We’re starting a new tradition at Gusto. Every once in a while, we’d like to showcase a new member of our growing team at Gusto by asking him or her five questions. This week, we want to highlight a new hire on our engineering team, Nikhil Mathew.
1. Tell us about yourself.
I just graduated from Boston University with a degree in CS but I’ve been hacking and working on startups for the past few years. I’m really into music, especially jazz, blues and funk. Bands I like include The Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin. That’s one of the reasons my friend and I built LiveGit while in school. LiveGit is like a mashup of GarageBand plus GitHub and lets artists collaborate on music together. Other than music, I’m also really big into biking and snowboarding.
2. What are you going to be doing at Gusto?
I’ll be working with the rest of the dev team on building features for our awesome payroll product. My background is in Rails and Node.
3. What got you excited about Gusto?
I really love the commitment we have to small and medium sized businesses. I was a startup founder so I know how hard it is to run a business. If we can make their lives a little easier and help them get back to doing what they love, then we’re doing something huge.
4. Other than Gusto, what is your dream job?
I’d revisit building a music-tech startup, like LiveGit but different. I just love the idea of helping artists connect with each other and helping them express themselves. One of the biggest lessons I learned from LiveGit was to ask our users earlier for their feedback instead of building features that nobody wanted. It’s this lean startup attitude we’re applying at Gisto now and something I’d like to explore again with my own music-tech startup down the road.
5. Every Gusto employee gets a free round-trip plane ticket to anywhere in the world on their one-year anniversary. Where do you think you’ll go and why?
I’d love to go to Thailand. A buddy of mine lived there and talked about all the trips he’d do. Plus, there are beautiful bike trails there.
You can find Nikhil on LinkedIn and GitHub. His prior startup is LiveGit.
Gusto is a company of builders for builders. If you’re interested in joining our growing team, check us out.
