Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 159 posts

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#61

Post by user5994461 »

ryanmercer wrote: post #56

I 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…

One way to think about it is that each employees costs $100k or $200k a year.

So for $100M, you can comfortably afford a few hundreds people for a few years with all the office space, benefits and hardware required. A regular small-medium business really, nothing special.

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#62

Post by edawerd »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

What R&D does a payroll provider do? (Genuine question)

Co-founder and CTO of Gusto here.

This is a REALLY good question and something that's hard to appreciate until you actually to build a payroll system. I think a common misnomer is that if you're not doing ML/AI/AR/blockchain/[insert latest technology here], you're not doing R&D.

The domain of Payroll turns out to be an incredible complex business domain. I think Ron Jeffries says it best in his post: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard

The software design of such a complex business domain at scale turns out to be an incredibly hard engineering challenge, and something that is often overlooked when we think about big engineering challenges.

A little known fact is XP and Agile were developed by Kent Beck while working on a Payroll system for Chrysler (In fact, Kent now works at Gusto to help us with our payroll system).

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#64

Post by edawerd »

jedberg wrote: post #10
edawerd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Cofounder and CTO here. We offer workers compensation insurance in all 50 states!

Is that new? Last year I had an employee in Washington and I had to call the State of Washington to set it up, for example. If it's new, that great! You should have told me. :)

nope! we've had it for many years now!

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#65

Post by ryguytilidie »

Meekro wrote: post #14

I 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…

I have an accountant and theyre tech savvy and thats pretty much how it all works.

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#66

Post by ojeggplant »

tempsy wrote: post #18

It 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…

You can wear your shoes in the Gusto office. A good number of us do; in fact I'm doing so right now. I think it's more that you have the option and encouragement to walk around freely without shoes, whereas other offices would probably frown on you for going into a meeting with just socks.

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#67

Post by ryanmercer »

user5994461 wrote: post #61
ryanmercer wrote: post #56

I 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…

One way to think about it is that each employees costs $100k or $200k a year. So for $100M, you can comfortably afford a few hundreds people for a few years with all the office space, benefits and hardware required. A regular small-medium business really, nothing special.

>One way to think about it is that each employees costs $100k or $200k a year.

Those are some expensive employees, me and my friends don't cost anywhere remotely near that. I make 34k a year after 13 years on the job. A company doesn't have to hire in one of the highest COL cities in the country.

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#68

Post by tyre »

tempsy wrote: post #18

It 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…

To be clear, no shoes in the office thing was started because the streets of SF are super dirty.

I hear you on the empower language. It’s always sounded a bit forced to me but I see what they’re going for. Managers should focus on helping their reports be successful rather than getting into management because they want power or status or whatever. Which isn’t to say that renaming titles with fix that, but it is one small communication of what’s important to leadership.

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#69

Post by user5994461 »

ryanmercer wrote: post #67
user5994461 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to think about it is that each employees costs $100k or $200k a year. So for $100M, you can comfortably afford a few hundreds people for a few years with all the office space, benefits and hardware required. A regular small-medium business really, nothing special.

>One way to think about it is that each employees costs $100k or $200k a year. Those are some expensive employees, me and my friends don't cost anywhere remotely near that. I make 34k a year after 13 years on the job. A company doesn't have to hire in one of the highest COL cities in the country.

It's fully loaded costs, an employee is a lot more expensive than just the yearly salary. Looks like they're expanding to NYC so definitely closer to $200k.

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#70

Post by throwaway082729 »

tempsy wrote: post #18

It 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…

In the Bay Area where opportunities abound and switching jobs is easy, companies need a way to brainwash you and help you settle into a nice cocoon so that employees don't consider leaving. If it feels like a job, any job is fine. If it feels like home or like a family, you wouldn't want to leave, would you? Companies without a strong culture or with a traditional culture experience a high rate of attrition at the hint of the slightest bad news.
Post reply on HN