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Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

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Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#81

Post by anurag »

jbarnold wrote: post #52
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…

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.

Extremely happy Pilot customer for render.com. Can't go wrong with them.

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#82

Post by jedberg »

edawerd wrote: post #64
jedberg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Then maybe we aren't talking about the same thing. When I added an employee in Washington, I had to apply online and then call them directly to get the employee set up. One of the things I had to do was buy Worker's Comp insurance through the State of Washington, because no one else will sell it. Also, I had to get my UBI number from them.

Ideally I would tell you guys "I have a new employee in Washington!" and that would be the end of the story, you'd do all the rest. That's what I'm hoping you can get to at least!

(To be clear, the part you can do today is already amazing and super helpful, I'm just being greedy because I'd rather spend time on product than on calling the State of Washington

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#83

Post by doh »

scrollaway wrote: post #55
doh wrote: post #50

I'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?

It does. It doesn't separate them and just allows you to have different types of workers in the same system. So for us we can have the same PTO, hardware and other things equal across the board, even if the employees are not equal in the eyes of the government.

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#84

Post by cosmodisk »

stevekemp wrote: post #19
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 Finland it is common for people to remove shoes indoors - I guess walking through slush/ice/snow in winters makes that a good habit - and that often extends to company-offices. Of course outside there it would seem a little odd to many, I'm sure. Though sliding around polished floor, in your socks? Never gets old. Maybe I'm just a child..

Lithuanian here.Most people would kick you out if you wouldn't take your shoes upon entering their homes. However I'm yet to see an office where people would walk shoeless( to have more comfortable footwear for office use only is acceptable,but no slippers).. Also carpets or carpet flooring isn't something one would normally would see in an office,as opposed to, let's say Britain.Most offices have either tiles,laminate or some other, easy to clean surface. During Autumn or winter,people do clean their shoes well enough before entering premises,so no snow or water is brought to the office,as not doing so is a big no no and is frown upon in most cases.

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#85

Post by Meekro »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #73
Meekro wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually a customer of Bench.co, but I've been somewhat frustrated and thinking about leaving. First, they are very slow-- the books for a given month are usually finalized at least a month later (so your May books won't be fully ready until July, sometimes even later). By the time they are ready, the information is "old news" and not useful for decision making. I end up running queries against my Stripe data to…

With 600k in revenue why don't you just get a real accountant firm to take care of that for you?

My first attempt to find one blew up in my face. =(

I lived in LA at the time, so I looked for highly-rated local accountants on Yelp. The search led me to this one[1], who proceeded to make a series of nasty mistakes that led to a taxation authority seizing money from my bank account (among other problems). The whole mess took months of time and many thousands of dollars to clean up.

Later on, I settled on bench.co doing the bookkeeping, and found a CPA firm to prepare the taxes every year. It basically works, but it still feels archaic and clunky. Several people here suggested pilot, so I might look at that next.

If you have an accountant you'd like to recommend, I'd definitely be grateful!

[1] https://www.yelp.com/biz/james-m-cha-cpa-los-angeles

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#86

Post by cosmodisk »

baxtr wrote: post #43
stevekemp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Finland it is common for people to remove shoes indoors - I guess walking through slush/ice/snow in winters makes that a good habit - and that often extends to company-offices. Of course outside there it would seem a little odd to many, I'm sure. Though sliding around polished floor, in your socks? Never gets old. Maybe I'm just a child..

One of my colleagues wears only happy socks during Winter, no shoes. It’s great because there always something to talk about whenever people bump into him.

I do have a set of black socks with weekdays written on them. I usually grab a random pair in the morning and go to work.I did have quite a few comments that I'm not wearing the right socks for the day,i.e. Friday socks on Tuesday,etc.:)

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#87

Post by user5994461 »

ryanmercer wrote: post #79
user5994461 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My 34k salary does not cost my company 200k, I don't know what benefits you get but for me to cost my company that they'd have to feed me multiple times every day (worth pointing out here, most companies do not provide ANY food or drink outside of tap water) and give me a phone and a car and a bonus or four and I probably still wouldn't get close to costing them 100k. Most people don't make 100k, or anything close to…

Worth noting that just like you pay 30% of your salary into rent, the company also pays a two digits percentage of your salary into office space.

So when management says the overhead is only 1.25, they clearly missed out on a lot of things.

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#88

Post by jagannathtech »

DidISayTooMuch wrote: post #59
drstewart wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

No place like that anymore

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#89

Post by ryanmercer »

ryanmercer wrote: post #79
user5994461 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My 34k salary does not cost my company 200k, I don't know what benefits you get but for me to cost my company that they'd have to feed me multiple times every day (worth pointing out here, most companies do not provide ANY food or drink outside of tap water) and give me a phone and a car and a bonus or four and I probably still wouldn't get close to costing them 100k. Most people don't make 100k, or anything close to…

To -user5994461-, I can't reply directly to you but:

Commercial real estate is pretty cheap in most of the country, we have 3 shifts in my building and are open almost 6 days a week, sharing desks with another shift, my company isn't paying thousands of dollars per person per year for this building.

Not every place is the bay area with insanely expensive rent and insanely expensive cost of living.

I've still seen exactly no one even attempt to explain to me why a payroll company needed to raise 200 million dollars.

Re: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

#90

Post by DidISayTooMuch »

ketzo wrote: post #78
DidISayTooMuch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like there's a big gap between "our mission is to save the word with payroll software"-esque virtue signalling, and a "PC" culture. 99% of the time, "politically correct" === "polite and respectful of boundaries."

Sorry, I am all for basic courtesy and niceties. But PC culture means not tolerating debate, not open to challenging ideas. It's dogma.
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