A $20m Business with No Meetings, Deadlines or Full-Time Employees

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Before we start, I just want to thank you all for being such amazing listeners to this podcast. In 2023, hundreds of thousands of you tuned into the show. Thousands of you wrote into my email, and I had the opportunity to do what I love, which is help entrepreneurs increase their odds of success. I want 2024 to be absolutely massive, and to do that, I need to hear from you. How do you want to see this show evolve? What would make you listen to every single episode that drops in the new year? Do you want more or less guests? Do you want more tactical episodes or less tactical episodes? Do you have any crazy ideas for content that I should try out that I haven't yet done? Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and let me know what you want to see from me and Founders Journal in the new year. Now for today's episode, I am highlighting a nearly $20 million a year business that is run in a pretty unconventional way. This business has no meetings, no deadlines, and no full-time employees. The business is Gumroad, an e-commerce platform for creators. And to break it down, I chat with Sahil Lavingia, the company's founder and CEO. While the way Sahil runs Gumroad may be too unorthodox for how you run your company, I have no doubt that this episode is going to push you to think more critically and creatively about what it looks like to build a business in 2024. With that, let's hop into the episode.

Okay, Sahil, long time no talk. Welcome back to the podcast.

Thanks for having me back again.

Okay, so last time we chatted, we talked about just kind of your reflection that you did in 2019 on the evolution of Gumroad from it being venture-backed business, kind of sights on multi-billion-dollar exit or IPO, to being a lifestyle company that you're gonna run profitably and grow sustainably for a long time. Now I wanna focus on the way in which you run Gumroad today, 'cause I would say by a lot of measures, it's very unorthodox, but it seems like it's worked.

Yeah.

for you and what you're building works so much that maybe we'll talk about this on a future episode. You're actually kind of productizing what you are doing. But can you just share the way in which you run Gumroad today and why it's rather unconventional?

Yeah. So the way I run Gumroad today is I think of it like an open source project, except everyone gets paid and it's not open source. So basically, It's a GitHub repository that sort of is the source code for a website and a bunch of 1099 contractors, freelancers work on it. And they do it just like they would work on an open source Rails or something like that project where they're basically async communicating via GitHub, Notion, Slack, Figma, all async, no Zoom meetings, no video, no audio even. Just text, images, code, designs. And I sort of product manage everything in a big sort of Kanban board in Notion to just like our sort of pipeline of stuff that we want to ship. And yeah, it's pretty novel, I think. I mean, very few people do it, but it's also not novel in the sense that many people do it. I think the scale is novel, right? Like trying to say, okay, we have $20 million in revenue. We have 35 people working like this. We do, you know, $8 or $9 million in net income. And yet still, we have no full-time employees. Like, I'm not interested in hiring a single full-time employee. I want to really try to see, like, how far we can push this. And then most interestingly, people can earn equity in the business as well. So they can choose to take their hourly rate and convert up to 80% of their cash into equity. And then that equity entitles them to dividends, cash flow in the business. And that's kind of how I try to create this like long-term alignment, ownership, and maybe even one day control that freelancers all over the world can earn in, in the business.

And do you dividend out a certain amount of money every year? Like if you're going to do $8 million in net income this year, is there a percentage that you aim for each year?

Yeah, I mean, we're still super new at this. So 2023, we'll do 60% of our net income. So we'll do about $8 or so million in net income and then we'll dividend out about $6 Got it.

I think it sounds, even though I'm not a software developer by training, I have enough familiarity of open source projects all the way from open source code to even something different like Wikipedia or Waze, where you just have this contributor model that pushes things forward. And the difference here is those contributors are being paid for the work that they're doing. I think a lot of my questions come down to like, how do you ensure that things are progressing in the, in the right way? And so like, and I, and I know kind of like your mental model for all of this is freedom at all costs. Like, how do you, how do you allow the business to respect kind of the way in which you want to live your life? And same thing with all of your employees versus The opposite. So maybe like the best way for me to understand this is to talk through one of kind of like your biggest product features within the business and how that actually worked within the construct of running the company. So at least in the article, you talk about November of 2020, you shipped Gumroad memberships. You can use that as an example or if there's a more recent one, but can you walk me through like how big product features and are shipped within the business in this model?

