Tomer London
Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Gusto · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
27statements → 7claims → 3claims resolved → 67%fully supported → 3.81/5average certainty → 1.63/5average debate potential → 3said about them ↓
2 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
7 assertions · 1 opinion · 15 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 4 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
London: Early payroll software separated paying workers from tax filings
“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 …”
Everything Tomer London said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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…”
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: Gusto's YC Demo Day pitch mapped expansion beyond payroll
“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…”
Gusto co-founders held weekly Friday 1-on-1 feedback sessions from early days
“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…”
London: Early payroll software separated paying workers from tax filings
“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 …”
London: Gusto achieved an NPS over 85 before expanding payroll
“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.”
London: 17 of 20 Gusto customers pre-signed for health benefits
“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…”
Tomer London: Remote Work Made Multi-State Compliance Vital for Small Businesses
“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…”
London: About 500,000 new employers are created annually in the US
“There's half a million new employers coming in to the US every year.”
London cold-called Yelp businesses from a walk-in closet for early validation
“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…”
The other half of the tape: Tomer London's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 1 episode on In Depth. every mention, with the transcript →
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Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| How Gusto built a $9.5 billion company by identifying a burning problem | Jul 1, 2025 | 41m |