YouSaid · the spoken record

Tomer London

lines on the record: 33
first: 2020-02-28
most recent: 2020-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The picture well, it's all in our hands. I think we're just starting in this journey. If you look at our customer base, we're still 100,000, over 100,000 small businesses now in the US. There's millions and millions of businesses in the US and many millions outside of the US that need this. They need help starting their teams, building and growing their team. They need help paying their team and retaining them. And I think we're just in the beginning of the journey. So I'm excited to keep learning and growing and kind of see how Gusto changes over these next five years.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we talked about these three layers of functionality, ease of use, and the lights. I think craftsmanship is about that. It's about making sure you don't miss one for the other. And it's really, really hard. And many, many times people overdo the light and the cost of functionality in the other way. I think striking the right balance is craftsman.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my biggest memory there, you know, YC's been amazing, amazing. I recommend every single person who have the chance to apply and try, definitely go through it. The biggest thing that I felt in YC was, gosh, these founders, they're all so smart and so fast and so talented. How the hell are we going to do this? Successfully, how do we compare? And I think the takeaway from there is that that competitiveness actually led me to really work at my peak and give my best work. I discovered something new about my software that.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. Well, I think it's actually in the first check to Gusto is like a close friend of Josh's that they've known each other for many, many years. And he was just actually hanging out with us in a house in Palo Alto where we were just coding. And he just loved Josh and really believed in what we do. He's an investment banker. So yeah, just like an angel, what VCs would call a small angel check that probably he's very happy about today.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a tough one. Well, I think the strength that helped a lot in the early days and today as well is empathy and understanding customers and being customer first. I always, just my mind automatically goes to the customer and their experience and everything that we do. And I think that has helped us, you know, kind of grow the business in the right way and do the right thing. Weaknesses, I think I do think a lot about what other people think and kind of analyzing that and sometimes overanalyzing that at night before I go to sleep and that just like takes a lot of energy.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I love Audible. Audible is like a great hack. I use it in my commute and I end up reading tons of books because of it, which is crazy because I didn't use to read a lot of books. A recent set of type of books that I enjoy is personal memoirs for people that I'm just inspired by. So I would say a recent one is Shimon Perez's book called No Room for Small Dreams. It talks about the foundation of Israel and Israel. If you think about it, it's just a huge startup.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a much more experienced tenure leadership team. Each one brings their perspective, and in the end, we make a decision, and we make sure we're all aligned and everyone is doing and projecting the values and what we care about in an intentional way. So I would say high level that my biggest piece of inputs for folks who are thinking about culture is be intentional, notice that the small things really matter and talk among the leadership team about these day-to-day decisions. And what do you want to actually convey from them?”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, really matter. So, how you handle when someone does not perform well in the company? How do you balance the situation where on one side you want to give this person a chance to grow, be successful, but on the other side you know that when you have one team member that's not pulled their weight, everyone around them suffers from. And on the other side, this is their friends. So they want to see them there. So how do you manage these type of situations, I think, is really the core of the culture. And for us to do it, in the end of the day, I think the key part is just to be intentional. Don't do this in a random way. Talk about it. So for us, in the early days, Josh Addine and I were meeting together every Sunday for four hours, five hours in Eddie's apartment building in San Francisco. And we were just talking about these exactly these type of things, how to handle these things. And sometimes to a place where we're feeling like, why are we over talking this? Is other funders talking about this type of stuff so much? Like, how do we arrange desks and stuff? But in the end of the day, these things really matter. And then all the way to today where we...”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that is the word that helped us kind of get to where we are. So intentionality. Intentionality is a huge part of how we think about culture. And I think just understanding that is kind of half of the battle. Just knowing that, hey, culture is not just about the values that you put together and what you say. It's what you do and understanding that every single action that you do has repercussion and especially as the company scales really quickly and you don't have tons of time with new people. So they really read into what they see around them. So intentionality on how we hire. So I mentioned earlier one of the biggest things for us is this motivation alignment interview and really figuring out like, is the person coming? What's the motivation? Are they here to serve others? Are they here to challenge themselves and grow? Do they have the humility that you need in order to keep growing as a person professionally and personally? These are the things that we're looking at. And that sets obviously a big part of the culture of how kind of we interview people in, treating people with respect, especially in the tough situation.