Former Gumroad employee here. Since we didn't write about this, here's a response from the other side-- we weren't blindsided by this. We knew there was a chance we wouldn't get our series B, yet we believed in the product. The numbers looked great (the best they had ever looked). And we wanted to see this work, whether or not it meant being part of it in a few months.
This isn't some photo sharing app; many creators earn their living from Gumroad. When the time came to make a decision whether to be acquired and have the product die, or to downsize and have the product live on, this choice involved a lot more than our 20 person team. It involved the thousands of creators that rely on Gumroad. With or without me, I still believe in Gumroad.
If the gender gap can be fixed through hackathons, this could completely change how many women accept jobs in tech, and the overall culture of startups. It wasn't until I attended my first hackathon (HackNY) that I fell in love with designing and creating new apps. Though my major is not CS, I know I'll be entering tech after graduation, because of the hackathon experiences that started this interest and propelled my self-taught education around it.
This isn't some photo sharing app; many creators earn their living from Gumroad. When the time came to make a decision whether to be acquired and have the product die, or to downsize and have the product live on, this choice involved a lot more than our 20 person team. It involved the thousands of creators that rely on Gumroad. With or without me, I still believe in Gumroad.