It takes the best parts of OpenClaw, Claude Cowork and Gusto capabilities into a single new product experience. Some key characteristics of this:
- Automations. You have a conversion with Gusto Cofounder to automate a business process that you have. These automations run in the background on a recurring schedule.
- Connectors: You connect Gusto Cofounder to systems that sit outside of Gusto, such as Notion, Google Sheets, or Quickbooks. Automations can do things *across* these systems. Connect to any remote MCP server.
- Channels: You talk to Gusto Cofounder via SMS or Slack. If you've used OpenClaw, you know how magical that can be. Automations can give you updates over SMS, and you can reply back.
- Gusto data + capabilities: And of course, it comes out of the box with many Gusto capabilities across Payroll, Time, Expenses, Scheduling, HR, Reporting and more.
- Cloud-based: Safer and no installation needed.
If it sounds like a mashup of OpenClaw, Claude Cowork, and Gusto, you’re absolutely right.
So why is this any different?
OpenClaw and Claude Cowork are such powerful tools, but they suffer from the "blank canvas" problem. Most users just don't know what to do with it, even though it can do so much. I spent 8 hours installing my own OpenClaw on my Mac mini and once I did that, I still didn’t know what to do with it. It’s just a glorified search engine to me.
I thought to myself, if we ground this technology in *real* problems that Gusto ALREADY solves for our customers, like payroll, time, HR, etc., there's a good chance that small businesses will finally get the version of AI that that everyone keeps talking about but never really see.
You can put Gusto Cofounder to work with a simple message:
- "Run payroll for me every Friday. Text me if there are any anomalies greater than 10% from the previous week’s payroll, and flag anything that needs my approval before it submits."
- "Generate a weekly labor cost report by department and send it to me over Slack every Monday morning."
- “Every morning, check the weather and if it’s forecasted to rain, send an email reminder to today’s customers to bring an umbrella along with them for the tour. The customers are in the Google Sheets titled with today’s date.”
- "Send me an approval request for any team expense over $25 before it gets processed. Otherwise, just approve it for me."
- "Flag any time-off requests that overlap with payroll deadlines or leave the team short-staffed."
Want early access? Sign up at: https://gusto.com/cofounder. If you leave a message in the comment, I’ll turn it on for you by EOD.
As someone who used to work at Gusto:
Two separate opt-ins are required - one from the employer for adding Truework to their account, one from the employee to share the information for every request.
This is a REALLY good question and something that's hard to appreciate until you actually to build a payroll system. I think a common misnomer is that if you're not doing ML/AI/AR/blockchain/[insert latest technology here], you're not doing R&D.
The domain of Payroll turns out to be an incredible complex business domain. I think Ron Jeffries says it best in his post: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard
The software design of such a complex business domain at scale turns out to be an incredibly hard engineering challenge, and something that is often overlooked when we think about big engineering challenges.
A little known fact is XP and Agile were developed by Kent Beck while working on a Payroll system for Chrysler (In fact, Kent now works at Gusto to help us with our payroll system).
I'm CTO of Flip (https://flip.lease), we handle a lot of rent payments each month.
I get the same question a lot. Most people could not imagine the amount of complexity that exists underneath the seemingly simple guise of paying rent. Just wanted to say I can sympathize and I respect what you've been able to do, specifically from the technical perspective. (We use Gusto and it's been absolutely fantastic)
Unrelated, my whole team was very impressed by the attention to detail in your rebrand. It's so difficult to transition the landing pages and internal product so seamlessly, again coming from the technical perspective. I imagine you're running a tight ship over there, and it shows.
Would love to see the API open up/be offered again!
We don’t use Quickbooks, but currently we are hacking the Quickbooks export with a bunch of JSON in the configuration UI, to provide extra context and more detail for team breakdowns, etc.
Is that new? Last year I had an employee in Washington and I had to call the State of Washington to set it up, for example. If it's new, that great! You should have told me. :)
Then maybe we aren't talking about the same thing. When I added an employee in Washington, I had to apply online and then call them directly to get the employee set up. One of the things I had to do was buy Worker's Comp insurance through the State of Washington, because no one else will sell it. Also, I had to get my UBI number from them.
