Y Combinator

Inside Gusto's Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim

Jun 6, 2026 · 54:31

Eddie Kim, co-founder and CTO of Gusto, reveals how the company grew from a 2012 YC startup called ZenPayroll to $1B in annual revenue and 500,000 customers by cracking the small business market against investor skepticism. He credits the 15-year co-founder relationship with Josh Reeves and Tomer London to shared values and radical directness, arguing that packaging feedback undermines trust. Kim describes building Gusto Co-Founder, an AI agent that automates back-office tasks via chat, with a team of five in eight weeks using Claude Code, embodying how the distinction between engineer and designer disappears. He calls the blank canvas problem AI's main barrier to mainstream adoption and predicts solopreneurs will thrive as AI enables anyone to become a builder.

The Untold Story About The Female Steve Jobs

Oct 6, 2025 · 1:26:17

Tyler Shultz, the former Theranos employee turned whistleblower, recounts how a 23-year-old took on one of Silicon Valley's most hyped startups, revealing the failed technology and manipulation behind Elizabeth Holmes' vision. From day one, Shultz saw red flags: the product launched with zero validated tests, and executives locked lab doors from regulators. He internally flagged a syphilis test with 65% sensitivity but received an email from Sunny Balwani described as 'dripping with venom' and calling him arrogant. After quitting, Theranos used lawyers and his grandfather, former Secretary of State George Shultz, to pressure him, leading to $400,000–$500,000 in legal fees. The Wall Street Journal expose led to investigations, and Holmes and Balwani were convicted on 4 and 12 counts respectively. Shultz now speaks on lessons from Theranos and trends in diagnostics, including Alzheimer's disease.

The Founding Story Of Zapier (Wade Foster)

Jul 24, 2025 · 51:33

Wade Foster, co-founder of Zapier, recounts the company's 2011 founding as an integration tool born from a forum thread and bootstrapped to scale without raising beyond $1.3 million. He explains how early growth came from answering forum posts with a prototype that converted at 50% despite being poorly designed, and how the company maintained a 'don't hire till it hurts' philosophy. Foster details the decision to avoid VC because customer acquisition costs were low and the business was profitable within a year, achieving breakeven with only tiny monthly losses. He shares two Paul Graham lessons from Y Combinator: focus only on writing code and talking to customers, and target 10% week-over-week growth, which the company sustained for years. On AI, Foster notes that AI is Zapier's fastest-growing category at nearly 300% year-over-year, and the company now offers agents built by non-technical users through natural-language workflows. He argues that seat-based pricing is dying and predicts a shift to usage-based models, while identifying the biggest AI opportunity in legacy industries like healthcare that work with unstructured data.