0:00

I love being in SAC, you know, I

0:02

went to Stanford, I studied electrical engineering, I've

0:04

lived and breathed software since I was young, but

0:06

there was something that all three of us really

0:08

were drawn to, which is, like, tackling a problem

0:10

that, you know, wasn't just for Silicon Valley, right?

0:12

Something that was, like, across the country, across

0:15

the world, frankly, when it came to what

0:17

we were doing around, like, enabling, you

0:19

know, payroll to start to be easier,

0:21

simpler, this is a mainstream small business,

0:23

small business, small business, small business, Like

0:25

we looked at the lay of the

0:27

land and saw how painful and frustrating

0:29

it was, you saw how many folks

0:31

were doing it on pen and paper

0:33

still, 40% of companies in the US

0:35

were making mistakes and getting penalized every

0:37

year. Like we saw stats like that,

0:39

we were like, oh good God, like

0:41

we could help these people, these small

0:43

businesses, these mainstream business owners, and that

0:45

just resonated with us more. Hi

0:51

everyone, I'm Hodge Tagger, one of

0:53

the partners here at Y-cominator and

0:55

today I'm very excited to be

0:57

joined by Josh Reeves, co-founder and

0:59

CEO of Gusto. I've known Josh

1:01

for almost 15 years now and

1:03

we met when he went through

1:05

Y-combinator with Gusto in 2011. Welcome

1:07

Josh. Excited to be here, look forward

1:10

to chatting. Why don't we start by

1:12

just telling us a bit about what

1:14

does Gusto do? Yeah, so our purpose is to

1:16

make entrepreneurship easier and more accessible. What

1:18

that means today in terms of our

1:20

product is we do things like payroll,

1:23

we set up health benefits, we have

1:25

a whole bunch of products around hourly

1:27

workforce, things like time tracking, shift scheduling.

1:29

We also make it easier for you

1:31

to hire in different locations, could be

1:33

multi-state, could be international, contractors, employees, and

1:35

there's a whole bunch more, but broadly

1:37

in this world of back office in

1:39

more people-centric products today. But more to

1:42

come. Let's like rewind and go all

1:44

the way to the start. You actually

1:46

apply to white combinator with a very different

1:48

idea to gusto. Can you tell us about

1:50

that? That's what you applied with and why

1:52

did you change the idea? So I'll take

1:54

us back to 2011. This is kind of

1:57

when we were talking about, you know, when

1:59

we connected. I had four kids now.

2:01

I had no kids then. I had

2:03

definitely much less white hair. More time.

2:05

More time. I was living in Palo

2:07

Alto. Now, Gusta, I started by three

2:09

co-founders. So, Tomar was one of my

2:11

roommates. And Eddie was living in San

2:13

Francisco at the time. And we had

2:15

all had prior startups. And so when

2:17

we came together, we were really excited

2:19

about wanting to tackle something that we

2:22

could spend decades on. And then to

2:24

your question, you know, you got to

2:26

start iterating, find problems, build solutions. So

2:28

one of the first things we got

2:30

excited about was actually, and not surprising,

2:32

many people think to their own personal

2:34

experience, you know, my mom is a

2:36

teacher, but you know, at that point,

2:38

I had a lot of friends contacting

2:40

her for advice on having children. Eddie's

2:42

mom, it actually helps to her, his

2:44

dad, his dad is a doctor. pain

2:46

point around accessing experts who are not

2:49

going to write, and you have to

2:51

think back to 2011, they're not going

2:53

to write blog posts, they're not in

2:55

the online kind of web environment, like

2:57

how do we make that knowledge more

2:59

accessible to people? And so we started

3:01

brainstorming from there. Within like a week,

3:03

we had a prototype where you could

3:05

basically call a number, it would ping

3:07

us, we'd have it route effectively, you

3:09

could just buy some keywords on Google,

3:11

and then all of a sudden start,

3:13

you know, you know, real people calling

3:16

you with questions they have that they

3:18

want expert advice on. And what we

3:20

realized within a week or two was

3:22

the questions were not related to the

3:24

things we really were interested in helping

3:26

people with. It was a lot of

3:28

questions around astrology and relationship advice and

3:30

none of us felt equipped to answer

3:32

those questions first and foremost. But also

3:34

we thought about, you know, is this

3:36

the type of space we want to

3:38

be in given what we initially see

3:40

as the signal on the type of

3:42

questions people we were going to have.

