edawerd

Hi everyone!

Gusto Co-founder & Head of Technology here. I'm excited for this as much as I was our first ZenPayroll launch HN post 15 years ago.

Today, we're launching Gusto Cofounder to the world. Here's a Loom video I recoded showing a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DBpVvJJeKc

It takes the best parts of OpenClaw, Claude Cowork and Gusto capabilities into a single new product experience. Some key characteristics of this:

- Automations. You have a conversion with Gusto Cofounder to automate a business process that you have. These automations run in the background on a recurring schedule.

- Connectors: You connect Gusto Cofounder to systems that sit outside of Gusto, such as Notion, Google Sheets, or Quickbooks. Automations can do things *across* these systems. Connect to any remote MCP server.

- Channels: You talk to Gusto Cofounder via SMS or Slack. If you've used OpenClaw, you know how magical that can be. Automations can give you updates over SMS, and you can reply back.

- Gusto data + capabilities: And of course, it comes out of the box with many Gusto capabilities across Payroll, Time, Expenses, Scheduling, HR, Reporting and more.

- Cloud-based: Safer and no installation needed.

If it sounds like a mashup of OpenClaw, Claude Cowork, and Gusto, you’re absolutely right.

So why is this any different?

OpenClaw and Claude Cowork are such powerful tools, but they suffer from the "blank canvas" problem. Most users just don't know what to do with it, even though it can do so much. I spent 8 hours installing my own OpenClaw on my Mac mini and once I did that, I still didn’t know what to do with it. It’s just a glorified search engine to me.

I thought to myself, if we ground this technology in *real* problems that Gusto ALREADY solves for our customers, like payroll, time, HR, etc., there's a good chance that small businesses will finally get the version of AI that that everyone keeps talking about but never really see.

You can put Gusto Cofounder to work with a simple message:

- "Run payroll for me every Friday. Text me if there are any anomalies greater than 10% from the previous week’s payroll, and flag anything that needs my approval before it submits."

- "Generate a weekly labor cost report by department and send it to me over Slack every Monday morning."

- “Every morning, check the weather and if it’s forecasted to rain, send an email reminder to today’s customers to bring an umbrella along with them for the tour. The customers are in the Google Sheets titled with today’s date.”

- "Send me an approval request for any team expense over $25 before it gets processed. Otherwise, just approve it for me."

- "Flag any time-off requests that overlap with payroll deadlines or leave the team short-staffed."

Want early access? Sign up at: https://gusto.com/cofounder. If you leave a message in the comment, I’ll turn it on for you by EOD.

Would love your feedback and thoughts on it!

Non-paywall link: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/gusto-cash-flow-positive-g...

We most certainly do not

nope! we've had it for many years now!

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).

Hi! Cofounder and CTO here. We offer workers compensation insurance in all 50 states!

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!

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!

+1.This is a great summary of my experience

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.

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.

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.

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.