tobi Lütke with former and current Shopify top executives and Celtic House Venture Partners, invested about 3 million dollars in Creative Layer, a global personalized print on demand platform for managing Shopify orders, proofs, fulfillment and team members. 

Tobi Lütke is married to Fiona McKean.  Fiona McKean was born in 1980, she is Canadian. Following her graduation, Fiona started working for the Government of Canada in security programming. She even became the deputy director within Global Affairs Canada. Fiona is a social entrepreneur and owner of  The Opinicon, a resort located in Ontario. Tobi Lütke  met his wife during a winter vacation in Canada. The couple stayed in a long distance relationship for a couple of years and in the early 2000s they got married. As for now, the family has three children.

Tobi Lütke has a presence on some social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. The LinkedIn account of Tobi is Tobias Lütke . Here his account has more than 7K followers and about 400 connections. On Instagram his account is tobi. On this platform Tobi Lütke shares photos with his friends, from different events and he likes to post photos of his children. The Twitter channel of Tobi Lütke is considered to be the most famous, on this platform Tobi Lütke first appeared back in January 2007, as for now Tobi’s channel has more than 219K followers. Tobi Lütke’s channel is Tobi Lütke.