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In this episode of The Business of Laravel podcast, Matt Stauffer interviews Gilbert Pellegrom, Engineering Manager at Stripe and former Co-founder/CTO of Lemon Squeezy. Gilbert shares his journey from self-taught developer to entrepreneur, building Lemon Squeezy to simplify selling digital goods online. They discuss technical challenges using Laravel, the role of community and branding in hiring, and the bootstrap mindset that led to their acquisition by Stripe. Gilbert reflects on leadership, soft skills, and balancing personal passions—like his love for cars—with the joy of building meaningful projects.
Creators & Guests
What is The Business of Laravel?
Short, powerful interviews with business leaders working with and within the Laravel ecosystem--about business, tech, and more! Hosted by Matt Stauffer.
Matt Stauffer:
All right. Welcome back to the Business of Laravel podcast, where I talk to business leaders working in and with Laravel. My guest today is Gilbert Pellegrom, the Engineering Manager at Stripe and also a previous co-founder and CTO at Lemon Squeezy. Gilbert, thank you so much for hanging out with us. And I wanted to get you started with basically, can you tell us a little bit about you? Tell us a little bit about Lemon Squeezy. I know we're going to focus more on Lemon Squeezy than Stripe today. So tell us a little bit about your business and kind of what it does and what it has to do with Laravel. How do they work together with each other?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
OK, well, yeah, well, thanks for having me. First of all, Matt, it's great to be on and yeah, great to chat and meet you as well. I've followed you for a long time in the Laravel ecosystem and so yeah, it's nice to be able to do this. Yeah, a about me. You can probably tell from my accent I'm from Scotland and I have been fully remote for a long time now. Well before Covid I was working remotely since 2010 and yeah, and I guess where to start is the question. I guess, as probably a lot of people in the PHP world did, I started in WordPress and had my first kind of introduction to business related things through the WordPress world. And back in, I don't know, 2010, 2011, 2012 maybe, I teamed up with Orman Clark, who many people will probably know. He's an amazing designer.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
And he at the time was running a WordPress theme company and said, I want to build a SaaS. I want to build what became a kind of portfolio builder. And at the time I was just kind of like digging into Laravel, right? So it was like Laravel three, I want to say. It was quite early on. It was going back and I was digging into that and people were starting to rave about it. It was really kind of coming onto the scene. And yeah, and so.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
I was like, yeah, okay, great. I'll learn Laravel, we'll build a SaaS. And that's what we did. Yeah, and that kind of kicked it all off. And then in the years in between, I've built many side SaaS's, micro SaaS's, SaaS's for other people all using Laravel. And yeah, my latest company was Lemon Squeezy, is Lemon Squeezy. Yeah, now acquired, but yeah, it's all still built on Laravel.
Still a relatively straightforward Laravel application in many ways.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So if somebody's never heard of Lemon Squeezy before, can you tell us a little bit about what, not only what it does, but what was the genesis of y'all creating in the first place?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, so again, this kind of goes back to our history in the WordPress world. So myself and Orman in particular, and our other co-founder who was JR Far who did the Mojo marketplace for those who were around in those days. We all grew up selling stuff, selling software online, primarily using WordPress and like cobbling together these terrible experiences, you know, that were available at the time. I'm talking like pre-stripe, you know, trying to work with authorized.net and PayPal and you know, and so it was like...
Matt Stauffer:
Yep.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
So anyway, so like we, that's where we all came from and we were around in those days. And then as time went on, services began to kind of get better and make things easier. So if you were wanting to sell digital goods online, it became easier as time went on, but it was still wasn't really a great like all in one easy peasy experience and so when we got together in 2020, want to say, Orman and JR had been speaking about this idea of building this all-in-one experience to make it super easy, like really nail the experience of selling digital goods online. And they were looking for somebody to help build it. So they reached out to me and that's kind of how it came about. And so, yeah, we built this platform to make it easy to sell digital goods online.
And so Lemon Squeezy really facilitates that in a number of ways. It does, you know, obviously handles all of your sales. It has features like email marketing and affiliates to help you make more sales and grow your business. But one of the kind of fundamental things that we really wanted to do, probably somewhat naively at the time, was essentially like take the burden of selling online away from sellers, right? And what I mean by that is, there's like the dark side to selling stuff online and that's, know, fraud, disputes, dealing with like tax compliance and all of these issues. And it's like that all these like process things on the back end that you run into when you sell software and sell different things online, but you really don't want to have to deal with. And so we made a decision early on that we wanted to try and like lift that burden as much as we could from our merchants.
