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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

The journalist reveals his or her ignorance by not considering Gusto or Flexport to be well positioned, imo.

Several companies with $1B valuations were missed:

  Reddit
  Zenefits
  Gusto
  Docker
  Flexport
  Coinbase
  Twitch.tv
  Quora
  Door Dash
  Machine Zone
  Mixpanel

Plus the article could do with some basic fact checking.

"The web boom of 1997-2006 brought us Amazon, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Airbnb"

Wikipedia AirBnB page: "Founded August 2008; 9 years ago"

Also iirc Amazon predates 1997. 1997 is its IPO date.

Yeah, Gusto is a big win IMO. Payroll stuff sucks, especially for early stage businesses. I've used all the services over the past 15 years, my current company is using Gusto, still sucks, but sucks the least, best price, best service. And 1000s of small businesses trust Gusto to process millions of dollars of their most sacred money each month. Underrated.

Zenpayroll was great! Gusto sucks. And the change took place right around the time of the name change.

Now, both Gusto and Zenefits are trying to play the same game and both are basically parasitic companies feeding off lock-in and transaction fees.

Which payroll and benefits providers make their money a different way?

Really curious what changed between ZP and Gusto. (we only use their basic payroll product)

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