How Gusto’s $10B founder raised $6M, built a team of 5—& hit $5M ARR in just 2 years. | Josh Reeves, Founder of Gusto

Gusto is a $9.5B startup that does $500M ARR. Josh built an absolute monster of a company-- and it all started with payroll software for SMBs. Not just that, he started by servicing only new tech startups that were based in California. It was exceptionally niche, and it worked.

After YC, he raised a $6M seed round from tier 1 angels, back when large seed rounds were not at all common. But, unlike others, he didn't spend the money. He kept his team small as they iterated on the product. By the time they raised their $20M Series A, they were  only 10-15 people. 

Here's the story of how they got started, gained initial traction, and took off.

Why you should listen:

• Why starting super small can lead to massive outcomes.
• Why you need a huge, no-brainer pain point to succeed.
• How to use early customer interviews to deeply understand your ICP. 
• Why small teams allow for faster decision-making and execution.
• Why deep passion about the problem set is so important.

Keywords
Gusto, Josh Reeves, entrepreneurship, startup, payroll, small business, Y Combinator, business model, innovation, technology, fundraising, startup, product-market fit, team building, customer satisfaction, growth strategy, small business, Gusto, entrepreneurship, SaaS

Chapters

• 1:57 The Alan Kay Quote that Stuck with Josh
• 5:01 Solving the Problems of Hand Written Payroll
• 7:03 Deliberately Choosing an Important Problem to Solve
• 10:54 The Mindset in the Early Days
• 15:35 The Status Quo of Paper Payroll
• 18:39 Becoming your First Customer
• 23:39 YC & Seed Round
• 31:20 Keeping the Team Small
• 34:19 The Minimum Lovable Product
• 40:44 Staying to help Small and Big Scale Companies Alike
• 44:17 Growth After Launching
• 50:43 Finding Product Market Fit
• 53:24 One Piece of Advice

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00):

We're starting this new year. On an exceptionally high note today, we have Josh Reeves, the founder, and CEO of Gusto. Gusto is doing over half a billion dollars in revenue. They're valued at $9.5 billion. It's the biggest company that we've had on the show yet, and this is the way to start 2025. We go deep into how Josh and his team built Gusto in the very early days, how they got started and why they started the company in the first place, how they started exceptionally niche, focusing just on new companies that were in tech and based outta California. We talk about how even though he raised $6 million from amazing angel investors and ex-founders, he didn't spend like any of it. He built with just like five people for the first year. While everybody wants to go mid-market and enterprise, he focused on SMB and he focused on payroll, something that is notoriously unexciting and yet is changing the lives of thousands and thousands of businesses worldwide and has been able to scale tremendously. Here's a story of how it all happened. Think back to the last few months, the last few years as you've been running the startup. How many different founders have helped you out? The reality is, founders help each other out. That's just who founders are. They pay it forward. So help a founder out. Take literally five seconds, take your phone outta your pocket and hit five stars. Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh Reeves (01:19):

Thrilled to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Pablo.

Pablo Srugo (01:22):

Dude. So you've built like a monster of a business. I mean, you're at over 500 million in revenue, nearly 10 billion valuation, over 300,000 customers selling to SMBs, which is just absolutely mind blowing. So we'll get into like the early days of how it all started, but I actually, I was just thinking through the episode, reading some of our emails, and I noticed you have this one quote in your signature, which is like the classic Alan Kay quote. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. And I thought I'd just start there, like, why that quote? Like what about that resonates with you enough to, to put it in every email?

Josh Reeves (01:57):

I actually love that question. I've never been asked it before, so thanks for having good attention to detail and, and noticing. For me, it kind of goes back to kind of what I view as the definition of entrepreneurship. And I think some people associate that term with tech and startups. I really think of it more as a mindset. And to share a little bit of personal background, my mom's an immigrant from Bolivia, came to the US when she was 18, went to university, was the first in her family to go to college. And my dad actually is from Pennsylvania, so he was in the US already but also was the first in his family to go to college, moved out west. My parents met in San Francisco. But when I think about both their journeys, especially my mom's moving to a whole new country, learning a whole new language, building a whole new community, you know, creating a whole career. That to me is the definition of turning nothing into something.

Josh Reeves (02:48):

And so when I think about that quote from Alan Kay it's not about accepting or or even looking at the status quo as the way things can or should be. It's thinking about what could be and then doing something about it. And then there's also a quote from Steve Jobs in a video  I love from him, where he talks about how the whole world around you was made by people that are no smarter than you. You gotta poke at it, you gotta prod at it. You gotta go make changes to it to go have something come out different on the other side. And I just love that mindset. It's all about, you know, challenging what you see and then doing something to make it better.

Pablo Srugo (03:24):

It's funny you mentioned that. I remember that video, I don't remember it specifically, but I remember the effect, which was I think a week after, whenever it was, I went out for dinner with my dad and I was enthralled by it. It was like, dude, this fork, this plate, you know what I mean? Like everything you see around you, somebody made it, you know what I mean? Somebody decided at some point, obviously then there's copycats, but at some point somebody decided, this is a thing that needs to exist, and they built it. And yeah,it's just a fascinating way to look at the world around you because you see these things around you and they become status quo. They become like- they’re so prevalent, you don't think about them like air, but, you know, everything took some work.

Josh Reeves (03:59):

Yeah. and I love the other embedded concept there is like, it's never done, right? Like, there's always ways, as long as something is still frustrating or still time consuming or still, you know, creating a lot of extra additional effort, it could be simplifying, streamlined, you know, the chance to save time, save money you know, we could talk a lot more about that in the context of Gusto, but like that to me is a call to action and go do something about it. Go make a change, go make it better.

Pablo Srugo (04:26):

Yeah. Well, I think it's a perfect segue because- I mean, I know Gusto started 13 years ago or so, in 2011, so it was a while ago. But even then you know, payroll- payroll for SMBs, it's not like the sort of venture tagline, you know, a robot that does everything for you. That people are like, oh my God, you're gonna change the world. And yet you're affecting so many, like at the end of the day, you're affecting so many different people because of, because of your reach, because of your scale. How do you get into that? Like, you know, in the first place? What drives you there?

Josh Reeves (05:01):

Yeah, so I think it goes back to like what excites an entrepreneur and what draws them to even wanna start a company. And for me, and, and for those that kind of fall into the same bucket of very mission driven entrepreneurs you know, I didn't want to start a company and I have three- well, two other co-founders, three of us total. Like what we wanted to do is go fix some problems, right? Kind of extending from the chat we were just having. And so, you know, what got us really excited and what our investors and our team today are really excited about is just how big the interlocking set of problems are that we're trying to go fix. And to kind of give some example of that we did start with payroll. That's a key part of our product today.