3:45

This was all actually within like November,

3:47

December of 2020. 2011. You interviewed, I

3:49

remember, you interviewed with this idea and

3:51

we accepted you. And behind the scenes

3:53

we were more excited about the team.

3:55

But worried about this idea, which, you

3:57

know, might still be a good idea

3:59

to some folks, but wasn't the right

4:01

one for us. The batch started in

4:03

January. Did you, when exactly did you

4:05

change the idea? So all before the

4:07

batch started. So like, I think the

4:09

exact mapping here, it's a while ago,

4:12

but like. We were thinking through this

4:14

expert thing, you're going to have multiple

4:16

stakeholders, they're going to be contractors, you

4:18

got to pay them as well as

4:20

connect them with who that person is

4:22

calling in. So that kind of became

4:24

more of like a payments concept. And

4:26

then there was like marketplaces in general

4:28

at that point, you're not just expert

4:30

marketplaces. So then it was. you know,

4:32

how are payouts happening in all of

4:34

these marketplaces? And then from payouts, you

4:36

go, well, that's just for contractor, like,

4:39

what's actually, the way they'll get paid,

4:41

well, that's called payroll. And so, you

4:43

know, it was, it was actually, you

4:45

know, all within a few weeks of

4:47

like that, that bridge to, well, you

4:49

know, payroll, we all used payroll products,

4:51

is that really a broken system, is

4:53

it, you know, in need of better

4:55

solution? And we realized after talking to

4:57

a bunch of other small business owners,

4:59

family and friends that like there actually

5:01

was something really broken here that we

5:03

could start working on. So by the

5:05

time we started YC in January, we

5:08

were already building a payroll system. I

5:10

think like tactical advice and details of

5:12

this phase, trying to find ideas is

5:14

really helpful for people who want to

5:16

be founders. So when you're in that

5:18

phase, like you, you already had an

5:20

idea, you're like, maybe this isn't the

5:22

idea, and you're trying to find new

5:24

ones. What does that look like day

5:26

to day? Like how much time are

5:28

you spending continuing to work on the

5:30

idea even though you're not fully like

5:32

bored into it? Just what what's your

5:35

advice to people who are in there

5:37

right now? So I think there's like

5:39

all the logical stuff and I'm going

5:41

to get to like my actual answer

5:43

is in the separate bucket. But like

5:45

you got to prove that there's actually

5:47

something broken and painful. Then you have

5:49

to prove that you actually create a

5:51

thing that makes it better and fixes.