Totally. Yeah. So most things come from our customers. Our creators say, hey, we really want a feature like Gumroad memberships, which was basically like, okay, we have products for sale on Gumroad. We have a really hacky way of changing the price to do memberships. We want custom memberships, first-class citizen. And that's one line. And my job basically as the PM of the company is to basically turn that into a set of atomic subtasks. It's like, okay, if we want to get there, what does that actually mean? And I do a little bit of maybe design. I do a little bit of engineering as part of that, but I come up with often a Figma prototype of what I mean. I spec it out in Notion, and then I basically ping a designer and an engineer and I say, hey, I'm thinking about working on this. Gumroad doing this, what do you think? They kind of look at the scope, and we refine it together. And then once the scope is in a good place, we move to design. We kind of repeat the process with the scoper and the engineer contributing, and then it moves to engineering, building, and then the builder builds it with the scoper and the designer contributing, and then shipped to production. And so we basically have these like 3 roles, right? We have scoper, designer, and builder. And like, it's very much like kind of like this assembly line.

Yeah.

Of course, things can go back and forth, but there's like a very, Well-defined pipeline, right? Like, if you're working on, like, an animated movie, you go from, like, storyboard to, like, keyframe painting to, like, 3D layout to, like, matte painting to—

Yeah, same thing here.

Whatever, right? Like, you have a process of going from, like, very low-fidelity wireframe to a very high-fidelity shipped product. You just have to figure out, like, what are, what are those functions? And it's like building a car, right? It's just like Henry Ford figured out, like, okay, you're really good at this, you're really good at this, you're really good at this, and then boom, boom, boom, boom. And there's sort of like a lot of design, like a lot of systemic thinking, you know, systems thinking here.

Yeah.

There's a design system, there's like an engineering code system that like, there's a lot of skill, I guess, involved in like figuring out how do you build the transition points between these things, right? But that's kind of how we run things. It's just like you can kind of see everything in this, like, big Kanban board and say, okay, there's like 50 things that are going from one line to shipped as a feature. And everything is kind of like along this. And it means that basically anybody in the company, customer support, any of those roles aforementioned, fraud, risk, can basically just like look, right? And they just see everything. They have full transparency. And that's kind of how we get things done. And the way we manage flexibility and freedom at all costs Is I just say, hey, this is what I think we should get done this quarter. This is what I think feels reasonable to me. And then we kind of backfill. People say, okay, I'm going to work on that. I'm going to work on that. I'm going to work on that. And then everyone just has to figure out, can I do my things in the next 3 months? And if everyone does, we'll get everything done. And then basically what it means is at the beginning and end of quarters, there's quite a lot of sort of more synchronous work, right? Like right now I'm starting to like plan Q1 and 2024 and put together a deck for the all-hands and certain things. But then from like mid-Jan really to like mid-March, there's like 2 months basically of like, I actually just become like, I either try to come up with new ideas.

Yeah.

I prototype stuff. I take a vacation, you know, like that's just, I try basically not to do much. And I think partly the reason I run the business this way is because I don't want to pretend to work. I think there's just like so many people. I want to get Gumroad to a place where the average person works like an hour a day. Maybe they make like $800 an hour, but they work like an hour a day. They're producing, you know, $800+ of value. They're assisted with AI to write their support tickets or code or design.

Yep.

All this stuff is totally going to happen. And I believe the way we transition to this world is like, basically right now the model is like you just do layoffs, right? You just have this, you're no longer working at the company, 17% of you because AI or because of this or cash flow.

Work isn't like a sliding scale, it's more of like a light switch.

