How to Lead Your Team with Comedy & Improv with Mike Tria, CTO of Gusto

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Mike Tria, CTO at Gusto, about how he blends comedy and improv in order to lead his team. Thank you to Fin for sponsoring this episode. To learn more about the number one AI agent for customer support, go to fin.ai/cto. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:27) The topic for today, the thing we want to talk about is leading your team, incorporating comedy and improv, something that you're doing. I think that's a really unique thing. I can tell you in a thousand episodes, I haven't had this conversation.

(Mike Tria at 00:00:39) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) So I'm curious, how long have you been doing improv? When did you decide to bring it into your tech leadership life?

(Mike Tria at 00:00:45) Oh, boy. Improv is a very, very big part of who I am. I started improv—so I was always a theater nerd. I was a theater nerd from a young age.

(Mike Tria at 00:00:56) Improv, I first dabbled into in college. So I went to Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, and there's an improv troupe there called Let's Try This, exclamation mark at the end of there. That exclamation mark is very important. And I spent my entire college years pretty much huddled around improv workshops, learning the tools there and the workshops and the capabilities for improv. I did it professionally a little bit after college as well.

(Mike Tria at 00:01:22) Did some improv for money, did a little bit of touring. And then in the years since, I've continued. I've done some shows, done some shows in San Francisco. I've taught classes. I've taught classes remote. Doing improv remote over Zoom is very challenging, but I've done that. Taught in-person workshops. It is a very, very big part of how I feel like leaders can show up, and it's a big part of my own leadership style. And I think it brings a lot—not even the comedy aspects, but we can get into "yes, and" and all of the core principles of improv that I think are really beneficial, very specifically for CTOs and engineering leaders, which seems counterintuitive, but it is very much the case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:07) I took my first improv class about a month and a half ago, and when they started doing the "yes, and" thing, I was like, oh, it's like management.

(Mike Tria at 00:02:16) It is. It's scarily like management. People will walk away and be like, Mike, when you said active listening, I then did an improv class, and now I really know what you mean. Now it really makes sense to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:28) Oh, yeah. Yeah. I do comedy. I tour around and do stand-up comedy, and this main club that I'm at a lot in Nashville, they were saying, hey, we have an improv class. You should come to the improv class. It helps you. You know, they're selling me. It makes you a better comedian, all this stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:45) I'm not an entertainer. I'm a performer. I like to go up there and know what I'm going to say and just deliver it. But it was so good for me to learn that. To try it and be like, alright, I get it. I could see the appeal. I could get good at this improv, learning the games and stuff. But my thing that's driving me is the comedy.

(Mike Tria at 00:03:06) For sure. And I think different people approach improv for different reasons, and they're all valid. Some people will go to improv because they might have stage fright. This happens in a leadership context—I'm uncomfortable talking in front of large groups of people, as an example. Well, improv's a great tool to help you with that. Or I'm struggling coming up with ideas. I want to be creative. I was having a workshop with a friend of mine that owns a film studio, and they're just trying to come up with ideas. Did an improv workshop to help them drum up ideas.

(Mike Tria at 00:03:39) For some, it's developing very specific capabilities. Let's say they are argumentative in meetings or cut people off. Improv teaches you tools to help you work with that. Different people approach it for totally different reasons, and you can get different things out of it as a result.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:57) Right. But overall, it's had a positive impact on you and your career.

(Mike Tria at 00:04:01) It has been the most—so I've done a fair amount of, as a manager, right? As a manager of people, I have gotten more out of the improv education than out of the academic education. For computer science, improv is not so great. So my background is as a programmer.

(Mike Tria at 00:04:21) Although, maybe nowadays, who knows of vibe coding? Maybe it is great now. But it was not as helpful for that. But in terms of leadership, by far, the highest functioning, highest performance teams that I have ever been on in my career were improv troupes. The amount of trust that you build with those groups—because, really, and I think this is where there's a misconception, because you do stand-up. Folks will often, if I mention I do improv, they'll be like, oh, get up and do a set.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:54) That's not good. Yeah.

