#152 Tobi Lutke: Calm Progress

Published: Nov. 15, 2022, 6 a.m.

My guest today is Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi L\xfctke.\xa0 We discuss the differences between founders and professional managers, how he\u2019s scaled with Shopify, the constant fight against bureaucracy, how he thinks about innovation in a large company, and how he manages to keep his head when everyone else is losing theirs.

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A coder at heart who emigrated from Germany to Canada two decades ago, L\xfctke co-founded the e-commerce giant Shopify in Ottawa in 2006. The Globe and Mail named L\xfctke "CEO of the Year" in November 2014,\xa0 and in May 2021 the company reported that it had more than 1.7 million businesses in approximately 175 countries using its platform. As of July 2022, Shopify is among the top 20 largest publicly traded Canadian companies by market capitalization, and the company\u2019s total revenue for 2021 was $4.611 billion. L\xfctke previously appeared on Episode 41 of The Knowledge Project.

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