No Figma. No Jira. No docs. How Gusto built a new product line with Claude Code | Eddie Kim (CTO)

Eddie Kim is the co-founder and CTO of the payroll and HR platform Gusto, which just crossed $1 billion in revenue and serves more than 500,000 small businesses. Recently he did something most CTOs don’t: he went back to writing code. With three other engineers and one designer, Eddie built Gusto Cofounder, a net-new AI product, from zero code to a tier-one launch in 10 weeks. He walks through how that team actually worked, why they threw out nearly every process, and how anyone can copy the approach.

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What you’ll learn:

The trash-can method: how to write, review, and delete a full PR as a product decision instead of a planning doc

The two-tool agent stack behind Gusto Cofounder

The exact “perma-Zoom” setup that replaced standups, retros, and Slack threads for 10 weeks

How a designer with no engineering background hit the 94th percentile for shipping code

The eval-first workflow Eddie uses to fix real customer bugs with Claude Code

How a non-technical leader can prototype an idea to win buy-in, then carry it all the way to production-quality code

Brought to you by:

Magic Patterns —Prototypes that look like your product

Jira Product Discovery —Prioritize with insights, build with confidence

In this episode, we cover:

( 00:00 ) Intro: five people, 10 weeks

( 02:38 ) The origins of Cofounder

( 08:32 ) Inside the 10-week build process

( 12:50 ) Building with no PMs

( 14:38 ) The “trash can” method

( 17:15 ) The stack architecture

( 19:10 ) Shipping to production from day one

( 22:03 ) How a designer became a top engineer

( 29:05 ) Demo: Cofounder over text and Slack

( 31:45 ) Demo: running a real payroll

( 36:26 ) Live coding with evals in Claude Code

( 39:39 ) Recap: prototype, small team, permission

( 43:17 ) Lightning round

( 48:44 ) Where to find Eddie and Cofounder

Tools referenced:

• Gusto Cofounder (early access/waitlist): https://gusto.com/cofounder

• Claude Code (Anthropic): https://claude.ai/code

• Cloudflare Workers: https://workers.cloudflare.com/

• Vercel AI SDK: https://sdk.vercel.ai/

• DX (engineering analytics): https://getdx.com/

• Wispr Flow (voice-to-text): https://wisprflow.ai

• OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai/

Other references:

• Gusto (the main product, “Gusto Classic”): https://gusto.com

• Mindbody (referenced as customer data source): https://www.mindbodyonline.com/

Where to find Eddie Kim:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edawerd/

Where to find Claire Vo:

ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/

Website: https://clairevo.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/

X: https://x.com/clairevo

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/ . For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.