4 ms·
Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll) Is Valued at $1B in New Funding Round
- ipince 11y agoSeries Panda ftw. Congrats to the team!
- orik 11y ago"We didn’t really need the capital, per se." Why exchange equity for capital if it's not necessary?
- jaksmit 11y agofor one, you don't know how the environment and access to capital might change. So it might make sense to take some cash whilst it's available.
- vecter 11y agoIt derisks the company at low cost because you're raising money on great terms. It's almost always a good idea to have extra cash in the bank, especially when that cash comes. I once heard a quote along the lines of "the company that wins the space is the last one to raise funding before the funding market turns south."
- ffyyg 11y agoAnd if you gave even 1x prefs on that vanity raise, then you've turned your "okay not great" outcomes into bad outcomes. Rule of thumb: if somebody raises at exactly or just over s billion, they did it because it feeds their ego and every other excuse is just an excuse.
- vecter 11y agoWhere did I mention vanity as a part of the raise? You missed all of the points I made and then attacked a strawman. When you raise on your terms, as these guys probably did, you get (1) a great valuation (i.e. cheap money) and (2) great terms (i.e. 1x or better liq pref).
- joevsthevolcano 11y agoBecause you're running payroll. You could lose it all pretty quickly if you screw a few things up.
- eli 11y agoBest time to raise money is when you don't need it.
- tim333 11y agoIt seems like everything is 'valued as $1bn' these days.
- joevsthevolcano 11y agoEverything that gets covered in the news.
- nodesocket 11y agoAwesome. Gusto is great, use them for my startup https://commando.io https://commando.io. However, I am not a fan of the brand and name change of Gusto. My 2 cents.
- fasteo 11y agoStrange name. Gusto is a polysemic Spanish word: taste, flavour, pleasure. I guess they were thinking in "pleasure", but for Spanish speakers, it just sounds weird.
- JVMsOfGor 11y agoI hope Gusto/ZenPayroll uses it to hire some customer services reps or whip up some of that advanced machine learning I always hear about now. To fix a payroll mistake they once magically sucked money out of my account, without any notification. An email or a message in their portal would have been nice. I am no longer part of the Gusto/ZenPayroll ecosystem, but at the time I found annoying their cute messages about how I could buy 500,000 gumballs with my paycheck if I really wanted to, plus how I should tweet about how much I love my gumball money via ZenPayroll. My paycheck and social media should not mix!