Shopify has added a marquee tech executive from Ottawa to its leadership ranks.
Luc Levesque, a former executive with major tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter and TripAdvisor, is joining the Ottawa-based e-commerce company to lead its international growth efforts, as first reported last Sunday by the Globe and Mail.
A graduate of Algonquin College’s computer engineering program, Levesque began his entrepreneurial career by founding TravelPod, a travel blog acquired by Expedia in 2001. He went on to act as a growth adviser at Twitter, Quora and Pinterest, worked as general manager and then vice-president of growth at TripAdvisor and most recently served as a senior director of Facebook in Palo Alto, Calif. He will remain in the West Coast state for his Shopify post.
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In 2008, Levesque was named one of the OBJ’s Ottawa’s Forty Under 40 recipients.
Levesque has known Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke for many years and joined him onstage at Ottawa’s AccelerateOTT conference for a fireside chat in 2014. Levesque wrote in a blog post Sunday that he and Lütke had talked about working together for 10 years, and this time “all of the stars finally lined up.”