5:53

or have a line of sight to

5:55

like a business model where you're actually

5:57

a company, not a project, and then

5:59

eventually you have to have a way

6:02

to like scale it and like acquire

6:04

and serve those customers in a way

6:06

that, you know, again, makes sense. So

6:08

those all need to happen, otherwise there

6:10

isn't a business, but we obviously didn't

6:12

explore all of that in two weeks

6:14

with the whole expert idea. Well, we

6:16

proved was like you could build something

6:18

and it would somewhat work to connect

6:20

people, but the other bucket I think

6:22

is actually even more important when you're

6:24

early on. And it's that you're going

6:26

to be living and breathing this problem

6:29

space. And not every problem space is

6:31

for everyone. And why we shifted only

6:33

after a few weeks to a different

6:35

problem space was we just weren't... obsessed

6:37

and it wasn't deeply internally like keeping

6:39

us up at night, this whole idea

6:41

around connecting experts. And so that's where

6:43

within even a few weeks of signal,

6:45

it not resonating gave us reason to

6:47

start exploring other things. Now when it

6:49

came to what we were doing around

6:51

like enabling you know, payroll to start

6:53

to be easier or simpler. This is

6:55

a mainstream small business customer. It's people

6:58

we were talking to that we connected

7:00

with. Like, we looked at the lay

7:02

of the land and saw how painful

7:04

and frustrating it was. You saw how

7:06

many folks were doing it on pen

7:08

and paper still. 40% of companies in

7:10

the US were making mistakes and getting

7:12

penalized every year. Like, when we saw

7:14

stats like that, we were like, oh,

7:16

good God, like, we could help these

7:18

people, these small businesses, these mainstream. business

7:20

owners, and that just resonated with us

7:22

more. I love being in tech, you

7:25

know, I went to Stanford, I studied

7:27

electrical engineering, I've lived and breathed software

7:29

since I was young, but there was

7:31

something that all three of us really

7:33

were drawn to, which is like tackling

7:35

a problem that, you know, wasn't just

7:37

for Silicon Valley, right, something that was

7:39

like across the country, across the world,

7:41

frankly. So this definitely met that trait.

7:43

I think we probably also liked a

7:45

little bit that it. Like we took

7:47

pride in the fact that it wasn't

7:49

when everyone was focused on. It's kind

7:52

of fun to like jump to the

7:54

stuff that isn't popular at the time.

7:56

I'm glad you brought that up because

7:58

absolutely during that era 2000 and 11,

8:00

everybody want to work on a mobile

8:02

social app. And a characteristic of working

8:04

on that sort of application is it

8:06

very easy to just get going. If

8:08

I want to build an app to

8:10

find my friend's favorite restaurants, I just

8:12

like start building the app. Starting a

8:14

payroll company, especially then, was just a

8:16

lot more complicated. Like how, once you

8:18

got the excitement, okay, we want to

8:21

do payroll. You had no experience running

8:23

payroll, right? Had you ever, no domain

8:25

expertise? We got really excited about this,

8:27

you know, broader back offerous like pain

8:29

point space, but like my advice to

8:31

founders and it was to us too

8:33

is you got to start with like

8:35

one thing. So payroll was always going

8:37

to be our first product. It's what

8:39

we will call our primary front door,

8:41

but we always thought we'd be adding

8:43

more products over time. But focus focus

8:45

focus focus focus focus is the key.

8:48

So. First thing we had to prove

8:50

not just to potential investors around demo

8:52

day, but to ourselves was like could

8:54

we even build a functioning payroll system?

8:56

So we actually scoped the solution we

8:58

were building to the bare bare bones.

9:00

It had to be a way to

9:02

go do tax filings. It had to

9:04

be a way to go do tax

9:06

payments. It had to be a way

9:08

to go, obviously do tax calculations to

9:10

drive that. It had to be a

9:12

way to go move money from like

9:15

an employer account into an employee account.

