Minimalist Entrepreneurship - Sahil Lavingia

Sahil is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, a service that helps creators get paid for their work—over $400 million paid out to date. They raised money from Kleiner Perkins, First Round, Naval Ravikant, Chris Sacca, and others. He wrote about his journey here.

Sahil got his start in Silicon Valley aged 19, as employee #2 at Pinterest, and since then has built Gumroad into a highly profitable, fully asynchronous, 40 person business with no full time employees, no meetings and no office. He works on Gumroad about 20 hours a week.

Sahil has also angel invested in about 30 startups including Clubhouse, Lambda School, Figma, Notion, Vercel, HelloSign, and Movable Ink. He now runs shl.vc, an AngelList rolling fund, which invests about $12m a year in startups. He raised the first commitments for the fund with a public notion memo and one Zoom call.

He also recently raised $5m for Gumroad via crowdfunding in just 12 hours. He is a radical advocate of building in public, regularly publishing Gumroad’s financials.

Sahil just released his book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur, where he outlines his philosophy for company building.

In short, it’s about:

Building for communities;
Starting small, and creating processes (not products);
Getting people to pay quickly;
And only then scaling by building software and an audience.
It is all tied together by a company culture that focuses on radical transparency (the company roadmap and values are public) and ownership (“everyone is the CEO”).

The quote that I think best sums it up (from the podcast) is the below:

“Let people get all the way through your sales funnel without you even being a part of it - that’s the goal.”

In the conversation, we also dig into Sahil’s world view and talk about:

His political ideas, which are part libertarian, part communist;
The Sovereign Individual;
The nature of power and violence
The future of countries and companies (solo capitalists and new nation states)

I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and I hope you do too! If you like it, go buy a copy of Sahil’s book here.