OTTAWA — Shopify’s symbolic green bag logo still looks out over the capital’s iconic canal. But the Ottawa office tower on which it’s installed is no longer the commerce company’s headquarters, and CEO Tobi Lütke is no longer in the building—or the city. 

On Friday, the founder posted a different skyline on X, formerly known as Twitter, marking his “first week living in Toronto.” It substantiated a rumour running round tech circles that the Shopify founder had left the firm’s hometown.  

In the company’s early years, Silicon Valley venture capitalists tried to move Lütke to the Bay Area. But the founder and his firm stayed put, and Bessemer Venture Partners eventually backed him in situ. “Shopify’s reputation in Ottawa as a local internet startup success story” and “Tobi’s reputation among the developer community” helped the firm hire the city’s best talent for less than Silicon Valley recruits would cost, BVP partner Alex Ferrara wrote in an October 2010 investment memo. (Despite the deal, Ferrara admitted he was still “not a big fan of Ottawa’s bone-chilling winters.” Same.)

Lütke’s move caps a larger geographic shuffle for his company. In May 2020, he declared Shopify “digital by default,” and the company began recruiting more workers outside office locations. That September, it started vacating some of those places, including the Elgin Street edifice that had held its HQ for six years. (The Logic’s capital bureau now occupies part of a co-working space that subleased some of the office.)

Shopify still has a presence in Ottawa—the green bag flies on the lower deck of another building on nearby O’Connor Street. But Lütke is the latest of the firm’s leadership to leave the capital, as relocations and replacements shuffled the firm’s upper ranks. 

Pre-pandemic, many of Shopify’s top-tier hires—the likes of Joseph Frasca, Amy Shapero and Jean-Michel Lemieux, former chiefs of legal, finance and technology, respectively—moved to Ottawa to take up their positions. Executives running the major product groups and service lines into which the firm was organized at the time worked out of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

But over the last three years, Shopify has turned over its leadership team significantly, with many new U.S.-based recruits. Chief information security officer Andrew Dunbar is the only one of the 10-person group still in Ottawa, per LinkedIn. Shopify declined to comment to The Logic.

Lütke’s move coincides with that of Shopify’s other major face; in July, company president Harley Finkelstein announced he was moving back to his birthplace, Montreal.  

Ottawa tech doesn’t end with Shopify, of course. The capital region has hosted networking titans Nortel and Mitel, and Kanata houses a variety of ventures started by their alumni. Office-software challenger Corel is still headquartered here, though under a different name. SaaS firm Kinaxis has played out its own public-market rise, albeit not as steep. Still, the city now stands shorn of one of its most prominent tech leaders.