Exactly. And I'm like, well, I don't need 5 full-time designers, but I need like 2 part-time designers, right? And if I have part-time designers, I can pay you very well, right? And like per hour, I can pay you very well. And on an absolute basis, like, I'm— it's not that expensive because I don't have to pay you like $400,000 a year with, you know, inclusive of healthcare and an office and food and all the stuff associated with providing a job.

Yeah.

Which is roughly double like what the salary may be. And so that's kind of how I think about it. It's like I just want to run a super freedom at all costs, but what it means is we are super efficient. When you're working, you are working, right? You're not grabbing a cup of coffee with your friends. You're not hanging out in the office. Like, these are not salary positions. These are hourly jobs. And what you get out of hourly, just like Uber, just like Airbnb, just like instances on AWS, you get efficiency. You get much better utilization of these assets. And that's— really, like, the one way I think about this problem is, like, basically, like, pre-COVID, we're in, like, all in offices, just like pre-AWS, where all the servers were, like, in the office, literally. And AWS made it so you could just, like, build stuff from your laptop, and you don't have to think about it. And I think the same thing is happening with remote work, which is, like, you can spin up, quote unquote, spin up a team. Obviously, it's much harder to spin up, like, an engineering team than, like, a set of EC2 servers. But the dream is that it gets closer and closer to that, where if I'm like, hey, I have 12 engineers and I know an engineer makes $200 an hour. So if I need one more engineer, I should just click a button that's like, Gumroad needs one more engineer, and then it sends out a tweet and we get like 300 applicants. And there's still obviously a lot of manual things. But then when I'm done, I just hit accept, onboard, and then they're onboarded, they get paid, they choose their equity split, they invoice. You know, they get their equity at the end of the year, they get their bonus to exercise, they get their dividends. Like, all that stuff is completely, like, automated.

Yeah, basically, you, you run your company as if, like, the gig economy for knowledge work already existed, but it doesn't really. You're kind of, like, makeshifting it for what works for your company. It's interesting to think about how much this will pick up in other companies in the future.

Yeah, I mean, I think about it like the gig economy is how law is done, right? Like, if you think about—

Totally.

Yeah, yeah. This is all gigs, right?

Consulting, same thing.

Consulting or accounting often is like this. Of course, you still have a GC, you still have a lot of in-house roles. But I do think like, you know, the Ben Thompson line of like, you know, everything is, you know, how you make money is bundling or unbundling, right? The 2 forms of making money. And we went through a very big transition period with remote work, right? Where like this very different thing. And I don't think anyone knows exactly what are the right roles. We don't have a PM, we have a scoper. It's slightly different than what a PM would be because the way we work is slightly different. I imagine that all this AI stuff will— the whole designer-engineer split seems weird to me too, to be honest, because the designer is really having to write code now.

Yeah.

And then the engineer, like, it's like actually really like everyone is a designer.

Totally.

And is it just, you know, like, I don't know, there's like a lot of interesting things. But yeah, I think of it more like functions. Like, what do I need? And that it's not really a job. It's not like a bundled job.

It's more like—

It's like a resource. Yeah, it's like I need a designer. A designer takes, you know, Gumroad plus Notion card and turns it into design, Figma design, right? And like, There's these functions that— Lambda functions that run, and it's tough sometimes because I know sometimes it sounds like transactional or something like that. But at the end of the day, I think this is like how you should run a lot of these businesses. Just like if you're trying to do something big, I hire Cooley, I pay them like $25,000, and they get it done, right? Just like I built Pinterest for iPhone as a freelancer initially, right? I didn't get any equity in it because I was a freelancer. So there's a little bit—

That would have been cool.

On my shoulder that I'm trying to fix with this problem, maybe.

Totally.

Product. There's like all this cool stuff. And then yeah, it's like if these people are earning equity and they're staying engaged in the business for a long period of time, effectively, I can just hand off the reins to them eventually, right? Like they are the scoper and all I have to do is say, hey, you're now the scoper.

