Tomer London
Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Gusto. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
3shows
3appearances
56statements
6resolved
5supported
0contradicted
83%fully supported
9said about them ↓ Everything Tomer London said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Tomer London: Initial product-market fit means 2 out of 10 prospects love the product
“Product market fit for me is that when you talk with 10 customers, two people are loving this and want this. That's great product market fit. Now, you need to figure out who's the two, who, what makes them special, who are the segments, and then you can pick 1…”
London: Payroll onboarding makes adding adjacent HR tools frictionless
“Payroll data is very, very powerful because onboarding is so complex. There's so much that you need to, we need to know about you as a company in terms of your employees and where, Where, where they work and how much they get paid and like your company address…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
Tomer London: Prior founder experience accelerates validation, but PMF requires luck
“I think having multiple founding journeys for me, having Josh and Eddie, having previous startups, it helps you by one, knowing how to avoid some mistakes. So you don't repeat the same mistakes. So for me, like I can give you a bunch of mistakes. We can talk a…”
London: A true growth mindset means feeling embarrassed by your past self
“What I mean by humble is self-critical in a constructive way. It's kind of like growth mindset, right? Like knowing that you are a work in progress. Every day you're supposed to be better, which means that if, when you look at yourself a month ago or it's a ye…”
London: Strong customer intuition means predicting what customers will say next
“Speak with customers so much, in fact, that you know, you can just start predicting what they're going to say next, because you've heard it so many times before, right? That when you start knowing that, that's like, oh, I've heard this before. Then you know th…”
London: Polite customer feedback provides zero signal compared to extreme reactions
“You need to build a business that's built on either
I want it right now.
Can I get it?
And then you put a price tag and they're saying, I will pay for it, right?
So strong positive emotion or strong negative emotion.
It's like, this is absolute shit.
I w…”
London: Product Creators Must Actively Seek Rejection in Customer Discovery
“When you speak with a customer, you kind of need to be in the mindset of seeking rejection. You go out there to learn, and again, the learning comes so much from rejection, so you got to go out there and seek that rejection”
London: Non-tech small businesses are eager to talk to product builders
“You would be surprised how many people actually are excited to speak with technologists. Most people outside of Silicon Valley, like small businesses and real, you know, industry and people don't get to speak with technologists often that can build products.”
London: Founders building multi-decade companies should codify values by hire three
“When you think multi, multi-decade, you put down your value. It makes sense for you to codify your values, put them down, make sure that you hire according to them, and you reward people according to them. Starting very, very early, like your first, second, th…”
London: Payroll pain is universal across industries, not unique to tech startups
“It ended up being that the inside is that payroll, the pain from payroll was across industries. It was not just startups. And the pain was strong enough that even if we did not have a personal network with dentists dentists love gusto.”
London: Monthly release deadlines enforce disciplined scoping by building backwards
“Having a monthly release means that you're building backwards instead of building forward. So you have like, hey, by the end of this month, here's the stuff we need to ship, right? And those things you can talk later about how you know what to ship, but like, …”
London: Founders should build with multiple teams to recognize co-founder fit
“The advice here for every single, every founder is to try to build stuff with a bunch of different teams and a bunch of different people, you know, and kind of go through this iteration. Because then when you get someone that's like a fit for you, like it just…”
London: Framing yourself as a student or foreigner disarms customer interviewees
“The first one is, hey, I'm a PhD student from Stanford, and I have a few questions. Do you mind helping? So that again really opens the other person to kind of to being open. They feel like they're not being sold to, or something like that. Then the other one …”
London: Payroll is not a winner-take-most market as incumbents thrive
“I don't think it's a market win all, win most. Like, our big competitors when we started are still around and are doing really well. Like you know, Intuit, ADP, Paycheck all have really large payroll businesses still today.”
London: Small businesses need centralized compliance dashboards, not just embedded workflow checks
“Yeah, I think because it wasn't totally clear what would be the business model around it, because compliance is a set of hundreds of thousands of interactions, and the way we kind of did it was every time we built something, well, we made sure it was compliant…”
London: It took five years and tens of millions in ARR to feel PMF
“It took me years, like maybe five years until I felt like, huh, ok, this is going well. So it may be like post-series B, like, you know, I don't know, like the tens of millions of AR, when I felt like, ok, this is actually, this is going well.”
London: Startups must target narrow customer segments to drive word-of-mouth growth
“These initial customers are your seed for your word of mouth and everything flows from there. So to do that, you need to be very, very selective on a small sub segment of target customer.”
Founders must be able to watch early customers use the product in-person
“It's really important for these initial customers for you to feel like you, they, you can spend time with them. You can watch them as they use your product.”
The other half of the tape: Tomer London's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 9 times in 6 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 5Kevin Busque 3Matt Ocko 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 6
In Depth 3
2025 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2020 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Retool Founder, David Hsu on Why YC Is Helpful Pre Product-Market Fit but Not Post and Why VCs Are Not Helpful Pre-Product Market-Fit but are Post, Why it is Difficult to Become Unprofitable if You Set Yourself Up For Profitability Early & Why VC Th
- 20VC: Vinod Khosla on What Venture Assistance Really Means, Why Many VCs Are Not Qualified To Advise Founders & Why Startups Can Innovate So Much Faster Than Incumbents
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Tomer's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN DEPTHLEDGER | Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Gusto | 1 | 27 | 67% 2/3 | full record on In Depth → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Gusto | 1 | 15 | 100% 2/2 | full record on 20VC → |
 a16zLEDGER | Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Gusto | 1 | 14 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |