@edawerd
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At @GustoHQ Next today in our beautiful SF office!
Excited to finally show this: Pro Gus, our new AI assistant for accountants, can answer questions across your whole book of clients. And our new multi-client MCP brings Gusto right into the AI tools you already work in.
gusto.com/company-news/intro…
What I'm most excited about with AI right now: systems that have enough context about a business to actually act, not just answer a question.
That's what made @GustoHQ Business Compliance possible in 6 months instead of a year+. We already knew the moment a customer hired someone in a new state. We just had to build the action that responds to it, fast, and gets it right every time.
Full story: gusto.com/company-news/gusto…
Thank you @LubaYudasina for having me on your show and helping me get my steps in at the same time! I loved the walking podcast format :) It was great to discuss how much serendipity and being prepared when opportunity knocks played a role in my personal journey building @GustoHQ
New pod drop!! Was so fun to walk with Edward Kim (@edawerd), co-founder of @GustoHQ. He’s one of the most positive, radiant, and lighthearted founders I met!
We talk about:
-The untrained half marathon that led to Gusto
-Making 700k on Android apps
-The Paul Graham essay his dad handed him
-"Everybody wants to be the CEO, not gonna lie"
-Being besties with @garrytan
-Missed flight → AI Cofounder in 5 hours
-Claude Code: the least judgmental mentor
-Life philosophy: be positive
Timestamps:
(00:00) Trailer
(00:51) Edward Kim, Co-Founder and CTO, Gusto
(00:57) The elaborate escape rooms he builds for his wife Yuna
(03:04) The San Francisco half marathon on a bet that reconnected him with Josh
(05:32) Making $700,000 a year selling Android apps
(10:25) Screenshot It, the $7 app for a feature Android didn't have
(18:31) His mom running the entire back office of his dad's medical practice
(26:22) The Paul Graham essay his doctor dad handed him in the car
(29:51) Getting into Y Combinator with Gary as a partner
(32:49) The unfairness technical co-founders feel while business co-founders raise money
(36:51) After 15 years of co-founding, why the workload evens out
(56:07) Building Gusto Co-Founder for the small business back office
(1:15:01) His life philosophy in one sentence
(1:15:08) Outro
Link - youtu.be/sTW_w9OPpk4
There is a class of technical debt that is hard to quantify and takes the judgement of an experienced engineer to identify. You can't just write a deterministic rule to find and inventory them. To make things worse, these are the sort of technical debt where each individual violation is on its own not a big deal, but collectively, they add up to huge declarants in engineering velocity.
At @GustoHQ, we're using AI to quantify and systematize how we pay down this class of technical debt. This post explains how we're doing it.
engineering.gusto.com/judgme…
We just expanded the Gusto connector for Claude and it’s going beyond payroll. Businesses can now: setup a bonus, check timesheets, run a salary calculation, and more.
We think about Gusto as a system of actions, not a set of features. AI platforms are one of the newest surface areas those actions can show up in, and they're intent-rich: people come to them already trying to get something done.
Every action still goes through the owner for approval before anything happens. Speed matters, but not more than trust.
More here: gusto.com/company-news/gusto…
For small businesses, AI can be a powerful way to run and grow their business. And having technology that knows their actual hours, pay, and people is what matters.
That's the difference between answering and acting with AI. Here's what it looks like in the Gusto plugin in ChatGPT 👇
Edward Kim retweeted
I am having the most fun of my life building with AI, and I think every company should, too
so i'm starting something new: cxo.dev
AI transformation consulting for AI-pilled leaders
(by builders, not consultants)
why I had to do it 👇
Great chatting on a beautiful rooftop on a rare sunny day in SF with @browserbase @pk_iv
"Even after I set up my OpenClaw ... I didn't really know what to do with it."
Gusto Co-Founder @edawerd says most AI products suffer from the "Blank Canvas Problem", where they have many capabilities but it's up to the user to figure out what to do.
Great products solve this problem and automate things that the user is already doing.
Every notice that really rich people tend to become gaudy and lack taste? It happens when you have an an over-abundance of choice.
Engineers today are at risk of the same because of AI.
engineering.gusto.com/taste-…
It's been exciting to see all the amazing things our customers are doing with Gusto Cofounder!