And so we decided to kind of go down this route and have this model essentially where it's called the merchant of record. And this became like a kind of cornerstone piece for Lemon Squeezy where we essentially sell things on your behalf so that you don't have to worry about things like disputes and global sales tax compliance and all these things, right? You just sign up, you sell your stuff. We deal with all of that, the unfun, unsexy part of selling stuff online and then you just get paid at the end of the day, right? And so it was all part of our easy peasy mantra. And it really was a first principles thing. We really did try to stick to that whole, how do we make this whole experience easy peasy for people? And yeah, so that's how Lemon Squeezy came about.
Matt Stauffer:
I love it. And I heard about Lemon Squeezy because I know a lot of people who build their own software platforms or whatever to sell products and sell courses. And each of them at some point came and said, oh my God, dealing with VAT, dealing with taxes, dealing with chargebacks, all this stuff, it's so miserable. I wish there was a platform. And there's platforms that are attempting to be all in one course creator platforms or all in one whatever platforms. But if you wanted to build your own thing, there was no intermediate, right? And they came along and they said, well, Lemon Squeezy, it's like Stripe, but it handles that for you. It handles this for you. It handles that for you.
And later I learned about all the merchant records stuff. But at first the pitch was just like, it's like Stripe, but you don't have to deal with all of the mess. So that makes a ton of sense. From a technical perspective, I'm super interested because if you talk about financial transactions, PHP is not the first place most people would think about, right? They say, well, you're dealing with microtransactions and billions of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And of course you're doing, you know, Rust or some other kind of crazy thing. So what was the experience like of building something that at least in eputation sake has such an intensity and complexity and you're using a web-based language that has a reputation for mainly for being web apps. Were there points where you're like, oh my god, I've made a mistake? Or did you end up using different languages for certain pieces of it? Or what was that process like for you?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, so it's a good question, this. So essentially, we just stand on the shoulders of giants, right? I mean, that's essentially how these things go. You know, there's like Taylor and he built the Laravel framework and that gave it out of the box, gave us like all these things that we needed like authentication and queues and caching and CSRF protection and Laravel, I mean, really is like out of the box provides so much. It deserves the status that it has, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Love that.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
And then, you know, we used from the financial side of things, we wanted to focus more on the, like the consumer experience and the merchant experience without getting too deep into the actual financial weeds of it all, right? And so we basically leaned on Stripe and PayPal primarily to provide all of the like, you know, the payment functionality, the PCI compliance stuff, you know, we didn't want to worry about any of that. We just let them do their thing, which they are.
Stripe in particular obviously is excellent at and everybody knows that Stripe's great at doing that. It's so easy, right? And so yeah, we just, we use them for that. The hardest piece actually was the tax side of things. And so we really went through a process of like trying to figure out, how do we effectively do this whole like global sales tax compliance thing? This is a big puzzle that nobody had really like solved I think in a very like obvious way. And there was other companies when Lemon Squeezy started that were doing this, like Paddle was doing it.
But I think we were kind of like still at the very beginning of like, there's no obvious way to do this. So how do we do this, right? And so we've found some third party providers that helped us to do things like sales tax calculation. We figured out like some...
Well, basically some like vendors to help us do like the filing and the remittance piece on an international side. But that whole process has really been a journey of discovery because, well, frankly, global sales tax compliance is not simple, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
And so, you know, there's so many things that we ran into when it came to like global country support and, you know, validating tax IDs and how the US tax system is different from the international tax system and the kind of things we need to do there. And there's just so many like complicated pieces to that. And so that really became, you know, the chunk of the difficult parts essentially of building Lemon Squeezy. You know, we were reasonably experienced at like building good UX, UI, could use Laravel, we could use, we use Vue.js as our front end. So, you know, Orman's an excellent designer. So we kind of had that stuff nailed. It was more the kind of behind the scenes, how we tied it all together, that's the complex bit, right? So, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah, and I just recently spoke with a friend who was tasked with building this group for nonprofits that handles with them their accounting for them in a way that is unique to nonprofits. And he was on on cue to go build accounting software. I was like, accounting software is out there. What you want to build is what is unique to this world. And I was like, I bet you there's some back end APIs and vendors you can work with. And he came back a week later. He's he's like, you just saved me from all this misery. And so that for you all, of course, it was a leading question when I asked you.
