The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 29 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: Bootstrapped SaaS startups risk falling behind venture-backed rivals
“Maybe it's not even until after five or ten million where if you don't have capital, you can't all be Atlassian or Qualtrics. Or, and they fall behind competitively. And I think that's the trap of the fallacy of the lifestyle-esque business, right? Where media…”
Max Altman admits holding Gusto past its $10B valuation was a mistake
“It might not have hurt to sell Gusto. I think Gusto's a great business, but I think, you know, they were valued at ten billion at one point, and I think they're still gonna be a strong business. I don't know if they're gonna have explosive growth from there.”
General Catalyst's top early fund expected to return 13x to 15x
“Yeah, that fund is one of our Two or three best funds, and just to tell you what was in it was Livongo was in that, Snap was in that, Circle was in that, Gusto I think I'm missing a few others. It's probably gonna end up being a, you know, 13 to 15 X fund.”
Taneja: Standard 'triple, triple, double, double' SaaS growth metrics are obsolete
“The normal has changed. We used to think about, hey, you go, like when we did Samsara and you know, Gusto and some of these companies are like, yeah, triple, triple, there you go, triple, triple, triple, double, double, right? And you look at these companies a…”
Lemkin: Passing on Great Founders Over Competition Misses Out on Category Winners
“I believe the best opportunities find you at the end of the day. It's not that you don't find them. Okay. But they also find you by the same token. And if you're gonna pass on an amazing binary set of founders, an amazing CEO, CTO, just because they're in a co…”
Data Collective passed on Gusto follow-ons because it wasn't deep tech
“We didn't follow on. We didn't raise our hand to be the big dog in successive rounds. And it had nothing to do with the quality of the company. And people trust us when we explain that because the company was a wonderfully engineered, great SAS company deliver…”
Emergence Capital backed Gusto over faster-growing rival Zenefits
“We had just invested in Gusto, which was a competitor that was growing not quite as quickly as Zenefits. But the reality is Gusto has endured and become a massive company, and Zenefits didn't.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Gomila: ADP and Paychex had terrible software and split market share
“So we knew at the time that ADP and paychecks were We're pretty crappy software companies. Like the software was terrible. There was not a monopoly on either side. Both companies, you know, had roughly equal market share.”
Taneja: General Catalyst advised Gusto not to copy Zenefits' scaling playbook
“In the very first board meeting, Josh said, we have this competitor called Zenefis, who I had met. I knew what the company was doing. They're going exceptionally fast. They've got a business model that's working really well, and they're outpacing us significan…”
Nozad committed to his largest angel investment, Gusto, in 15 minutes
“It's my biggest, single biggest angel investment ever, and when I met Josh, it took me like 15 minutes to commit, and I didn't see even one page of the product he's building”
Taneja lost Series A deals in Stripe, Samsara, and Snap before Gusto
“I lost a Series A of Stripe. I lost a Series A of Samsara. I lost a Series A of Snap. And the first one I won was a Series A of Gusto.”
O'Driscoll: Scale passed on Gusto after underestimating the founder and market
“I think I underestimated both the founder and the openness of the market to switch and I'll say something else, the willingness of investors to pay up quickly for that, such that it got outside my price range very quickly, right? Stuff happens, you know, and y…”
Saper: Top Emergence investments like Zoom were expensive, but Veeva wasn't
“They are not always expensive, but they are often expensive. So if I look back at our portfolio, Gusto was expensive. Zoom was expensive. Yammer was expensive. A lot of the good ones, Ironclad was expensive. But some of them weren't. Viva wasn't expensive beca…”
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.”
Gusto's payday notification email achieves one of the highest open rates ever
“It's the highest open rate email probably ever.”
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.”
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.”
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.…”
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…”
Gil: Invested in Stripe and Gusto because he needed them as founder
“So for example, a few years ago, I invested in a set of companies based solely on the fact that I would have used them at my first startup. I would have used Stripe for payments. I invested in Stripe. I would have used Mailgun for email, and so I invested in M…”
Wesley Chan Wrote First Checks Into Robinhood, Plaid, Gusto, and Flexport
“And, you know, I was able to write the first check in the, you know, companies like Robinhood or Platt or Gusto or Flexport.”
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.”
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.”
Mercor Founders Paid Themselves $500 per Month Before Seed Funding
“We changed our like salaries and gusto to 500 dollars a month.”
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.”