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's beautifully sad. I totally agree with that. Yeah, you know, there's this thing that I read somewhere that, you know, you usually, people regret what they did not do. They don't regret what they did do often. Yeah.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think definitely I'm filling it at every step. And at this point, I kind of got used to it and know how to overcome it. And I think the way, at least that I'm thinking about this is, let's say, I'm noticing that, hey, there's some real shift happening in the company right now and we need something different from cheap product officer. I can see this coming the next couple of months. And kind of being in this place that you kind of know that it's going to come. You'll be like, all right, well, here it is again. I'm going to start doubting myself. Am I ready? You know, is this going to work? And then you're like, okay, well, I knew this was coming. Now let's get to work and do the best that I can in order to be ready for the next level. And hey, in the end of the day, that's the only thing you can really do is to do your best. And that's how I think about it. That's kind of how I'm talking with my kids about this stuff. Just do your best and focus on the task and focus on making the impact that you want. And that's it. If you keep doing your best, you're going to end up in the top place that you can. And that's awesome. And don't go more than that because that's going to make you really unhappy.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hiring people that think about their world as servicing customers and servicing users and being there for them. And this idea of delight that we talked about earlier, this idea of like craftsmanship and going the extra mile to make the customers happy is something that they just inherently believe in and therefore they bring into their work. So I think 80% of this is really solved by hiring and the other 20% is solved by making sure we don't miss out on opportunities that are not directly staring us at the face. I'm so pleased you mentioned that at the hiring element because it's the core all of any great founder. And I do want to touch on you before we move into the quick firearound because it's been an incredible few years and the scaling has been amazing. As I said, I saw your office in San Francisco and I didn't really want to leave. I think it was security that probably threw me out. But I do want to ask, because it's a big change to make as a leader, how have you seen yourself change and evolve as a leader over the last few years? Yeah, so I think the company eight years ago when we started, we were three and now we're around 1200.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it is really hard. Because what happens, as you mentioned, is let's say all of a sudden you scale really quickly. And then what happens a lot is that you start getting a lot of tons and tons and tons of requests from existing customer and new customers. And if your customer focused, you really want to satisfy them and make sure you go and do all these things. And I think there's a couple things there. One is to make sure to understand the role of customer feedback in the development process, know that customers are going to ask for things and the salespeople are going to ask for things delivering what prospects are telling them. And that is a really important piece of feedback and input. But there's also another piece that the unheard majority. You know, most people are not using your product yet. Most people are not knocking on your door yet. And you have to remember to think about these folks and what are some of their needs and how do you make sure the balance between those two buckets? So that's one part of it. The other one is around how you build your team and how you hire. I think one of the things that I mentioned earlier, this kind of service mindset, when we hire engineers, product managers, and designers, we really care about”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comments, and we have a Slack channel in Gusto, it's open to everyone where literally every single NPS comment is being read by many, many people in our Gusto team, and especially the product and design teams. And these really matter because these anecdotes can show some trends. They can show some specific situation we haven't thought of, and they can bring ideas and they can connect people that work in the day-to-day directly with customer happiness or customer pain. So I think the role of having an ongoing NPS survey and looking at that data, not over analyzing it, not overusing it, but using it the right way is actually quite powerful. Yeah, no, I do agree, and especially in terms of bringing the team closer to the customer. I do want to ask, because the challenging element often is when you're thinking about going all out scaling, people often lose sight of product development. How do you think about the balance and relationship of product dev and also hard and fast scaling and whether they actually are contrary to each other? Right, that's a really good one. That's a really good question.