Like to choose to say, we're going to do this and we're going to build our own payments platform would have been such a different story than if you said we're going to build something unique on top of what already exists. We're going to use this vendor for that, that vendor for that. And these, what we're doing is we're doing some things uniquely. We're doing a great user interface and we're also building some glue that nobody else has done before.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
That's a, that's a story that I think is really uniquely qualified for the layer of a world when we can build these incredible, powerful front ends and back ends that allow, I think, one of the parts of your story you keep mentioning your designer. And obviously he's one your co-founders, so that's a part of it. But I feel like a lot of people who are trying to change the world don't often lead with the user experience, design or whatever, and saying, hey, like what we're providing more than anything else is an experience for our users, and it's the visual experience, but it's also that you don't have to do X, Y, Z, and you don't have to be the first person to do international taxes or the first person to do payment processing to bring an experience to them that is interesting.
because you're the first people to make it accessible in this way, to put these pieces together. So anyway, just the answer of like, well, we didn't have to do it ourselves. We could plug vendors together and be the glue behind that. I'm like, yes, let's do it.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, yeah, totally. I think, sorry, I was just gonna follow on. Like I think, know, that especially when you're in startup mode, you know, it's, you want to like ship fast, validate your idea. You know, it's actually important, I think, like the speed side of things is an important point to make because, you know, using, leaning on other vendors like that is hugely important when you're trying to like validate a business, you know, and trying to get like off the ground and up and running.
There's this whole talk about being scalable in the long term and of course you need to do that. there is a lot that can be said for just, let's figure out the easiest way, the simplest way, the most lightweight way to do what we're trying to do and bring it together.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah, I love that. You've talked a little bit from a business perspective. One of the most challenging things was figuring out all of the integrations with the national taxes and the US taxes. Was there any particular technical challenge where you're like, from a coding perspective, this is the one that really just kind of blew my brain and was the hardest for me to fit? Or was most of it stuff that was pretty easy for you to figure out?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
I think the kind of funny answer to this question is that Laravel really makes it pretty easy. You know, it really does. Like there's so many technical challenges that would have been a nightmare, you know, if we didn't just get it out of the box with Laravel, right? I think, you know, a big one for us is we rely a lot on que jobs because, you know, obviously there's a lot of stuff that happens kind of behind the scenes, you know, when you're fulfilling orders or...
you know, sending out emails and bulk and all sorts of stuff, right? So there's, you know, there's loads of stuff that goes on behind the scenes. And, you know, having a system that's just set up just to make it like dead easy to kind of like implement that really makes it simple, right? You know, it did make it very easy for us. And so we didn't really run into like any like massive technical challenges. I think that there was points that we hit things that weren't straightforward, right? So that, you know, like,implementing, for example, right, our checkout flow is a bit unique because very early on we realized we knew that we had to deal with like fraud. Fraud was gonna be an issue, right, on a platform like this as it is online everywhere. And so we actually teamed up with a relatively new company who were at the time working on like machine learning based fraud protection systems, right?
And it would be a like, if you think about Stripe has a product called Radar, which does a similar kind of thing, but this was like not just for payments, this was across our whole platform. And because of that, we have to like separate the payment process. So like you have to authorize a payment and then we do it, we actually do the fraud check before we actually complete the payment, right? And so there's this in between step. And so some parts of the implementation did start to get a bit kind of hairy in the sense that, know, like things start to get complex pretty easy when you're trying to, you know, like, and then of course, you know, with the checkout, it's like one time payments, subscription payments, pay what you want payments, PayPal payments, multiple payment methods, then you throw in discounts and, you know, and so it's like, before, know, it's a whole, you know, thing, but in the main though, I would say like with Laravel and Vue and with Stripe in particular, like these.
You know, made it relatively easy to kind of go with these things. And so technically we never really kind of get lost in the weeds. I would say the other thing probably that really helped us is like we never had a dedicated DevOps person. And so from an infrastructure point of view, like we were going mainly with my experience of, what I'd worked on in the past. And one of the things we decided to do very early on was just lean on serverless.
You know, like it was like, it was just one of those decisions that was like, look, I don't want to manage servers. In my last job, I'd worked on spinup WP, which is like a managed, it's like a cloud portal for managing WordPress hosting, right? And so like, I know what's involved in managing servers. And I was like, I don't want to do that.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. I don't want it.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Like, I just want to, it's not, I just don't want it, right? And so, so we decided that very early on and Laravel Vapor, of course, and this is the other thing about Laravel, right? Is the ecosystem.
Right, Laravel Vapor probably hadn't long been around at the point where we launched and we were like, well, let's just use Vapor. It's serverless, it's scalable. We used serverless for our database and it's still on that architecture, it's still on that infrastructure, right? It's still on the same thing and it's done us pretty well. And yeah, okay, we're maybe getting to the stage where, you know, we've scaled enough now that we might need to kind of move onto some dedicated hardware, but.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
For the journey we've been on, been excellent. And in hindsight, that's been a great decision for us.
