Gusto

“And a lot of times, if you find a leader that can convince you on the problem, that's where my, a lot of my like, okay, I trust the intuition on this because I can, they can reasonably articulate to me why they believe, we might not know this all yet, but like…”

“And good judgment is something that is best screened for at the point of interview.”

“So if you break down our customer set and we have north of 300,000 small businesses on Gusto now, And you look at them sort of by traditional industry segmentation, it's very evenly distributed across a lot of industries.”

“There are like, even horizons within a product. So you look at something like payroll, for example, our payroll product is our, is the backbone of gusto. There's a lot of things we're going to do that adds into what we already have. That is high rate of succes…”

“When you look at it over a three year view, you're like, okay, that's a Horizon three thing. But then when you break it down into what we're going to do in the next year, it's oftentimes a reasonable adjacency that is the first step towards that. And we can ki…”

“If we're going to expand off the wedge, how does the wedge product, whatever the first one is, really help unlock the door to the second? What are the sort of unique insight, unique advantage or right to win? Does the first product open up for the second?”

“So if you wanted to be completely full stack or bundled solution, you also had to become an RIA. Becoming a registered investment advisor means you have to register with the SEC. The SEC has all of these different things. Now you have the SEC, the IRS, and the…”

“And they can be start to finish. It was eight minutes. And that was just like unheard of in, in the four one K lens.”

“So if you have one or more employees in California, you now have to meet this mandate, which is just a huge, that's 200,000 small businesses across Gusto and Intuit alone.”

“We totally made this market with the help of gusto in our early days.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“I remember sitting in a room and calling 20 of Gusto's customers that I thought could be a good fit for it. And I was pitching them like, Hey, we're going to build this. You know, here's how much it's going to cost. Can I sign you up? And I got like, 17 out of…”

“Most payroll services back then actually split that job to two different things. There's one which is paying your employees, and there's two is paying your taxes. There was two different workflows, two different situations. Some companies just did one and not …”

“I actually went, personally onboarded every single employee, every single one of these, the first, I want to say, 50 companies.”

“When we started the company, one of the insights that we had was, you know, I talked with like, I closed myself in a room, I mean like in a walking closet when we were, where we were living. And every day I was like, I'm going to, for a whole hour, I'm going t…”

“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…”

“The thing that really helped us is this idea of like having a weekly founder one-on-one. So what we did is every Friday we had three one-on-ones you know, Josh and Eddie Tom and Josh, Tom and Eddie. And in those conversations and this was from the very, very e…”

“The last slide was all about that. It was about, hey, we're starting from payroll. The next step is benefits and HR. And from there, it's going to be a full what we call their people platform. So everything, you know, to help you start building, grow your busi…”

“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, …”

“So for a full self-service product, so full meaning, you know, you could onboard, run payroll probably took a year until that. And then the folks that used it before that year, that full year you know, kind of used me as an interface in a bunch of places. So w…”

“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…”

“Once we saw we had product, or we had like a very high NPS, over 85, that was kind of what we knew that would be, you know, the customer love we need, and then we kind of expanded.”

“We did not do like a big market analysis. We actually, I didn't even know. We, I don't think we knew so much how hard it is to switch payroll providers. We took us a few months to actually, while building the flow for it, we're like, wait a minute, this is a l…”

“Multi-state used to be something that, you know, only large companies cared about. So it wasn't like, it wasn't, it was kind of on our roadmap, but it wasn't like that important for us. And then all of a sudden with COVID, a bunch of people working remotely an…”