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The extraordinary Shopify story begins with an online role-playing game, a long-distance romance, a snowboard or two, and a bespectacled young German, Tobias Lütke, pecking away for endless hours at his laptop in a downtown Ottawa café. The story wraps up, for now at least, two decades later, with a Canadian-based company making its debut on the NASDAQ‑100 index, with a market capitalization of $136 billion (U.S.), and with Lütke worth more than $9 billion, though these values oscillate with market moods.

Larry MacDonald, an economist and the author of Nortel Networks, from 2000, and The Bombardier Story, from 2001, has now tackled Shopify, with the aim of unlocking the secrets of the company’s success and the role Lütke and many others have played in it. The Shopify Story: How a Startup Rocketed to E‑Commerce Giant by Empowering Millions of Entrepreneurs is rich in insight, psychologically penetrating, and occasionally amusing. It may...