Breaking into Tech

Singapore-born Sahil Lavingia, got his first taste of building something from nothing when he was introduced to Photoshop at 14 years old and started to learn how to code at the age of 15. He kept coming across websites and mobile apps that he didn’t enjoy using, so he decided to build his own. Sahil would share his app creations with a running list of blogs and popular tech startup forums such as HackerNews, in hopes of gaining some traction. Some people would share his products with their readers, and Sahil, just a kid in Singapore, would sell his apps for a few thousand dollars. By age 15, Sahil created over 20 mobile apps and made more than $100,000. Sahil decided to attend the University of Southern California (USC) when his talents caught the eye of an up-and-coming startup called Pintrest. After just 4-Months into college at USC he was recruited to join Pinterest as their first designer and second engineer hired when the popular bookmarking tool only had 5,000 users.

The Road To Entrepreneurship

Sahil left Pinterest at the peak of its growth to start his own startup Gumroad, a marketplace for creators to buy and sell digital goods. He was confident in his idea from the start and knew that it was a risk, but with his technical skills to support himself, he went for it. He raised $1M and focused on scaling Gumroad so that the company’s numbers would remain in line with his asks of VCs – ‘build a billion-dollar company.’ The pressures that came with being a venture-backed startup striving to reach unicorn status of a billion-dollar valuation started to pile on when his investors thought Gumroad wasn’t growing fast enough.

After “failing” to build a billon-dollar company and having to layoff a bulk of his staff in 2015, Sahil looked at his bottom line and noticed that Gumroad was actually profitable! That moment ignited a shift in Sahil’s perspective of what means to run a ‘successful’ business. He realized that by unbinding himself from other people’s expectations and perceptions of what success is he’d be able create his own version of success by slowly growing a profitable startup on his own terms and time.

The Minimalist Entrepreneur

Sahil believes the ideal entrepreneur is someone who doesn’t let their business control or define them. A healthy, sustainable attitude towards entrepreneurship is what Sahil aims to provide through his latest published book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur. Here are a few key takeaways from the book:

1. Focus on sustainable growth over raising capital
2. Figure out how to add value to your customers in the most simplistic way
3. Don’t let your business be your identity as a person. Define what success and happiness means to you
4. The Manual Viable Process: What’s one small step that you can take today? Instead of jumping to building a business, think like a creator – lower the barrier of beginning the process for yourself and over time, a completed product (or learned experiment) will be produced. Over time continue improving or automating each aspect until you have a product.

Reflections On The Journey

Success is truly in the eye of the beholder. At the beginning of an entrepreneur’s journey, you want to spend your time making money but once you make the money, you want to spend it making time to do things that fulfill you in life.