9:17

You know, actually, that's that's the basic

9:19

building blocks. And so that's all we

9:21

focused on doing, like, which is building

9:23

a functioning system in California. You know,

9:25

you could scope there too, because every

9:27

single state has different roles and requirements

9:29

for a new company that had never

9:31

paid people before, so you don't have

9:33

to do any historical tax import. And,

9:35

you know, fortunately this mapped to our

9:37

company, right. So we also that added

9:39

the additional incentive of, well, we're not

9:42

just going to, you know. try to

9:44

get there you know for all the

9:46

good reasons of wanting to build a

9:48

business. We're also going to add the

9:50

pressure of what we won't pay ourselves

9:52

until we can use our own system

9:54

to pay ourselves. So that was kind

9:56

of the first few months. So once

9:58

we did that we did on board

10:00

some other companies in YC. And that

10:02

was a very manual process because we

10:04

had only built this back end, but

10:06

we at that point could say, accurately,

10:08

honestly, that we are now processing payment

10:11

to the tune of thousands of dollars,

10:13

tens of thousands of dollars, but when

10:15

you do that over an annualized basis,

10:17

millions of dollars of payroll, which was

10:19

one of the key messages I wanted

10:21

to be able to tell during our

10:23

demo day presentation. How did you convince

10:25

these early customers to trust you? So

10:27

I think there's like two phases of

10:29

like... how to answer this. One is,

10:31

you know, we had fellow companies in

10:33

YC, there were also new companies who

10:35

had never paid themselves, who were based

10:38

in California, and so that was just

10:40

a low-hanging fruit. Now, that obviously wasn't

10:42

going to be our long-term strategy. There's

10:44

not enough. We knew that there is,

10:46

you know... for backdrop is about 6

10:48

million employers in the US. And so,

10:50

you know, if you're going to get

10:52

to real, real volume in the space,

10:54

you have to go into many, many

10:56

industries. It was going to be more

10:58

of a horizontal solution. But after demo

11:00

day, we actually did not launch the

11:02

product. That was also kind of a

11:05

non-obvious choice we made. We'll probably talk

11:07

about the seed round we did, but

11:09

we actually didn't launch publicly where you

11:11

could like come up as a stranger

11:13

who we've never met, A stranger who

11:15

we've never met could come to our

11:17

website, could set up, could add employees,

11:19

could go run payroll and it would

11:21

all work. And if they wanted to

11:23

call us, they could, but it would

11:25

actually all be there ready for them

11:27

to use. We didn't actually do that till

11:30

December of 2012. So several months later. You

11:32

mentioned the C-Drown. As I remember it at

11:34

the time, you actually ended up raising, I

11:36

think, the largest C-Drown, any Y-C company had

11:39

raised, sort of at the end of the

11:41

batch around demo day. But as you said,

11:43

you didn't actually launch into our, officially launch

11:46

it after the batch. And so you didn't

11:48

have sort of like this obvious traction story

11:50

here with like growing revenue week over week

11:52

by 10, 15 percent. So what did you

11:55

do to convince investors and why did it

11:57

go so well? couple building blocks. Number one,

11:59

I think we stood out simply because we

12:02

weren't like everyone else. So that was interesting,

12:04

at least to some folks who were kind

12:06

of ready for like tackling or evaluating or

12:08

meeting founders who like had a business with

12:11

a straightforward business model. Like we were going

12:13

to charge our customers for using the product.

12:15

It's a SAS business. But if you look

12:17

at the space for anything, this is where

12:20

you know, folks that aren't in the space,

12:22

aren't aware of this. But you had this

12:24

amazing combination of So, you know, some big

12:27

incumbents, like, like, paychecks and ADP, worth, you

12:29

know, over $100 billion together at that point.

12:31

So, like, clearly, big, incumbent market presence in

12:33

terms of, like, economic value. but also an

12:36

incredibly fragmented market, like 80% and paychecks at

12:38

that point were, you know, less than, you

12:40

know, 20, 30% of the customers out there.

12:43

So you had tons of folks on pen

12:45

and paper. And so we had, I think,

12:47

a good story to tell on like, this

12:49

is a real pain point. People get that.

12:52

And then there's this big disruption happening, which

12:54

we're going to be leveraging. And the disruption

12:56

is in both technology and go to market.

12:59

On the technology front, it's... cloud, paperless and

13:01

mobile. Three trends we didn't create, but we

13:03

definitely leveraged to our benefit. And on the

13:05

distribution side, it was search, like SEO, SEM,

13:08

and then social. No one's ever cracked the

13:10

small business side of this market. There's these

13:12

technology changes and distribution changes underway that. typically

13:15

benefit a disruptor not the incumbent. And now

13:17

maybe now is the time finally when like

13:19

small business will start getting amazing software and

13:21

it won't just be into it as the

13:24

one example of a company that like can

13:26

serve small business. And I would actually argue

13:28

investors are pretty much always excited about big

13:31

big markets with like clear business models and

13:33

then always a hypothesis if you're a seed

13:35

stage on like how are you going to

13:37

go capture that market. But we had I

13:40

think Like over 11 VC firms offered to

13:42

invest, which he chose to do the round

13:44

with no VC firms. It was all angels.