Gusto (YC W12) recently surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue and now serves more than 500,000 small businesses across the US. Today, one in five new businesses started in the US uses @GustoHQ.
In this fireside, Gusto co-founder and Head of Technology Eddie Kim (@edawerd) sits down with YC's @harjtaggar to talk about Gusto Co-Founder, a new AI product that automates recurring business processes end-to-end, all triggered through SMS or Slack without the business owner ever logging in.
Eddie shares how an experiment with OpenClaw led to the idea, why he believes AI agents need to move beyond the "blank canvas" of chat, and how AI is making it easier than ever to start and grow a business.
01:24 - Beyond the Chatbot
03:54 - The OpenClaw Experiment
07:06 - Building an AI Product in 10 Weeks
10:13 - Why Context Is Everything
13:49 - The AI Features Customers Actually Want
17:05 - Your AI Business Partner
21:27 - The Future Roadmap
23:37 - Five People Built This
26:16 - No Meetings. No PRDs. No Jira.
30:20 - The Best Time to Start a Business
Thank you @clairevo for the great chat on how we built Gusto Cofounder in 11 weeks from idea-during-a-layover to launch!
No jira.
No figma.
No PMs.
Just a CTO, designer, 3 engineers + a permazoom.
(and ofc claude code)
That's how @GustoHQ launched the new AI-first version of their app in < 10 weeks.
I loved sitting down with @edawerd about a completely new way of building, including how he
- vibecoded a vision of the product during a delayed layover
- gathered organic interest in the project, and didn't get his feelings hurt when his code got thrown out
- giving permission to break every rule made everyone faster
Plus, we get his thoughts on what this means for the other 1000 people in the eng / pm / design org.
Full ep on yt: youtube.com/watch?v=5FKBkUCa…
Here's a screen share of me completely automating payroll runs for a massage therapy business (w/ hourly employees + calculating tips + bonus + commissions) using Gusto Cofounder
I recorded this a few weeks ago, which is ages ago at the speed we're moving. It's even better than what you see in the video now.
Thanks for having me @tbpn !
Gusto cofounder @edawerd says today is the most important day in Gusto's history since launch.
They just shipped Gusto Cofounder, an AI agent that you talk to through texting and Slack that automates almost everything a small business does in its back office.
He explains:
"We start with all the problems that we're already helping our customers with — payroll, benefits, HR, scheduling — then we bring on a lot of the power of AI into it."
"You tell us what your business processes are, starting with payroll, benefits, and all these things we're already doing for you. And Gusto Cofounder will basically run your business process for you."
"You communicate with it through SMS and Slack. You don't really even interface with it through a website."
"And we connect to all the systems that you're using outside of Gusto as well. Notion, QuickBooks, Google Workspace... Gusto Cofounder brings it all together into one place where it automates your business processes."
Gusto just announced Gusto Cofounder, and this is something I'm really excited about. Not just because it's all I've been doing for the last two months, but because I think it's an example of what I've always thought to be the ideal user experience for our customers – almost no user interface, we just do it for you – run payroll via SMS, get weekly reports, set up automatic expense approvals, or anything else on your mind. It's an AI assistant for 500k small businesses, available in their preferred messaging app. Here are a few real conversations I've had with it 👇
Meet Gusto Cofounder: An AI teammate that already knows your business and actually does the work.
Most AI just answers questions. This runs payroll, flags compliance deadlines, handles time-off requests, and works over text or Slack.
Because every founder deserves a cofounder.
We're opening early access to a small group of @GustoHQ customers now.
Join the waitlist here: gusto.com/cofounder
The SaaSpocalypse is real. @GustoHQ very easily replaced a $250k/year SaaS contract with something we built entirely by AI. Not a single hand-written line of code.
Many more rip-and-replace coming.
So far, with FixtureKit, we've reduced total test suite runtime by 23% in the @GustoHQ Rails backend (~10 min)
We have ~30,000 _spec.rb files, and we've only migrated ~17% from Factory Bot to FixtureKit. Can't wait for <3 min RSpec on a test suite of 5M lines of RSpec.
If you use factory_bot with Rails and have always been jealous of those fixture guys, check out FixtureKit! github.com/Gusto/fixture_kit
