Tobi Lutke Net Worth & Biography  

Tobi Lutke Net Worth & Biography

Tobi Lütke is a German-born Canadian billionaire businessman and investor, who is perhaps best known as the founder and chief executive officer of the famous eCommerce company Shopify, headquartered in Ontario, Canada.

He is one of the world’s youngest billionaires and has happened to earn his fortune from his involvement in programming and all things tech from a young age. Tobi has developed open-source libraries like Active Merchant and has been a member of the core group of developers of the Ruby on Rails framework. The article below contains all that there is to know regarding Tobi Lutke’s biography and net worth.

Early Life: Childhood, Education

He was born Tobias Lütke in Koblenz, Germany in the year 1981. When he was six years old, his parents presented him with a Schneider CPC (German model of the Amstrad CPC issued by the Schneider Rundfunkwerke AG). Before reaching the age of 13, Tobi had started modifying computer hardware for fun and rewriting the code of the computer games he played.

Tobi dropped out of school after tenth grade and started an apprenticeship program at Koblenzer Carl-Benz computer institute to become a computer programmer. He was 21 years old when he moved to Canada from Germany in 2002 in search of better opportunities in the tech world.

Professional Life: Entrepreneurial Career

In 2004, Tobi Lütke, along with two of his partners, Scott Lake and Daniel Weinand, launched an online snowboard shop which they named Snowdevil. Lütke was the one who built a new e-commerce platform for the website, using Ruby on Rails. Not long after their project, the ambitious team of young developers who founded Snowdevil shifted their attention from snowboards and put together some funds, with which they launched the online shopping platform Shopify in 2006.

At the current time, Tobi Lutke owns 7 percent of the company, Shopify, which went public in 2015. He combined with former and current Celtic House Venture Partners and key executives of Shopify and invested $3 million in Creative Layer, which is easily described as a personalized print-on-demand platform for handling Shopify orders, fulfillment, proofs, and team members.

About the Company

Shopify Inc. is a Canadian world-renowned e-commerce company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is also the name of its registered platform for retail point-of-sale systems and online stores.

The platform, Shopify, offers online retailers a wide range of services including marketing, payments, shipping, and customer engagement tools. As of October 2021, the company reported that it had nearly 2 million businesses in approximately 175 countries around the world using its platform. A recent Builtwith report showed that around 1.58 million sites on the net run on the Shopify platform. As of the current time, Shopify is the biggest publicly traded Canadian firm by market capitalization. It reported revenue of $2.929 billion for the year 2020.

A bit of its history, Shopify was founded by Scott Lake and Tobias Lütke in the year 2006 after attempting to open the online site Snowdevil which was meant as a store for snowboarding equipment.

The company enjoyed massive popularity and growth in 2020 when social-distancing measures enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic, forced small businesses online. In May that year, The Ottawa-based e-commerce company became the most valuable publicly-traded company in Canada, surpassing RBC to claim the top position on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Achievements: Awards & Honors

For someone who never passed through college, Tobi Lutke has done immensely well in the tech industry. He is a highly respected programmer, and his key contribution to the founding and expansion of Shopify is something that is especially applauded.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke was, in 2014, named CEO of the Year by The Globe and Mail. In 2020, The Logic’s subscribers named him the Canadian tech founder of the year.

Tobi Lutke Net Worth: Salary, Income Sources, Shares

Now 40 years of age, the German-Canadian techpreneur Tobi Lutke’s net worth is $7.5 billion. He has rightly earned his wealth by founding the online company Shopify and also serving as its chief executive officer.

Lutke started rewriting codes for computer software and games for leisure when he was age 11 or 12 and eventually dropped out of school after tenth grade to follow his passion for tech by enrolling in an apprenticeship to become a computer programmer. His decision to chase his dream has paid off today, as one of his developments, in the form of the e-commerce company Shopify, is now known to be one of the biggest businesses in the world. To top that off, the entrepreneur holds a 7 percent share in the company and also sits at its helm of leadership as the reigning CEO.

His donation of 1,000,001 seedlings to Team Trees in 2019 is still registered as the biggest donation of such nature as of October 2021. He is one of the world’s youngest billionaires, but one may never find out with the way he likes to lead a modest life and keep his private matters away from the attention of the public.