Tobi Lutke

Tobi Lutke founded and runs Shopify, a Canadian ecommerce firm that helps companies set up and run online stores.Lutke grew up in Germany, where he learned to code by age 12 and left school at 16 to enter a computer programming apprenticeship.He moved to Canada in 2003 after meeting his now-wife, an Ottawa native, on a snowboarding trip to Whistler.He began working on an ecommerce platform after he and a friend tried to open an online snowboard shop but couldn't find decent software.They soon realized their software would make a good product to sell, so they raised about $200,000 from friends and family to launch Shopify.