The Shopify Story: How a Startup Rocketed to E-commerce Giant by Empowering Millions of Entrepreneurs

MacDonald (The Bombardier Story), a columnist for the Globe and Mail, offers a listless history of Shopify, the Canadian company that provides digital infrastructure for businesses to sell their wares online. Focusing his account on cofounder Tobias Lütke, MacDonald describes how the German-born programmer moved to Ottawa in 2002 to live near his future wife, Fiona McKean, whom he’d met through an online game. Though Lütke didn’t have a work visa, there were no laws against starting a business, so in 2004 he partnered with a McKean family friend to launch a company selling snowboards online. They abandoned the venture after a year but used the software they’d created as the basis for Shopify, which was founded in 2006. MacDonald peppers in insights about what drove Shopify’s success (he highlights how Lütke continually injected fresh perspectives into the company by acquiring startups and absorbing their employees) and offers a dutiful chronicle of the company’s major milestones, including its 2015 IPO, its efforts to make its mobile interface more user-friendly, and the decision to go completely remote in 2020 so the company could “recruit talent from anywhere in the world.” Unfortunately, MacDonald’s writing has little character and the narrative little drama, making for a rather dry account. This fulfills its purpose but will struggle to hold readers’ attention. (Oct.)