Ideally I would tell you guys "I have a new employee in Washington!" and that would be the end of the story, you'd do all the rest. That's what I'm hoping you can get to at least!
(To be clear, the part you can do today is already amazing and super helpful, I'm just being greedy because I'd rather spend time on product than on calling the State of Washington
Now you just need health insurance in all 50 states.. maybe build up association health plans that cross state lines by industry, etc. The lack of health insurance for small businesses is such a devil, and keeps so many people from even trying to go out on their own. Really our only options start at about the 5 employee mark, and even then the rates are often not much better than the individual market (which is more than a house payment in many states).
CTO and co-founder of Gusto here. This has actually been on our mind for many years now, and it's a problem we've seen that hurts paycheck to paycheck employees the most. We've recently taken a first step towards rethinking how payroll should be for a modern workforce, and launched a pilot for a new product called Flexible Pay (https://gusto.com/flexible-pay).
Flexible Pay enables employees to cash out unpaid earned wages, without any changes to how payroll runs. Happy to answer any questions about it. Also, if this is a space you're passionate about, we're actively hiring engineers for that team!
Fun fact we took over the lease at 425 right after y'all. That picture on the blog with the couches does not do justice to how packed the office was when we did our site tours!
Yeah, I found a few mentors who I would feel comfortable asking questions and getting advice. I met some though investor introductions, and others through friends of friends.
That certainly did happen. In fact, I would say its quite necessary for growing startups to continually hire people with more management experience than anyone else in the company. There isn't a sense of ego associated with that. Many of them are really just excited to be on this mission together.
Gusto Co-founder & Head of Technology here. I'm excited for this as much as I was our first ZenPayroll launch HN post 15 years ago.
Today, we're launching Gusto Cofounder to the world. Here's a Loom video I recoded showing a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DBpVvJJeKc
It takes the best parts of OpenClaw, Claude Cowork and Gusto capabilities into a single new product experience. Some key characteristics of this:
- Automations. You have a conversion with Gusto Cofounder to automate a business process that you have. These automations run in the background on a recurring schedule.
- Connectors: You connect Gusto Cofounder to systems that sit outside of Gusto, such as Notion, Google Sheets, or Quickbooks. Automations can do things *across* these systems. Connect to any remote MCP server.
- Channels: You talk to Gusto Cofounder via SMS or Slack. If you've used OpenClaw, you know how magical that can be. Automations can give you updates over SMS, and you can reply back.
- Gusto data + capabilities: And of course, it comes out of the box with many Gusto capabilities across Payroll, Time, Expenses, Scheduling, HR, Reporting and more.
- Cloud-based: Safer and no installation needed.
If it sounds like a mashup of OpenClaw, Claude Cowork, and Gusto, you’re absolutely right.
So why is this any different?
OpenClaw and Claude Cowork are such powerful tools, but they suffer from the "blank canvas" problem. Most users just don't know what to do with it, even though it can do so much. I spent 8 hours installing my own OpenClaw on my Mac mini and once I did that, I still didn’t know what to do with it. It’s just a glorified search engine to me.
I thought to myself, if we ground this technology in *real* problems that Gusto ALREADY solves for our customers, like payroll, time, HR, etc., there's a good chance that small businesses will finally get the version of AI that that everyone keeps talking about but never really see.
You can put Gusto Cofounder to work with a simple message:
- "Run payroll for me every Friday. Text me if there are any anomalies greater than 10% from the previous week’s payroll, and flag anything that needs my approval before it submits."
- "Generate a weekly labor cost report by department and send it to me over Slack every Monday morning."
- “Every morning, check the weather and if it’s forecasted to rain, send an email reminder to today’s customers to bring an umbrella along with them for the tour. The customers are in the Google Sheets titled with today’s date.”
- "Send me an approval request for any team expense over $25 before it gets processed. Otherwise, just approve it for me."
- "Flag any time-off requests that overlap with payroll deadlines or leave the team short-staffed."
Want early access? Sign up at: https://gusto.com/cofounder. If you leave a message in the comment, I’ll turn it on for you by EOD.
Would love your feedback and thoughts on it!
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