“I was a pretty bad people manager and so there was a moment where I decided that this is not going to work and I really need to decide which path I'm gonna go. Am I gonna stay hands on keyboard or am I going to really help build the engineering team and scale the organization?”

Edward Kim is the CTO and co-founder of Gusto, a multi-billion dollar company that helps businesses with payroll, benefits, and human resources. In this episode, we’re talking about scaling up and why Gusto’s focus on quality code and engineering mindset is so critical. Plus, Edward tells us how he learned to be a great manager, how watching his parents struggle to run their small business planted the seed for Gusto, and and what it was like recruiting top talent to work on a “boring” problem like payroll, back when Instagram and social-local-mobile startups were all the rage.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:50 - Why Edward loves solving problems for small businesses
• 04:20 - Building out version one
• 06:48 - Finding product market fit
• 09:48 - What does Gusto offer today?
• 11:15 - The secret to good code
• 15:49 - Growing as an engineering leader
• 18:44 - What’s next for Edward and Gusto?
• 20:04 - Exploring Generative AI
• 22:09 - Outro