Josh Reeves (05:39):

We think about Gusto more broadly as an entrepreneurship platform. And we're trying to make it easier for folks to start. Companies grow, companies survive and thrive. There's about 500,000 new employers each year in the US and only about half make it to year five. We want to change both of those numbers through the work that we're doing. But just specific to payroll, when we started Gusto, you had close to 40% of companies in the US doing payroll by hand. You had close to that same percentage, you know, 30 to 40% getting fined, penalized by the government for making mistakes. You had billions and billions of dollars of penalties. You had all of this time being invested. And we had gotten some exposure to that through each of us running prior startups where we had invested that time through family running small businesses. We interviewed a ton of small businesses. And so what got us excited was like people seeming so frustrated and, and spending so much effort on something that we just felt we could make simpler, easier, more intuitive.

Pablo Srugo (06:35):

There's a few different ways of starting a business, right? Like one of them is, you know, the classic Shopify thing , like by accident. You create, the store for snowboards and then people are like, oh, what's this platform? And you start selling it to them. The other way is you kind of get together with a team, with some other people, you kind of maybe like working with like your co-founders and you decide, you know, we want to build something. What are the sort of things we can build? And then maybe you end up where you ended up. Like which of these two ways is, is more like the way Gusto got created.

Josh Reeves (07:03):

When it comes to Gusto. You know, I think it's, it's actually kind of a cool dynamic. We were all second time founders. We were much more intentional. It was a lot of reflection being in our mid to late twenties. We were all, you know, builders. We all had a software skill set. But we really kind of thought about where we wanted to dedicate our time? And, fortunately all three of us kind of aligned. Like we wanted to tackle a really, really big problem that was very broken, very painful, where we had a hypothesis at least to start on how we can make it dramatically better. And we wanted it to be something we could spend decades of our life, maybe the rest of our working life trying to make better. That's, I would say, kind of the starting point of Gusto and how we came together as a founding team. Even more important, proving that you can make it better and then proving that you can actually scale that with good unit economics, viable, go to market, build a team to replicate and do it at bigger, bigger volume. That's all stuff that comes later. But like, you gotta have a big problem. That's very obviously a problem, you know, if you're gonna go spend decades trying to make it better,

Pablo Srugo (08:06):

I think, you know, I completely agree and I, I would argue like 95% of the companies that kind of don't make it to product market fit, maybe 95% is high, but like a very high percent of the companies that don't make the product market fit, were never solving like an important enough problem in the first place. Like that's what I see most commonly. Whether it's as a VC or as somebody that has helped a bunch of these and frankly done it myself, <laugh>, but like helped you know, other, other companies like, and it's just like you look at it and you're like, at the end of the day,  the thing you're solving, maybe you're solving it, maybe it's a good solution, but it just doesn't matter that much. And so you're just pushing a boulder up a hill forever and trying to do that for 10, 15 years A you don't get very far and B it’s very, very painful.

Josh Reeves (08:46):

Well, that's what I mean, andI know your audience is mostly- I'm talking to an audience who are mostly entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs.  it's an amazing choice to kind of go down that path and, and also know that, you know, statistically a lot of companies don't work out. And that's not a reason not to try. it's just don't beat yourself up, you know, iterate and, and realize that there are a bunch of stacked risks here. And you already alluded to a few, I'll add a few more. Like, you know, the problem could be too small. And that's actually not a big risk if you're just trying to build a business. You know, most Gusto customers are small businesses. Like they don't wanna scale into big, big organizations. They just want to go deliver some meaningful product service.

Josh Reeves (09:28):

It could be a small law firm, it could be a small cafe, it could be a small dentist shop or dentist office. Like they're just gonna go deliver value to their customers and their communities. And that's wonderful. But if you're trying to tackle a big problem or have the potential and raise, you know, venture money and, and scale a bigger scale, then, then it has to be a big enough problem. And then the next big thing is, you know, can you actually solve the problem, right? Like, there's plenty of problems out there that haven't been solved yet, which means there's gonna be a startup at some point that solves them. But you know, it has to not just be a hypothesis. You have to prove it. And then, like I mentioned earlier, it's also all the corresponding key ingredients if you're gonna be a for-profit business of like, you know, do you have a good gross margin? Do you have good acquisition costs to get a customer in the door? There's a lot of ways to also solve problems with bad business models where then, you know, the company doesn't exist in the future either.

Pablo Srugo (10:20):

So I wanna get into the interviews and, and the, the building. But I have to ask one more question. I've found it- because in this show, obviously I got the chance to interview a lot of very successful founders. And it's actually, I found like it's the exception are the ones that knew at the outset that they wanted to create billion dollar businesses. And, in contrast to me as a VC. Like everybody that pitches me at a preseed or seed is like, I'm building a billion dollar business. Was that your mindset back in 2011 that you wanted to create like a unicorn type scale outcome?

Josh Reeves (10:54):

So I think it is important for me to share my philosophy and our philosophy. I view things like valuation and headcount as byproducts. They're never the motivation. The motivation is we wanted to go serve and solve these key pain points for millions of businesses and hundreds of millions of people. And even before that, we looked at the ingredients like how many companies are getting fined and penalized? How many are doing this manually? How many are using point solutions? How many do not have access to healthcare? 'cause They find it too complex to set up. How many are doing time tracking on, you know, paper-based documents? How many do not know that they can access tax credits that actually bring cash to their bottom line? How many, you know, X, Y, Z... I can keep going on and on.

Josh Reeves (11:38):

These are all products, Gusto now has live and we help our customers with these pain points. But it was really starting with, hey, how many folks today are basically, this is what makes entrepreneurship hard. Either not aware or spending way too much time on these very onerous painful tasks. And, we just had a belief whether we solve it or someone else that technology. And at that point in time, especially leveraging the trends around paperless cloud mobile and from a distribution lens leveraging search and social. Today, I would add, you know, a big tailwind to help us help our customers is things like ai. There just seemed to be the right conditions with the right technology shift and the right behavior change to have a whole bunch of these pain points be made better, where companies could use a more all-in-one digital first solution.

