Meet The Next Self-Made Internet Billionaire – Sahil Lavingia
Watch out Mark Cuban, Zuck and those Google guys, Sahil Lavingia is coming.
I’ve been following @shl for about a year now and he continues to impress me with his design, vision, hard work and overall awesomeness. I wanted to write about him because he’s a perfect example of what our country needs more of. He had some great opportunities growing up, like having a computer and a stable internet connect (something far too many Americans don’t have), but nothing anyone who works hard today couldn’t have achieved.
At age 14 he started to play around with photoshop, googling around and learning some of the basics. It’s clear he’s a very creative guy, and certainly more artistic than I will ever be, but he simply wanted to learn how to better harness his design abilities. After he had a few projects under his belt he started designing web pages and earning some side-money.
It’s this moment in his life that I find fascinating. Not wanting to be at the whim of another person to actual program the site, and roughly 16 years old, he took up learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. After he conquered that, he learned PHP for the backend driving the site. By his own accord, this was difficult, but the Stanford iOS classes were a nice break for him to get away from the dry, UI-less backend and learn how to create iPhone applications. At this point he has the ability to design, engineer and ship products across the web + mobile. This is a very powerful toolset to drawn from.
He built Color Stream, which allows you to take a photo and create a color palette (acquired). He built caltrainer, an amazingly simple timetable app for the bay area caltrain system (4.5 stars and my fav caltrain app). He’s also helped build Pintrest, which is one of the hottest startups on the web right now, not to mention tons of other “side projects” that any one of which I’d be proud of. The kid is a rockstar, and after recently dropping out of USC, just keeps on going. His latest project, and his first serious business, Gumroad, aims to make it easier to sell things online. Just need a link to the content you’re selling and a paypal account. It’s going to be huge.
When people talk about being innovative, it’s hard work and creativity like Sahil’s that has allowed him to make 10+ production products and a very credible business…all before his 20th birthday. I don’t get how people talk about “job creators” as only being this class of wealthy businessmen. Yes, some industries need significant capital like manufacturing and or high end biotech, and even tech companies need some level of VC investment to scale accordingly, but there’s 1000’s of Sahil’s working their ass off, innovating and creating the next businesses of the 21st century. This is where true job creation, and increases in productivity, will come from. Jack Dorsey, founder of both Twitter & Square, “creator” of 1000s of jobs, comes to mind.
Congrats Sahil on your latest investment round for Gumroad, look forward to what the future brings!
Various Projects: Gumroad, Pinterest (iphone app), TurnTable (iphone app), LetsCrate, Dayta(app), Caltrainer(app), Rmmbr, Color Stream, Trnsfr
Side Note: I spent well over 15 minutes trying to find a different photo of Sahil, but this seems to be the only one on the internet. Strange considering his recent rise in fame, I’m sure they’ll be a wiki page for him soon.
