---
title: Gumroad No Full Time Employees
link: https://sahillavingia.com/work
published: 2021-01-07
date: 2021-02-20
tags:
    - Gumroad
    - Future of Work
    - distributed team
author: "Sahil Lavingia"
---

By [[Sahil Lavingia]], @shl, founder of [[Gumroad]], the article is titled [No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees](https://sahillavingia.com/work), and describes how the currently 25 people work at Gumroad.

> The internet has enabled new ways of working, but we’re just starting to see them unfold. There are a lot of different ways to make work work. Ours is just one.

No one is an employee, everyone is a contractor, and they get paid hourly. They have an "anti-overtime" rate: past 20 hours per week, peoples' hourly rate is cut to 50%. 

They don't have meetings or deadlines. People pick what to work on. They use Github, Notion, and Slack to "talk".

* [How do we decide what to work on?](https://www.notion.so/gumroad/How-do-we-decide-what-to-work-on-f2064b8ab16c4cbcac1077e16c8cf33b)
* [How do we communicate?](https://www.notion.so/gumroad/How-do-we-communicate-06f2032bfdae4552a38149c99c68e3df)
* [What does working at Gumroad feel like?](https://www.notion.so/gumroad/What-does-working-at-Gumroad-feel-like-7d9fd1c9548245a58afe5569d76a7960)
* [What's not so good at Gumroad?](https://www.notion.so/gumroad/What-s-not-so-good-at-Gumroad-847e3c285b1f45ab955ebacf52867900)

> Today, working at Gumroad resembles working on an open source project like Rails. Except it’s neither open source, nor unpaid.

> There are no deadlines either. We ship incrementally, and launch things whenever the stuff in development is better than what’s currently in production. The occasional exception does exist, such as a tax deadline, but as a rule, I try not to tell anyone what to do or how fast to do it. When someone new joins the company, they do what everyone else does: go into our Notion queue, pick a task, and get to work, asking for clarification when needed.

> Instead of setting quarterly goals or using OKRs, we move towards a single north star: maximizing how much money creators earn. It’s simple and measurable, allowing anyone in the company to do the math on how much a feature or bug-fix might be worth.

> People work at Gumroad as little as they need to sustain the other parts of their lives they prefer to spend their time and energy on: a creative side-hustle, their family, or anything else.

> We also have an “anti-overtime” rate: past twenty hours a week, people can continue to work at an hourly rate of 50 percent. This allows us to have a high hourly rate for the highest leverage work and also allows people to work more per week if they wish.