edawerd | 1 year ago | on: Gusto is cash flow positive–and it got there by sticking to mom-approved values
Non-paywall link: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/gusto-cash-flow-positive-g...
edawerd's comments
edawerd | 4 years ago | on: Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses with Equifax
We most certainly do not
edawerd | 6 years ago | on: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
nope! we've had it for many years now!
edawerd | 6 years ago | on: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
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).
edawerd | 6 years ago | on: Payroll startup Gusto raises $200M
Hi! Cofounder and CTO here. We offer workers compensation insurance in all 50 states!
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: Payday loans are coming for everyone
CTO and co-founder of Gusto here. This has actually been on our mind for many years now, and it's a problem we've seen that hurts paycheck to paycheck employees the most. We've recently taken a first step towards rethinking how payroll should be for a modern workforce, and launched a pilot for a new product called Flexible Pay (https://gusto.com/flexible-pay).
Flexible Pay enables employees to cash out unpaid earned wages, without any changes to how payroll runs. Happy to answer any questions about it. Also, if this is a space you're passionate about, we're actively hiring engineers for that team!
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: Staying Ambitious on Diversity: New Diversity Goals for Gusto Engineering
Hi everyone!
Gusto's co-founder/CTO here. I'll be more than happy to answer any questions about our diversity program here, should you have any!
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
+1.This is a great summary of my experience
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
Hey Wil!
Yeah, I found a few mentors who I would feel comfortable asking questions and getting advice. I met some though investor introductions, and others through friends of friends.
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
That certainly did happen. In fact, I would say its quite necessary for growing startups to continually hire people with more management experience than anyone else in the company. There isn't a sense of ego associated with that. Many of them are really just excited to be on this mission together.
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
It's great to hear that you found the Masters invaluable! I personally didn't do any formal education myself beyond reading, finding mentors, workshops, some coaching, and experience along the way.
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
Hey Brad!
I'd say it was a combination of hiring in-house experts (we did that to learn about payroll taxes), and lots of reaching out to people and not being afraid to pepper them with questions (for example, in the case of learning about the ACH system: https://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-pers...)
As for Denver, a ton of factors went into choosing it. Ultimately though, we just loved the people, talent, and culture in Denver so we went with that!
I'm doing great! It's so great to hear from you again.
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
Definitely miss coding! I still do a little during our hackathons but otherwise don't have that much time to commit to any projects. I would just slow down the team.
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
It was important to us to be deliberate about hiring senior ICs since I was more on the management track. We already had some in the company so that helped as well.
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
I can certainly share some of the meatier areas that engineers at Gusto work on.
- Calculating payroll and filing quarterly and annual forms are very complicated tasks that (a) is different in every state and (b) changes frequently as federal, state, and local tax laws change. Doing payroll in 50 states is similar to doing payroll in 50 different countries
- Benefits is similar to Payroll in the sense that it's also very different in each state. The business logic is complex and a significant amount of engineering work goes into simplifying it for us customers
- Because we move billions of dollars per month through the banking system, we have a lot of the same technical challenges as a Stripe, Square, Paypal, Venmo, etc. We have a dedicated FinTech, Payments, and Risk teams for this.
- Security is super important to us, since we have a lot of PII/PHI and financial informaiton
- Gusto is about 600 employees today and we invest in lots of internal tools for non-engineering functions, an enterprise data warehouse, and security.
- We are also looking into what the future of payroll looks like. A personal goal of mine is to rid the world of the concept of a "payday". Why shouldn't employees get paid whenever they want for the work that they did? https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/gusto-flexible-pay/
- Technical debt: When you grow as fast as Gusto does, you inevitably accrue technical debt and it's important that we carve our engineering resources to keep that low.
There's a lot more in there, but hopefully it gives you a sense of how 100 engineers can add up pretty quickly!
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
Hi all!
I'm the author of this post. Happy to answer any questions here about how my role as CTO of Gusto has changed over time!
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: Gusto's new office in SF has a no-shoes policy
As you correctly mentioned, some do have medical requirements that require them to wear shoes in the office, which is obviously totally OK.
edawerd | 7 years ago | on: Gusto's new office in SF has a no-shoes policy
I'm the co-founder and CTO at Gusto.
Yes, slippers in the bathroom are certainly needed! Every employee at Gusto has an annual "slipper stipend" for use on buying slippers to wear around the office and in the bathrooms. We also provide disposable slippers for everyone (and guests).
edawerd | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2018)
Gusto | VISA, San Francisco or Denver | Senior Rails/React Engineer | San Francisco
Gusto is building delightful payroll, benefits, and HR software for small businesses.
We process $30B+ in annual payments for more than 40,000 corporate customers, helping them with payroll, health insurance, 401(k), and a host of HR features. We have a team of super-sharp, passionate, hard-working, and friendly software engineers. You can read more about us on our engineering blog: https://engineering.gusto.com/
Some of the technologies we use: Ruby/Rails, JavaScript, React, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Chef, Terraform, AWS, Kafka.
We have openings to work in our Payroll, HR, Benefits, SRE and FinTech teams.
Apply at https://gusto.com/careers or email me directly.
Interview process: 1 technical phone screen and 1 onsite interview (~4.5 hours of interviews + pair programming)
edawerd | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2017)
Gusto | VISA, ONSITE | Sr. Rails/React Engineer | San Francisco
Gusto is building delightful payroll, benefits, and HR software for small businesses.
We process $30B+ in annual payments for more than 40,000 corporate customers, helping them with payroll, health insurance, 401(k), and a host of HR features. Team culture is a huge part of what makes Gusto special. We have a team of super-sharp, passionate, hard-working, and friendly software engineers. You can read more about us on our engineering blog: http://engineering.gusto.com/
Some of the technologies we use: Ruby/Rails, JavaScript, React, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Chef, Terraform, AWS, Kafka.
We have openings to work in our Payroll, HR, Benefits, SRE and FinTech teams.
Apply at https://gusto.com/careers or email me directly.
Interview process: 1 technical phone screen and 1 onsite interview (~4.5 hours of interviews + pair programming)
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