
Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll) Is Valued at $1B in New Funding Round - londont
http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/gusto-is-valued-at-1-billion-in-new-funding-round
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orik

        "We didn’t really need the capital, per se."
    

Why exchange equity for capital if it's not necessary?

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vecter
It 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."

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ffyyg
And 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.

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vecter
Where 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).

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JVMsOfGor
I 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!

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fasteo
Strange 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.

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nodesocket
Awesome. 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.

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tim333
It seems like everything is 'valued as $1bn' these days.

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joevsthevolcano
Everything that gets covered in the news.

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ipince
Series Panda ftw. Congrats to the team!