Josh Reeves (12:26):

It would be easy to use, it would be more self-serve. They'd be in the driver's seat. You know, these small companies could have the same types of tools and technology as big companies have, but the big companies spend tons of money and have lots of specialists and customization. You know, we could bring that same benefit to small companies in a much more automated self-serve type way. And so, like I had conviction that that was gonna happen now exactly what year was gonna happen and who was gonna do it? Of course that's up for grabs, but I had conviction it was gonna happen inevitably. And then, you know, as we've progressed and actually been the one to do that for more and more customers and with the business model where, you know, we get paid for the value we create, that has led to a lot more revenue that has led to, you know, us being able to hire more teammates and invest more in RnD and build more product that has led to higher valuation, for example. But to me that is very much a byproduct. And I think when folks get too caught up in that early on, it's really a distraction. Like none of this is about achieving a valuation or achieving some benefit to ourselves. It's entirely about having created meaningful value for our customer and then do we have a business model where again, more value for the customer equals more value for Gusto.

Pablo Srugo (13:41):

I also think to an extent it's a little bit almost delusional. I mean there's exceptions to everything, but, but generally, you know, it's kind of putting the cart before the horse to think about how you're gonna be a billion dollar company when you don't even have a million in revenue, how are you gonna solve a problem <laugh> and, you know, get a few customers across the door. So okay, so going back to then, maybe just two kind of related questions. Do you remember more or less how many of these customer interviews you did? And maybe more specifically, are there any of those conversations with SMB owners that you remember, like the story and maybe that it opened your eyes or was an aha moment or just something about it that, for some reason you can still remember today?

Josh Reeves (14:22):

Yeah, so I'll get back to like the early days here and I mean, one thing I'd add though is, you know, all the ingredients I just mentioned, like we, all three of us as founders definitely saw the possibility that we could spend the rest of our life on this. But like, we didn't spend much time thinking about that. 'cause That doesn't mean anything. We went back to writing code, talking to customers, talking to prospects, talking to leads. 'cause That's really all that matters early on. So I just wanna double down on like, these are big, fun, philosophical thoughts that I can reflect on after the fact. But like early, early on, if you're a founder, like if the ingredients are there on like size of market, size of pain, check, check, basically now get back to like actually building something useful for a very, very targeted focused set of customers. So, you know, I'll get to your question about who we talk to early on, but I just wanna mention like for all the things I just said, when Gusto went live, and I know we'll talk about this shortly, about a year after we got started, like it was a product that was just for new companies in California with full-time employees who had never, you know, paid someone before. And they could just do payroll. Like we had scoped down to a very, very simple-

Pablo Srugo (15:32):

That is niche. That is niche niche.

Josh Reeves (15:34):

Yeah. I mean, there was plenty of companies that still could use it, but you have to scope your vision down to something very concrete to go approve a step one before you get to step two, step three, step four. But yeah, in terms of customers and, and interviews, even before we had a product live yeah, we talked to both small businesses but also accountants and bookkeepers. What came to mind is a chat with an accountant who worked with multiple small businesses. 'cause All too often, a lot of times the accountant was the one that was doing payroll manually for the small business. And this accountant just talked us through, you know, the lay of the land, the different products out there, their pros and cons, the pain points. I was kind of shocked. She introduced us to a number of additional accountants.

Josh Reeves (16:13):

We then met with many of the small business customers. I won't share which incumbent company this story is about, but like the number of times business owner told us their login to one of our incumbent competing products was like, F that company. I think that's probably a good signal.

Pablo Srugo (16:31)

That's a great signal!

Josh Reeves (16:32) 

whenever you're building a product in the space that you want to disrupt, and customers are so angry with the incumbent product that their password includes a swear word about that product, that's a pretty good sign to you that the pain point is not being met or solved the way it can or should be. And then more importantly. we just saw, it wasn't just about building a better, faster, cheaper version of current product lines. Like there was this shift happening. do folks trust doing this type of thing in the cloud? 

Josh Reeves (16:58):

This kind of takes us back again to like 2011, 2012, but like onboarding to Gusto then and now included someone signing up and through a web form giving us, you know, company information like EIN and address personal information like SSN bank account numbers, routing numbers, addresses. And then five days later we're pulling like $5,000 from their bank account to go pay taxes, go pay employees, right? There's a trust bar to be met there. That is super critical that today might seem table stakes, but back then we had to even validate, would people feel comfortable doing that

Pablo Srugo (17:32):

Because what was the status quo? Like they were doing it how? on paper or, these softwares operating now?

Josh Reeves (17:38):

Yeah, we just write checks. I mean, payroll predates the internet, right? So like the way you did payroll back in the day was you look up tax tables and kind of printed documents, you write checks to employees and you track hours and you know, paper-based documents like, it was all done way before the internet was invented. It's just with internet and cloud and paperless and mobile and all the, you know, corresponding technology trends there, it's possible to now build, at least we've now proven, but like back then it was a hypothesis, just a dramatically simpler, better way to do it that's more accurate, more reliable easier to use, more cost effective, et cetera.

Pablo Srugo (18:17):

And how do you-  so you decided this point, I think you're pretty set that okay, this, this is a real pain point. You've done some qualitative research talking to some of these people. You've done maybe some market research, understand that is, you know, it's a big problem. How would you scope out V1 What do you do? 'cause  I mean, payroll's a big world, right? Like what do you decide to build first and how do you decide that? 

Josh Reeves (18:39):

So, even choosing to start with payroll was a big decision, right? So we, you know, we're really excited about doing benefits and brokerage and our seed fundraising deck talked about all the other product lines we would get to. But we chose payroll to start because it is the de facto system of record for employee data and it's the least optional part of the stack. Another way to think of it is like, if you don't pay someone, they quit. And so it is the medicine, not the vitamin. And so we knew that's for a small business, especially where the data sits, the transactions sit, it's where the money moves through. So it would be kind of a very, very important position to be in, for us to be a foundational part of how then, the company functions. And so if you break down now just payroll, there's many components to it.

Josh Reeves (19:22):

There's tax calculations, there's tax payments, there's tax filings, there's money movement, and then there's the corresponding workflows for the employer, the employee. And then when those two connect with each other. And so, you know, we're three people. we had never worked in this field before. The first thing we had to prove was from a credibility lens, let alone like to prove to ourselves, could we actually build payroll infrastructure, right? And so that was the first thing we focused on. It wasn't customer acquisition, it wasn't anything tied to user experience. Although that became very important when we launched the next year. It was: could we literally just do tax filings, tax calculations, tax payments accurately, reliably and not, you know, some of the time, all the time. 'cause In the space we're in, whether we were three people back then or today, over 2,500, it is something that has to work right?

