Shopify: Tobias Lütke

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2019

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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 4,000 employees and $1 billion in revenue. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," after Barb Heilman invented a device that easily releases child car seat buckles, she started a business with her daughter Becca Davison called Unbuckle Me. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New years is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:27.0	Really quick before we start the show. I want to let you know that there are just a few tickets left for the how I built this summit supported by American Express.
0:35.0	It's happening October 22nd and 23rd at the Year of the Boi-N-A-Center in San Francisco.
0:40.0	It is going to be an incredible event. You'll be able to hear from and probably even meet founders from companies like Away, Slack, Instagram, Spanx, JetBlue, CliffBar, Jenny's Splendid Ice Cream, and many, many more.
0:54.0	You can get your tickets and learn more about the summit, including how it can help grow your business or build your big ideas at summit.npr.org.
1:04.0	I also want to let you know about a few how I built this live shows. We've got coming up on the East Coast this fall.
1:10.0	Also supported by American Express, we'll be heading to New York on September 10th, where I'll be talking with Christina Toci of Milk Bar.
1:17.0	And then we'll be in Washington, D.C. on September 12th with Tristan Walker of Walker & Company.
1:23.0	You can get tickets and find out more about our East Coast tour at npr.org.
1:30.0	So how are you doing as the CEO of the company?
1:37.0	I had not good. My team was very, very patient with me. There was a lot to learn. It's a very subtle job.
1:47.0	You know, one of the things about computers is when you tell them what to do, they'll keep doing it and they'll try to do it until you stop.
1:53.0	Turns out humans are not like humans.
1:54.0	Humans are different. Yes. So there was a very large learning curve.
1:59.0	From NPR, it's how I built this, a show of innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built.
2:17.0	I'm Guy Raaz and on the show today, how a young programmers ambition to sell some snowboards on the internet grew into Shopify,
2:25.0	a platform that now powers billions of dollars of e-commerce every month.
	...

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