(Mike Tria at 00:04:54) These are different things here. Improv is a team sport. And I think, really, that's the reason it is so helpful for anyone in any kind of leadership position or if you're on a team. It teaches you how to be the best team player you possibly can be. And the reason it does that is because when you walk out onto a stage, if you're doing a workshop, there is no script. It is just you and one to two to three other people. That's it. All you have is each other. And anything that you construct for the audience, whether it's telling a joke, telling a story, singing a song, all you have is each other. It is quite literally the definition of the most amount of trust you can have in other groups because without them, there will be no scene. There will be no song. So, yeah, for me, it's been one of the most helpful things to help me develop as a leader, and I continue to learn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:48) Yeah. I'm trying to find the words to say this, but the idea that when you're in that group and you're doing the improv and you can kind of watch yourself from the outside, be like, alright, this is the collection of people. That abstraction, that sort of mental model abstraction—that was very useful for me to learn. It helps even in my relationships. When I'm talking to my wife, it's like you have to understand the character you're playing, but also the context of the whole. And that's just incredibly valuable. And I don't know any other way to practice it other than improv.

(Mike Tria at 00:06:24) Same. I feel, to your point, you learn a lot about yourself through this based on—because quite simply, you're put in positions in improv. You're almost living a whole bunch of lifetimes in a single improv workshop. You are playing different characters. You're in different situations.

(Mike Tria at 00:06:44) So in a lot of ways, it touches all the edges of you to give you a sense of how you react in those situations, emotional settings, how you think on your feet in terms of certain types of contexts. As you've stated, a business context, a relationship context—you will learn a lot about yourself fast in improv because it's putting you in positions that you wouldn't otherwise be in or that would take a lifetime to be able to discover.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:15) Have you ever had a team member, someone you're a direct report or maybe skip level, join you in a class from work, kind of crossing that over?

(Mike Tria at 00:07:24) It's been a while. I've done workshops at the office. So even this is about three months ago—did a workshop with the entire executive team. We took the entire executive team. So one thing we do at Gusto is, once a quarter, we have these—we call them anchor weeks. And that's where large groups of Gusties, this is what we call employees of Gusto, all come together into one of our offices, either San Francisco, Denver, New York. And we kind of jam on a topic. Maybe it's planning for the fiscal year. Maybe we're looking at talent. Maybe we're thinking about—the last one was how do we think about better leveraging AI in our products. And I will always use that as an opportunity to teach an improv workshop. And what we did recently was with the executive team. So we took the entire executive team for three hours, and we played together.

(Mike Tria at 00:08:15) You know, we went through the basics, starting out with simple "yes, and," story one word at a time. And you could just—you know it's fun when people walk away from those sessions and everyone's face is red because they've been laughing so much. And they reference the games weeks later, weeks later, talking about the experience that they had to build that shared sense of comfort, context with folks. I have certainly done improv with folks from work outside of work. Certainly done it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:48) I would rather do improv games than trust falls.

(Mike Tria at 00:08:56) I'm with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:57) Yeah. Yeah. Now here's the thing, right? You're the CTO of Gusto. Is that correct?

(Mike Tria at 00:09:02) That's correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:03) Yeah. Are you supposed to be this fun? Are CTOs supposed to be this fun?

(Mike Tria at 00:09:08) Fun? I don't know if I consider myself fun. You would need to do a survey of the staff to really see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) Biased, but you are.

(Mike Tria at 00:09:17) I think in a lot of ways, humor brings safety. It can be disarming for tense situations, not necessarily to make light of the situation, because that's really never the point, but to make people feel comfortable. I feel it's a very important part of leadership, and there's many different ways to lead. There really are. I have found that something that works for me—it scales. Right? So I've managed a few hundred folks here at Gusto. In my past at Atlassian, I was managing around 3,000 people. In a lot of ways, there's a distance that is created between you as the CTO and your engineers the bigger the company gets. The bigger the company gets, you stop in a lot of ways being a person that they're interacting day to day, and you are more of an idea, or you're someone that shows up and does all-hands.

(Mike Tria at 00:10:11) People get a glimpse of you through a keyhole. And the thing, though, is people hear a lot about how you show up in other places where it's, oh, I was in a meeting with Mike Tria. He did this thing. Or, oh, there was an architectural discussion. This is how Mike Tria weighed in on it, or here is how we let the team speak about it. They only know about you thirdhand in a lot of ways. And so for me, fun, humor, how things show up is something I want in the culture. I want people—psychological safety is in a lot of ways linked to the sense that people feel like they can be vulnerable. And you can't be funny, you can't generate that if you yourself do not show a lot of humility. And, again, that gets back to the improv bits. Improv teaches you humility like nothing else. Because, again, you walk out there with pretty much nothing. You might have a suggestion from the audience. You have your teammates, but you really do have nothing. And it kind of grounds you in thinking that everyone's kind of doing that when they're showing up at work. They're all kind of showing up the same way. So, yeah, I think there's a logic to the madness of the fun. It is to generate safety. It's to make it such that people feel like they can be vulnerable. The other bit about, at least my leadership style, and I think what improv brings to it, is when companies say open communication, I like to be very precise about what that means and how it helps a company. Open communication for it to work is two-way.

