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Tobi Lutke

Executive

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Person
Role
Executive
Updated

The profile

Shopify chief executive through the pandemic e-commerce surge. Shopify's 2021 revenue rose 57% to $4.6 billion; in 2022 he wrote that his bet on a permanent online shift "didn't pay off," and cut about 10% of staff.

Identity and role

Tobias Lütke is chief executive officer of Shopify Inc., the commerce-software company listed in New York and Toronto as SHOP. He signed the Sarbanes-Oxley certification for Shopify's annual report for 2025 as chief executive on February 11, 2026.

Biography / career arc

By his own account Lütke wrote Shopify's first code. He opened the July 2022 layoff memo by saying he was writing "not far from where I once sat down to write the first few lines of code for Shopify itself. Those lines of code started a company." He led the company through its pandemic expansion and the two rounds of cuts that followed, in July 2022 and May 2023, and he described the expansion as his decision: "placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong."

Pandemic-relief / PPP-EIDL role

Shopify sold the tools that small retailers used to move online, and the relief period was its best stretch. For 2021 total revenue was $4,611.9 million, up 57% from 2020. Subscription Solutions revenue grew 48% to $1,342.3 million and Merchant Solutions revenue 62% to $3,269.5 million. Gross merchandise volume, the value of goods sold on the platform, was $175.4 billion, up 47%. "We nearly tripled revenue, more than doubled GMV and the Shopify team, and the number of merchants using Shopify is nearly twice as big as 2019 levels," Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said of the two pandemic years.

Lütke later explained the hiring. His July 26, 2022 memo said that when shelter-in-place orders pushed retail online, "Demand for Shopify skyrocketed," and "we threw away our roadmaps." The company then bet "that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years." It did not: "What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be." About 10% of staff left that day, mostly in recruiting, support and sales. Departing employees received 16 weeks of severance plus a week per year of tenure, with the equity cliff removed.

Their own relief

The SBA's PPP data show no loan to Shopify. The only row containing the name is a $12,200 loan approved June 12, 2020 to Alphas Shopify Store of San Antonio, Texas, a separate business. No relief loan to Lütke personally appears in the documents cited here.

Lütke has not been charged with any crime. The documents cited here record no enforcement action or lawsuit against him or Shopify over the relief programs. Shopify does not appear in the SBA's PPP data as a lender either.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Lütke remains chief executive. On May 4, 2023 he told staff that "Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics," ending the company's own logistics business. On April 7, 2025 he posted to X an internal memo titled "Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify," saying he shared it because it "was in the process of being leaked."

Sources

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