13:46

raised from 20 plus CEOs and founders. It

13:49

was the CEOs and founders of PayPal and

13:51

stripe and, you know, Mint and Instagram and

13:53

a whole bunch of amazing businesses and it

13:56

was great to have them be sounding boards.

13:58

So I think that that helped with story.

14:00

But I would always say like no matter

14:02

what's hot at the moment, I think most

14:05

founders or most investors are pretty excited about,

14:07

you know, a huge market. industry is going

14:09

through disruption and a new company coming in

14:12

that has a pretty good strategy at least

14:14

at that point on how to go turn

14:16

it into reality. So I think I personally

14:18

have been getting paid through gusto for over

14:21

a decade at this point and what's always

14:23

stood out to me as a user is

14:25

just your product has always had this sense

14:28

of like fun and whimsy and just design

14:30

which is obviously not what you associate with

14:32

the payroll companies that came before you. Can

14:34

you speak to like... when did that start

14:37

and why has that sort of fun design

14:39

sort of heart being important to you? Yeah

14:41

we think of it as like warmth hopefully

14:44

because you know it's obviously still a really

14:46

business critical task we're doing reliability accuracy is

14:48

you know stuff that we're obsessed with. That's

14:50

more I think a byproduct of how we

14:53

view what software should be right like you

14:55

know there's a world where like software you

14:57

know is hard and difficult and you kind

14:59

of feel like it's cumbersome thing to navigate.

15:02

There's also a world where it's like this

15:04

cold frictionless sterile machine that just works in

15:06

hums for our product product space, our problem

15:09

space. Like we just really believed you need

15:11

both. Like the stuff we abstract needs to

15:13

be super automated and like very powerful. But

15:15

like we're going to ultimately be this partner

15:18

to you in navigating really important decisions like,

15:20

you know. paying someone choosing their pay or

15:22

the employee side getting paid like these are

15:25

magical moments to be a part of it

15:27

just we didn't even debate it just feel

15:29

weird like why wouldn't you want to bring

15:31

warmth and humanity into that interaction during that

15:34

time I thought of this before, but you

15:36

were building a company that wasn't the typical

15:38

type of company people were building during this

15:41

era. So did you have like a peer

15:43

group to lean to you where this sort

15:45

of stuff like figuring out compliance in multiple

15:47

states, growing like to small businesses and doing

15:50

sales and getting them on board? Were there

15:52

other founders you could lean on for advice

15:54

or were you sort of figuring this out

15:57

a lot for yourselves where everyone else is

15:59

building photo sharing apps? investor in Augusto, so

16:01

it was fun to talk to him about

16:03

some of the scaling stuff, but actually I

16:06

think, you know, you know this more than...

16:08

Anyone, like, tech is pretty broad. So even

16:10

back then, right, like, was everyone building mobile

16:12

showing Arabs? No, like, Jeremy Stopman from Yale

16:15

was one of our angel investors. He's been

16:17

passionate about small business forever, right? Darmesh off

16:19

from Hubspot. He's a lot of small business

16:22

forever, right? Darmesh off from Hub Spot. He

16:24

was a lot about small business forever, right?

16:26

Darmesha from Hub Spot. He was a lot

16:28

of Fin Tech, you know. Patrick at Stripe

16:31

was an angel investor. So we actually had

16:33

plenty of, again, the folks I would have

16:35

honestly paid money to to give us advice

16:38

and said they gave us money, but they

16:40

also got stocks. Definitely better. But like, no,

16:42

we felt like we had a really good

16:44

network of folks that. Honestly, I think part

16:47

of why they got excited about investing was

16:49

they realized how foundational this problem is. Right,

16:51

they had all felt it. They're all founders

16:54

in building their companies when they were small.