Matt Stauffer:
I love to hear that. And it's great because people don't often think about the fact that you can choose something today that might not be what you need five years down the road, but it's gonna get you there. And I mean, talk about a success.I mean, again, we're not gonna talk about the acquisition, but being acquired by Stripe is a pretty significant measure of success and the fact that you're now still running the product, and so you have a successful product and an acquisition story. I would say that's success and the success on the back of, I mean, how big has the team gotten at this point?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, exactly.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's well, the team was like 18, I want to say, at the point where we were acquired. So that was back in the summer of this year. And it's still roughly the same size. We've expanded our support capabilities and we've expanded some of our like technical support and engineering as well. But in the main, it's still, you know, roughly the same group of people where we're still doing a lot of the same things just within Stripe now.
And we're still working on the product, still shipping features and yeah, still doing the same things.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, so a team of 18 with a successful business that can support that many people and the acquisition by Stripe, the idea of doing what kind of I mean, the way you've told the story so far just seems so different than what a lot of people prescribe a successful thing needs to look like, which is structure and rigidity and enterprisey and whatever. And you've gone very I mean, I don't know if you use the phrase bootstrap, but I don't know if you all took any funding upfront, but it just feels very much the direction of like, we're going to do what we need to do. We're going to make it work. We're going toadd stuff when we need to add it. We're going to lean on existing services. We're going to lean on Laravel and Vue to make it as quick as possible. I feel like you're a pretty huge success story for the type of work that I hope Laravel developers are able to do, which is come up with a great idea, lean on our tools to build it, and see what people think. So I'm just really having a good time with that.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And we were like, we took some like, or we gave ourselves some initial funding to get going, but it really wasn't a lot. It was literally enough to like get me to be able to work in a full time for six months and to get the initial thing out the door. You know, aside from that, it really was a bootstrap story and we were always quite strong. We actually had plans early on to kind of try and be like the...
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
the decade long, you know, that was always our vision very early on was to be like, look, we're building a business. We want it to be sustainable. We want it to be around for like a decade, you know? And so we very much like took that perspective in a lot of our decisions. And a lot of those decisions actually paid off in the long run, right? Like they really did. And so while we didn't expect to maybe sell this early or be acquired this early,
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
We also didn't really expect to be this successful this early, right? It was one of those things where it really like, it just kind of, it took off, it was crazy. So, but yeah, we very much had the bootstrap mindset. We were minimal, we went lean. We, know, even when we were hiring, we talked a lot about, you know, high impact, know, low head count. We really want to like do this thing the right way without having to take on those that like millions of dollars of
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
seed funding or series A or whatever, and just below everything. We really wanted to just do it our own way. And we held our own. We had lots of acquisition, inbound acquisition interests right from the beginning. We spoke to multiple billion dollar companies before this year, and people were interested. And we always kind of said, no, we're trying to do this. We're trying to do the bootstrap thing. And so we held out as long as we could, I think, essentially.
And yeah, we.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, with Stripe knocking on the door, it's hard to...
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, yeah, that was a bit of a different one for sure. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Well, that's very cool. So speaking of hiring, you mentioned kind of what the hiring process was like. And one of the things I hear from a lot of people as they say, well, I know how to hire a JavaScript developer. Every boot camp in the world is turning out JavaScript developers. What's the experience like of hiring Laravel developers? And so I wanted to ask you, what was it like building a team of Laravel developers?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's a funny one because it's kind of, it's a more unique or niche, I guess, industry compared to JavaScript or PHP in more general or even React or whatever it might be, right? And so there definitely doesn't seem to be the same kind of just like size of ecosystem. And so in a sense that that's a bit more challenging.
But that being said, we literally, I don't think we hired anyone in the end that didn't come to us. So we had a of like unique journey in this, but essentially, we were very strong on Twitter and we were kind of like, our branding made a lot of noise. And so whenever we said, look, we're hiring Laravel developers, people were like knocking at the door. And we did advertise a few times and...
But I think in the end, almost everyone we hired was just through either connections or the network or the community. And I think one of the things that I think this really goes to is the community within Laravel because there's plenty of communities where it seems very toxic or there just seems to be a lot of negativity in general. And one the things I would say that really stands out about the Laravel community is people in the main are very supportive.
