#152 Tobi Lütke: Calm Progress

My guest today is celebrated entrepreneur and Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke, who sits down for his second appearance on The Knowledge Project, this time in a wide-ranging conversation about how Shopify endured through the COVID-19 pandemic and why he’s so optimistic about the future.

We discuss the differences between founders and CEOs, how his job has changed as Shopify has grown over the years, 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.

A coder at heart who emigrated from Germany to Canada two decades ago, Lütke co-founded the e-commerce giant Shopify in Ottawa in 2006. The Globe and Mail named Lütke "CEO of the Year" in November 2014,  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’s total revenue for 2021 was $4.611 billion. Lütke previously appeared on Episode 41 of The Knowledge Project.

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