(Mike Tria at 00:11:40) Open communication isn't just companies say a thing and they tell you about it. That's great. There are some companies that internally share their financials, share all their plans. Their documents are open by default. That's wonderful. The real benefit is when employees feel like they can speak. They can react to that. They can ask questions even about things that happen at the company level. Really great company cultures scale well. You could preserve your culture if you have a two-way street when it comes to communication. It's delicate because you have to account for sometimes people abuse that and use it as a forum. I mean, there's countless situations over the course of the past few years at a lot of companies where that was potentially abused. But it's really important to not disquiet the voices of the people. So combination of psychological safety, comfort, vulnerability, and open communication—I would consider those at the core of at least my style.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:36) Nice. That's a good overview. Real quick, thank you to Fin for sponsoring this episode. Fin is the number one AI agent for customer service with a 59% average resolution rate. They deliver high-quality answers and resolve even the most complex customer queries. Fin is trusted by over 5,000 customer service leaders and top AI companies including Anthropic and Synthesia. Fin works on any help desk. You don't have to overhaul your current system to get the best AI agent for customer service. Priced at only 99 cents per resolution with a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you're ready to transform your customer service experience, find out how at fin.ai/cto.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:20) Because when you first start talking about this conversation of improv and work, the first thing that pops into my mind, probably many other people's, is Michael Scott. You know, The Office. He probably does the worst things with it. Right? And so when joking around at work, I'm always reminding myself, like, okay, what's appropriate? What's not appropriate? Don't be like Michael Scott. Alright? But could you, or have you developed any rules, or do you have any thoughts on when the appropriate time to use humor is as a boss versus not?

(Mike Tria at 00:13:52) The easiest tip I would give to anyone—and, yes, this gets very delicate about where the line is—the easiest thing that you can do as a leader, which will both—it's fun and it generates an environment of comfort and safety—is if you're going to poke fun at anyone, you poke fun at yourself first. That's always rule number one. You will never get in trouble for making fun of yourself. You're pointing at your own flaws, and it teaches everyone else that you're a human being. You're a person like everyone else that's on the team. We're all, as we say, Gusto—we're all Gusties together in this regard. Start there is where I would start. Start pointing the finger at you.

(Mike Tria at 00:14:33) It'll also get people to know you better in a lot of ways, and it also role models that it's okay and acceptable to do so. Past that gets into advice that is probably too challenging and is very much company dependent. Different companies have different cultures about what's acceptable, what's not, especially when it comes to joking around. I don't consider the benefits of improv or comedy knowing where the line is of joking around. I actually don't think it teaches you that, to be really candid. I think the only thing it teaches you is that you can do it to yourself, and it works fine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:05) And you were at Atlassian previously?

(Mike Tria at 00:15:07) I was. I joined Atlassian in early 2016, so right after their IPO. I was there for about eight years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:16) Oh, wow. Okay. So Rajeev, someone in technology I've talked to, Sri, and then Archana Rao. I don't know how to say that.

(Mike Tria at 00:15:26) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:28) Archana Rao.

(Mike Tria at 00:15:29) I know all of these people very well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:30) You do? Oh, they've all been on the show before. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, I will never forget what Archana said. We were—it stuck to my mind. She said something along the lines of, it's not drink your own Kool-Aid. It's like drink your own wine, or it was something hilarious. Own champagne. Drink your own champagne.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:49) Sorry. There we go. That sounds better. Yeah. But or dog food. It's like the modern, classy version of dog food in your product. Drink your own champagne. Yeah. Anyways, that was years ago, but it just—sometimes people say stuff, it just sticks. You know?

(Mike Tria at 00:16:04) Yeah. Yeah. Atlassian was a good ride. I was there for about eight years. I ran about half the engineering team.

(Mike Tria at 00:16:09) So I was brought in to do—Atlassian was all running on essentially physical data centers. They were in colos.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:18) Mhmm.

