How I Built This with Guy Raz artwork

Jun 8, 2026 · 58m, Episode 842

Shopify: Tobias Lütke. How a snowboarder built a $150 billion business (2019)

From How I Built This with Guy Raz

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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, s...

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