Shopify: Tobias Lütke. How a snowboarder built a $150 billion business (2019)
How I Built This with Guy Raz
- Published
- June 8, 2026
- Duration
- 58:48
- Summary source
- description
- Last updated
- Jun 10, 2026
Discusses In 2004, German programmer Tobias Lütke was living in Ottawa with his girlfriend.An avid snowboarder…
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 on…
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Show notes
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