Totally.

And like, I really believe there's even more interesting stuff we could do around like DAO type, like voting on things and like prioritizing stuff in that way.

Yeah, that's interesting. Instead of right now, you effectively being lead PM and choosing kind of how to prioritize.

Yeah, like imagine I own, let's say, 50% of the business right now. My votes are 100%. Yeah, yeah, 100%. But maybe they should act as 50%, where I can— I still win. But maybe one day I own 30%. And then all of a sudden, I can start losing. Yeah, and start losing certain— or creators can like do a leveraged buyout.

Or what if it was set up where actually, like, the extent to which you can vote on a decision was based on like, your past performance around that decision, meaning it was like, truly merit-based weighting versus just how much ownership you have of the company.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, kind of like the Ray Dalio Bridgewater model. A few questions on this. One is, if you were starting Gumroad over, if you were starting a new business outside of the confines of the legal structure of Gumroad, would you start your new company in this way? Like, meaning, do you think you were able to kind of move into this way of running the business as a function of all of like kind of like The kind of like the things you had that existed with Gumroad, or could you start this from day one with any company?

My belief is not today, but maybe in 5 years. Honestly, I don't think even today, like running, like it requires a lot of custom stuff. Like we had to build this whole product in order to run Gumroad this way. So I think of it almost like we're in like the worst part of the mid-Twit meme where like we could just do W-2 salaried employees, We're trying to get to this really cool new feature where you just have like this sort of liquid pool of people that's all vetted and prescreened, et cetera. I think we can get there, but there's still like, you know, work to be done.

Yep.

But I certainly believe, and it's funny as I talk to especially second-time founders who've exited before, where they're like, even stuff like, you know, C-Corp versus S-Corp and things like that, right? They're like reconsidering some decisions that like the startup industry or like would consider like pretty fundamental.

Totally.

Because it's like, hey, if we're just trying to cash flow this business out of the gate or as soon as possible, like, we don't need QSBS, we don't need C-corps, we don't need to issue different classes of shares, we're happy to sell common, right?

Yeah.

Things like that, that like, I'm very excited to see like how that plays out over the next several years. But I would love to believe that, yeah, like, in my ideal world is I have some side project that starts taking off. I say, oh, cool, I would love like a million bucks to hire like 2 Really amazing engineers. And I should just be able, just like Gumroad made it possible, I should just be able to create a product, create a landing page and say, hey, here's the trailing 12 net income, go through whatever's legally required. Of course, these are securities. We'll use Regulation A+.

But— You go raise $1 million, you hire the 2 engineers, they build, and you go from there.

Yeah. And let's say I sold 20% of the company, Then when we issue dividends every year, 60% of net income or whatever has been defined, they get 20% of that, right? So they just get paid back. Maybe there's a hurdle, like you can find ways. I'm sure like if this does become more common, like there will be a new SAFE, like some— there'll be like a new sort of like ideal mechanism.

Yeah.

Yeah, maybe you get paid like up to 1x first, and then it's like a split based on ownership, just like a liquidation preference, but for Safes or something like that.

Yeah.

So there's like ways to like, I think, model it out if there's the demand to switch. The hard thing, to your point, is like, it's hard to go from one to another.

Yep.

It is hard to— like Gumroad kind of went to zero people and back up, and I was able to transition. But I would love, I mean, I would really love to help people do this. Like, you know, we were talking in the last time about like services, and like, this is like a service business. Like, I would love to sit down with a founder and be like, hey, you've built this amazing business. It didn't turn out to IPO, but you're doing like $20 million in net income. Like, let's convert the company. Maybe there's a buyback here, there's some secondary. Like, it's gonna take some time to transition from one model to another. Even today, like, Gumroad is a C corp. It's not super tax efficient.

Yeah.

We're talking about like, what's the right structure? Like, you know, there's always going to be, uh, you know, we're never— there's always debt at the end of the day, right? Because we're moving into the future. The future always has like cool stuff that wasn't possible before. And it's like, oh shit, we should use AI to do product creation instead of a form. But we just keep going.