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Benchmaster the industry standard, and I find it all quite bluffy actually. So how do you think about yes and using MPS effectively in terms of determining to license and customer love? Yeah, I think NPS is not the one metric. It's not the one place you go and everything about how people think about your product or love your product at all. So there's a lot of really solid criticism about NPS. But it's really about the usage of NPS. I think we have different usage here with NPS. So where I think NPS is really helpful is two things. One is seeing trends and two is reading the comments. Trends are obvious. you see have more promoted, less promoted when you cut by different types of customers. So you learn about who the different experiences are better for. Or perhaps specifically, if you think about the NPS question, when customers do use feature X, do they tend to then want to talk about Gusto positively outside or not? That is a really interesting question. If your go-to market is too word of mouth, which is a huge part of how Gusta grows. That is one specific thing. The other thing is about”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you think about Does it have User workflow, right? That's a great one. I think, yes, I think the fastest you can, of course, delight the customer and show them what you're about, the better. And for me, the way I think about this is a brand or a product experience is really like a product's like a personality. It's like a person. And when you meet someone for the first time, the first 20 seconds, the first 30 seconds really, really matter. And after the personality shines, even in the dull moments of whatever waiting in line or the dull moments or just randomly seeing someone crossing ice, and they think that if you really understand the personality of your brand, personality of your product, you can bring that in very, very early through simple things like copy, through simple things like illustrations. And these things can make a really big difference. Yeah, no, I do agree with you in terms of those kind of impactful first impressions. You asked about the NPS earlier. Yeah, hand me on NPS because it's one where founders often kind of aligned.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To put a smile on people's faces. And when you find that, that's golden. So you should go all in there. Can I ask? We often hear that.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teams design sprint, there's a book there, they have like a bunch of content about it. And basically it's a short period of time, the defined period of time in the process where you can solve a design problem. So we ended up building this now very infamous email experience, which is just a payday email. And that payday email, if you check it out, it looks like it's a celebration. People love opening it. It's the highest open rate email probably ever. People open it. It says, you know, congratulations, Harry. You got paid today. You click on it and you can see like a bunch of information about your paycheck. You see some lovely quotes there. You see some insights and some jokes. And people just love that. So if I take a step back, like this process that I just described, this idea of, hey, the light really matters. And in order to make sure it happens, you have to put it as a part of your product development by sitting there looking at user experience and asking, where are my opportunities to delight? Where are my opportunities? Where is there some really nice opportunity?”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want, yeah, it's a great one. I'll give one example so folks have an idea of what I talk about when it's a delight. So I remember when we like in the early days, so we had this gusto started as a payroll product and then expanded into benefits and employee onboarding and other HR functionalities. And now we're this all-in-one HR platform. In the early days, in payroll, we had these interesting moment where we were like, well, let's look at our, how does it feel like as an employee to get paid? And instinctively, we saw all of our competitors and the way it feels like to get paid is it actually doesn't feel like anything at all. Maybe there's a line item on your bank account if you check that day or maybe there's like a really, really boring notification or something or like an email. And that felt like a missed opportunity. So then what we did is we basically said, hey, you know, this payday is just inherently a wonderful thing. You get paid. You get money. You can do a bunch of really good stuff with that money. So what can we do there? So we did this design sprint and I'm actually a really big proponent of the Google Ventures design.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Balance. Right. I think high level, if you know, again, in generalization, I would say every industry is different, every product is different. I'll tell you for us. For us, what happened is delight is not a nice to have. We have to have the light. That is our differentiator. People come to us because they've heard from someone else who's a customer that they absolutely love their payroll experience. They love their benefits experience. Who says that? Who says they love payroll? It's something that was never sounded crazy earlier on. And I think that that is a very important insight. So you have to ask yourself as the founder or product leader, what is the role of delight in my business model? If the light is the way you end up acquiring new customers, well, guess what? It's as important as just the freaking thing worked. So I think that is something that we understood early on and we spent a lot of time on. And there's also that we don't use the word MVP here. MVP was all the rage. In Silicon Valley with the lead star.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really matters Delight Leanest product that we can get out the door as fast as possible and then test and iterate. Does that element of delight go against that incredibly lean MVP given delight maybe feels more like a luxury?”