“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.

Key Moments:

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

Why “The Right Mindset” Is Key to Shipping Great Software | Edward Kim, Co-founder & CTO of Gusto