(Mike Tria at 00:16:19) And the company had been struggling for years to try to migrate to the cloud, like their own offering. And so I was brought in to help do that and then stuck around. I basically ran all their platform teams for about eight years. Ended up running Jira for a bit of time, built out the API marketplace capabilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:32) Oh, nice.

(Mike Tria at 00:16:33) Really loved it. It was a great role and a good company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:36) Yeah. And so, yeah, Eddie and them were great too. So it makes sense. I found this trend, Mike, that there's these certain companies that have great cultures, and the people kind of migrate between them.

(Mike Tria at 00:16:47) It's very easy to discount culture because it's hard to measure it. Atlassian had this Australian base to its culture. It was founded in Australia. And it had values that I would say were not things that you'd find in your typical Silicon Valley tech company.

(Mike Tria at 00:17:07) And I think for me—and I think just honestly, as an engineer, it's a hard thing to describe to an engineer. "Oh, you should join so-and-so company." "Why?" "They have a great culture. They have a really great culture." And they'd be like, "Oh, that might not mean anything to me." It's hard to quantify why that would matter. But once you're in one of those companies and you feel the impacts of the culture, it's something that keeps people for a long time. I was there for eight years. I expect I'll be at Gusto a long time.

(Mike Tria at 00:17:34) Gusto has an incredible culture. I talked to a few companies prior to Gusto and literally, outside of the customer focus—because I am a huge fan of small businesses, technology, compliance, and government. I just geek out about taxes and accounting. I just love it, and I love the serving of small businesses. Outside of that, it's the culture.

(Mike Tria at 00:17:57) And the way you understand a company culture is through stories. It's, where are the situations where an incredible thing happened that you wouldn't expect in a company? How was it role modeled? What does the company choose to celebrate? What does it choose not to?

(Mike Tria at 00:18:13) That's what a culture is. It's in stories. And I would just put that out as advice for anyone: go and learn the stories. It's hard to quantify a culture on a website. It's very, very hard to do it. But if you go and talk to folks that worked there or have worked there, what are the stories? What are the top one or two stories that really impressed you about this place? Those illuminate the culture better than anything else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:39) Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, my mind's just running through doing all these interviews with all these different companies. And then a portion of the people I end up meeting in person or spending time with, having lunch or visiting their offices, things like that.

(Mike Tria at 00:18:54) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:54) I always play this game in my head where, like, if I wasn't an entrepreneur, where would I work? And, yeah, Atlassian was one of them. Gusto now, AVI. There's Dave Ramsey's companies. There's a bunch of different companies, and their cultures aren't all the same.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:11) But I just noticed there's a certain type of person. It's really to be around the other people that have that culture. Like, I'm a high-quality person. So whether I am doing something in the material world, like buying a car, or if I'm building a piece of software, or if I'm re-landscaping the house, I'm trying to do it at the highest level of quality and always, you know, not perfectionism to get stuck, but back up a little bit from perfectionism, get that 80 there. You know?

(Mike Tria at 00:19:41) Yeah. I'm a quality person. Maybe not to the level that you are. You might want to give me some tips, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:49) I'm working on reducing my quality.

(Mike Tria at 00:19:52) But I'm—it's, for me, I love working with high-quality people. So when I think about what a job really is—I've never physically seen the code of Gusto. Why? Well, I mean, I've seen it on a screen. It doesn't exist in the physical world.

(Mike Tria at 00:20:10) It's digits. It's bits. The things I interact with day to day are human beings, other employees at Gusto. And I would say it's probably 30 people that I work with more than anyone else. And do I get jazzed and energized on a Sunday night about working with those 30 people next week?

(Mike Tria at 00:20:27) Absolutely. I do. And if I ever don't, or if I run into incredible people outside of Gusto where I'm like, "Oh, this person, I would love to bring them in. I would love to have them be part of that 30." That would just mean the work would be incredible.

(Mike Tria at 00:20:43) I would feel enriched. They would produce a lot of value. If everyone does that, right, in a position where you're either going to hire people or you're part of a hiring decision, shaping the world in terms of the actual people you're working with—because that's really how you're spending your day. You're spending your day as a leader talking to people. And again, this goes back to some of the improv bits.

(Mike Tria at 00:21:04) It's like, who would I want in an improv troupe? Not that that's the only delineator for success there, but it's one of them. Right? Because it means they're a great team player. And I would say that there is—that is a through line certainly between Atlassian and Gusto.