You know, they seem to be very positive. They're kind of like-minded builders and they tend to kind of like look out for each other, which I think is great, you know. And so like an example was like Claudio Decker, you know, who worked at Laravel. Like he came and worked for us for a while, you know, like, and it was great because, you know, he helped us with Inertia stuff, which he's, you know, helped build and then Boris Lebkin came and worked for us. And he is a contributor for
Inertia as well and stuff and so you know it was great because like it just felt very much like the community was supporting us and so when we were hiring people came and were like yeah you know let's let's try and do this and I think to be fair I think the brand helped a lot as well but because I think people thought it was cool it was an exciting thing and and it was you know it was interesting to work in an interesting space so yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you say the brand and I think it's both. It's certainly the idea that you all were doing something that's really new and really unique. Also, can't I hate to say it, like it just looked fun. Like you guys, you had great marketing. You had great energy. You had a great social presence. I mean, have. And it's there's something to say about a place where someone says, hey, that's a that's something I'm excited to be a part of. You know, if I could be attached to that cool and exciting thing, that would be fun for me. You know?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And I think that that was a reflection on, you know, I think just our culture in general, I think, you know, it was. We try to, I would say this, I would say like ourselves as co-founders, because I do kind of feel like culture tends to trickle down from the top inevitably, right? And I think ourselves as co-founders, we are pretty like chilled out, we're reasonably laid back. And I think we do like to have fun, right? And I think that kind of culture, probably comes out in our marketing quite a lot. And I think, you know, the marketing and the branding was very much just a reflection of the kind of fun. We didn't want to take ourselves too seriously, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Yes.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
And so we, you know, when we made the make Lemonade page originally, which was the kind of landing page we had saying that we're building something, this is before Lemon Squeezy was launched, you know, it was very tongue in cheek. And we were just like, yeah, you know, that's just, you know, that's the way we are. And so, yeah, and I think, I think that was infectious. I think people did kind of like take to that and be like, yeah, this seems cool, and it seems like a cool, fun thing to do.
Matt Stauffer:
I love that.
Well, I mentioned this to you before the call, but there's kind of two primary goals for this podcast. And one is to talk to the people who are in your position and are considering Laravel. And the other one is to talk to people who want to be in your position one day. And I know that there's a lot of people in the Laravel community who would love to one day be the founder of a successful software startup where they get to have fun and keep the energy good and maybe get acquired one day. But even if not just be something, you know, creating something that people really love. So if someone is in that position and they don't have their good idea right now. They've been honing their Laravel skills but they don't have their good idea, they don't have their team. What would your biggest piece of advice for that person be to just kind of set them on their trajectory towards maybe hitting a moment like you've hit?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, good question. I think the honest answer to this, the kind of sleazy word for it is networking, right? But I honestly think the honest answer to this is to just put yourself out there. Like go and meet other people, speak to other people in the community, build stuff together and help people. Like be genuine. know, don't just like go and...
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
try and solicit work or whatever, but be genuinely helpful. And the reason I say that is when I look back at my path, I was very heavily involved in open source work and haven't been in recent years, but I've built a lot of open source projects. And that stemmed from my love of just building stuff, right? I'm a builder, I love to just play with software and build it, it's like Lego. And I look back to my story and my relationship with Orman in particular.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
which is how I got involved in Lemon Squeezy. Our initial interaction was Orman was like, hey, I want to build a side project. Do you want to build it with me? And he'd heard about me because of my open source work. I think at the time I'd built the Nevo Slider, which is going way back, was popular. And I worked with John O'Nolan, who's now the CEO of Ghost. And I think Orman was like, hey, he'd heard of me. And then he was like, right, do you want to build a side project? So we built a side project. And then he was like, right, do you want to come and work for me? So I went and worked for him. And then we built a SaaS.
And then, five, six, seven years later, he's like, hey, look, we're this new project. You want to come and build it with us? And so I think, honestly, yeah, the best thing that you can do is just be out there. Network with other developers, speak to other business owners, be active on social media, build side projects, publish stuff, be genuinely helpful, contribute to the community.
Build packages for Laravel that are genuinely useful. When I look back over the years, not just for my own story, but for others, I think about people we've hired and, you know, people we've come across and people we've worked with, you know, it's almost always been people who have been contributing in some way or helped us in some way or did something for us in some way. And so, yeah, that would be my biggest bit of advice for sure.
Matt Stauffer:
That's really helpful. I'm trying to think about the phrase, the luck surface area and actually for those who are listening to the podcast, if you've listened to the most recent one with Alex Millar, he talked a lot about being ready for kind of when your lucky moment happens, like you have to have done the work ready, you know? And then you think about anything Aaron Francis has been sharing about kind of sharing your work in public and stuff like that. Like time after time after time where we've got folks like you saying, you know, I didn't just sit down and say, I'm gonna do this thing. Like there's a lot of steps that have gotten to this point and a lot of them involve sharing stuff in public and building relationships and helping people. Like, just, feel like those are the really steady ones. That's really helpful.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's the nature of the 10 year overnight success, right? Like that's fundamentally what it is, right? And it's like, yeah, another example I could share is like, just before I graduated university, I genuinely used to chat with the ADP Nar, who for anyone in the WordPress world will know, you know, was the co-founder of WooThemes. And he came to me one day and he was like, look, I have this side project idea. I want to build WooShop. Do you want to help me like build a prototype? And I was like, well, I've got six weeks before I graduate. I was like, sure, let's do it. So we built a prototype of this thing called WooShop.
