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This week, Guideline founder Kevin Busque shares how a contrarian bet to fix 401(k) launched a decade of building — and an eventual acquisition by Gusto. It’s 2014 and Kevin Busque is too busy to be verifying 401(k) contributions on every pay period. As co-founder and VP of Technology of TaskRabbit, the same-day service platform widely credited with catalyzing the gig economy along with Uber and Airbnb, he is focused on scaling the company rapidly. TaskRabbit recently launched in London, its first international market, and its headcount has grown to 70. Compared to his days as a scrappy early-stage founder, figuring it out on the fly with a small band of early hires, things now look very different for Busque. He spends a lot of time thinking about leadership. Thinking about hiring. Thinking about HR and employee benefits. It’s the latter in particular that begins to keep him up at night, after he stumbles upon a discovery that makes him do a double take: a mere 36% of TaskRabbit employees are enrolled in the company’s 401(k) plan. It doesn’t make sense. “I remember the number, because when I found out, I was flabbergasted,” Busque recalls. He begins trying to understand why so few of his employees are making use of this company benefit, which costs TaskRabbit more than $20,000 annually. As he takes a closer look at their 401(k) providers, he starts to grasp the issues.
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