2026-10-31
Tobi Lütke: From a Frustrated Snowboard Shop Owner to the Man Arming Millions of Rebels Against Amazon
[DO AI PM Top 100 Product Managers · #45 Tobi Lütke] In 2004, 24-year-old German programmer Tobi Lütke just wanted to sell snowboards online from Canada—only to find existing e-commerce software so awful that he wrote his own store engine in Ruby on Rails. Two years later, he realized other merchants wanted his software far more than his snowboards. Here is how a 87.2-point master PM (VIS 90 · BIZ 90) built a $230B+ GMV commerce infrastructure by refusing to steal his merchants' customers.
