Gumroad

Gumroad is an extraordinary company. They provide a service for creators like writers, designers, teachers, and a lot of other craft(wo)men. They describe it as: Escape your 9-to-5 job. Take off your suit and tie. End your commute. Get paid for your craft.”

Gumroad started as a lot of other internet startups. With a great idea and with funding. It grew to a team of over 25 employees. But to manage the growth they needed a new funding round. Gumroad failed to get the funding and needed to lay off almost everyone. And the founder had to rethink its strategy. Because, in the meantime, the demand from creators grew.

This is a truly progressive organization but is not using Agile/scrum nor OKR's to go forward. They have almost none meetings and are working fully remote.

Some extraordinary examples of how they are organized:

• Their Even over strategies: freedom over growth, sustainability over speed, life over work.
• They have No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees
• They also have an “anti-overtime” rate: past twenty hours a week, people can continue to work at an hourly rate of 50 percent
• There are no perks of any kind, besides the flexibility and the cash.

It isn't they didn't try to become a 'normal' company with employees. At a certain moment, Sahil pitched to hire full time employees to his team members. Nobody agreed. Sahil: "I realized then that I was trying to copy the status quo–to try and fix something that wasn’t broken–so that I could feel better about doing things the “normal” way."

"This way of working isn’t for everyone", says Sahil. "There are no retreats planned, and no social channels in Slack. There are limited opportunities for growth. And we can’t compete with the comp packages that big tech companies can provide. But we can compete–and win–on flexibility."

Make sure to read Sahil's full article: https://sahillavingia.com/work