344: Sahil Lavingia On Building Technology Companies

You can't predict if this [your company] is going to be a billion-dollar thing, or a million-dollar thing, or a 10 billion-dollar thing. No one really knows. You should just focus on building something you think is interesting and valuable for people that gives you the lifestyle you want, and then just be happy where you are ... Then, if it happens... great, but it's probably not going to change your life drastically if you're already pretty content with what you have.

I really do believe that crypto will change everything ... Whenever you have that many smart people interested in something, it's really an inevitability.

People see someone's success pattern and say, 'That's the way that I need to become successful,' but the truth is, if you're starting out today, the way that you become successful is going to look very different.

It doesn't matter how amazing your team is or how fast you ship features, the market you're in is going to determine most of your growth.

Something that's hard is going to get easier over time. Something that's expensive is going to get cheaper over time. Something that only companies with a 100+ employees can do—companies with 10 employees or 1 employee will eventually be able to do.

Gumroad could be 30 times bigger in volume and scale, and my job would roughly be identical. That's the beauty of software. That's the point of automation.

I think people underestimate how hard it is to reach product-market fit and how, once you reach it, literally nothing else matters at that point—you're just scaling.

What do we not need? What is going away? I think that's a really interesting framing because that's a lot of what innovation is ... A dishwasher used to refer to a human being ... A computer actually used to be a human being. These are people and jobs that we don't need for our society to function anymore.

There's this interesting shift you can now do that wasn't really possible five to ten years ago, which is you can actually build an audience before you have a product.

Raise venture [capital] if there's something you want to do that you just don't have the profit stream to do.

I really believe that humanity in the future, if we want to get to whatever the paragon of civilization is, it will be decentralized.