Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M

I love it when I don&#x27;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.<p>Now if only there was a company as good as Stripe&#x2F;Gusto that did accounting+taxes, I&#x27;d really be set! I mean, &quot;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 done every year.&quot;

I&#x27;m really happy for them.<p>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&#x27;t support outside of US folks, so we had to maintain two systems.<p>One of the most frustrating things was the 2 day payroll. They turned it on for us, and the capped it at something like $60k even when we have millions of dollars in the bank account they have direct access to. Every two weeks, when the payroll supposed to be run, we had to contact support to request and exception which required a screenshot of our bank account balance. EVERY TWO WEEKS.<p>There is a lot of small things like this that forced us to talk to their support almost on daily basis. In some cases we waited for an answer for months.<p>As such, we recently switched to Rippling and are very happy with the decision. I&#x27;m glad that Gusto is working for so many people. I really enjoyed it while it did work for us.

I remember switching to Gusto early on in the life of my startup, and how surprised I was to realize that I was excited about payroll software. The UI and UX were 100x better than the stuck-in-the-90s software we were using previously. It made me really optimistic that starting a startup would only become easier as services like Gusto popped up to meet their needs.<p>My only gripe is that I liked the old name (ZenPayroll) better :P

I truly don&#x27;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&#x27;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?<p>Why would you sell that much of your company to investors?<p>Why would you invest that much money in a payroll company?<p>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&#x2F;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&#x27;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?!<p>This stuff always blows my mind.

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.”<p>Can we go back to a time where employees aren’t asked to be 100% emotionally attached to their work, in ways like this that are clearly made more extreme by the company itself?

Oh good! I love Gusto, and their customer service has been stellar.<p>I hope this allows them to get into more areas of payroll that I hate dealing with, like worker&#x27;s comp insurance, or just managing my insurance for employees in general. That&#x27;s my biggest sticking point, especially since I have people working in multiple states.

I’m happy for them, seemed like an interesting company. Personally I had a bad experience with them as far as their recruiting went. As a very experienced candidate I was working with a senior recruiter who thought I was perfect for a position, however hearing my compensation requirements said he had to check in and get back to me. I never received a response. Perfectly fine with it not being a good match, but have the common decency to have some kind of response.

I tried to use Gusto but no where on their site did it say I couldn&#x27;t use it if I only had contractors. Their support was pretty bad about it too.<p>Ended up going with Square Payroll which supports my model AND does it all for no monthly fee.

One thing I don&#x27;t like about Gusto is a platform lock-in for new features. We&#x27;ve been a customer since before there were health benefits available (and now have no intent to switch). Things we&#x27;ve been asking about like HSA contributions or prorated benefits were eventually added - but only if you use Gusto&#x27;s own program. That&#x27;s annoying...

Whenever I work in a company that uses Gusto for payroll and benefits, I breathe much easier as an employee. It&#x27;s easy and out of your way. Please send the design team love and compliments from me. A+

Good for them. I&#x27;ve loved using Gusto so far! Nothing but good experiences compared to my last payroll company

Good for them. Used them for startup a few years ago. Worked really well and super simple to use when all employees were in a single state and we only utilized their payroll services. Once we started venturing into offering health insurance to employees though and our employees spread across multiple states &#x2F; countries we were not able to customize the plans to our liking (we had some very specific ideas about how we wanted to subsidize insurance) and ended up switching to different provider. We ended up trading the nice Gusto (ZenPayroll) interface for a much more clunky one and most likely a higher premium, but the other provider was able to customize our packages without us having to devote much time to it, which at that point was worth the trade off. I&#x27;m sure Gusto has improved hence, and I would likely give them another try today as needed. By the way, for those switching payroll providers, in my experience it is better to do either on a quarter end or year end - while not necessary by any means, it can make it easier to gather all needed documents in case there are tax questions down the road.

Used to work at a company that was using Gusto, much prefer them to the payroll my company is currently using, ADP

Very exciting to see more companies open up prod + engineering divisions in NYC - I feel as though typical bay area tech satellite NYC offices are go-to-market focused first before expanding out to prod&#x2F;eng so interesting to see Gusto go the other way first!

Wish list:<p>- international employees (US, European countries)<p>- better support for employees across-states (they already do many things well in this regard)<p>- taxes<p>- general accounting<p>- atlas-type stuff (bank, incorporation)<p>- maybe a specialized account manager &#x2F; team to handle the above (I guess it&#x27;d be region-based CPA&#x2F;lawyers?)<p>Some of those are sophisticated things, but having one hub to view&#x2F;manage it all from the top down would save oodles of time.<p>Aside: Gusto&#x27;s support has been very helpful, even as an employee, when I contacted them directly they went out of their way to help me solve a payment issue.

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

Love Gusto! Some other services I love in a similar realm include: - Stripe - Pilot - OpenA401k (For me and my wife&#x27;s solo 401k plans)

This is an aside, but can we define what a &quot;startup&quot; is? To me, if you have a repeatable business model and have scaled it to thousands of customers, you&#x27;re no longer a startup.<p>Is the convention that if you take private investment, then you are a startup?

I keep wondering whether these guys will go public. They&#x27;re at least 6-7 years old, have healthy revenues, and seemingly a lot of customers.<p>I&#x27;ve wanted to see the financials for a while. Show us the numbers, Josh!

Will Gusto ever expand to larger start-ups? (200~300 employees)

Gusto uses a Rails monolith.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;engineering.gusto.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;engineering.gusto.com</a> describes some of their experiences with it.

Congrats to Joshua and team. Awesome product, awesome team!

And to think Rippling could raise this for their series B