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, that you feel great about them bearing your name. It's exactly like recruiting. It's exactly the same thing. Had a mash, I remember having him on the show a long Across multiple verticals. Totally. Well, I think it starts by just understanding this idea that the light really, really matters, this idea of delightful experience. I think people appreciate the functionality, but love to your product comes from delightful experience. And there's a really big difference between those two things. More specifically, when we do product reviews, design reviews, and so forth, we look at product quality as a stack that has three different layers. The first one is function. The second one is ease of use, and the third one is the light. And the idea here that's really important is that you can't add the light later. When you look at a product, our experience, you have to think about the light as an inherent part of the product itself. Now, what is the light? What do you mean by that? The light for me is like a brick broken down into two different ideas. One idea is, you know, you have to do something of value. That's one. And two is that you have to do it in a way that's unexpected. And the result of that of doing something that unexpectedly delightful is you just put a smile on people's faces.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would you give to founders when it comes to cap table management? Yeah, so that's a really good one. So, again, I don't think there's one way of doing things. I think our way was we'd really try to guide the fundraising process around this idea of alignment in values and motivations. And I think a lot of these people are people that we've known before, Gusto started. And, you know, Gusta's been a long journey. So we got to meet a lot of people throughout the time. And we try to make sure to bring people on the cup table that can add some sort of value. And I know that that sounds probably like a cliche in the world of VC, but it's still true. Like, you know, when I look at specifically when I look at some of the angel investors that we brought in, one person comes to mind, like Adam Nash, right now VP of product at Dropbox. He's been immensely great sounding board to me in making some big product decisions. And similarly, there's other folks that have made a really impact on the company. And when we try to bring someone in or I guess the advice then to founders is be really picky because those people are going to be out there and they're going to be associated with you and make”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we haven't launched and announced yet. So I can't share too much about, but the world is going to hear about it. Two of these are going to hear about it next year, investing in that requires funds and requires money. And that's why that's one part of the race. And the other one is around scaling our growth channels. Again, we saw opportunities where marginal CAC looks solid and we can keep putting money in and get great growth out of it. So that is a really good way of compressing time. And instead of getting to the next revenue milestone in five years, we're going to get shrink into three years. That was the thought behind that raise. Totally. And I'm very excited to see that newly announced product or iteration of some forms. investors”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really good question. I think we reached basically this scale over, we're serving over 100,000 small businesses across the country, across all these different industries. We have dentists and lawyers and tech companies and barbershops and anything that you can imagine. And we're fortunate to see that working. Like you see it in the numbers, you see it in our ability to kind of scale our growth engines, our ability to bring a really product to market that people really love and talk a lot about. And when that happens, you feel like you have all the signals. And that's where kind of start looking for these opportunities that I mentioned earlier in our conversations. It's really about, again, this fundraising is all about in order to have a specific purpose to it. And for us, like this $200 million raise was less about going big because I think that we were already going big before that. I feel like it's a mindset that was true from day one, but it's more around specific opportunities that we've seen. I think we've seen two specific opportunities. One is around R&D. So we have this really exciting new initiative here.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do they look at this step in their career as well as have the right motivations that align with what we care about? And that is the most important interview in the Gastro Interview process. And we take the same type of criteria and we apply it when we talk and when we get to know investors and new investors. And I'll give you one example of that is one of the core principles for us to be looking at is this idea of service mindset. The idea of service mindset is all about is that you do what you do in order to serve others. Whether you do what you do in order to serve coworkers, to serve customers, but it's always about helping other people. And I think that when people start their day and leave their work life with this type of motivation, it's just extremely powerful and fulfilling. And that's how we're building Gusto. And that's when we think about investors, that's definitely something that we're looking at.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in gasto, you know, we've been in a very fortunate situation ever since Y Combinator started in Y Combinator in winter 2012. And I think ever since we're in this really fortunate situation where we had options, we were out there raising and we've had folks that we knew for a long time and we've had good traction and as a result of that we were oversubscribed and we were in this nice situation where we needed to ask ourselves Josh Eddie and now like, hey, how do we choose our investors? And Josh came up with this thing that I feel like is just really wonderful and it's definitely the way we're working on. We're still doing this today, which is thinking about investors as team members. When you bring in a new Gusti, that's how we call our own team members. When you bring in a new Gusti on board, there's an interview process, right? And there's like a whole lot of criteria that when we think about culture fit, when we think about, is this the right person for the company? And that type of process we call is the values and motivation alignment. The idea is to make sure that the person that's entering and now is being a part of custody shares the same type of values in how they want to live their life.