Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Tobi Lütke dropped out of school at 16, completed a programming apprenticeship in Germany, moved to Canada for a woman he met on a ski trip, and ended up founding one of the most consequential commerce platforms in the world because he was frustrated with the quality of existing e-commerce software.

Shopify succeeded because Lütke is an unusually disciplined builder who stayed focused on the product longer than almost anyone else would have.

His investing approach follows the same logic.

How Shopify Got Here

Lütke co-founded Snowdevil in 2004 as an online snowboard store. The existing e-commerce tools were bad, so he built his own using Ruby on Rails, a framework he contributed to as part of its core development team. The software turned out to be better than anything available commercially. By 2006, the product had replaced the snowboards as the actual business.

Shopify went public in 2015 at $17 per share. Its market cap briefly exceeded $200 billion during the pandemic. The platform now serves merchants in more than 175 countries and processes hundreds of billions in transactions annually. Lütke's stake is roughly 6% of the company, primarily through Class B supervoting shares that give him around 40% voting control.

His net worth was approximately $12.3 billion as of August 2025, though Shopify's stock volatility means that number moves around. His official 2024 salary was $1. His actual compensation was roughly $150 million in stock and option awards.

The Investment Portfolio

Tobi Lütke investments span 43 companies as of early 2026. His portfolio has generated 6 exits. The most recent was Promptfoo, an AI application security and testing platform, in March 2026. Promptfoo had raised $23.6 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Partners, with Lütke coming in at the seed stage alongside a16z. The company was later profiled by OpenAI as an example of an agentic startup built on its reasoning models.

His most notable current holding is Perplexity, the AI-native search company that has become one of the most-discussed consumer AI products in the market. He also backed Neo Financial, a Canadian fintech challenger bank that has grown into a unicorn. Manifold Labs was his most recent confirmed deal as of July 2025, a Series A bet on a company building at the intersection of AI and infrastructure.

Other portfolio companies include Foxglove, a robotics software platform that raised its Series B in September 2025, Pachama, an AI and satellite data company helping organizations invest in carbon sequestration, and General Fusion, a Canadian company pursuing commercial fusion energy through magnetized target fusion technology.

Lütke also serves on the board of Coinbase, which he joined in 2022, citing the alignment between decentralized finance and what Shopify has done for commerce. He sits on the board of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates's climate tech fund.

The Consistent Thesis

Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund has noted that the best investors have a clear point of view about where value is being created, and they invest from that point of view rather than chasing trends. Lütke's portfolio reflects a coherent thesis: he backs companies that improve the capability of builders.

Promptfoo makes AI applications more secure and testable. Perplexity changes how people find and evaluate information. Foxglove makes robotics software more accessible to developers. General Fusion is trying to give the world a better energy substrate. These aren't random bets. They're bets on the infrastructure that makes the next layer of things possible.

This approach maps directly to what Angel Squad members develop over time. When you co-invest alongside Hustle Fund GPs including Eric Bahn, Elizabeth Yin, and Shiyan Koh, you're building the same kind of thesis-driven judgment. You stop reacting to what's hot and start investing from a genuine point of view about where capability gaps exist. The Angel Squad community of 2,500-plus members across 50-plus countries operates this way. More at hustlefund.vc/squad.

The AI Memo and What It Signals

In April 2025, an internal memo from Lütke was widely circulated. It stated that Shopify would not approve new headcount requests unless employees could demonstrate that AI couldn't do the job. The memo was blunt to the point of provocation, and it generated enormous reaction across the tech industry.

Whatever you think of the policy, the memo tells you something about how Lütke sees the current moment. He's fully convinced that the capability of AI agents has crossed a threshold that changes what human labor allocation should look like inside a software company. That's not a PR position. It's consistent with his investing thesis and his operating decisions.

Eric Bahn of Hustle Fund has noted that the founders most likely to build durable companies are the ones who are actually ahead of the curve on technology, not just the ones who talk about it. Lütke's entire career is a demonstration of that principle.

The Takeaway

Tobi Lütke built Shopify by solving his own problem well enough that it became everyone else's solution. His investment portfolio follows the same pattern: find the places where capability is bottlenecked, back the builders who are removing those bottlenecks, and stay patient enough to let the thesis play out.

That's a replicable framework. You need a point of view about where the world is moving and the discipline to invest from that view rather than from social proof.