Josh Reeves (20:15):

So other product domains have different dynamics to it, but when you're in our product domain, right, this is people like getting paid so they can make rent or when we launched health benefits, it's like their kid being covered and getting help when their kid gets sick. Like, these are really, really critical, very, very important experiences that we are always grateful and take very seriously in terms of our approach to doing it the right way. And so the first thing we built was literally the ability to pay ourselves in a compliant way where we would actually have money, go into our bank accounts. We also weren't gonna pay ourselves till we could use our own system. So that was maybe another little added incentive for three of us is that w-,

Pablo Srugo (20:52):

So you're customer number one, like your, you're dogfooding it. 

Josh Reeves (20:55):

I mean we were, yeah, we were definitely the first people to get paid through the system. And again, we hadn't been paying ourselves yet, so that was like a fun added incentive. And so the money movement piece, the like tax calculations piece, the filings piece, there's actually over 10,000 different tax rules across the country. These are local, state, federal. We focused again just on, you know, being in the Bay Area in California, in the US but even that was still a lot of different rules and requirements. And that was the first kind of big push we made to get to that milestone. I can talk about the next set of milestones, but I'll pause there to see if you have any questions.

Pablo Srugo (21:31):

Yeah. Well I'm curious, how do you- well couple things, I mean first how do you choose that that scope of like Bay Area new company hasn't paid anyone? Like why, why that decision? 

Josh Reeves (21:40):

So target customer, that's a piece of this. We knew that, you know, this is a pretty generalized problem, right? Every company, wherever you have capitalism, you have work, you have a company, you have jobs, you have currency, you have pay. These are all pretty foundational concepts. And so from day one we were really focused on mainstream pain point. I think that came from our research and talking to the small businesses around us. And yes, we were in the broader Silicon Valley area and there's a lot of tech, but there's also a lot of non-tech, frankly, everywhere, including in Silicon Valley. And I love reminding folks, you know, today, like there's more dentist offices in America than tech startups. And so we had an early on hypothesis and it just showed up as a big part of our strategy. Like we're here to go solve the pain point for as many of these mainstream small businesses as possible.

Josh Reeves (22:30):

We love serving tech as well, but like we're gonna go after and chase the big, big opportunity here to meet and serve millions of companies and not just the tech startups in our backyard. And so that meant it was gonna be obviously small because when you look at the number of employers just in America, there's about 6.2 million employers in America. Over 4 million of them are less than five employees, right? Like, like two thirds are less than five employees. And so if you're gonna tackle the bulk of companies or try to reach a big segment of the market in what we're doing, at least you know, you're gonna be focusing on smaller companies. So then it's a nice coincidence. We were three people, so we met that stat pretty nicely. So it kind of just lined up nicely that we would be the first to use the product. It also gave us the credibility to onboard some of our friends' companies that, you know, were more in the tech space 'cause we were going through the Y Combinator program. But that was really just to get some initial volume through the system. And again, mostly we were proving out that we could do tax calcs, tax payments, tax filings, ACH money movements accurately, compliantly and efficiently to the system. That was the first big milestone for us to prove.

Pablo Srugo (23:39):

Well you mentioned YC. I wanted to ask about this. I mean, you're in YCI guess in, is that 2011 or 2012?

Josh Reeves (23:44):

in 2012. So kind of January, February, March of 2012.

Pablo Srugo (23:48):

I'm really worried because listen, like you've been listening for like, what, 10, 20, 30 minutes now? Clearly you like it and the thing is the next episode is way better and you're gonna miss it. You're gonna miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button,

 which in any case is still pretty early. I mean, not obviously not, it's not like batch one, but it's still pretty early YC days. Like what was it like going through YC? Like what was that experience like? I'm curious, especially back at that time, I'm sure Paul was very, very involved and you know, I guess Airbnb would've gone in what, two, three years earlier? Like it is just that that's kind of the world you're coming from.

Josh Reeves (24:26):

Yeah, I mean it I'll give you a little bit more history too. One of my co-founders, Eddie, had done YC with his first company in 2008. So he even has more stories. That's when it was all in Boston and Paul and, and Jessica would cook dinner for everyone and they would all eat together. But yeah, when we did it in 2012, you know, first the reason why we we joined it was we just saw like, like a, well multiple reasons, number one, like the dynamic of all being at the same stage, really just beginning the business and going through those first few months together was exciting. It led absolutely to us having a bunch of ready to sign up customers for Gusto. So it was a fantastic way to jumpstart the initial usage. And then it also frankly was great for the companies that stand out in a YC batch, like we had a fantastic fundraising moment in that spring where, where we did a, a $6 million seed round. And so the, the impact-

Pablo Srugo (25:25):

which is huge! It’s huge whenever, but it was very big at that time. For a seed in 2012 is not normal. 

Josh Reeves (25:31):

Yeah, I mean we had proven out that we could build a system that worked. We had onboarded our first set of customers. You know, we did the seed fundraising. But yeah, YC the community aspect, you know, we talked to a bunch of alumni and they all just had really high, you know promoter score, we use ENPS, we use ENPS a lot at Gusto, but, you know, talk to alumni of anything and if they speak very highly of it and give positive endorsement, that's a good sign. But we knew that it would just be very relevant to our, our product domain as well. So very grateful and proud that we went through the program back then.

Pablo Srugo (26:02):

And like when you raised that 6 million seed, you were kind of just launching, you had like a handful of customers.

Josh Reeves (26:07):

Yeah, so our next milestone was like now we were serving a number of other YC companies. We raised that seed round to start building out more of our r and d team. 'cause We knew we had a lot more product to build a lot more payments infrastructure and tax infrastructure to build. And we also knew that we weren't ready to launch yet. 'cause If we're gonna serve small business, one of the biggest things we had to prove was that we could set up a product that was so easy to use that it wouldn't require high touch. It wouldn't require any face-to-face interaction. Like when I had set up payroll with my prior company with a vendor, like they wanted to meet, grab coffee, you know, kind of connect exchange documents and like they were a lovely person. They bought me, you know, a hot chocolate, but I was busy.