(Mike Tria at 00:21:17) They're both team-based companies. Atlassian is literally—their stock symbol, it's what the products are built around. And Gusto is all around, at least within the company, it's about teams and helping small teams.

(Mike Tria at 00:21:30) Now, Gusto is, I think, a hair shy of 3,000 employees and a bit over 400,000 customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:39) Yeah. We are a customer.

(Mike Tria at 00:21:41) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) Wonderful. I don't know if we have to edit that out for threat vector reasons, but that's how I met Eddie in the first place. I was using Gusto, and then some opportunity came up, and I was like, "Yeah, that'd be great to meet with him." And—

(Mike Tria at 00:21:56) My doctor uses Gusto.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:58) Does he? Really?

(Mike Tria at 00:21:59) My doctor uses Gusto.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:01) Most of—it's easy. I recommend it all the time on the show to people because I remember life before Gusto.

(Mike Tria at 00:22:07) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:07) And it was painful, to say the least. So I have one-click payroll set up, and I've got all of my systems and integrations and the health care thing. And it's good. It makes my life—running payroll takes me five to seven minutes every two weeks.

(Mike Tria at 00:22:27) Oh, awesome. I would love to get that number down to two to three for you. I'll work on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:30) I bet you it's—it's probably two or three. We're getting there close. I'd say, well, since we're here having the conversation and the theme is improv—

(Mike Tria at 00:22:41) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:41) The most annoying thing is that the QSEHRA health care plan doesn't automatically pipe in. So that's the one thing I have to do. I have to go over there, log in to it, download it—they've got a Gusto export-specific thing. And then I go into mine and upload it. And so that's longer than just looking at the—well, everyone's salary is here. So just looking at it and being like, click, click, click, just getting their payroll stuff over or their health care benefit stuff over.

(Mike Tria at 00:23:09) Yeah. We've been doing a lot of investment. I'll definitely look into that actually for you. We've been doing a huge investment into R&D, into research and development at Gusto to sort of—I feel like we actually ship pretty fast here. But the product breadth is so broad.

(Mike Tria at 00:23:24) Right? So Gusto is not a payroll company. Right? It has payroll. It has time tracking. It has HR products, consumer financial products. It's vast and broad. And if you're like yourself—you're a small business owner, you're wearing a hundred hats. And we like to think we can help take off maybe 15 of those hats, and we have aspirations to take off a lot more. When you have a broad product offering, and so we're multi-SaaS, broad product offering, you need a lot of engineers.

(Mike Tria at 00:23:51) You need a lot of consistency, but you also—the problem becomes how do you measure the effectiveness and the efficiency of that engineering organization to go even faster. My approach to doing that has changed dramatically just over the last 18 months because of the advent of AI, and it has completely changed. I had a playbook that I spent so long on around, "Well, here's how you look at developer productivity. Here are the things you can put in place across hiring, retention, code reviews, process, all of it." And something that has been very energizing for me recently has been being able to upend all of that and say, "Okay.

(Mike Tria at 00:24:31) Forget a lot of this. Instead, how do you retool your entire engineering organization to be AI-native, to leverage these tools such that you're simply not doing tasks that an AI could do for you, on behalf of your engineers, so that they could spend more time fixing bugs, actually building and shipping features?" And so, yeah, a lot of that has changed. It has changed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:54) And so how far are you into this? Give me some time frames.

(Mike Tria at 00:24:58) We—so our fiscal year started—what's today? The seventh? Six days ago. So May 1st. So we go May through April.

(Mike Tria at 00:25:05) One of the largest plans we have over this fiscal year is to do a large retooling of mostly the engineering organization around AI. Not just engineering, but it also impacts product, design, data. We have already put in place several tools internally for letting people discover and find things within the company across all places. Things like performance reviews—we have an AI tool that helps draft everything for people such that that process is a lot less laborious. We're putting in a process now that lets us keep track of all the work that we're doing such that people don't have to go and update tickets all the time.

(Mike Tria at 00:25:41) It can just automatically do that. We heavily use coding assistants and copilots internally. Also, we've done something I think is pretty novel. So we have our conversational interface which we give to customers called Gus. It's our AI system that our customers can interact with to do things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:00) Oh, I haven't talked to Gus yet.

