The Minimalist Entrepreneur with Sahil Lavingia

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
But if you have a diversification, I can actually take more risks with Gumroad because I have a fund, because I have another income stream, right?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:09)
Or I have a book now.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:09)
I can actually make riskier and riskier bets with any of these projects because I know that I have at least one or maybe even multiple things that are backing me.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
Hey, friend, it's David Nebinski here in Brooklyn, here at the Portfolio Career Podcast. We help you take ownership of your portfolio career and design the life that you want to live. Today's conversation is with Sahil Lavingia. Sahil is the founder of Gumroad, the founder of an investment fund, a painter, a course creator, and a recent author of a book called The Minimalist Entrepreneur. In this episode, you will learn the importance of creating content before starting businesses, how remote work has opened up opportunities for knowledge workers, ideas from Sahil's book on community, getting started and growing from there, hiring quarter time executives at Gumroad so that working is not the main thing and they can work on other things if interested to build out their portfolio career, how to effectively put yourself out there for jobs or for funding. As always, this episode with Time Sam Notes is available on my website at portfoliocarepodcast.com.
There you can subscribe to my newsletter, which has the best insights from the podcast and friend-sourced job opportunities. So excited for you to build and grow your portfolio career. Here we go with Sahil.
Sahil, welcome to the show.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:40)
Thanks for having me.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:41)
So before we kind of get started, Sahil, I'm curious like what you did over the weekend, any new prototypes, any new, did you build anything over the weekend?
I just, you know, like we're preparing for interviews, you know, you want to make sure you know what's kind of happened in your journey a little bit. I think, you know, building things on the weekend has been significant for you. So since it's Monday morning, I thought I might want to ask that question.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:08)
Yeah, not this weekend, unfortunately. I felt a little sick.
I was in New York last week for NFT NYC, really not really for the conference, but just as an excuse to meet all the other people who were using it as an excuse, kind of a shelling point for cool people post kind of COVID to finally hang out and meet everybody in person. So nothing this weekend, but I was on the plane sort of thinking through my first kind of NFT project and what that might look like. Because I think as you just mentioned before we started recording, like kind of optimized for being lucky, I think is like a pretty good kind of insight. And I think they're like kind of just trying things out, kind of bottoms up instead of saying, oh, this is where the future is. Like, I don't think anyone can really predict that, especially in a space that's so new and weird. It almost feels kind of like the singularity or something like that, where it's just like very, no one, you know, it's a very weird, strange feature, but there seems to be some emerging properties that are emerging, but I think the right way to take advantage of it is just to like try stuff, you know, bottoms up instead of top down. And so, yeah, I started thinking through, and I like doing art and like writing science fiction and fantasy. That was kind of my trajectory post Gumroad when I published Reflecting on my Failure to Build a Billion Dollar Company. And then that essay actually kind of like galvanized Gumroad in this weird way, and then COVID and all these sorts of things happened.
But I have these skills that I've developed over a couple of years in that kind of slow down period. And so, yeah, I'm like, oh, maybe this is kind of like an interesting way to kind of harness kind of some of these random skills that I ended up developing. And I had no idea why. Like I had no idea why I was getting good at painting or writing science fiction and fantasy. But I did, I put a lot of work into those skills. And so maybe this is kind of some, you know, or not, we'll see, we'll see. But I'm excited about it. But yeah, I basically drew kind of like what I think like the way I'm thinking about is I have this book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur, and I wanna build a kind of a room in the metaverse, basically that people can enter, which is kind of the minimalist entrepreneur universe. And it will have its own origin story and kind of religion basically. So I kind of wrote out like the first chapter kind of of Genesis effectively.