I want to talk about a few of the trade-offs that come to mind as I think about this model, and I just would be interested to hear how you think about them. The first is you talk about the need for basically any gig economy worker, almost utilization or efficiency to be super high. per minute or per hour that you're hiring someone. But I guess in a world in which you don't have full-time employees, my assumption is like, if you have 30 employees right now, you're not having one-on-ones with all them. So like, your ability to have oversight over them is different. And you also don't have deadlines, is my understanding. Like, how do you basically evaluate whether someone is good at the work they're doing or bad?

Yeah, and I think a lot of this we have to solve if we wanna productize it. But basically, I just ask the company, it's funny, Elon asked Parag, from Twitter, what did you get done last week? When he was trying to buy them and all this stuff. And I basically copied him and I just, I was like, this is actually kind of funny and also like very true. It's like an uncomfortable question.

It is so uncomfortable. I feel like we've been taught we're like asking people how they spend their time. There's something wrong in doing that because quote unquote micromanaging is a bad thing.

Yeah. And I don't, you know, what I say is I don't micromanage, but I do manage, right? And like what I need to know, and I ask every Monday, I ask everybody in the company, what did you get done last week? And then I ask one fun question. Like this time it was like, what's your favorite salad dressing? And every Monday people just chime in, just like, you know, just in Slack. And that's it. That's literally it. And all I do, if I ever have a concern that I feel like, hey, I haven't heard from that person in a while or something, you know, I just go in or they build a lot or something, you know, I just go in and I just like do from this update and I just— see their updates. And very quickly, I can see, oh, wow, they shipped these 5 things, right? And if they didn't, then I just ping them and I say, hey, I haven't seen a lot. What's going on? And that's their hint to be like, either I'm not doing a lot of stuff or I'm not doing the updates well enough. One of those 2 things is true. And then the next week, their update's awesome. is back. They just had to get a little reminder that this is, you know, I'm paying attention.

Yeah.

And that's generally like, kind of like, it's kind of like an electric fence or something like that. But besides that, like, there isn't a lot. And I honestly think like, there's a couple things that make this work so well. And I think like, unreasonably well, like, I think people are still like, probably underestimating how well this works. One is people are getting equity in the business. And this is a rare opportunity. Like Gumroad is generating— the conversion rate is like $100 million valuation. We're doing, you know, $8 or $9 million net income. So it's like 8 or 9% cash yield, pre-tax, I guess. But it's a good thing, right? It's a cool thing I'm doing for people. Like generally, like you're not gonna get a bunch of like people who are like slacking at work, who are choosing to trade like cash for equity, right?

Yeah.

So I think there's that. I think it's very hard to get these jobs. It's not like I'm hiring people off the street. Like I get thousands, literally like This last batch, we had 2,000 applications. I've hired 2 people so far. So it's like 1 out of 1,000. So every single person who works at Gumroad knows if they fuck up, like—

There's a lot of people waiting to work at Gumroad.

Yeah, like, it's not, you know, there's a long line. The other thing is like, I'm me. So like, you're gonna— you're not— I'm not the right person to like defraud, basically, right? Like, if you want to like— and also working at Gumroad, and I think this is honestly the most important thing, it's hard. It's actually very hard to be productive at Gumroad. Like, if you wanted to pretend to work at Gumroad, you would, you have to be amazing because you literally have to be like shipping products, doing really good product scopes, like fixing bugs. Like, you have to ship.

Yeah.

You have to.

It's like, it's a very objective role.

Exactly. And I, that's, that's a good point, right? Like, I think if there was a lot of soft middle manager-y type roles where it's like, Did you lead the team well? Right. Um, and stuff like that. Uh, then yeah, it is hard, but like, you know, and maybe you could say, oh, this model doesn't work if you need 300 people.

Yep.