(Mike Tria at 00:26:02) Gus is great. You should. Internally, though, something I think is really novel is the problem with these tools—it's actually tool generation. We've got—the company's been around for 14 years. We have an extraordinary amount of experience and data serving customers, but without AI. How do we take that experience and then give it to something like Gus to help customers faster? Well, it could be I have a bunch of engineers go and code up a bunch of tools, code up a bunch of recipes that can sit behind Gus. Or instead, we have this incredible customer support team and operations teams. We built the tool for them called Gus Studio, and we hand it to them, and it lets them draft in relatively natural language how Gus should serve and help the customer in the voice of the way that Gusto works.

(Mike Tria at 00:26:52) And so this is sort of putting to work—it's in a lot of ways putting to bed the notion of, like, "Oh, you want to build something? You need an engineer for that." That is not always going to be the case. You're going to need new types of employees, and employees are going to do very different things than the job profile stated that they would do two years ago.

(Mike Tria at 00:27:13) You need Renaissance people in a lot of ways where they are part designer, part engineer, part product manager. I think it's going to be very exciting for people, because I think there's too much out there of some of the negative impacts of AI in terms of what it has on workforces. The tools it opens up and the capabilities, I think we're just getting started on. So Gus Studio is an example of that internally that I'm really proud of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:36) I think that we're making tools available. This is going to sound horrible. I know it's going to sound horrible. There's an IQ distribution curve whether we like it or not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:48) And the thing is we're making it more accessible. There is an IQ limit. If you look back 20 years ago and measure IQ limit needed for computer science, to build something or whatever, much higher than it is right now. And as a lower IQ person, I appreciate that. So I think, you know, I love when I see the ex-Twitter story or whatever about some dude working at a restaurant, serving, waiting tables, has an idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:16) V0'd something, is now making 10k a month on, you know, through $9 a month subscriptions. Right? That to me is beautiful. I'm like, I'm so grateful I live in this world. And my 20 years as a software engineer is my background.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:31) So there is not a hateful bone in my body. I'm like, yes. This is going to be a better future. We're going to have higher quality products, more people getting involved in playing the game. It's going to be good.

(Mike Tria at 00:28:42) I am excited for a revitalization of personal software. So just writing something just for you because it will help you. Personal software. I've got—I love—I still write code. I have my own—I wrote my own tax software. So I file my own taxes with my tax software.

(Mike Tria at 00:29:02) I wrote my own double-ledger accounting system. I still maintain these things. I run them all the time, but I'm rare in that regard, even amongst managers. Often when you get into management, you start stepping away from coding day to day. There's a little danger to that, to stepping away far.

(Mike Tria at 00:29:21) I think the accessibility of the tools, as you've mentioned, I think is going to open up the door for people to just write little apps for themselves, write things that they need in their lives to sort of fill the gaps that aren't served by others. I am very excited about it. I even have my nephew—he wants to write games and has now tools available to help him do that. Yeah. I similarly am very excited.

(Mike Tria at 00:29:44) Or even internally here at Gusto, people are doing these things very much bottoms up. The legal team is using AI tools to sort of help distill the thousands and thousands and thousands of compliance rules across all various agencies, so they're doing that internally. We have our go-to-market teams leveraging it to better understand customer signal and intent. This is without an engineering team building all of these tools. Right?

(Mike Tria at 00:30:05) This is teams that are not engineers by trade being able to build. So I just think it's going to turn more employees into builders, which I love.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:16) You built your own tax software?

(Mike Tria at 00:30:18) Sure did. I'm a glutton for punishment. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:20) Did you just—

(Mike Tria at 00:30:21) It could do all the—it could do Georgia, federal, and state. It doesn't cover everything. For instance, it can't—I can't do farm subsidies, but it does—it calculates everything, generates forms for me, based on my data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:37) I just hard-code the total amount owed to IRS to be zero. You know, worst tax software ever.

(Mike Tria at 00:30:43) Yeah. That's a shortcut.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:45) It's a quick way to get them to knock on your door, though.

(Mike Tria at 00:30:48) I will say, though, I've compared it to—now I've seen the actual incredible tax software that Gusto has, and I felt a little embarrassed about what I had built because I built something that's, you know, used for me personally. But it also gave me—and I had thought, I had an appreciation for how hard this stuff was building it for myself, but my mind was blown when I saw just how complex and gnarly the space is. Again, it made me fall in love. I love the space that is, I would say, classically considered unsexy, payroll compliance, all that stuff. But in a lot of ways, this is how small businesses interact with the real world, is through government agencies. They have to pay taxes, have to do insurance, need to raise money.

