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ipince
Series Panda ftw. Congrats to the team!
orik 

    "We didn’t really need the capital, per se."
Why exchange equity for capital if it's not necessary?
jaksmit
for one, you don't know how the environment and access to capital might change. So it might make sense to take some cash whilst it's available.
vecter
It derisks the company at low cost because you're raising money on great terms. It's almost always a good idea to have extra cash in the bank, especially when that cash comes.

I once heard a quote along the lines of "the company that wins the space is the last one to raise funding before the funding market turns south."

ffyyg
And if you gave even 1x prefs on that vanity raise, then you've turned your "okay not great" outcomes into bad outcomes.

Rule of thumb: if somebody raises at exactly or just over s billion, they did it because it feeds their ego and every other excuse is just an excuse.

vecter
Where did I mention vanity as a part of the raise? You missed all of the points I made and then attacked a strawman.

When you raise on your terms, as these guys probably did, you get (1) a great valuation (i.e. cheap money) and (2) great terms (i.e. 1x or better liq pref).

joevsthevolcano
Because you're running payroll. You could lose it all pretty quickly if you screw a few things up.
eli
Best time to raise money is when you don't need it.
tim333
It seems like everything is 'valued as $1bn' these days.
nodesocket
Awesome. Gusto is great, use them for my startup https://commando.io. However, I am not a fan of the brand and name change of Gusto. My 2 cents.
fasteo
Strange name.

Gusto is a polysemic Spanish word: taste, flavour, pleasure.

I guess they were thinking in "pleasure", but for Spanish speakers, it just sounds weird.

JVMsOfGor
I hope Gusto/ZenPayroll uses it to hire some customer services reps or whip up some of that advanced machine learning I always hear about now. To fix a payroll mistake they once magically sucked money out of my account, without any notification. An email or a message in their portal would have been nice.

I am no longer part of the Gusto/ZenPayroll ecosystem, but at the time I found annoying their cute messages about how I could buy 500,000 gumballs with my paycheck if I really wanted to, plus how I should tweet about how much I love my gumball money via ZenPayroll. My paycheck and social media should not mix!