Uh, and maybe that's true, you know? Uh, but I, I don't know. I feel like actually maybe we, we like, why can't I have 500 people work in this way?

Yes.

I've heard Tesla's kind of like this where they just, it's like super flat. Everyone has like a ton of transparency into everything. Um, because everyone's working on the car. It's just like a single, like, there's like, I work on the wheels for the car.

Totally.

You don't need a lot of, you know, it's very horizontal. You have this like very, very horizontal, very flat sort of system. And so, yeah, you know, it probably doesn't work for every company, but for certain companies, I think you just have to figure out like what's the deliverable that everybody has, make sure that everybody is working on something that needs to be designed or engineered, like a real thing, you know?

Yep. Last question on this, and then I'll punt it to you to talk about any other trade-offs or sticking points you've run into as you've built this model. But the other one that stands out to me is culture. Can you have culture, whatever that means, with this model or not really? How do you think about that?

I mean, I think you always have culture, right? At the end of the day, you have some degree of Something has brought you guys together in Slack, right? And it's like, we did a retreat in Rome. I hadn't seen most of these people ever, and it was super fun because people have all these shared interests. You don't know what they're gonna be, and humans are humans. Like, we're all very similar compared to like snakes and stuff, right? So we're like, we all get along roughly, you know, pretty, pretty well. Obviously, like, there's probably like people have crazy opinions in their own heads. People are coming from all their different own cultures and family histories and backgrounds. But like, it's fun to hang out with people. Uh, it just, it's just fun. And so I think we do that. We, we do in-person. I still think that's important. I just don't do the fake stuff. Like, I just like, I don't want to hang out on Zoom and do happy hour. Like, that's just not that compelling to me. I'd rather like fly to Rome and hang out and grab a drink. Yep. You know, like, that's really fun. And we're even thinking about getting an office in New York so we can like do stuff every once in a while together, and that would be really cool. I do think there are other trade-offs. I think recruiting is hard. I think the culture isn't that bad or missing in my opinion, but it's scary to people who haven't experienced it before. So I do think even getting an office, maybe there's a physical component where you onboard in person, like college, right? You onboard in person and then you can go remote or whatnot, right?

Yeah.

So I think there There are things we can do to, you know, recruiting is hard when you basically can't train anyone in person. You have to like go straight to super senior type people. There's not that many of those kinds of people. So there's, you know, that trade-off. I would say like scaling it is hard. If you're trying to scale it, then do the normal thing. W-2, healthcare, all that stuff, right?

Right.

But if you're trying to build like a different kind of company and work this kind of way and you have a product and like the truth is like Gumroad, like It doesn't need like 30 full-time people. It really doesn't. And I just feel like it would be wasteful, right? But I want to employ people.

Totally.

There are 30 people working on it because each person can contribute. And maybe in the future you could have like 300 people who are all working like a few hours.

Yeah.

Right? Gumroad can't afford it. But what if we could trade equity? What if we were like, hey, we can't hire you right now. We don't have the cash. Or we'd rather like dividend out the cash. But like, if you want to earn for dividends, maybe there's a way, you know, like, there's all this interesting stuff that I think if you're not just so focused on just like the growth, like hiring people to ship product, and also like this R&D tax stuff is changing. So like, I don't know, there's a lot of interesting stuff I think will happen that will make this more appealing.

Yeah.

But I would say the biggest trade-off is like, yeah, you're just doing something different. And every time you do something that's like different from the norm, You're gonna lose a lot of people.

Yep, that makes sense.

I feel it takes when you're trying to build something novel, right?

Yeah, I think kind of what I think is coolest about this, or one of the things that's coolest, is it's showing how wildly inefficient many companies are.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And there's— and that's fine, honestly. A lot of people, they're fine running very efficient— inefficient companies as long as they get their paycheck and like they're still doing great, their valuation company is still high, whatever. I just I just look at it.

I'm like, yeah, there are just trade-offs of that that you don't necessarily want to subscribe to.

