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Inside Gusto's Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim
Description
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Why I built America's most-loved payroll company then reinvented it with AI
Eddie Kim, Co-Founder and CTO at Gusto, joins NEW ECONOMIES on cracking the small business market, keeping all three co-founders for 15 years, and why he just built the most important product of his career in eight weeks.
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Download the full transcript:
Eddie Kim is the co-founder at Gusto, the small business platform that just crossed a billion dollars in annual revenue serving over 500,000 companies across payroll, benefits, HR, and compliance.
A two-time YC founder who met his co-founders at Stanford and at a half marathon starting line, Eddie has spent 15 years proving that the most unglamorous problems in business are often the most valuable ones to solve. In this episode, we explore what it actually takes to build a category-defining company in a space nobody wanted to touch — and why Eddie believes he just built the most important product of his career — Gusto Cofounder: The AI Teammate Built for Small Business.
We also explore the blank canvas problem holding AI back from mainstream adoption, why the distinction between engineer and designer is disappearing, and how a team of five people went from zero code to full launch in eight weeks.
Timestamps
(0:00) Eddie Kim, Co-Founder at Gusto (5:40) Lessons from Y Combinator (9:30) 15+ years on co-founder relationships (15:00) How to give feedback to your co-founders (17:45) The early days at Gusto(21:10) Gusto’s new product: Gusto Cofounder (33:05) How to launch new features (38:15) The rise of solo entrepreneurs (41:25) How to avoid distractions (45:20) How Gusto would launch today from scratch(47:00) Lightning fire round
Our notes from this conversation
1. Boring problems are the best problems — if you can stomach the grind
In 2011, the hottest companies were chasing eyeballs. Mobile, social, local. Nobody wanted to work on payroll. Hiring was nearly impossible, and one of the category’s own pioneers told the Gusto founders to their faces: don’t do it. That discouragement was actually the signal. The problems everyone avoids