Fireside Chat with Tobias Lütke and Guillermo Rauch | DotDev 2026
Lütke and Vercel's Guillermo Rauch talked developer tooling and what changes when AI writes most of the code — the on-stage conversation at Shopify's own developer conference.
Tobias Lütke
Co-Founder & CEO, Shopify Inc. (SHOP)
The CEO view
German-Canadian programmer who built Shopify in 2006 to sell snowboards, pivoted to e-commerce software. First-principles thinker building a "100-year company." Still hands-on with tech. Major shareholder with supervoting control.
Podcasts, interviews & articles
10 recorded appearances
2026
Fireside Chat with Tobi Lütke & Harley Finkelstein | DotDev 2026
Lütke and Shopify president Harley Finkelstein set out what is driving the company forward heading into agentic commerce, in the DotDev 2026 mainstage session.
The Era of the Entrepreneur — Tobi Lütke (Shopify) & Lulu Cheng Meservey (Rostra)
Lütke argued the coming problem is not a jobs shortage but a companies shortage: engineering is no longer scarce and every individual now runs 'a data center of agents'. He also called the one-person-company idea 'bullshit' while conceding such companies could still make a billion dollars.
Tobi Lütke – Building Shopify and the Future of AI | Ep. 50
Lütke explained why founder-led companies move faster through platform shifts than consensus-run ones, and argued AI will create more opportunity than scarcity rather than collapsing the labour market.
Tobi Lütke x Ilya Grigorik: Building the Universal Commerce Protocol
Lütke made the case that agentic commerce needs a shared open protocol rather than proprietary integrations, comparing Shopify's approach to the bazaar rather than the cathedral, and explained escalation as a core primitive in the Universal Commerce Protocol.
Shopify CEO on How AI is a Scapegoat for Mass Layoffs & Trump Derangement Syndrome in Canada
Lütke said AI is being used as cover for layoffs that would have happened anyway, disclosed that AI now writes over half of Shopify's code, and talked about the luxury of long-term thinking as a public company.
Tobi Lütke x Jess Hertz: Invisible Work
With Shopify COO Jess Hertz, Lütke argued X-shaped people have replaced T-shaped as the ideal hire, that stable teams should roam like molecules, and pushed back on anthropomorphising AI while defending incentives that push AI usage inside the company.
Tobi Lütke (Shopify) - CDL Super Session 2025
Lütke's session at CDL's Super Session for seed-stage science and technology founders, on building massively scalable companies.
Tobi Lütke: 21 Years of Building Shopify
A career-length conversation: companies as social technology, the post-IPO period where he felt he was 'cosplaying as a CEO', the distinction between competition and rivalry, hiring for spikiness, and what AI changes in 2026.
2025
AI and eCommerce with Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke
A long-form discussion of how AI reshapes the mechanics of e-commerce and what it means for the merchants on Shopify's platform.