Josh Reeves (26:49):

I wanted to be back in my office writing code, not meeting in person with someone. And so we had a hypothesis that like we could build something that was so easy to use, anyone could use it with no training. We also had a hypothesis that obviously we could onboard in a way that was, you know, very, very self-serve. We also had a hypothesis that the employee would log in and be able to do their own interactions. And so we had a number of milestones to work through in those first several months. We didn't launch till December of 2012. So we did YC at the beginning of 2012. We raised that seed round in the spring. We launched publicly in December of 2012. And when I say launched publicly, that's when we actually had a website where you could set up, you know, enroll, start using Gusto, pay an employee, you know, entirely through the web app without actually ever talking to us.

Josh Reeves (27:43):

Up to that point, there were pieces of it that were more manual. You might have to call us. We hadn't built out the employee flow yet. We hadn't built out the employer flow yet. We hadn't built out the run payroll flow yet. And so in that 12 month period, we were doing a lot of iteration, a lot of software development. We were still doing all of the backend processing at bigger and bigger volumes. So we had gone to around I think like 50, 60 companies using Gusto prior to launching. But once we launched, we had a hundred companies sign up that we had never talked to all across California who we had never met. And that's when we started knowing, hey, we're onto something interesting here. 'cause Now we have actually a good feedback loop on, the ability to have folks sign up in a self-serve fashion and, and actually start using the product without, you know, meeting Tomer Eddie and I in person.

Pablo Srugo (28:28):

You raised that $6 million seed in early 2012, what do you do with it? Like, do you grow your three people at that point? Like do you grow to like 20, 30 people right away? Or like how do you, how do you use that in that first kind of year as you're still building towards a public launch?

Josh Reeves (28:45):

Yeah, so I think my mental model on fundraising is there should be a reason to raise money. And in addition to that, you know, don't spend money 'cause you have it. So when we did our series A, which I know is fast forwarding a bit, in 2013 we still had like two thirds of that seed round in the bank. And so maybe there's in retrospect some optimization around dilution stuff, et cetera. But, you know, we got a good price. We got some fantastic angel investors. It was 20 founder-CEOs that, you know, did that seed round. It was the founders of PayPal and Instagram and Mint and Eventbrite and Stripe and Nest and a whole bunch of really incredible businesses box and Dropbox. And so you know, I was really grateful to have those folks get involved. Most of our money, to answer your question, was focused on hiring engineers, designers.

Josh Reeves (29:37):

We started building out the beginnings of our go-to-market motion and that's where I ended up focusing more of my time and attention. My other two cofounder co-founders focused more on product and engineering and design. I focused much more on go to market distribution as well as kind of broader operations for the company. And so we had added like one or two folks more on the kind of content marketing, inbound marketing. Hubspot had started getting some traction. That whole concept was kind of becoming more prevalent. But the bulk of the team, you know, when we raised our series A in 2013, we were probably about, I wanna say 10 to 15 people were mostly engineering and product folks at that point.

Pablo Srugo (30:13):

Okay, so like pre pre-launch you were probably maybe 10 total

Josh Reeves (30:17):

Pre-Launch in December of 2012. We were like five to six people. I wanna say maybe seven.

Pablo Srugo (30:23):

So I need to, I need to double down on this because I think, you know, I'm biased. Like my bias is small teams are incredibly important in the early days because like, the tradeoff is between getting more things done, like writing more stuff, building more stuff, and communication and overhead. I mean, the more people you have, the harder it's to move everybody. The more you need to , make sure everybody understands, sure you can get more things done, but if you don't know exactly what things need to be done, I mean I think it's happening more now, actually post all the hype that happened in 21, 22, but in that time it was raise a round, hire as many people as you can and just like, you know, why would, like, this is the kind of, the thing is you have $6 million, you kind of know what you need to build. Why not have 10 people, 15 people, 20 people and just build it faster. Like what, what was your thinking? And even now looking back,

Josh Reeves (31:20):

Yeah, I think there's a couple kind of inputs here. I mean first off, like, you know, at this point, you know, we're only building one thing. Like there's no multiple roadmaps, there's no big planning process. Like it's just us in a room literally. And like, you know, when we're interviewing a candidate, like the whole company's interviewing the candidate because the whole company is five, six people. There's also some related concepts here. Like, you know, from an engineering lens, we're hiring full stack folks as much as possible. You know, our designer was one of our first employees. Like he could write front end code, he could do graphics, he could do video, he could do web. Like you kind of want people that are pretty generalist, agile, flexible. It depends on your product. I'm sure if people are in like super esoteric specialized product domains, they might need an extreme specialist as a result in that domain.

Josh Reeves (32:05):

But we're building out, you know, payments infrastructure, FinTech type stuff, rebuilding out software SaaS and for that product domain, you know, people that are able to wear many hats was much more useful. We kind of had a set of clear milestones to reach in terms of getting the product ready for launch. We weren't holding back from hiring great talent. But when you're that small too, you know, you gotta really have a high bar for who you're gonna bring in. You know, one person joining a six person team is gonna massively affect the whole way the company functions at that point. And so, you know, we were definitely looking for great talent scouring, you know, who could join us. I think again, when we launched, probably closer to like eight or nine people, is probably where the head count was.

Josh Reeves (32:50):

And then when we did our series A in 2013, I think we were closer to that 15 to 20. But it really ties to like what you're trying to go do and is headcount the constraint or, or is it just you know, subject matter expertise. And, my mental model for hiring in general, you know, whether it's then or now, even is you gotta have a clear need, a clear thing you want to have done better, faster, or done in more volume to justify hiring. Otherwise, you know, hiring for the sake of hiring is one of the biggest pitfalls in Silicon Valley. You know, founders that are really proud of their headcount, like I would just say, you know, be proud of your customer account and be proud of your ENPS. Be proud of your product retention. Be proud of your conversion, be proud of your revenue, which is a byproduct of those. And then all of that leads to the ability to have, you know, larger teams if you need it. In our case, we've grown the headcount quite a bit because we are doing lots of product development. Like we have many, many different product lines now. We have many more on the way. And, and that's a big part of where we're reinvesting our cash flow at this point. 'cause We're generating a lot of free cash flow back into adding more products into the platform to solve more pain for our customer.

Pablo Srugo (33:55):

Well I, you know, for what it's worth, I tell especially pre-product market fit and, and look, startups are almost exceptions by definition. So there's no perfect rule. But, generally speaking I tell pre-product market fit startups to stay small, you know, 5, 7, 8 people sort of thing, can do a lot and could move really quickly and learn really quickly and disseminate information really quickly. And that's usually more important than just, you know, more bodies.

