How Things Dont Grow; Reflections on Failing To Be a Billionaire - with Sahil Lavingia (CEO at Gumroad)

My guest today is Sahil Lavingia, and this is an incredibly powerful, honest & inspiring episode. Sahil is today the founder & CEO of Gumroad, a platform that helps creators get paid for the work they do. What is significantly more impressive though is Sahil's journey to where he is today. Sahil was in many ways a prodigy as a teenager, working on apps & websites - and making $100k by age 15. He joined the University of Southern California, only to drop out after a semester to join the then fledgling platform Pinterest to build their iOS app as employee . Within a year, he left Pinterest - before his shares vested - to found the company that he hoped would be his magnum opus, what he announced on Twitter as a 'billion dollar company idea' before he launched it. This was Gumroad - and for a while he seemed to be a man who, at age 19, could do no wrong. Until things started to go wrong. Growth began to stall. Sahil and his team put their soul into the business - and they couldn't do what it took to hit the targets they need to hit to make it a venture-scaleable business. In what was a wrenching time, he had to lay off three fourths of his company - and find his own path forward. This is Sahil's story - about how things don't always grow, and how sometimes that's ok - but only if you make your peace with it.

You can listen to How Things Dont Grow; Reflections on Failing To Be a Billionaire - with Sahil Lavingia (CEO at Gumroad) online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

How Things Dont Grow; Reflections on Failing To Be a Billionaire - with Sahil Lavingia (CEO at Gumroad) is an episode from The How Things Grow Podcast by Shamanth Rao.

This episode is 43:52 long.

This episode was published on Aug 7, 2019.

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