Tobias Lütke

Ottawa, from 2004. Lütke, who moved from Germany to Canada, started Shopify in Ottawa with Scott Lake and Daniel Weinand after building an online snowboard shop. Ottawa's government and telecoms engineers, a base of Nortel veterans and lower salaries helped Shopify hire and keep developers, and it grew into Canada's most valuable technology company. It later went remote-first, partly abandoning the idea of a headquarters city.