Josh Reeves (34:19):

Well this is where I would say there's a, I mean there's a whole sequencing  to oversimplify you're kind of alluding to it, but until you have product market fit, we Guo talked also about not just MVP but a minimum lovable product. So MLP 'cause we had to have that high word of mouth, that high customer satisfaction to drive referrals and top of funnel. You know, we started doing paid acquisition, you know, several months after launching. 'cause We had to figure out first like had we built a product people loved after we went live and started having customers sign up, like the next big milestone for us was seeing like were we hitting that really high customer satisfaction point where they were so in love with the product that they wanted to tell others that we could be growing organically? 'cause We knew with a smaller business you're gonna have a lower ACD like organic has to be the lifeblood of your growth engine.

Josh Reeves (35:08):

It's also I think just a good one to have in general because it means you've actually built something useful that people love and like are willing to pay for. But we also had to prove out, you know, where gross margin was gonna be at. 'cause It's not just product market fit, it's also having good unit economics. But once you have people loving a product and you have good unit economics, then for sure it's about scaling the heck out of it, right? We wanna go help as many companies as possible. So, you know, I think about the high level there being this check and balance dynamic. Like we wanna grow as fast as we can once we knew the product was loved and once we knew that it had good unit economics. But the three checks and balances are number one, you know, if unit economics degrade, we have to make sure that we maintain them. Number two, if product quality degrades, we have to make sure we maintain that. And three, if our Gusties experience, the team, we call ourselves Gusties. if ever part of that starts degrading. We have to maintain that. But if you kind of keep those three in mind while you're in scaling mode, you know, the goal is to grow as fast as you can while having those three as checks and balances.

Pablo Srugo (36:10):

You, you mentioned a minimum lovable product and you mentioned kind of making sure that people loved your product. How did you, how did you do that? Like how do you measure? I mean it's, it's critical, right? You want customers to love your product, but how did you measure if people really loved your product?

Josh Reeves (36:26):

So there was a combination of qualitative and quantitative. I mean, the qualitative was just people posting on social media. And like, you know, talking about it publicly and, and like we could parse and read any of that if they did reach out to us or email us, you know, a lot of positive sentiment, gratitude, like, a lot of appreciation for us, simplifying their life, making something complex much easier, saving them in a bunch of time, you know, and, and other parts of their life have been getting better. If you think about the time period we had, people using Gmail and they're like, email now is easier, better, simpler. We had people using, you know, starting to use products like Dropbox and doing, you know, file storage online. And then they were still doing payroll like on pen and paper manually the way they had for decades.

Josh Reeves (37:08):

And so it kind of almost just made sense like, oh, Gusto is like the modern way to do payroll. So qualitative public kind of social commentary was one quantitatively it was like, you know, pretty logical stuff like retention, right? So people staying in the product obviously people were paying for it. There was a subscription attached. So I always say to folks, if you ever have an issue with customers not willing to pay for a product, you might not be creating enough value. 'cause When you create value, you know, people then aren't usually willing to pay for that value. And so really no issue at all with folks paying, kind of gave us good signal. But then really the main quantitative feedback loop was looking at top of funnel leads, traffic and then signups and then new customer ads. And you know, almost across the board we had done some pr especially tied to the fundraising, but the majority of our customer acquisition in that first year was coming from customers telling, you know, their friends telling other business owners they knew in their communities on their email lists, you know, in their, you know small business forums.

Josh Reeves (38:10):

Like, you have to check out Gusto, you have to use Gusto.

Pablo Srugo (38:13):

What do you think drives that? Like this is something, I mean, everybody wants referrals and you know, I have companies I know with solid retention that get some word of mouth, but they're just like, how do I get more referrals? How do I get more word of mouth? Like, what do you think was driving so much word of mouth for you, because gusto -, payroll's not - it's not like a Snapchat where it's like, dude, look at this cool new app. Right? It's not, it's not like a thing people talk about and yet you're getting a lot of it. What, what do you think was driving that?

Josh Reeves (38:38):

The amount of pain that we were fixing. Again, I think the more you talk to small business owners and I can go on this for a whole hour, I'll hold myself back, but, it is still way too difficult to run and start a business and there are so many different compliance headaches and hurdles and hoops to jump through. And at this point we're obviously further along, but even then when we just took payroll, it made it dramatically simpler. You know, we would send an email to folks that said, here are all the forms you need to do this quarter. We did them all for you, have a good day. Like, that was a magical moment of folks wanting to just show love to gusto. And like that led to a whole bunch of subsequent, you know, tweeting and social sharing. But that just wasn't the way it had been done before.

Josh Reeves (39:19):

People were just used to like this being a kind of brutal time suck. Like that would drain you and take you away from why you actually started your business. And turning it from that into something that felt magical, felt simple, like saved you time again for a small business owner really, really was special, right? Like that small business owner doesn't care too much about things like Snapchat. Like they care about things like that actually make their life simpler because they're, you know, trying to hold the whole thing together, wearing 20 different hats with their five person team and like, you know, seemingly no one's cared about them for a long time. 'cause You know, most software companies wanna move to enterprise or upmarket. And so just even Gusto and obviously other companies too, like bringing great technology, great software to bear in this small business customer segment made their day, made them get really, really excited that someone cared about them.

Pablo Srugo (40:11):

I've got so many different Q- but I gotta ask because of close. you mentioned moving up market, that's like, that's the thing, like anybody that starts in SMB generally gets to IT market so they can get enterprise, so they can have seven figure contracts. It seems like you haven't. Is that just- it's work. like from a business perspective, is that just like a mission thing? Like you mentioned at the beginning or, or what drove you to just like, I'm sure you had many opportunities to go up market, what drove you to stay more or less where you've always been? 

Josh Reeves (40:44):

So our long-term ambition is to solve pain wherever it's at. You know, that means eventually Augusta will be serving all size companies in all countries around the world with, you know, all pain points tied to running a business. Now obviously we have to sequence it, we have to prioritize, you kind of can't snap your fingers and do all of that all at once. But I wanted to note that there's obviously a lot of pain in lots of places. You know, every year we've progressed further in expanding who we can help, expanding the product mix we have, et cetera. But especially, you know, to early stage founders, and I know that’s a large part of the audience focus is so, so important. So for us, we started and, and and have as our core small business. Now to your point, you know, why do a lot of SaaS companies in particular leave behind that segment?

