Tomer London

Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Gusto · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@tomerlondon ↗LinkedIn ↗gusto.com ↗

In 2011, London co-founded Gusto, an HR, payroll, and benefits platform serving hundreds of thousands of businesses. Before starting Gusto, he co-founded Vizmo and now actively angel invests in software and fintech startups.

15statements → 4claims → 2claims resolved → 3.87/5average certainty → 2.07/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 6said about them ↓

2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 3 assertions · 1 opinion · 8 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Tomer argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Gusto serves over 100,000 small business customers across the United States

“We're serving over a 100,000 small businesses across the country, across all these different industries.”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 10:29 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

none yet certainty 3

100% certainty 4

100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

267 words/min while actually speaking · 2.1 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Tomer London: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 24 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 5,634 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Tomer London is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 3/10

pushed back at the host 3/10

setup questions received 75%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 10:25“How do you know when's the right time to go big?” ▶ 14:27“Does that element of delight go against that incredibly lean MVP, given delight may be” ▶ 20:58“How do you think about the balance and relationship of product dev And also hard and fast scaling, whether they actually are contrary to each other.”

What they said15 What others said6 Episodes1

Everything Tomer London said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Founders should raise capital to execute goals, not set goals for fundraising

“Investors kind of set the tone. And sometimes the implied conversation there is, what do you need to do? You need to do A, B, and C in order to raise your seed bounce. You need to do D, E, and F to raise your series A. And I think that's just a really wrong wa…”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 6:54 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Insight

VC Twitter echo chambers destroy the mental space needed for original thought

“I think social media in general, like, you know, the amount of information, the amount of opinions, the amount of knowledge out there has a lot of positives, but it also has some negatives, and we talk a lot here about being in a bubble, and kind of the echo c…”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 7:34 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Insight

Product delight cannot be added retroactively and must be designed from inception

“You can't add delight later. When you look at a product, our experience, you have to think about delight as an inherent part of the product itself.”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 13:48 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Insight

Founders should cut feature scope rather than product delight when launching

“So the way to solve it is not for us, it is not like cut the delight element out. It's got the functionality down. It's scope it down to a place where it's small enough that you can test it and then ship it.”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 15:51 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Opinion

Net Promoter Score is insufficient on its own to evaluate customer sentiment

“NPS is not the one metric. Like, it's not the one place you go and you know everything about how people think about your product or love your product at all.”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 19:28 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Insight

Gusto evaluates prospective investors using its employee interview criteria

“We're still doing this today, which is thinking about investors as team members. When you bring in a new Gusti, that's how we call our own team members. When you bring in a new Gusti on board, there's an interview process, right? And there's like a whole lot o…”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 8:59 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Gusto's $200M funding round compressed its next revenue milestone timeline by years

“Instead of getting to the next revenue milestone, in five years, we're going to get to shrink it to three years.”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 11:42 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Gusto's payday notification email achieves one of the highest open rates ever

“It's the highest open rate email probably ever.”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 17:32 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Insight

The first 30 seconds of user onboarding establish a product's brand personality

“And for me, the way I think about this is a brand or a product experience is really like some, like a product is like a personality. It's like a person. And when you meet someone for the first time, the first 20 seconds, the 1:30 seconds really, really matter.…”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 18:34 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Insight

Hiring solves 80% of the challenge of preserving product quality while scaling

“So I think 80% of this is really solved by hiring. And the other 20% is solved by making sure we don't miss out on opportunities that are not directly staring us at the face.”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 22:21 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Insight

Founders must fire and rehire themselves into new roles every six months

“This idea of kind of like firing yourself from your old role and hiring yourself to the new role is something that I think the three of us really took to heart and it's been really helpful.”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 23:34 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Assertion Supported

Gusto serves over 100,000 small business customers across the United States

“We're serving over a 100,000 small businesses across the country, across all these different industries.”

Disclosure

Gusto streams every customer NPS comment into an open company-wide Slack channel

“The other thing is about comments, and you know, we have like a Slack channel in Gusto, it's open to everyone, where literally every single NPS comment has been read by many, many people in our Gusto team, and especially The product and design teams.”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 20:13 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Assertion Supported

Gusto grew from three founders to 1,200 employees in eight years

“So I think the company eight years ago when we started, we were three and now we're around 1200 people.”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 22:54 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

Disclosure

Gusto's co-founders spent five hours every Sunday aligning on company culture

“In the early days, Josh and I, we're meeting together every Sunday for four hours, five hours in, in Eddie's apartment building in San Francisco. And we were just talking about these, exactly these types of things, how to handle these things.”

Tomer London Feb 28, 2020 ▶ 27:31 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con

The other half of the tape: Tomer London's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 5 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 5 Matt Ocko 1