It started in 2004 when a couple of guys, Tobias Lütke and Scott Lake, tired of their jobs, decided to do something different. Sell snowboards. At the time, building an online store with existing software was incredibly complicated and expensive, so Lutke, a programmer, decided to design and create his own software to make it all easier. Two months later, they launched Snowdevil. They had a profitable season of snowboard gear sales and at the same time they started passing their e-commerce platform around to some colleagues and got a ton of inquiries about how they had built the website. Soon, it was clear their e-commerce software might be a better product to sell.

They scraped the snowboards and  refocused on creating a product that would help people build their own stores. They asked a group of friends and family members to invest in their idea and built a $200,000 nest egg to fund it. The entire family fortune was hinging on their success. In 2006 Lütke, Lake, and Weinand officially launched Shopify. Growth was slow at first. The company was making around $8,000 a month. By 2008, they had about 10 people on staff and a revenue of around $60,000 a month. That year, Lake left to pursue other business ventures and Lutke, being a programmer, had virtually no business background. When he took over as CEO, he had to essentially get anMBA in a couple of weeks. In 2019 Lutke posted on Twitter “Amazon is trying to build an empire, and Shopify is trying to arm the rebels.” The rest is the stuff of legends. Today, Shopify powers more than 1,000,000 businesses, and they’ve changed the world of commerce.