16:56

Like all of that complexity, that compliance, that

16:58

back office headache type stuff, all the things

17:00

that are manual. Like, you know, we talked

17:03

about it and then we had to go

17:05

prove it, but like we were clearly going

17:07

to be a company obsessed with how to

17:10

go make that stuff easier and simpler. And

17:12

I think a lot of them just got

17:14

excited about like making that mission real. You

17:16

launch your first product when it's three of

17:19

you in a house and you launch your

17:21

second product when you have hundreds of employees

17:23

and lots more investors and just like a

17:25

lot more going on. What are some of

17:28

the big differences between those two? And how

17:30

do you keep the startup speed when you're

17:32

launching new products at scale? So some of

17:35

the first similarities are like the benefits team

17:37

at gusto started as like a small team

17:39

of five people, you know, with the same

17:41

dynamic as when we were just five people.

17:44

And the painful part was it meant we

17:46

had to pull five people off of payroll.

17:48

So that's the, you know, puzzle when you

17:51

shift from one product to multi product. You

17:53

do it too early and you're spreading yourself

17:55

too thin. you do it too late and

17:57

you're kind of just not helping your customer

18:00

with all these things you could help them

18:02

with. And so we had to make sure

18:04

we were, you know, still have tons to

18:07

do even today around payroll and there's a

18:09

lot more coming there in terms of innovations

18:11

in payroll, but you know, separate of the

18:13

team, create a separate swim lane, give them

18:16

lots of autonomy, align on like that deep

18:18

deep connection to the customer. It was a

18:20

little bit easier actually because it's not... prospective

18:23

customers. These are existing gusto customers when we

18:25

say, can we talk to you about doing

18:27

benefits? Most were like, oh yeah, we're happy

18:29

to give you feedback. Let me tell you

18:32

exactly what would be awesome. Let me react

18:34

to your, you know, spec, your, you know,

18:36

wireframe, your diagram, your early, like, beta usage.

18:39

And like, there was a lot of like,

18:41

oh, that'd be incredible. That'd be amazing. We'd

18:43

love for you to do that. Please do

18:45

it faster. How do you allocate money in

18:48

a company? How do you allocate headcount? But

18:50

the mindset of like create different swim lanes

18:52

actually persists today. Like we have many many

18:54

products now and most of those teams operate

18:57

as different swim lanes inside the company and

18:59

we want people that are in that swim

19:01

lane to be obsessed with that pain point,

19:04

that problem and solving it. And frankly there's

19:06

other guesties focused on you know the other

19:08

problems that we're solving. Especially as you've got

19:10

multi product it also means you run into

19:13

more competition and competitors. At the very very

19:15

early stages I often feel like one of

19:17

the things I hear a lot from founders

19:20

when they're trying to pick an idea is

19:22

I'm worried there's too much competition. How do

19:24

you think about that? Like what's your advice

19:26

to founders on should they should they be

19:29

worried about competition or not thinking about it

19:31

at all? So I think when you're really

19:33

really early you know you gotta look at

19:36

like the market and like if, and this

19:38

wasn't the case for gusto, like someone has

19:40

like 90% market share, that's definitely like trickier,

19:42

right? Like the cool thing for us was

19:45

in all of the products we've done so

19:47

far, they are massively fragmented markets. So, you

19:49

know, I would be weirded out if there

19:52

wasn't competition because that means like almost for

19:54

somehow the only ones that saw the insight

19:56

that you could build a big business here.

19:58

So competition is good. It means that people

20:01

also see the opportunity you have. But, you

20:03

know, fragmentant market means there's a lot more

20:05

opportunity to focus on what you're doing versus

20:07

get distracted by what someone else is doing.

20:10

And then you just got to make sure

20:12

you have, you know, a strategy that's unique

20:14

to you. And then, you know, beyond that,

20:17

you just got to execute. Like, at the

20:19

end of the day, build the best product,

20:21

go to market, like, you know, conversion, retention,

20:23

etc. and the rest, you know, works its

20:26

way out. I think it's more challenging if

20:28

you have the same strategy as someone that's

20:30

much bigger than you, who has more money

20:33

and resources and is moving as fast as

20:35

you. In our case, it was, there was

20:37

definitely companies bigger than us, but they're moving

20:39

much, much, much slower than us. And so

20:42

we could just really focus on executing as

20:44

fast as possible. So speaking of founders, you

20:46

have three co-founders, and all three of you

20:49

are still. very actively involved in the company

20:51

and every time I see you it's very

20:53

clear that all through we are very like

20:55

pumped and excited to work on the company

20:58

and with each other. Well I think it's

21:00

pretty unusual to see like the three co-founders

21:02

actually stick at the company for this long.

