Tobi Lütke loves snowboarding and programming. When he wanted to start an e-commerce business to sell snowboarding equipment, he found there was no good software to help get his online business up and running, so he coded it himself. It didn’t take long for Lütke and his co-founder Scott Lake to realize that the snowboarding business didn’t do well in the summer. However, subscriptions of the e-commerce platform Lütke built had started selling, and Shopify (NYSE:SHOP) was born.
Shopify’s stock has been on a tear since the company’s IPO, significantly beating the S&P 500. Shopify’s platform supports 377,500 merchants today, an 814% increase from 2012. Through this tremendous period of growth, the company has been able to attract talented people because of a great culture and that has contributed to the company’s amazing performance. Lütke, Shopify’s founder and CEO, has had significant influence on what Shopify’s culture is today. Let’s go back in time to see how Lütke’s early training as a programmer and his unwanted CEO promotion have shaped this fast growing e-commerce platform company’s culture.
High school dropout — and programmer
Lütke received his first computer at age six and by the time he was 12, he was rewriting the code for his computer games. He dropped out of high school at the age of 16 because, in his words, “computers were so much more interesting.” Lütke was able to land a computer programming apprenticeship at Siemens in his German hometown. He ended up working for an unconventional boss named Jürgen, who made a tremendous impact on Lütke.
Jürgen was a rebel, he refused the corporate dress code, rebuffed the corporate standard programming language, and called people out on bad ideas in a public way. But everyone respected him because the team produced results. Lütke described the experience working for Jürgen in a blog titled “The Apprentice Programmer.”
It was probably the most important thing that happened to me in my professional life. Jürgen was a master teacher. He created an environment in which it was not only possible but easy to move through 10 years of career development every year. It is a method and an environment which I am fiercely trying to replicate at Shopify.
Lütke spent seven years at Siemens before snowboarding and a girl from Ottawa got Lütke to move to Canada. In 2004, he started the online snowboard shop with Scott Lake.
The unlikely CEO
Fast forward to 2008; Shopify had a staff of ten and $60,000 in revenue per month when his co-founder and CEO, Lake, decided to leave. Up to that point Lütke had been totally focused on the product and had no idea about the finances or business of Shopify, but now he had no choice but to step into the CEO role. Lütke said “When I took over as CEO,…