Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Oh, very. Hey, that's great. That's a good, that's for the best answer. That's the best non answer I've had to that question. We'll put it like that, Josh. That's good. Let's talk about Gusto. So what, first off, what gave you the idea and what does Gusto do?
A Yeah, we got started about four years ago and launched three years ago. Um, and what we do is help teams build, um, companies or managers build great teams and help people do their best work. What that means is payroll, HR benefits, health insurance, et cetera. Um, but how we got into this space was actually from what we were just talking about. I have two co-founders. Each of us had had these prior companies and we had all experienced that pain of using other systems, doing it in a fairly manual way. And besides our own frustration, we actually each have family that have helped to run small businesses for quite some time. And, um, basically those experiences gave us some perspective on a problem. And that's how I describe, uh, the essence of our type of business, which I think of as a mission driven business. We didn't kind of start a company to find a problem to solve. We're solving this problem by building a business. And in our case, there's some huge stats out there, like of the six million companies in the U S every year, about a third of companies get fined for incorrectly doing their payroll taxes. Um, that was shocking to us. It's kind of crazy to think that there's that many folks doing it, um, by hand, making mistakes, um, facing penalties. And we knew that it didn't have to be that way. We wanted to use technology to help fix that problem.
AI assessment note: “What that means is payroll, HR benefits, health insurance, et cetera.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q And so, so is the tool, let's kind of break this down. Is it a software as a service? Is it a kind of a monthly subscription business?
A And yeah, so the way to think about, um, we have, it's a software as a service, um, We give folks a chance to partner with us, and there's really two main things we do for them. One is we hopefully bring them peace of mind because we're doing all their taxes, all their filings, all their direct deposits, all their insurance setup, all of these really complex processes that usually take a lot of time and a lot of headache, and we're doing it for them automatically in software. And I always describe it as, you know, a business owner isn't better off by signing their name on the fifth document for the government in a different color pen. Right. They have to get the document signed. They have to get the payment completed. It has to be done accurately, but this is really a distraction from focusing on the most important part of their company, which is their team and their customer. And so we do one part there, which is automating all that complex pieces. But the other part of what we do is, is help you build your company where, You know, what we're doing in our product is you're adding new employees. You're, um, showing appreciation for their hard work. You're seeing who you work with this people side of how you run your business. If you've seen the movie office space, you know what I'm talking about in terms of, um, a lot of companies that I think end up feeling very, very sterile.…
AI assessment note: “it's a software as a service... it's a monthly subscription.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q And what would a five person company pay you? A lot of folks listening in are potentially running five to 10 person companies.
A Yeah, so our pricing, it's actually very simple. It's 29 dollars a month for the company and six dollars per employee. So a five person business is going to be, uh, 59 dollars a month, and that's for everything. There's no Quarterly filing fee. There's no annual filing fee. There's no direct deposit fee. There's no W two processing fee. We think in general, there's a shift towards transparent, simple pricing, especially in financial services. And it's a good thing for the customer because all too often it's very complex for you to even find out what the cost is. If anyone goes to our homepage, you just literally You know, enter in how many employees you have. We tell you the monthly fee, and it only changes based on how many employees you have inside your company.
AI assessment note: “So a five person business is going to be, uh, 59 dollars a month”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Okay, oh, I'm sure there's cost advantages for the Denver team, right?
A Um, I joke sometimes, I'm a Bay Area native, love San Francisco. Everywhere in the world today is actually more affordable than San Francisco. But, um, Denver really wasn't about cost as much as just wanting to have a separate base of a place where a lot of people are eager to live. There's 2000 people a week moving to Colorado. Mm-hmm. From all over the US. And so we wanted to have two bases. SF and Denver will have every team in the company in both locations. And we're growing, we're growing in both locations. Right now, um, over 275 members of Gusto are still in San Francisco. That team will continue growing. Um, but we're excited to now be ramping in Denver as well.
AI assessment note: “Denver really wasn't about cost as much as just wanting to have a separate base”
