Shopify: Tobias Lütke. How a snowboarder built a $150 billion business (2019)
How I Built This with Guy Raz
Guy Raz | Wondery
4.7 • 31.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 June 2026
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2004, German programmer Tobias Lütke was living in Ottawa with his girlfriend.
An avid snowboarder, he wanted to launch an online snowboard shop, but found the e-commerce software available at the time to be clunky and expensive.
So he decided to write his own e-commerce software.
After he launched his online snowboard business, called Snowdevil, other online merchants were so impressed with what he built that they started asking to license Tobi's software to run their own stores.
Tobi and his co-founder realized that software had more potential than snowboards, so they launched the e-commerce platform Shopify in 2006.
Since then, it has grown into a publicly-traded company with over 7,000 employees and $11 billion in revenue.
Timestamps:
- 07:20 - Tobi discovers snowboarding–and meets his future wife–on vacation in Canada
- 11:25 - Building a new kind of snowboarding company
- 29:35 - Pivot point: skateboards or software?
- 34:25 - The night before Tobi’s wedding, Shopify switches business models
- 45:25 - The 2008 financial crisis hits… revealing a huge opportunity
- 58:55 - After a decade, Shopify goes public
This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. This archive episode was produced by Katherine Sypher.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everyone. So this week we're revisiting one of our absolute favorite episodes from the archive. It's my conversation with Toby Lutka, co-founder and CEO of the e-commerce brand Shopify. Since launching 20 years ago, sales on Shopify have topped over $1 trillion. |
| 0:24.3 | But as you'll hear, it all started back when Toby decided to move to Canada from Germany and start |
| 0:30.1 | a snowboarding business. Here's my conversation with Toby from August 2019. Enjoy the show. |
| 0:38.7 | So how are you doing as the CEO of the company? |
| 0:43.4 | I'm not good. I mean, my team was very, very patient with me. There was a lot to learn. |
| 0:50.1 | It's a very subtle job. You know, wonderful things about computers is when you tell them what to do, |
| 0:56.1 | they'll keep doing it and they'll do it forever until you stop. |
| 0:58.7 | Turns out humans are not like that. |
| 1:00.2 | Humans are different. |
| 1:01.1 | Yes. |
| 1:01.7 | So there was a very large learning curve. |
| 1:08.3 | Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. |
| 1:22.9 | 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, |
| 1:31.0 | a platform that now powers billions of dollars of e-commerce every month. |
| 1:41.7 | Shopify is an e-commerce software platform that works behind the scenes so that when you click |
| 1:47.0 | add to cart or buy in an online store, that transaction is seamless from payment to fulfillment. |
| 1:53.0 | And in 2015, when Shopify went public, many people outside of tech had never heard of it. |
| 1:59.0 | But even so, lots of those people had already |
| 2:02.2 | used it to buy something online, even if they didn't know it, which in a way fits the personality |
| 2:08.5 | of the company's co-founder and CEO, Toby Ludke. Toby's a low-key guy, the kind of guy who |
| 2:15.2 | literally rode his bike to VC pitch meetings. And at a time when Shopify |
| 2:20.2 | had already raised well over $100 million in funding, Toby was still living in a spare room |
... |
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