Josh Reeves (41:32):

Well, it's not about passion or interest. It's, you gotta find what works for your company. For a lot of companies tackling small business customer acquisition is really hard and you typically have a pretty big leaky bucket problem as well. And so whenever I meet founders, you know, I ask 'em if you're serving small business pain points, like what are your, you know, what's your NDR? What's your net dollar retention given that leaky bucket problem and you know, what's your customer acquisition cost? I'm like, are you actually cost effectively reaching and expanding your customer mix? And if both become really challenging, that's probably a good reason to pivot and or move into larger contracts where you have more stickiness. Customers stay around longer and exist longer. And also they're obviously, you know, paying, paying much more as well.

Josh Reeves (42:19):

Now on the flip side, if mental retention and CAC is great and it has been at Gusto since the beginning, then you know, you just wanna crank that flywheel and crank that engine for as long as possible. And it's not just gusto that that has this dynamic. You know, companies like Shopify Square, Intuit have proven that you can build like a hundred billion dollar plus companies if the numbers are working right, if you’re medicine not vitamin for a small business customer, but it definitely doesn't work for the whole product portfolio. I think in our case payroll was in retrospect, again, a really smart bet. It's something everyone needs. It's something when you start out, there's about 500,000 new companies each year. Every single one of those new employers, actually specifically 500,000 new employers when they hire their first employee needs to pay them, right?

Josh Reeves (43:06):

If they don't pay them, they're gonna quit. And so it was again, that was a bit more luck. We had a hypothesis on it, but it was a product that made sense for a small business where we could have great unique economics, great NDR. So on the flip side, to answer your question directly, like we have a great business in small business, we want to help more of them. We wanna solve more pain in their life. And for the folks that do grow bigger we wanna keep 'em on Gusto. So, you know, they used to be, I would say Gusto is great for, you know, one to 10 person companies and it was one to 50 and it was one to 100. Today. We have a lot of companies in that one to 500 employee count. But if you look at where a lot of our new companies sign up, it's still at that smaller, smaller scale. And some will grow to be a hundred or 200 employees, but the vast majority will grow to be 2, 3, 5, 10 person companies. And, we're happy to serve both. 

Pablo Srugo (43:58):

So going back now in the timeline, I'm taking you all over the place, but you finally do that public launch at the end of 2012, you have those like a hundred  wait list customers. Walk me through that early ramp, like one year after, two years after, like how fast was that early growth in terms of customers and revenue?

Josh Reeves (44:17):

Yeah, so we grew from like a hundred customers in that first month to a thousand in the first year. So that first year felt good, you know, I guess yeah,

Pablo Srugo (44:28):

ACV was like, what, like 2000 or so a year.

Josh Reeves (44:31):

ACV was lower. Our initial ACVs were like 500 bucks ish. Wow, okay. Honestly we were proving out, first again, how we built a great product. So word of mouth, NPS most of, of new traffic and new leads were organic. We didn't start doing even the basics of Sam search engine marketing till later that year. So we weren't chasing to start putting ad dollars to work like we wanted to get those customers, you know, we were hitting growth targets too. We didn't quite have a full plan of record if you will. 'cause We're still small and just like trying to grow as fast as we could. But it felt good. Like it felt good that if we grow to a thousand in our first year, a thousand businesses, that's a good milestone.

Josh Reeves (45:13):

We felt like if we did that, we'd be on track, if you will. And again, with good gross margin, with good customer acquisition cost, with high customer satisfaction. And we started doing a little bit more around content marketing. We started writing blog posts. We started kind of answering questions inside Quora and Reddit, you know, that type of stuff, to be a part of the conversation. But most of, most of the work actually was building out on the team, you know, our, our engineering team. And then we had a big choice once we went live. And we're a few months in, like what are our next big milestones on the product side and you know, we actually could have chosen to start launching additional products. But, you know, you probably can guess this, you know, we were still only in California.

Josh Reeves (45:55):

And so once we had enabled the ability for folks to switch to Gusto, once we had enabled the ability for, obviously not full-time, but part-time, you know, and other work types to be in the product the next big, big multi-year activity for us, it took us a couple years. It wasn't until 2015 was actually getting nationwide coverage. 'cause This isn't just a software app, right, where you just like, make it accessible. You know, you don't have to do anything to make a software app accessible across the country. It's accessible across the world and the internet, right? But like we have to do every single local, state, federal town county tax code to actually be able to support customers in that specific state. And, and so we went through this multi-year progression of basically state expansion. And so that was the next big kind of set of product activities.

Josh Reeves (46:43):

It wasn't launching new products, it was simply taking what we had built that was working in California. And we kept growing there. We had wait lists in every state across the country, and we could have gotten to those states faster if we had kind of watered down the product, maybe did a partial solution. But our value prop was, we are gonna be your partner. We are gonna take care of all the details for you at least at that point tied to payroll. And so it took us a couple years to get to that nationwide coverage to make sure we didn't dilute or water down that value prop. And when we got nationwide coverage in 2015, we had a big celebration. It was our kind of states party. We had a big kind of party inside the company. It was fun to be at that milestone.

Pablo Srugo (47:23):

And how, like by then, by 2015 that's about, I'm just looking here. When you raised your series B, where were you customer wise? Like revenue wise?

Josh Reeves (47:32):

Yeah, so early on customer growth, I mentioned that thousand was the first year. Next year was around 9,000. So we kind of kept with that like 10 x each year dynamic. And then we didn't keep doing, to be clear, Gusto’s not- <laugh> point. Yeah, I think it was like 10 x, 10 x and then it was something like five x. Okay. From there,

Pablo Srugo (48:00):

no, I mean, but numbers obviously, like you're talking like half a million to maybe 5 million to 20, 30 million top line ish.

Josh Reeves (48:08):

Yeah. So the customer account directly correlates to actually revenue for Gusto because we price per company and we also price per employee. And so yeah, that was a big part of it was actually scaling customer accounts. Knowing we had good product market fit, good customer feedback, getting to more state coverage, having more obviously revenue come from that. And then we raised the series A when we had proven in California that this was working and most of the money for the Series A we decided to invest to go get nationwide coverage. So again, fundraising to me is about hitting a milestone, de-risking the business and then having a clear goal of what you wanna do next. And then you can get there with enough time from things like cash flow. But the whole point of collapsing time taking venture capital, you know, shortening that horizon is because you want to get there faster.