21:05

What's your secret there? Did you guys get

21:07

lucky in the Stars aligned or did you...

21:09

something behind the scenes that's made it work

21:11

so well. I think there's like luck for

21:14

sure but there's some things that have to

21:16

align like one way to think about it

21:18

and make it you know actionable for everyone

21:20

is like how do you build long-term relationships?

21:23

Well you know it takes work and there's

21:25

like ingredients that have to be there already.

21:27

So the three of us like loving technology

21:30

wanting to dedicate ourselves to building products. that

21:32

goes solve meaningful problems deriving a lot of

21:34

joy from like helping others and like also

21:36

really having this deep like we call it

21:39

today productive discontent like we're just constantly both

21:41

you know proud of the progress slash like

21:43

really eager to get to the next step

21:46

the next step the next step because there's

21:48

so many people we can help there's so

21:50

many more problems we could solve you know

21:52

those are the ingredients that had to line

21:55

up and then you know you got to

21:57

invest in good communication how to give feedback

21:59

to each other But yeah, you know, 13

22:02

years in, like we're even more excited and

22:04

more focused on like how can we do

22:06

more faster. And I'm really grateful to my

22:08

co-founders for the important roles they play in

22:11

the company. The number one thing everyone wants

22:13

to talk about at the moment is AI.

22:15

How do you think about AI impacting both

22:18

gusto's business and the product, but then also

22:20

gusto the organization? We've always said like small

22:22

business. You know, they want an opinionated partner,

22:24

right? They don't want just a tool. They

22:27

want just a set of menu of options.

22:29

They're super busy. They're wearing many, many different

22:31

hats. And they don't, frankly, have the resources

22:33

to go hire all of the specialists that

22:36

a big company has. So they're either left

22:38

on their own googling it or, you know,

22:40

they start working with a company like Guesto.

22:43

And so... What AI enables us to do

22:45

is turn that vision in a reality even

22:47

faster, right? Like you can imagine gusto as

22:49

we continue to add more and more capabilities

22:52

than keep evolving our interface to kind of

22:54

become that back office agent, that, you know,

22:56

set of capabilities for a business owner that's

22:59

highly personalized, unique to their needs, pattern matching

23:01

on their industry, growth rate and profile, and

23:03

like. being proactive in helping solve pain in

23:05

their life, not just waiting for them to

23:08

log into our website and go click some

23:10

things. Final question for me, just, yeah, you'll

23:12

pass the first decade of gusto into the

23:15

second decade. Like, what does the second decade

23:17

look like? Like, what do we have? to

23:19

forward to, and what's

23:21

your vision of of

23:24

years from now? Yeah.

23:26

mean, two stats I'll

23:28

just share. now. There's about

23:31

two ,000 new employers each

23:33

year in the US,

23:35

and the historical stat

23:37

is that about 52

23:40

the make it to

23:42

year historical ,000 new employers 52%

23:44

make it to year

23:46

five. five. Like we to

23:49

increase both numbers, both and

23:51

that's the simplest way

23:53

I can put it.

23:56

simplest way I a whole

23:58

bunch of it. So that.

24:00

I won't do any of

24:02

unveil right now. that. I

24:05

we did announce recently,

24:07

though, is now. Something hub.

24:09

announce like a one a

24:12

for all those compliance

24:14

just like a one-stop shop for all

24:16

be payroll, could be

24:18

benefits, could ultimately be

24:21

anything. could be going to

24:23

be the company that

24:25

takes care of all

24:28

of that for you, anything.

24:30

Like and you're going

24:32

to see us be

24:34

pretty aggressive in that

24:37

area. of all thanks so

24:39

much for the time,

24:41

Josh. This was a

24:44

lot of fun. to see us

24:46

thank you. Thanks. aggressive.