Gusto uses a Rails monolith.
https://engineering.gusto.com describes some of their experiences with it.
Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
51–60 of 159 posts
Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
#52I love it when I don't have to think about things, and Gusto combined with Stripe (Atlas and card processing) have made it possible for me to not ever think about a whole lot of things. Now if only there was a company as good as Stripe/Gusto that did accounting+taxes, I'd really be set! I mean, "I give you access to my accounts, (almost) never think about you, and I have a proper set of books and my taxes are fully d…
Pilot.com founder here. This is exactly the startup that we're working on! We have 500+ customers including 100+ YC companies and fully take care of bookkeeping + taxes. Feel free to drop me a note at jeff@pilot.com if I can help.
Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly my feeling. Gusto just comes across as a nauseatingly virtue-signaling company (another is Lyft which I found out when I interviewed with them). I read an interview somewhere by Joshua Reeves, and he seemed to answer every question like he was Tony Robbins or some top-level guru. Dude, I don't want your life advice, tell me how to run a profitable company. Silicon Valley tech is overtaken by this need…
>That's one big reason I wanna leave this place and work for a more blue-collar tech place I'm guessing you'll quickly find that a "blue-collar tech place" isn't quite the panacea you expect. There's a reason no one in Silicon Valley pines for traditional corporate culture. Because it sucks really bad. Putting up with some faux-wokeness is a small price to pay to get away from it.
Personally if I had to choose the tech equivalent of a "blue-collar" company I'd want to work at it'd be Costco.
Pay above average with good benefits, no uniforms (white collar equivalent of the uniform is in-your-face "culture"), no frills, no BS.
Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
#54I'm really happy for them. I used to like Gusto a lot. It worked fairly well when we were a few people, but as we grew, things started breaking, especially as our setup started becoming more and more complicated. For instance, we have offices in 5 states and two countries. Gusto doesn't support outside of US folks, so we had to maintain two systems. One of the most frustrating things was the 2 day payroll. They turne…
They completely fucked me over. Not only did they not pay out commuter benefits (send the confirmation emails, didn't actually put the money in my account), but they ignored 4 (!!!) support requests in a row, sent once per day for a week. It wasn't until I got on the phone and was rude to someone that they deigned to help... and then missed their self-imposed communication deadlines.
Complete incompetent shitshow.
So yeah -- in case you were pondering using Gusto, just know that
* not paying out $250 in commuter benefits owed;
* not noticing the extra cash in their bank account;
* ignoring 3 polite emails to the support addresses, and one less polite request;
* ignoring the first phone call;
* requiring you to be rude;
* blowing their self-set update deadline;
is all part of the wonderful Gusto experience!
If you use them, I'd strongly suggest checking that all your commuter benefit reimbursements actually landed in your bank account.
Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
#55I'm really happy for them. I used to like Gusto a lot. It worked fairly well when we were a few people, but as we grew, things started breaking, especially as our setup started becoming more and more complicated. For instance, we have offices in 5 states and two countries. Gusto doesn't support outside of US folks, so we had to maintain two systems. One of the most frustrating things was the 2 day payroll. They turne…
Does rippling work better for non-US and contractors?
Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
#56I truly don't understand why a payroll company would need to raise 200 million dollars and what they could possibly do with the bulk of it aside from buying 24k gold toilets. You're not going to hire 200 million worth of people, or buy that many ads, you could build your own server farm for a fraction of that and cloud services would take quite a long time to burn through that. So why?
Why would you sell that much of your company to investors?
Why would you invest that much money in a payroll company?
I can sometimes understand it, say a company was working on some sort of energy generation and needed tens of millions of dollars of equipment/infrastructure to even start truly testing their idea, or you were going to sell some physical good that was going to sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars per unit and you've already been selling other versions but need a large amount of cash for the MOQ to manufacture your new hardware in the best setting and banks are hesitant to pony up, but for a payroll company?!
This stuff always blows my mind.
Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
#57It seems like a good product, though I always get very uneasy by companies that have extreme company cultures. If you work there, you can’t wear shoes in the office (to give the feeling of being at home?) and apparently you need to change your LinkedIn headline to say you “Empower” X or Y. I feel like every blog post I’ve ever seen from this company is about their “mission-driven culture.” Can we go back to a time wh…
I once almost worked at a beer company where they would literally ask you on your interview which was your favorite beer. This was a mass-produced, cheap lager like Budweiser, so clearly it could not be anyone's favorite beer... but apparently if you didn't say their product was the best you couldn't get a job there. I straight up lied in my interview and accepted the eventual job offer, only to renege on it after ge…
Literally drinking the kool-aid.
Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
#58It seems like a good product, though I always get very uneasy by companies that have extreme company cultures. If you work there, you can’t wear shoes in the office (to give the feeling of being at home?) and apparently you need to change your LinkedIn headline to say you “Empower” X or Y. I feel like every blog post I’ve ever seen from this company is about their “mission-driven culture.” Can we go back to a time wh…
It's what cults do. I know this as being raised in scientology. You control their actions and thoughts.
Yikes. I hear ya brother. Was not raised in it, but my aunt owned a private 'applied scholastics' school and I was a student there for a few years. What a trip that was.
Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly my feeling. Gusto just comes across as a nauseatingly virtue-signaling company (another is Lyft which I found out when I interviewed with them). I read an interview somewhere by Joshua Reeves, and he seemed to answer every question like he was Tony Robbins or some top-level guru. Dude, I don't want your life advice, tell me how to run a profitable company. Silicon Valley tech is overtaken by this need…
>That's one big reason I wanna leave this place and work for a more blue-collar tech place I'm guessing you'll quickly find that a "blue-collar tech place" isn't quite the panacea you expect. There's a reason no one in Silicon Valley pines for traditional corporate culture. Because it sucks really bad. Putting up with some faux-wokeness is a small price to pay to get away from it.
Partially agree. I have no inclination to work for IBM or corporate software. Just wanna work for a startup where I can crack non PC jokes. Where the company hires for competence and not because they wanna show off that they hire 50% women.
I think the Valley was like this 10 years ago.
Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
#60It seems like a good product, though I always get very uneasy by companies that have extreme company cultures. If you work there, you can’t wear shoes in the office (to give the feeling of being at home?) and apparently you need to change your LinkedIn headline to say you “Empower” X or Y. I feel like every blog post I’ve ever seen from this company is about their “mission-driven culture.” Can we go back to a time wh…
This is exactly my feeling. Gusto just comes across as a nauseatingly virtue-signaling company (another is Lyft which I found out when I interviewed with them). I read an interview somewhere by Joshua Reeves, and he seemed to answer every question like he was Tony Robbins or some top-level guru. Dude, I don't want your life advice, tell me how to run a profitable company. Silicon Valley tech is overtaken by this need…
If you think that is a valley only thing you are highly mistaken. Its actually worse in other tech areas like Austin.