By Capital & Growth

Your host for this episode: Elyse Hauser

Sahil Lavingia is the founder of Gumroad, an ecommerce platform that allows creators to monetize their wares. As of June 2019 Gumroad has paid out more than $200 million to creators. 

He once thought success meant building a billion-dollar company. One very public failure later, he considers himself successful for completely different reasons.

“Money is money,” Lavingia says. “My experiences that I’ve been able to have, and this path, have been pretty great.” Gumroad will never be worth a billion dollars, but Lavingia is content to run it as a smaller company with no plans for scaling up. How did he go from billion-dollar dreams to this relaxed acceptance?

Once upon a time, Lavingia was the second employee at Pinterest -- a company now valued at $12 billion, and rumored to be going public this year. He left Pinterest before his options vested hut he doesn’t look back on the decision to leave wistfully. “I think regrets are mostly a waste of time,” he says. “I try not to think too much in hypotheticals.”

That same attitude helped him turn what many would call a start-up failure into an unconventional success.

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