(Mike Tria at 00:31:33) I really enjoy that because that's where the complication is. And I think software does best when it can take this really complicated stuff and make it such that you could run payroll in five minutes, knowing that you're compliant, knowing that you're good. It's something that I think is a great use of software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:51) That's how I feel. Honestly, if you guys have a tagline in my head, it's "Gusto's got it." When I see I'll get unemployment notices for tax rate change, I'm like, "Gusto's got it. Gusto's got it."

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:01) And that's what I say internally. I'm just like, and if they don't, I'll get some notice at some point. But I don't have to worry about it. And that's just because, I mean, I don't know, I think I've been a customer for somewhere between five to seven years, and it just builds a lot of trust.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:19) So I've watched the product evolve tremendously, and it just builds a lot of trust.

(Mike Tria at 00:32:24) There's different types of software that, the longer it's around, the less you trust it because it gets calcified and ossified and like the way things used to work. In the space of tax regulation and compliance, it's the opposite. Gusto's had so many runs at year end, quarterly filings, that if you just get started in this space and you've been doing payroll and you're one year in, you haven't learned much yet. Because unfortunately, in this world, how you test in a lot of ways, there's no way to simulate the IRS.

(Mike Tria at 00:33:02) There's no way to simulate the state of Kentucky. You have historical data. You really need to go and stress the thing in live with your customers safely. The fact that Gusto has now been doing this for so long, I think in a lot of ways helps bring that trust. And a lot of that flows into even how we build here at Gusto.

(Mike Tria at 00:33:23) We like to move fast, but we remember that compliance, like what you said, "Gusto's got it," is something that sits on everyone's monitor. And so we are just very, very, very protective of those code paths and jobs to be done for customers to make sure that we don't break them. Because that's, in a lot of ways, that peace of mind is a huge value proposition for us. And so breaking that, it's very hard to walk it back if you break it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:49) I love the R&D tax credit thing.

(Mike Tria at 00:33:52) Oh, yeah?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:53) Did that for several years, and it was just so smooth and easy. And I was like, "Yes. This is great."

(Mike Tria at 00:33:58) It's remarkable to me how many folks don't realize that there's money that is sitting out there that is available to them, and just how easy it can be to get access to it. There's an obtuseness, I think, in some forms of compliance. And things like tax credits is a good example where, yep, that's an area where we can make it easy, and then customers get money. Because when we talk to small businesses and we ask them what their biggest problems are, they always say two things, and it's always two things. And they just, the order flips. One is access to capital and money, finding great people.

(Mike Tria at 00:34:32) And it just sort of depends, depending on the year, which one's number one and which one's number two, but it is always those two.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:39) You guys are right at the intersection of that too.

(Mike Tria at 00:34:42) Exactly. Yeah. And I feel like that's why we feel forever not done in terms of building out the hats model. Right? We want to get to 50 hats.

(Mike Tria at 00:34:52) And as a CTO, part of what I have to think through is how broad can the offering be and not have the products that we build be paper thin? Because they need to, anything we build here instantly could be used by 400,000 customers. So you have an incredible amount of scale on day one. So the thing needs to be reliable, durable, secure, performant. But we also want to do things quickly and have a lot of them.

(Mike Tria at 00:35:22) It's a balancing act between, like, how deep do you go in your core product offering? How deep do we go further on the payroll stack, the benefit stack, the finance stack? And then how wide do we allow the offering to go is the balance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:35) Yeah. Well, the only other thing I could say would be just make it so I can hire a digital AI employee inside Gusto. Just like, I need this to...

(Mike Tria at 00:35:45) Try Gus.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:46) You gotta try Gus.

(Mike Tria at 00:35:47) I'll say, we're pouring a lot of energy into that, and I feel like it strikes a pretty good balance. But use it and report back. I'm curious what you think. We're always looking for feedback as well on all these things, and that's something we do with all of our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:01) Yeah. I mean, I love when my report can just be like, "I don't know. It works, and I don't think about it." Those are my favorite products. My favorite products. And so, yeah, I'm a fan, and then I'll continue to be a fan. So if you want to catch up again next year, I know we have a hard stop here. So I want to be respectful of your time and make sure we get you out of here on time. But, Mike, we made a podcast, man. How do you feel?

(Mike Tria at 00:36:26) I feel great. I haven't had a chance to talk about improv with a fellow comedian in a work context for a long time. This has been very, very novel and a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:39) A lot of fun. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected].

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:57) Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.