Josh Reeves (48:59):

And if you're gonna get there faster through building faster through having a parallel product team effort that's a good reason to raise money. A lot of the times we've raised capital has been to go fund r and d. I think the pitfall is when companies raise money to fund bad business models, right? If you have bad gross margin or bad CAC, bad unit economics and you're raising money, you really need to get that back into the right spot. Otherwise you're gonna have to keep raising more and more money just to fill the hole as it gets bigger. It's kind of that whole pitfall of like, make, make it up at volume. Well, if it's a negative gross martian business at the extreme, you're just gonna lose even more money at volume, right? So, you know, my philosophy is you gotta have good unit economics. And then, you know, raising money is about collapsing time to get to more product quicker. And then on top of that there's obviously a lot of competition dynamics at play too. So it is “grow as fast as you can” just with those checks and balances in place.

Pablo Srugo (49:53):

And what's the next milestone? Am I gonna see you ringing the bell in 2025?

Josh Reeves (49:57):

I mean our big milestones, like we're here to build for the long term. You know, we're only one decade in many, many decades to go. We want to help, as you probably can tell, like millions more companies at some point, Gusto, you know, will be a public company. That's not, to me, the destination. It's a good milestone to celebrate for sure. But then, you know, we got the next couple decades to keep building from there. So yeah, no timing to share at this point, but hopefully everyone, everyone gets- for us, it's all about the customer, all about being the best possible product to serve and solve their pain. And I think the rest, frankly, works its way out if you, if you do that the right way.

Pablo Srugo (50:30):

Perfect. Well, Josh, we'll stop it there. I'll ask the two questions we always end on the first one is, when did you really know that you had true product market fit? 

Josh Reeves (50:43):

So, early on, maybe my, the first anecdote that comes to mind is like, when we launched and had like all of these companies we had never met who I never had talked to across California. So we were fortunate, the first state we started with happens to be the most populated state. And like they were in SoCal and like there were these clusters, it would be like all of a sudden one day there'd be like three like churches that would sign up and we'd be like, whoa. Like we looked at every single customer climbing in every single lead. We'd be like, who, who are these? And we'd google them and learn more about it. And so, you know, that was special because it told us like, you know, again, this is a mainstream problem. Many folks feel it, they're kind of drawn into the potential of like taking payroll at that point and making it way simpler and easier.

Josh Reeves (51:29):

But then the second big kind of set of moments milestones are like them actually using the product and then emailing us, tweeting about us and like just how vocal and, and how grateful they were for, you know, what we had built. And so those were the initial signals. And again, coupled with a pricing structure that meant we had good gross margin. So it wasn't just people loving our product. And we did surveys like, why do you love Gusto? I think it's a flag if people love a product, because if pricing is number one that’s- , pricing was number like six, and we had people telling us like, you should raise your prices. You're too cheap. Which is also a pretty good sign, frankly. But like, the number 1, 2, 3, 4 reasons were like time savings, ease of use, simplicity. And like also when they called in, we were there to help as well.

Josh Reeves (52:12):

So also great, great service, but it was, you know, really that we had proven that hypothesis that it was possible to build like what I would call modern software. And I can go on a whole diatribe about like, I think enterprise software historically, like modern software is there to make you have superpowers done, right? It gives you this incredible augmentation and you feel like you can do way more than you could before. I think unfortunately a lot of software historically kind of felt like you had to conform to it. You had to read books, you had to read manuals, training materials, and learn how to use it. Great software done right? And we're still working to keep getting better at this doesn't require training or make you feel like you have to learn how to use it. It's there to give you superpowers. And so again, seeing folks kind of realize that and give us their vocal kind of appreciation for it told us we were on the right track.

Pablo Srugo (53:03):

And then the last question  either it's basically around a piece of advice, but like either some piece of advice you could give yourself, if you could go back to the time you were starting gusto or a piece of advice you find yourself giving. I'm sure you meet a lot of early stage founders, so something you, you find yourself, like some of the most common advice you find yourself giving early stage founders these days.

Josh Reeves (53:24):

So the number one I advice I give, and I'm, I I love repeating it even if folks have heard it from me before, is if you're gonna tackle a big pain point, if you're gonna start with the problem, if you're gonna, maybe if it's big enough, spend decades of your life tackling it, making it better you know, make sure when you talk about it and you break down like what you're trying to go fix and what the future could look like, that it, like truly intrinsically, authentically just gets you riled up and excited. 'cause There's gonna be all the bumps and, you know, ups and downs along the way of actually executing to go actually solve that problem. And the way I've at least gone through all of those different hurdles and challenges, and it could be tied to team, could be tied to execution, it's all of the above is I just keep going back to like why we exist, what we're trying to make better, and if we do our job right, we've done obviously some of it so far, we have so much more to do.

Josh Reeves (54:18):

Like, how excited I would be to kind of have that type of impact and, and that to me is such a key part of what gets you through challenging moments. So yeah, the way I kind of frame it as advice is imagine it's the 10000th time you're describing what you're doing. Will you be as excited as the first time? And if you can't imagine describing your mission or purpose 10,000 times, that's probably a flag. And on the flip side, you know, if you've already done it 10,000 times and your addressing society like it’s the first time, then fantastic you've found something that really resonates with you. And then the key is finding other people that it resonates with too. Like today, Gusto and at the beginning our hiring philosophy has had three dimensions to it. Maybe I'll add this as well. It's alignment around values, alignment around motivation and alignment around skill.

Josh Reeves (55:06):

I think a lot of times early stage founders get caught up too much in number three, three matters, right? You need to have it-  you need to build more, you know, a product, you need to have people that can write code, you wanna do more content marketing, you have people that can write content or maybe now it's AI . But, but if the first two are overlooked, values alignment, which is kind of the way your company operates and approaches problem solving and motivational alignment, people that really care about what you're trying to go do, if those are not very strong, you kind of end up with a little bit more of a mercenary dynamic. And so we've been fortunate to really attract people that wanna make healthcare better, wanna make entrepreneurship more accessible, wanna help small businesses, you know, get the benefits of big companies historically, but do it while they're still small. And like that's made the world a difference in how we've executed at early stage, at mid stage, and even now at late stage in over thousands of employees. And I think that can scale no matter what size you're at Franklin.

Pablo Srugo (55:59):

Perfect. Well Josh, thanks for jumping on the show, man. It's been great. 

Josh Reeves (56:03):

Yeah, My pleasure. Thanks Pablo. And thanks, team. Thanks everyone for joining this podcast and, and excited you're all part of this community.

Pablo Srugo (56:13):

Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe, you're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel, send it to your founder friends, and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.