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try as much as I can to not be a part of it, to not be a listener to it, to be honest. I think social media in general, the amount of information, the amount of opinions, the amount of knowledge out there has a lot of positives, but it also has some negatives. And we talk a lot here about being in a bubble and kind of the eco chamber and people repeating each other's words. And I think when you're in it, when you're overly tuned to the kind of repeated opinions and kind of the small debates and the small conflicts that happen in this bubble of venture, you just don't have the mental space sometimes to come up with something.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, they don't have a lot of time. You're sitting there, you're building the company, you're coding, you're talking with customers. And what happens there is that investors kind of set the tone and sometimes the implied conversation there is, what do you need to do? You need to do A, B, and C in order to raise your seed value. You need to do D, E, and F in order to raise your Series A. And I think that's just a really wrong way of looking at it. It should be the opposite. You raise your seed round in order to do A, B, and C.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can do it in four years. Well, maybe that's a good reason to go and get some funding. But without this type of hypothesis, I think it can actually be quite ruinous because you can just put yourself in a situation where you're making promises to investors, to employees, to other people that you can't really fulfill. Another example of, I think, a thesis where it makes sense to go out and raise funds is when you see like, let's say you already have a product out there that has good product market fit and you have growth that you're happy with, but you're seeing an R&D opportunity. You're seeing like, hey, there's this new market or this new product that I can introduce to my own customer set. And if I fund this, I believe that it's going to make a huge impact on my business. Well, that's again another opportunity, perhaps a good idea to go ahead and raise money. I had a previous startup company that failed back in Israel. And, you know, that's really where I feel like I kind of started from scratch and learned from people around me. And one interesting thing that happens there and I think is still true today is that truly the people who have time to talk about startups are the investors because if you're going to see you”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say specifically for fundraising, what I've seen a lot is in the ecosystem, in meetups, in conversations, in other places, is that it's really easy to confuse and look at fundraising as a goal, as a target, as something that you as an entrepreneur, the goal that you're trying to achieve, as opposed to thinking about fundraising as more like a means to an end. What I mean by fundraising is really about creating change. For me, the most important thing for an entrepreneur and startup founder early on, as well as as you go and you grow, is to build a great business, make sure that you find your product market fit, understand the customer, build a product customers love, get a product to market, and hopefully build a great business out of it. And fundraising is just a tool to use to create chain. What I mean by that is, for example, let's say you're out in the market and you're seeing like, hey, interesting, there's a new channel for us to go and acquire customers. And I really think it can scale and it can take my journey instead of getting to 100 million ARR, instead of taking it taking seven years.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it can have on people's lives and specifically on small businesses. And I can say that I expected it, but fast forward for today, I was a part of Gusto, we are here to help small businesses and software is here to help them start build and grow their teams. And I'm super, super proud of that journey. Yeah, around 10 years ago, I've moved from Israel to Silicon Valley and to Stanford. And that's where, and I was doing a PhD at Stanford, and that's where I was lucky and fortunate to meet Josh and Eddie, my two co-founders. And we kind of connected on this family history and family connection with small businesses. And we wanted to start a company together to focus on helping small businesses. And people are really the thing that matter the most or the most important thing. So for us, it was very natural to work on business and a new type of startup that's really in a system that helps small businesses start and grow their teams. So that's how we got into this. And that's kind of my journey.”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. Yeah, so I'm originally from Israel, and my parents have a small clothing store in downtown Haifa. And I actually got into startups and got into programming by just picking up a book, a visual basic six programming book, to help me build something for our store. I was in charge of, I was a small kid, I was like 11 years old and my dad asked me to make sure that we have enough inventory and count all the inventory and the jeans and the shirts and the sizes and all that stuff. And I used to do it by hand. And then I just figured that, hey, I think we had a computer at home. And I was like, you know, computer should probably be pretty good at this. Anyway, I ended up going to this nearby bookstore. I got these visual basic six book and I built this inventory management software and it worked and it really helped my dad and it really helped also other small businesses that my dad's cousins had and my grandpa had and ended up kind of starting funny enough like this journey that I had with falling in love with software and seeing that all the real impact”
2020-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source