logo
episode-header-image
Aug 2019
1h 4m

Shopify: Tobias Lütke

Guy Raz | Wondery
About this episode
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 ... Show More
Up next
Oct 19
Sweet Loren’s: Loren Castle. How A Recipe Makeover Built a National Cookie Brand
Loren Castle started baking cookies after surviving cancer in her early twenties. Five years later, Sweet Loren’s refrigerated cookie dough was generating just $350,000 a year. But instead of giving up, she listened to customers, and reinvented the dough without gluten, dairy, eg ... Show More
1h 4m
Oct 15
Advice Line with Tara Bosch of SmartSweets
Today’s callers: Lindzi from Chicago wants to expand her gourmet marshmallow brand into retail without cannibalizing her high-margin DTC sales. Then, Vivi from Hawaii considers how to best tell her sustainable swimwear brand’s story to a digital audience. And Aly from Los Angeles ... Show More
46m 13s
Oct 12
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League (2023)
In the early 1990’s, Tim League spent $50,000 in savings to lease an abandoned movie theater on the wrong side of the tracks—a shaky experiment that eventually grew into a thriving national chain. As Tim and his wife Karrie built theaters in Austin and beyond, they made a name fo ... Show More
1h 16m
Recommended Episodes
Dec 2024
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke Shares His Secrets to Entrepreneurial Success
<p>Tobi Lütke, the founder of Shopify, started his journey over 20 years ago with a simple dream: to sell snowboards online. He wanted to combine his passions for snowboarding and technology to build a thriving online business. But the road to his first sale was filled with unexp ... Show More
37m 3s
Nov 2022
Tobi Lütke: Calm Progress
My guest today is Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke. We discuss the differences between founders and professional managers, how he’s scaled with Shopify, the constant fight against bureaucracy, how he thinks about innovation in a large company, and how he manages to keep his ... Show More
2h 42m
Apr 2021
Shopify: The E-commerce On-Ramp - [Business Breakdowns, EP. 01]
Today we will be diving into Shopify. Shopify was founded in 2004 by Tobi Lütke and Scott Lake around their original problem of why it's so hard to build an online business when they struggled to open an online snowboard equipment store. Today, Shopify's goal is to make commerce ... Show More
1h 3m
Apr 2023
20VC: Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke on Why Micromanagement is Good | Why You Will Learn More From Studying World of Warcraft Guilds Than You Will Companies | Why Happiness is BS; Lessons on Marriage, Fatherhood & Decision-Making Quality
<p><!-- wp:paragraph --></p> <p>Tobi Lütke is the CEO and Co-Founder of <a href= "https://www.shopify.com/uk">Shopify</a>, the powerhouse company allowing anyone to start and grow their e-commerce business. Over an incredible 18 years, Tobi has scaled Shopify to 10% of total US e ... Show More
56m 48s
Sep 2024
Tobi Lütke on Creating Shopify for Americans as a German in Canada
<p class="MsoNormal">Tobi Lütke is the CEO and co-founder of Shopify. 20 years ago, he was just a German coder who emigrated to Canada to launch some ecommerce platform with another German. Now he's the world-renowned thought and tech leader who has revolutionized online shopping ... Show More
54m 4s
Aug 2019
The Shopify IPO
Ben and David head north of the border to Ottawa, Canada to cover perhaps one of the greatest IPO success stories of the past 5 years, Shopify. From humble beginnings as a “lifestyle business” hawking hipster snowboard gear online to now routinely mentioned in the same breath as ... Show More
1h 23m
Feb 2020
Be a platform, w/Shopify's Tobi Lütke
The secret to massive scale? Be a platform. Build a virtuous cycle where everyone wins, and you’ll emerge the biggest winner of all. This is what Tobi Lütke did when he built Shopify – and then opened it up to the world. Cameo appearances by: Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt (Google), Ju ... Show More
32m 10s
Dec 2020
Be a platform, w/Shopify's Tobi Lütke
The secret to massive scale? Be a platform. Build a virtuous cycle where everyone wins, and you’ll emerge the biggest winner of all. This is what Tobi Lütke did when he built Shopify – and then opened it up to the world. Cameo appearances by Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt (Google), Jul ... Show More
32m 10s
Sep 2025
How to Live in Everyone Else's Future (with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke)
Tobi is one of the most thoughtful people in the technology industry. He's also one of the very few people who started as a programmer -- just trying to solve his own problem -- and still runs his company as CEO today even as it approaches a $200B market cap. Tobi has done this i ... Show More
1h 47m
Apr 2021
Shopify: The E-commerce On-Ramp - [Business Breakdowns, EP. 01]
Welcome to the first episode of our newest show, Business Breakdowns, featuring deep-dive conversations on individual businesses. In each episode, we will dissect a new company with investors and operators that know it best. We’ve already released the first three episodes on Shop ... Show More
1h 6m