Joel Gascoigne

Joel Gascoigne is a British entrepreneur best known as the founder and CEO of Buffer, the social media scheduling tool. Buffer is famous in the startup world for radical transparency: it publishes its salaries, revenue and shareholder updates, and it bought back control from its venture investors to run as an independent, profitable company.

Gascoigne was born and raised in Sheffield, England, and lived in Utsunomiya, Japan, for a few years as a child. In late 2010, while living in Birmingham and working a full-time job, he built the first version of Buffer to schedule his own tweets. The first version went live on November 30, 2010, and he soon teamed up with Leo Widrich. Buffer went through AngelPad in 2011 and raised a $330,000 seed round that December.

The company passed $1 million in annual revenue in January 2013 and $2 million that September. In 2013 it published every employee's salary along with the formula behind it. A $3.5 million Series A followed in late 2014. After layoffs in 2015 Buffer became profitable, and in July 2018 it spent $3.3 million, about half its cash, to buy out its main Series A investors so it could stop optimising for venture-style growth. The team, fully distributed across many countries, later moved to a four-day work week.

In his May 2025 shareholder update, Gascoigne reported $1.87 million in MRR ($22.4 million ARR), 67,572 paying customers and a team of 72, with ARR back above its February 2020 peak after a roughly 20% decline. Buffer still shuts down products that do not fit, such as the Pablo image tool in 2024.

Gascoigne has lived in the UK, the US, Hong Kong and South Africa while running Buffer, and has been an angel investor since the company's first liquidity in 2014. He matters to bootstrappers as proof that a VC-funded company can walk back to independence, and as one of the earliest founders to build in public at scale.