How Shopify's soaring stock created a fistful of new billionaires
Shopify’s 39-year-old cofounder and CEO Tobi Lutke, pictured here at the company’s 2015 IPO, went from shredding the slopes to shredding the markets.ove over Silicon Valley. The newest additions to the angel investor Hall of Fame are a little-known husband and wife from Toronto, who are now each worth $1 billion thanks to a small investment they made 13 years ago in Shopify, a software platform that helps small and mid-sized businesses launch and manage their online stores.
These investors have benefited from a stock that has climbed an incredible thirty-fold since its 2015 initial public offering. The company now sports a market cap of $60 billion, making it Canada’s seventh most valuable company, ahead of the likes of Canadian Pacific Railway and Thomson Reuters. It has also become a millionaire factory for Shopify’s 5,000 workers, who sit on stock awards worth $2.2 billion.
At the time companies could pay for placement on sites like eBay or Amazon, which took a cut on each sale, but there was no easy way to sell directly to customers online. Lutke decided to build a one-stop shop that would cater to both existing brick-and-mortar retailers and to the emerging generation of social media entrepreneurs. He offered an array of tools allowing proprietors to quickly create a website, process payments, fulfill orders, manage inventory and place ads.
Phillips invested $250,000. “I really liked that the software was rooted in Snow Devil’s immediate practical needs,” says Phillips, referring to Lutke’s snowboard shop, who recalls walking away from his first meetings “thoroughly impressed by his acuity, clear and deep thinking and resolution.”
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