An Entire Vacation in a Weekend

The day job is better known. In brief:

A programmer first. He trained as a programmer in an apprenticeship at the Carl-Benz-School in Koblenz after tenth grade.

Snowdevil. In 2004, with Scott Lake and Daniel Weinand, he launched an online snowboard shop in Ottawa and wrote its store platform himself in Ruby on Rails.

Shopify. The founders turned that platform into Shopify in 2006. He is co-founder and CEO, and the company went public in 2015.

Open source. He served on the Ruby on Rails core team and created Active Merchant, a payments library.

Elsewhere. A seat on the Coinbase board from 2022. With his wife, Fiona McKean, he bought and relaunched the Opinicon, a historic summer resort on the Rideau Canal, in 2015. In 2018 he received the Meritorious Service Cross for supporting the growth of Canada’s technology industry.

The two lives overlap. He writes his own tools for the track. In a reply on X about one of them, he wrote: “Yep it’s on my github. Racing viewer. IMSA data, motec parser etc. MPV plugin. I do too much of this”.

The jump to the top of American endurance racing came with a push from a friend. In December 2024 David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and a Le Mans class winner, posted: “I told @tobi that if he wanted to get to Le Mans, he better push the pedal on his prep, so he did, and now we’re racing Daytona 24 and the rest of IMSA together in the @EraMotorsport LMP2 in 2025 🤘”

His first IMSA race was the 2025 Rolex 24 at Daytona, sharing Era Motorsport’s No. 18 Oreca 07 with Hansson, Paul-Loup Chatin and Ryan Dalziel. They finished 4th in LMP2. At Sebring, Hansson posted: “Holy smokes! @tobi put us P5 in only his second ever LMP2 qualifying session for the 12 Hours of Sebring.” The race went the other way: the car retired after 37 laps. Hansson’s reply to him was a joke: “There are only two types of racing drivers: Those who have crashed and those who are slow 😄. Pace was mega 🤘”

The work in between was physical. Testing at Indianapolis that August, Hansson wrote, meant “45 mins stints in that sauna trying to hit a lap time within 0.2s every time.”

After top-five finishes at Daytona, Watkins Glen and Road America, the season ended at Petit Le Mans. Lütke, Hansson and Oliver Jarvis finished 3rd in LMP2, his first IMSA podium. He posted: “Podium at Road Atlanta is the perfect ending of our IMSA season. Mega drive by @dhh. And perfect execution by @EraMotorsport.”

For 2026 he moved to TDS Racing’s No. 11 Oreca, with Hansson and Mathias Beche, in a green and blue Shopify livery. Years earlier, he had already answered the obvious question on X: “I’m racing. I just slap Shopify on the car because I’m really into that brand 😆”

He doesn’t describe the attraction as trophies. “I don’t even try to win,” he said on the Cheeky Pint podcast. “I’m still competing against myself, and I see all of the other cars as obstacles.” He called a sheet of lap times a report card of “all of your inadequacies as a driver”, and named what keeps him coming back: “The immediacy and the adrenaline. It’s just a brilliant thing that I discovered for myself.”

In October 2026, the entrepreneur Bryan Johnson wrote about Lütke’s racing on X. Lütke answered:

Incredibly kind. It’s a hell of a hobby. An entire vacation in a weekend for me. My friend @johnhopebryant calls it Zen Buddhism at 180mps. You get into a deep flow state in the car. And you experience camaraderie with your fellow drivers and crew unlike anything else.

The focus lasts after he climbs out. In an August 2026 reply on X, he wrote: “i actually think yes. There is something about getting out of the car that makes it trivial to lock in for the rest of the day on whatever”. A minute later he clarified: “and car here means race car”.

Paul Sparta, who calls himself a Bronze driver like Lütke, described the mental side in a reply to Johnson’s thread: “In the wet, physical stress goes down...e.g. g forces, but mental stress and heart rate increase due to the heightened volatility of racing in the wet.”

In June 2026 he made his Le Mans debut in TDS Racing’s No. 14 Oreca 07, in the LMP2 Pro-Am class, with Mathias Beche and Kévin Estre. Before the race he posted: “Absolute privilege to get to compete in the 24h of Le Mans this year. Bucket list stuff. Wouldn’t have gotten here without @dhh’s encouragement and guidance.”

His first stints went well. He posted:

Unbelievable experience driving Le Mans for the first time. Day, night and dawn. Done with my driving time and handed it off to @kevinestre in 2nd place of the class. Couldn’t ask for more as a Le Mans Rookie. And can’t wait to do it again.

He didn’t wait long. He got back in the car for the last hour, on tires Estre had already double-stinted, and later admitted he “almost binned it twice”. The car finished 5th in LMP2 Pro-Am and 27th overall after 355 laps. Hansson’s verdict that month: “Tobi showed up at Le Mans with the best pace I’ve ever seen from a first-time bronze-rated driver.”

He came away with advice for everyone else: “Le Mans is truly one of the grandest sporting events in the world. You should go experience it”. The race followed him home, too. In October, about the sim game Le Mans Ultimate, he posted: “I’m now in a video game 😆. So fun.”

His most useful advice is about where to start. In the same reply to Bryan Johnson, he took the mystery out of it:

Best hobby in the world. And way more accessible than people think. I did much of my best racing in Mazda MX5 and in SR3 Radicals, which come a lot cheaper than LMP2!

The people from those early years remember it. When he went to Le Mans, John Painter, a tech CEO who races, replied: “It was only three short years ago I remember going side by side with you in T1 at CMP in the Radicals.”

He likes taking others to the track, too. Before Petit Le Mans in 2026 he posted: “So fun to introduce old friends to the amazing world of endurance racing.”

That is the whole case he makes. Start small, bring friends and keep going. He began in a Miata in his late thirties and reached Le Mans seven years later, still racing no one but himself.

An entire vacation in a weekend.