Which startup was founded by Tobias Lütke?

Tobias Lütke founded Shopify with Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake.

The company began when the three founders launched Snowdevil, an online store for snowboarding equipment, in 2004. Dissatisfied with the available e-commerce software, Lütke built a new platform for the store using Ruby on Rails. The founders then shifted their focus from selling snowboards to providing that commerce technology to other businesses, launching Shopify in 2006.

Wix, Squarespace, and BigCommerce are legitimate e-commerce or website-building companies, but they are not the company associated with Lütke’s founding story. Shopify is best understood as a commerce platform: merchants can create storefronts, manage products and orders, accept payments, and extend their shops through apps.

Shopify’s Canadian origins are another useful clue. It was founded in Ottawa and later became one of Canada’s best-known technology companies. Lütke has remained closely associated with the business as its co-founder and chief executive, while Shopify expanded from a small snowboard-shop project into software used by merchants around the world.