Eddie Kim is the co-founder and Head of Technology at Gusto (W12), a payroll and HR platform serving over 500,000 small businesses in the U.S. that recently crossed $1 billion in annual revenue — with one in five new businesses started today becoming Gusto customers.
Recently, Eddie built Gusto Cofounder, a new AI product that automates recurring business processes end-to-end, all triggered through SMS or Slack without the business owner ever logging in. In this episode of Founder Firesides, Eddie sat down with YC Managing Partner Harj Taggar to explain how he built the first working prototype which was then turned into a shippable product by a team of five people in ten weeks.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
Chapters:
00:00 — Intro
00:56 — AI as a glorified search engine
02:41 — Solving the blank canvas problem
03:53 — From hobby project to product idea
05:27 — Why texting AI works
07:06 — The missed flight that built a prototype
09:00 — What the first version actually did
10:47 — Leveraging what Gusto already knows
13:49 — Selling AI to small business owners
15:39 — Automating the work before the work
17:05 — From automator to true co-founder
19:48 — Early results & surprising use cases
21:31 — What’s next on the roadmap
23:37 — Five people, ten weeks, no Jira
26:05 — Advice for teams at scale
28:53 — Discipline in an age of abundance
30:41 — Outro
