Tomer London: Prior founder experience accelerates validation, but PMF requires luck
Tomer London · How Gusto built a $9.5 billion company by identifying a burning problem · Jul 1, 2025 · at 7:54
Gusto co-founder Tomer London reflects on whether Gusto's multi-billion dollar success was driven by founder skill and past startup experience or by timing and luck.
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“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 about it. But helping avoid some of these mistakes, that's one. Two is it kind of gives you some shortcuts to doing things correctly. Doing things right, so you don't need to do so much searching about, you know, how to do something, because you've done this before. The last thing is absolutely, like, I think, you know, you can move faster in validating or invalidating ideas, but in the end of the day, you know, to strike gold, to get to that product market fit, to be the right, you know, the right team at the right time, there's incredible amount of luck involved as well.”
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