Like many, Loom co-founder Vinay Hiremath saw ups and down in his career. Once a “broke stoner”, Vinay co-founded video communication software Loom. He sold the company for around $1 billion, “made $50-70 million personally”. He “turned down $60 million in retention bonuses” and doesn’t regret it.
Vinay gave most of his early money to his parents, and now he’s looking for an internship in robotics. He wrote a viral blog titled: “I’m rich and have no idea what to do with my life.”
Still in his 30s, Vinay Hiremath may be worth $50 million right now— after selling his billion-dollar company, according Money Wise.
That’s the long story short. But here’s the long “wild” story:
In a podcast with Moneywise, Vinay Hiremath said his company’s value before it was sold was “technically and non-technically” worth ₹1.5 billion.
How much did Vinay get?
“I walked away with a lot. Tens of millions of dollars,” Vinay said. When asked if the figure was “closer to 100 or closer to 30”, he said it was in between. He said the money was “enough for forever, for my kids…” According to the podcaster’s analysis, this money adds up to roughly $50-70 million.
Vinay could have made another $60 million if he had stayed for little more time with the company. Instead, he decided to walk away. “I was really strong-going with this decision,” he told the podcaster.
‘Stoner’: Early life and career
Vinay said October Sky made a huge impact in his life. He said he took education seriously but didn’t care about the grades in high school.
“My best goal was to become the best engineer I could be and that’s still my only goal,” Vinay said. He said he started Loom when he was 23.
Vinay said his first salary offer was like, 90,000 a year. “That blew my mind. My first job, I was 20 years old, so I didn’t understand the concept of, like, cost of living. I didn’t know what it meant to, like, save up money,” he said.
“Just before starting my company, like, my sister ended up having some medical issues, and so I was, like, supporting them with that, like, what, $1,000 a month or something…a little bit more than that,” Vinay said.
He said his “biggest expenses” were “rent and weed”.
“I was just like stoned all the time, I was fu**ng high all the time. I’m not anymore, but back then, I was just like before I had to like manage people and then I was, like, okay this i very obviously not working…,” he said.
‘Very cliched founder story’
Vinay said Loom had “very cliched founder story”. He said they didn’t make any revenue for “like two and a half, three years”.
“In fact, we gave away a bunch of free money because we created this credit system, which we absolutely did not have to do for referrals to unlock paid features in the future. So the first three years, we didn’t make any money at funding, I assume,” he said.
After the six-month period, when the Chrome extension started taking off, we were in the negative, all of us, on our bank accounts. Very cliched, you know, founder story,” Vinay said.
“We started making revenue. We started generating revenue… It was kind of a moment where we started to see signs of intra and inter-office virality. Our first major customer was HubSpot,” he said.
Vinay said before he sold the company, “there was a period of like a year and a half where we had gone through two rounds of layoffs, and our company was stagnating….”
“At the point that we sold, we were essentially, like, 400 or like 450% year over year,” he said.
He said at 30, “my personal finance situation was — I was doing well, but I was mostly living off of like an executive C-suite paycheck that I knew I would have this, like windfall in the future.”
Gift to parents
Vinay said he gave $1.7 million to his parents. “They crawled their way out of…a ditch in India to, like, provide this, this life that me and my sister get to have. I was like, this is an easy decision,” he said.
When the podcaster asked if his parents freaked out, Vinay said, “Dude, it was so good, it was so good, like to see your parent’s face and just feel for them to be like so proud of me to do it in person. I did not do it in person, unfortunately. So how did you, what was the reveal it, like the review.”
What’s next? ‘To start as an intern’
Vinay said that at this time, “I’m telling myself…you really don’t know what you’re doing, and just submit to that ambiguity.”
“I’m in a very happily ambiguous moment of my life,” he said.
He said he as been “doing a bunch of physics. I am, potentially, hopefully, knock on wood…interviewing at a few different startups here…like couple robotics companies to basically intern as a mechanical engineer, and then I want to intern as an electrical engineer.”
“I really don’t know what I’m going to do with this I really have no idea,” he said.
When asked if he is going to start as an intern, Vinay said, “I’m going to start as an intern…”
Catch all the Business News , Corporate news , Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
MoreLess
Leave a Reply