For about ten years, the founder of what would become one of Canada's most valuable companies slept in his girlfriend's parents' house in Ottawa.
Tobias Lutke did not plan it that way. He was born in 1980 in Koblenz, in what was then West Germany, and his parents gave him a Schneider CPC computer when he was six. School, it turned out, mattered less to him than the machine. After tenth grade he left to apprentice as a programmer at the Carl-Benz-School in Koblenz. He has said that John Carmack's .plan files, the plain-text updates of the Quake programmer, left a huge impression on him as a teenager.
What almost nobody saw at the time was where the money was coming from.
In 2003 he moved to Canada, following love, and settled in Ottawa. A year later, with Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, he started Snowdevil, an online store for snowboards. The shop was the idea. The trouble was the software: every e-commerce package he tried was clumsy. So Lutke, a programmer who had never finished school, wrote his own, in Ruby on Rails, a young framework most people had not heard of.
What almost nobody saw at the time was where the money was coming from. Lutke took no salary while the platform was being turned into a product. He lived with Fiona McKean's parents, in their home, for roughly a decade, which kept his costs close to zero. Her father, Bruce McKean, supplied early seed capital. A founder's courage is easy to admire; a family that quietly pays the rent is easier to overlook.
Shopify launched as its own product in June 2006. The snowboards faded; the software stayed. Bessemer, FirstMark and Felicis led a US$7 million Series A in December 2010, followed by US$15 million in 2011 and US$100 million in 2013. The company went public in May 2015, raising more than US$131 million.
The years after were not smooth. In 2017 a short-seller attack and a boycott campaign knocked more than 11 percent off the stock in a day. In 2022 Lutke said the company's growth forecasts had not paid off and cut about 10 percent of staff; in 2023 another 20 percent went, and the logistics arm was sold to Flexport. A founder who had been cheered as a prophet had to stand in front of his people and say he had been wrong.
The recovery was fast. In 2025 Shopify reported revenue of about US$11.6 billion, up roughly 30 percent, with net income near US$1.2 billion, and Forbes put Lutke's fortune at US$12.3 billion that August.
The lesson is less about code than about runway. Lutke's real early investor was a household that gave him time. Before you look for venture money, look at who is already, quietly, buying you years.