Now I didn't know it at the time and the original code I wrote never got used, but I went through a few cycles and then they forked Jiggle Shop and it became WooCommerce, right? Now WooCommerce is a multi-billion dollar a year industry, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
And I happened to just be the guy that wrote the very, very, very first version of it because Edie was just like, I want to build a side project. And I was like, sure, let's do that. And I just emailed him out of the blue to speak to him about something at the time, and that's how it came about. So yeah, it's loads of examples of that, but yeah, for sure. Be genuine, help people, be out there. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
That's brilliant and that's a pretty amazing story. I knew that you had been involved in the WordPress world in the past and kind of that you'd been, I, was, you looked, worked at those, pranes and stuff like that. Like I was just like, you knew that. But I didn't know it was at that level. So you've been around there for, for a minute.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, I've been in there for a bit.
Matt Stauffer:
I'm tempted to talk about WordPress, but we're not going to do it. We're going to stay in the Laravel world. So, okay. One of the things we talked about here is what it looks like to get to where you are from, a meeting the right people and building the right products perspective. But I also imagine you have some responsibilities at the company that are different from just your average programmer. You probably have been involved in the hiring. You probably involved in managing people one on ones and stuff like that. Were there any experiences or resources or books or podcasts or anything that you feel helped you be prepared to do the more important or not more important but more expansive leadership role that you have that's outside of just writing code on a day to day but now also running a company. Is there anything that helped you get here?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
You know, it's funny, I'm not, I've never been a big reader in terms of, you know, like for learning, certainly from like business stuff, I read for fun, never been a big reader from a kind of educational point of view. I love like video courses, like that's much more engaging to me. And I've done that a lot and Laracasts is an excellent resource and use that loads for technical stuff.
Honestly, no, like I never did any like training on the management side of things or, you know, did any kind of prep work really at all. I very much just like took it as I went, you know, and don't get me wrong, soft skills are massively important, you know, especially as you advance in your career. But yeah, no, I think it was one of those things where I was fortunate that I was like given the responsibilities in a kind of cadence that meant I could learn as I went, right? And so.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, totally.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
When I worked at Delicious Brains, which was my previous job, I had the opportunity to do hiring, for example. And so I learned how to do hiring there. And then when I started working, when we launched Lemon Squeezy and started to build a team, started to do one-on-ones, but it was only like with an engineer at first and then two engineers and then three. And then, so because of the reasonably slow cadence of it all, I was able to just kind of like learn as I went.
Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
And figure things out as I went, which is fine I think. Again it's a reflection of, and this might just be a personal thing, but it is a reflection of almost the way everything's gone in my career because I didn't even get taught web development, right? Like I went to university, I did a software engineering degree, we did one class one year for like two months on web development and like I didn't get taught anything at all and I started doing web development on the side as a hobby when I was at university and that taught myself web development, right? And I think the internet is such an opportunity, I think, particularly in web development, to be able to just like do that, just like learn it yourself, learn it as you go, go and find resources and go and figure it out and just do it. And I think my whole journey has been very like that. And so I think, yeah, it was the same with management for me. It was just opportunities arose and came up. And yeah, I just kind of winged it, essentially. For good or for bad, was the way it went. Unfortunately, it means I don't have any great resources to share. But yeah, that was kind of how it worked for me.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I love it.
I'm going to say this is true for our entire generation, but...
For a lot of us who are in leadership positions today, many of us were starting back when there weren't boot camps. CS degrees still don't often give you everything you need from web, but they certainly didn't when we were college. It's very interesting to me as my experience in talking to people on my podcast differs depending on their generation and how they learn. The more established folks in leadership today usually were self-teaching because that's all you...
by hitting view source in Netscape Navigator because there weren't any books about how to write HTML at the time. Right? was 1994. People weren't writing books about how to do that. So yeah, that's cool.
All right. So we're wrapping up a little bit, but one of questions I try to always ask sometimes I forget is, are you hiring? And this is both because of the question of are you hiring today, but also because people listen to this podcast down the road and I want them to know that like, hey, do you think you might hire in the next couple of years? And if so, what's it like working with you? Where should people go? So are you hiring or do you expect to hire anytime in the next year or two?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, so it's a funny question because we're in an interesting spot, obviously, having been acquired, but we are actually looking for maybe a Laravel developer to kind of come and help us out for a bit. So yeah, it's, there is one spot open at the moment. Yeah, if you're, Laravel's your thing and you want to maybe come and technically you'd be working for Stripe and not Lemon Squeezy, but you know, if you fancy going through the interview process, and then having a crack at it, then yeah, we actually do have a spot open at the moment. So yeah, let me know.
