Tobias Lütke

Tobias Lütke (born 1980[1]) is a German Canadian entrepreneur and racing driver who is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify, an e-commerce company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.[4][5][6] He competes in the 2025 IMSA SportsCar Championship driving in LMP2 for Era Motorsport.[7]

Lütke has been part of the core team of the Ruby on Rails framework and has created open source libraries such as Active Merchant.[8] As of 2022, he was the 11th richest Canadian.[9] As of August 2025, his net worth was US$12.3 billion.[10]

Early life

Lütke was born in Koblenz,[11] Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany in 1980.[1] He received a Schneider CPC (German brand of the Amstrad Colour Personal Computer distributed by the Schneider Rundfunkwerke AG) from his parents at the age of six.[12][11] By 11 or 12, he began rewriting the code of the games he played and modifying computer hardware as a hobby. Lütke graduated from school and entered an apprenticeship program at the Carl-Benz-School in Koblenz to become a computer programmer after the tenth grade.[13][14] He moved from Germany to Canada in 2003.[10]

Lütke cites John Carmack's .plan-files from the mid-1990's as "making a huge impression"[15] on him as a teenager and calls them "a master class in systems design".[16]

Career

In 2004, Lütke, along with his partners, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, launched Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop.[4] Lütke built a new e-commerce platform for the site, using Ruby on Rails.[17][14][18] Soon after, the Snowdevil founders shifted their focus from snowboards to e-commerce and launched Shopify in 2006.[19][20] He currently owns 7% of Shopify, which went public in 2015.[21] Despite controlling a minority of the shares outstanding, he controls a 40% voting interest in Shopify due to a two-class voting structure.[22]

The Globe and Mail named Lütke "CEO of the Year" in November 2014.[23] Lütke was presented with the Meritorious Service Cross on November 5, 2018, for his work in supporting the growth of the Canadian technology industry.[24]

In October of 2019, Lütke donated over 1 million dollars to Team Trees.[25] This made him the largest donor in the projects history and marked a personal commitment to environmental protection.

On September 8, 2021, it was announced that Lütke, along with former and current Shopify top executives and Celtic House Venture Partners, invested $3 million in Creative Layer, "a global personalized print-on-demand platform for managing Shopify orders, proofs, fulfillment, and team members".[26]

On January 31, 2022, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced Lütke would join its board of directors.[27]

Criticism and controversies

Racing career

In 2025, Lütke entered the 2025 IMSA SportsCar Championship to compete in the LMP2 class driving for Era Motorsport alongside co-drivers Paul-Loup Chatin, Ryan Dalziel, and David Heinemeier Hansson.[7][35][6]

Personal life

Lütke has three children with his wife Fiona McKean, a former Canadian diplomat.[36] Public servant and mining investor Bruce McKean and his wife Dale, Lütke's in-laws, were initial investors in Shopify. When the company succeeded beyond expectations, the McKeans sold all their shares and became full-time philanthropists and donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity through Waverley House Foundation.[37][38] Their support for mental health research is founded in family tragedy and experience.

In 2015, Lütke and McKean purchased and relaunched a classic Ontario summer resort lodge named Opinicon near Chaffey's Locks on the Rideau River. [39][40][41]