Tobi Lütke’s Journey of Building a Billion-Dollar Company One Step at a Time

magine moving to a new country, facing long winters, and turning a hobby into a global empire—all without a work permit or a traditional education.

That’s the story of Tobi Lütke, the founder of Shopify, a company that today powers over 600,000 businesses and sees a first sale every 60 seconds.

What started as a small idea to sell snowboards online grew into a platform that’s redefining entrepreneurship.

Here’s how it happened, step by step, driven by a childhood obsession with computers and a relentless quest to understand the world—a quest that Lütke believes is the key to becoming the best version of yourself.

A Computer at Six: The Spark of a Lifelong Passion

Lütke’s journey began in a small German town in the mid-1980s, far from Silicon Valley’s buzzing tech scene. At six, he got lucky—his parents gave him an Amstrad, a basic computer akin to a Commodore 64.

“I knew there was nothing else that would be more interesting,” he recalls. The moment he typed a letter and watched it flicker onto the screen, it was magic—a revelation in a world of typewriters and rural simplicity.

“It was 10x to 100x more interesting than anything else in my life for the first 15 years,” he says, a grin in his voice.

That magic wasn’t just novelty—it was a gateway. Before he knew “programming” was a word, Lütke was deciphering code listings in magazines, teaching himself to bend the machine to his will.

By 12, he’d decided: “There’s no chance I’m doing anything other than programming all day.” School couldn’t compete—hours of Latin droned on, offering no agency, no leverage.

But the computer? “It does this thing, and it will do it forever,” he marvels. “It didn’t fit into the rest of life’s experience.”

He calls it tinkering, but it was more—crafting pranks, building tools, sharing them with friends. In a small town where his skills were rare, he found a frontier. “Entrepreneurs need frontiers,” he says.

“There’s a need to reach for something that could create value.” Curiosity fueled him, a hatred of “black boxes”—things he couldn’t understand—propelling him forward. “It’s a parenting principle in our house,” he laughs.

“We don’t like black boxes. Everything is understandable, and everything is way more interesting than it seems.” At 10, wrestling with Germany’s rigid system, that computer was his rebellion, his playground, his universe.

This wasn’t just child’s play—it was the foundation of a mindset. “I hate ignorance,” he admits. “Not understanding feels almost amoral.” That drive to unbox the world, to peel back layers, would later define Shopify. But first, it shaped a boy who’d rather debug code than memorize conjugations.

From Tinkering to Snow Devil: A Newcomer in Canada

Fast forward to 2004: Lütke arrived in Canada from Germany, chasing love—his wife is Canadian—and a fresh start. Used to milder winters, he found himself snowed in with time on his hands and a passion for snowboarding.

Without a work permit, he couldn’t get a job, but a loophole changed everything: you don’t need a permit to start a business. “People presumed it would go nowhere,” he laughs, proving them spectacularly wrong.

With his programming roots, he built an online store called Snow Devil. It was the early days of Google Ads—20 cents a click to target ski resorts—and it worked. But existing e-commerce software was a mess, built for big businesses, not scrappy beginners. So, he coded his own.

After a successful season, summer slowed snowboard sales, and he pivoted to skateboards. Then came the turning point: others wanted his software. Over two years, he refined it, launching Shopify in 2006—not a store, but a platform for dreamers like him.

A Non-Traditional Path: Apprenticeship Over Academia

Lütke’s disdain for “black boxes” clashed with traditional education. “I was a rotten student,” he admits. “I can’t learn solutions to problems I never had.”

School felt abstract, disconnected from the tangible puzzles he loved solving on computers.

After 10th grade, he jumped into Germany’s dual education system, apprenticing as a programmer at 16—four days a week coding, one in school. “It was a dream,” he says, crediting a mentor who guided him.

This hands-on path shaped Shopify’s ethos. Today, the company’s pioneering a “Dev Degree” program with a Canadian university, blending work and education so students earn money while earning a degree.

“We need to experiment with how we train computer scientists,” Lütke argues, hoping to globalize the model.

Shopify’s Mission: Empowering the Little Guy

Shopify’s rise—now a multi-billion-dollar company headquartered in Ottawa—stems from Lütke’s mission to democratize entrepreneurship. He rejected Silicon Valley, once declining a 2008 Sequoia offer requiring relocation.

“I figured it’d be easier to make Shopify the best company to work for across Canadian cities,” he says. It paid off.

But his vision is bigger. Entrepreneurship is declining globally, squeezed by internet-driven centralization. “The internet only needs one Amazon,” he notes. Yet, with retail growing from $1.9 trillion to $4 trillion soon, he sees opportunity in small players—limo drivers building sports brands, lunch-break innovators—not tech giants.

Shopify’s affordability ($30/month plus a sales cut) and features like payment gateways and revenue advances remove barriers Lütke once faced, like scraping together $20,000 for a payment bond. “Every bit of complexity makes people quit,” he says. “We make it go away.”

A Philosophy of Life

Lütke’s drive isn’t just about business—it’s personal. “The goal in life is to become the best version of yourself,” he muses. “At the end, you meet the person you could’ve been, and the work is minimizing the diff between that person and who showed up.”

For him, understanding—unboxing the world—is moral. “Not understanding feels almost amoral,” he says. Each lesson updates his mental model, sharpening decisions at Shopify, from meetings to tackling new tech like AI.

That model began forming in 2004, in a coffee shop, when an email popped up: someone in Pennsylvania bought a Snow Devil snowboard. “I wrote that email software, but it was profound,” he recalls.

“Someone validated that this thing I built needed to exist.” That moment fueled a mission to share that feeling. “We don’t need five more mega companies,” he insists. “We need millions of 20-person businesses.”

From a six-year-old typing letters to a global enabler of dreams, Tobi Lütke proves small steps—and a hatred of black boxes—can build something massive.