Matt Stauffer:
That's very fun. Is there anything that you wanted to make sure we covered about your journey or about Lemon Squeezy that we didn't get to get to today?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
No, I don't think so. No, I think I'm happy to just go with the flow and chat about whatever seems interesting. I think it's funny that you do that thing where I guess there's probably a perception now that I'm a successful person and I've sold a startup and I've grown a Laravel application to an enterprise scale thing and maybe had lots of success in the past or whatever, but it's not how I perceive myself, right? And this might get deep, but it's like, it's one of those things where it's such a strange place to be because to me in my head, I'm still like this guy in his dorm room at university, like coding.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yep.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
You know, working on side projects and just like, you know, learning stuff and trying to figure it all out. And it's very much the fake it till you make it mentality, right? And I think like, I still feel like that. And so. Yeah, I don't feel like I have these really important life lessons that I must share with everyone. I still very much feel like I'm with everybody else in the same boat, just trying to figure it out, trying to work out the best path, keep working hard, and just hopefully gain some success as we go along.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I love that. I mean, you are, I mean, we talked for a few minutes beforehand, and I've also, you know, followed you on Twitter for a while, and I'm like, you're just a...
Like following you, I'm like, you just like playing with cars and speaking of which, we didn't get to talk about cars at all. So we need to talk about that for a second. But just, you just seem to be someone who you take every day, find the joy in what you have around you, you make cool stuff, you have a good time. And so I just want you to know that from the outside, I'm experiencing you as you feel, you know, just like another guy. I mean, I don't think of you as just a kid in a door room or whatever, but let's talk about cars.
So one of the things that I ask at the end of the podcast for everybody is if you made $100 million today, take home, you walk away from your business, what would you go do with your time? You and actually my previous guest uniquely have some experience of now I'm not saying you need to talk
about or at all how much you made from from the acquisition but I do know that like we could at least see some slight hints of what you do because in some ways you're doing it today now you still work at Lemon Squeezy, you still work at Stripe, so it's not exactly the same. But I still want to ask that question in a second, but we got to talk about the cars because that is clearly something for you so tell me about your relationship with cars.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, so I've always been a petrolhead. Always, like from the day the first Fast and Furious film was released, know, it's just like, always been a passion and then grew up like loving cars, talking about cars, dreaming about cars. And, you know, I was 17, passed my test as early as I could and got into cars and, you know, it didn't come from an affluent background at all. You know, like didn't, you know, I drove my mum's car as my first car and then I drove more of my mum's cars and then, and they weren't exciting cars at all by the way, and they were slow. And then, you know, like I did an internship one summer and was able to buy my first car and that was cool. And I'd like went to town, know, did the whole, I don't know what they call it in different areas. We would call it like a boy racer here in Scotland. That's kind of what we call it. I know it has different names of different places, but you know, it had the big shiny wheels, lowered. I built a subwoofer and that literally filled the boot of the car, tinted windows, loud exhaust, like annoy your neighbors.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yep. I know exactly what this is. Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
I did all that. And so, yeah, I just did that. And I've always been interested in cars, always had interest in cars. I've driven lots of sports cars over the years, but always had this desire to have fast, nice cars. And so in some ways that was always a dream of mine, to be able to do that one day and it's funny because I always had the kind of sense that that was something I was working towards and maybe it's you know a bit of like higher level motivation I don't know. People have different motivations I guess for or I guess people have different definitions of success but success to me was always like you know I'll get to like mess around with nice cars right like that was my thing right?
Matt Stauffer:
Great, there you go.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
And so yeah and so like you say like this year has been a bit of a kind of crazy journey in that sense in many ways but but also for my dream of one day owning a nice, fast car. So, yeah, and it's funny because as co-founders, we're actually all into cars. We're all reasonably big petrolheads. So we talk about cars quite a lot and we all bought cars after the acquisition. So it's cool, it's good fun. Even before the acquisition, like months before the acquisition was even closed, we were all starting to look at right when...
Matt Stauffer:
Cool, that's fun.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
You know if this thing happens, what are we going to get realistically, right?
