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David Senra: Tobi Lütke, Shopify

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Tobi Lütke is the co-founder of Shopify, where he has served as the company's CEO since 2008. Under his leadership, Shopify grew from an online snowboard shop in Ottawa, Canada in 2004 to the world's leading e-commerce platform, powering over 4 million merchants in more than 175 countries. The company went public in 2015 at a $1.27 billion valuation and has since grown to a market capitalization exceeding $200 billion. After dropping out of school following the tenth grade in Germany, Lütke completed an apprenticeship in computer programming at the Koblenzer Carl-Benz-School. He moved to Canada in 2002 and launched Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop, in 2004 with Scott Lake and Daniel Weinand. Frustrated with existing e-commerce solutions, Lütke built his own platform using Ruby on Rails, which became Shopify in 2006. He became known for pioneering accessible e-commerce tools, contributing to the Ruby on Rails open-source community, and championing the idea that entrepreneurship should be available to everyone. His accomplishments include building Shopify into one of Canada's most valuable companies, being named "CEO of the Year" by The Globe and Mail in 2014, receiving Canada'

David Senra: One of the things I admire most about you is, like, you've been running your company for 21 years, something like that. Tobi Lütke: Yeah. David Senra: I love people that do things for a long time, people that chase excellence, that try to be great. My entire life is founders, right? So during the day, I read biographies of history's greatest founders. I've read, like, 410 of them, and then at night, I hang out with founders. I don't think I have a single friend that's not an entrepreneur. And then, I'm always asking the founders I most admire, who are the founders they most…

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