Yeah. I'm like, I'd rather this engineer who's absolutely amazing, like, go work at OpenAI and actually contribute a lot of value to the world. I don't want to pay them to sit there.

Yeah.

Even if it makes my valuation, like, go up a little bit. Totally. You know, like, that just doesn't feel like the right sort of— it feels like we're in a little bit of a prisoner's dilemma sometimes.

Super interesting. Well, I'm excited to see basically a kind of like a live experiment going on of how big can a company get building in this way. And I think my hope is that it gets very big, because to me, that'll be kind of like the best almost like wedge or like evidence for people to see that this is possible.

Yeah. And I think the board meetings that I do on YouTube, like the goal is to show people like, hey, if we pull it off, like, this is how we pulled it off. This is the changes we had to make, the learnings we had to make. These are things we completely got wrong about this model. You know, like, oh, it turns out, like, it's, uh, you know, we, like, it's really complicated to give people equity, like a swap for cash for equity, because you have to, like, basically accounting-wise, like, hold this, like, spot of which they've given up but haven't. And, like, all this compliance, it's luckily, it's great because we have a super tight integration with our own QuickBooks account. So it's all automated, you know, and this, like, it's a systems thing. Like, the CFO doesn't have to go in every month and be like, oh, how many people did that? Like, fuck.

Yeah.

It's all automated. But that's the value, is scale. Can we take this weird quirky thing that is how every coffee shop is run like this, right? It's just freelancers and 1099 people and blah, blah, blah, and say, hey, what if we just softwaretize this?

Super interesting.

So yeah, it's going to be interesting to see the first company that embraces this way of working.

Yeah, it's super interesting to think about, like, what is the platform? If people start embracing it, what does the platform look like to actually kind of be the, you know, to use the tired analogy, the AWS for kind of like what I would call like modular or scaled knowledge work?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And like, is there even like a marketplace for these companies?

Exactly right.

If you have like 50 of these amazingly well-run businesses, You know, like, why can't I invest in that cash flow? I want a chunk, you know. So I think there's a lot of interesting stuff if you can get like— it's got, you know, a lot of it is like the promise of crypto, right? It's like the promise of crypto. But unfortunately, crypto is so far outside of like the legal framework for people that it just hasn't been adopted. Like, no company is like— Figma is not going to say, oh, we didn't get bought by Adobe, we're going to go on-chain. Yeah, right. Totally. No, they're going to go IPO because that's like the the regulated thing. But like, if we could offer something that's like, hey, what if you DIY PO'd and you run your own process and you run your own book? But instead of paying $1 million a year to the NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange and all the people you have, uh, and they have all these requirements of your board, like, you just have a piece of SaaS and then you just say, hey, this is, you know, we're issuing like a $4 million dividend quarterly.

Yeah.

Or, I mean, in my view, like, at some point, what if you could every month, you know, you close the books for the month. And then you say, hey, we did this much in net income, and you dividend it out, or you put it in everyone's account, they can choose to withdraw when they want, or they can even choose to reinvest it in the company. Like, there's all sorts of fun—

That's really interesting.

Stuff you can do. It's just always manual, right? Like, the problem is you can do all of these things, you just have to pay your lawyer and an accountant. And so, because every single transaction is like a business legal, sort of, you know, highly regulated securities transaction. Um, but if you can—

if only there was a piece of software that let you do this.

If only, if only. So yeah, I'm very excited to see how that goes.

Totally. Cool, man. Well, thanks for joining, uh, the pod again and, uh, looking forward to having more conversations in the future.

Yeah, likewise.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Founders Journal. As I mentioned at the top, I want to make 2024 the best year yet for this podcast and for your businesses. To do that, I want to hear from as many of you as possible. Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and share any recommendations you have for the show, ranging from specific topic ideas to changes or new things you want to see me try out with the show. As always, thank you so much for being a part of this community, and I'll catch you next episode.