Pinterest hired Sahil Lavingia to build its iPhone app in 2010. He was 19, a college dropout and a self-taught coder. His stock options would end up being valued around $40m.
In 2011, Lavingia, then 26, quit to start Gumroad, an ecommerce tool for selling creative products. He thought it was a billion-dollar idea, but the path to success has not been nearly as smooth as it was at Pinterest. Though Gumroad has helped over 40k creators make a total of $213m, Lavingia has lately been getting attention for getting specific about the difficulties of building a startup.
Every month, Lavingia publishes Gumroad’s financials on Twitter. Recently, he gained greater fame for a viral Medium story, publishing in February the Medium post Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company. More than 700k people have read it.