Matt Stauffer:
What are we gonna get?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
You know, it's to start the car shopping and then and yeah I had my a few different cars and there was this one in particular came up and it was this yellow Audi R8 and I've always loved the Audi R8s and they stopped producing them this year and they're just great cars. You know, they're just like V10. The noise is amazing. It's four-wheel drive. It's reasonably safe They call it an everyday supercar, right? And it's just you know, it's just amazing. It's just so much fun. And so
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, I was like, pretty much the first thing I did, that was like my reward to myself, was like, you know what, I'm gonna buy a super car, I'm just gonna do it, you know, and so like, yeah, so that's what we did. And then I don't know what comes after that. My worry is like, now that I've got it, I'm like, right, what do we do now? But then, you know, I'm sure I'll figure that out.
Matt Stauffer:
You're to be like DHH and start doing racing and everything.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, exactly, it's to enter for Lamonts or something. So yeah, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yes, exactly.
Well, I love it. I can see you have so much joy in that. So while we have that kind of short term answer to question, I do still have the question because while you were able to get the financial buyout, you still have a day job. Right? And so if someone came along and I know this has to be a little bit more theoretically for you than for everybody else. But if somebody came along and somehow you were able to be completely bought out, you never had to show up to work ever again. You already had your R8. What do you do with your life? Right. Are you retiring to an island? Are you starting a new start up?
like what do do tomorrow if today you're told you never have to work ever again?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, so it's an interesting question. Given my experience this year, I've obviously had time to think about this. Now, it's not like here's $100 million, you never have to work ever again. But you do, and so I have a few thoughts on this. The first thing I would say from my experience this year is you don't have to rush it, first of all, right? It's like a life-changing thing and there's lots.
Matt Stauffer:
Sure. Yeah.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
I think there's probably more to figure out than you probably realize when you dream about these things, right? When it becomes a reality, you know, that it's more kind of nuanced than just like, lots of money, great, I can go and spend lots of money. And so, yeah, so the first thing I would say is like, you can take your time, you know, figure it out.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, take a breath.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
You know, and yeah, there's lots to kind of work through, you know, not even mentioning things like tax, which is, you know, a whole other thing. The other thing I would say though is like for me personally, I would still be doing the same thing today, I think. I'm relatively young, I'm not 40 yet, right? So I'm not at the stage where I would want to retire. But more than that, and this will probably sound cliche, but I love what I do. And this passion for web development that started when I was a teenager, I still have that. I still work on side projects, like I still just build things in my spare time because I can, you know, and so I don't really see me stopping doing that really at all in any way, you know. And I think, yeah, you know, and I think talking, going back to the cars thing, you know, if I did have more free time to be able to like pursue other things, like if I was gonna consider, you know, maybe a career change or whatever.
It probably would be something to do with cars, right? I would love to like resto mods cars. I think that that would be like the ultimate kind of, you know, semi retirement, you know, enjoyable hobby stroke business goal would be, you know, take old cars, restore them and, know, but just have that, you know, like the, cars where they have like modern chassis and modern engines, but it's the old car on top and yeah, just drive beautiful cars and do that.
Yeah, that would probably be my thing.
Matt Stauffer:
I don't want to put his information on blast because I don't know how public this is, another person I know who has had a similar kind of buyout experience is just, that's literally what he's doing. He took an old Jeep and he's just bit by bit by bit been restoring it. And I'm just like, that looks really nice. My dad in his retirement, he's a ham radio guy and he buys and restores old ham radio equipment and sells it to people.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Oh really, wow. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
And I'm like, I'm sure he's making a little bit of money doing it, but it's because it's what he loves. And if you tell him you could spend all day working on radio innards and he goes, great, you know, sign me up. That's very cool for you for the cars. Okay, well that was, no go ahead.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
I was just gonna say, I think that that is probably ultimately the short answer to the question, which is like, find something you love doing and then do that, right? It doesn't matter if you get paid for it not, just do it because you enjoy it.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. So that was it for all my formal questions. I already asked if there's anything else you want to talk about. When I give you one last moment, is there anything you want to plug or share? People should sign up for this or try that, donate to that, visit that. Or do you feel like we covered everything that's on your plate right now?
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, no, I think that's everything. I don't have anything top of mind that I'm like, you need to definitely go and check this out. Obviously check out Lemon Squeezy.
Matt Stauffer:
Of course!
Gilbert Pellegrom:
But apart from that, no.
Matt Stauffer:
Well, I really appreciate you spending your time with us today. I know you're extremely busy and it's been taking a little while for us to work this out. And just thank you for hanging out, teaching, sharing, and also just the contributions you've made to the community prior. I mean you said everybody else, the way to go forward is by giving back. Well, you know this because you've been giving back and you've been building things, you've been turning things. So thank you for being who you are and thanks for hanging out with us today.
Gilbert Pellegrom:
Yeah, no, and thank you for having me. It's been great. Really enjoyed it. So thanks, man.
Matt Stauffer:
And for rest of you, we will see you next time.