Kevin Busque, Founder/CEO of Guideline — Serial Entrepreneurship & Disrupting US Retirement Savings
Miguel Armaza sits down with the amazing Kevin Busque, Founder and CEO of Guideline, a modern 401(k) provider for small businesses. Under Kevin’s leadership, Guideline has grown to be the retirement plan of choice for more than 20,000 small businesses, amassing more than $4 billion in assets under management and raising over $140 million in equity from top industry investors like Generation Investment, Tiger Global, Greyhound, Lerer Hippeau, Amex, Propel, Felicis, NEA, and many more.
Kevin founded Guideline after seven years as a Co-Founder at TaskRabbit, another massively successful business that was acquired by IKEA in 2017.
I also want to extend a special thank you to professor Adam Grant for his help in making this episode a reality, where we discuss:
- Kevin’s background and how his upbringing led him down the entrepreneurial journey. Growing up in a military family, always moving around the world, he was forced to become very adaptable and had tolearn to make new friends and quickly find his voice in radically different environments. This reality forced him to always find a way to provide for himself and starting his own businesses became ‘a means to an end’
“I started my first company in eighth grade, and then did custom computer services for local colleges and network services… And that paid for anything I really wanted. I think I made $60,000, my junior year of high school.”
- Launching Guideline from a house garage and some of their early-day challenges. After realizing US retirement savings had been largely underserved for the last 40 years, Kevin and team figured there should be a better and cheaper way to offer a simple retirement savings product, particularly for small businesses. They set out to reimagine the service and after over a year of building, Guideline launched their first product in 2016.
- Navigating the pandemic and why they had no idea how it would affect their business (hint, they actually doubled in size). It’s no secret that some of the hardest-hit companies during COVID have been small businesses. This being the most important customer base for Guideline, the pandemic brought a lot of uncertainty to the company. But given their limited exposure to retail and food services, Guideline actually saw a ramp-up of activity.
“What precluded us from actually having a disastrous year is that we don’t have a lot of retail exposure and we don’t have a lot of food service exposure… more than 50% of our customers are in professional services. So these are businesses that are naturally able to go remote. So a lot of them have been quite successful.”
- The surprising effect of the pandemic on US retirement savings rates. The combination of US Government stimulus, coupled with a reduction of daily expenditures (commuting, gas, restaurant dining, etc.) resulted in an average 50% increase of retirement savings for Guideline’s customers, going from 8% to 12%.
- Company culture philosophy. Kevin spends a lot of time thinking about company culture, but he is against engineering an artificial environment. His past experience as Co-Founder of TaskRabbit convinced him against taking an active role in dictating company culture. He believes employees will join a company for its mission and the culture will speak for itself, which is why Guideline does not offer office perks but instead provides great benefits to attract high performers interested in meaningful work.
“I think the company’s mission needs to speak for itself. It can’t be artificial… all this Kumbaya stuff works for a very short period of time, and people get over it really quickly.”
- Valuable reflections for entrepreneurs and the importance of always doing the hard things first.
“When I think of Guideline’s success, it’s really about doing the hard things first. That first year and a half, really set us up for success… I would say focus really hard, very intensely on building hard things first, that will give you your advantage.
And then, the whole idea of stealth startup is absolutely baffling to me, I think that you should be talking to absolutely everybody! — You can imagine, if I never talked to Adam Grant that one time… he knew all about Guideline, we had the most beneficial conversation I probably ever had early on by talking to him on a chairlift randomly. If I was in ‘stealth mode’, I don’t even know that we’d be friends.
Kevin Busque
Kevin is the founder and CEO of Guideline, a modern and affordable modern and affordable 401(k) for small businesses. Under Kevin’s leadership, Guideline has grown to be the retirement plan of choice for more than 20,000 small businesses, amassing more than $4 billion in assets under management. A World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, Fast Company named Guideline one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies and Forbes named it to its Fintech 50 — a ranking of the companies shaping the future of money — twice. Kevin founded Guideline after seven years at TaskRabbit, the online and mobile labor marketplace that he co-founded, which was acquired by IKEA in 2017. Kevin has been featured in Inc., the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and is a contributor for Entrepreneur Magazine. The son of an Army intelligence Sergeant, he grew up in several cities across North America and Europe, but considers himself a New Englander. He now lives in San Mateo, California.
About Guideline
Guideline launched in 2016 with a mission to create an honest, easy retirement platform that gives people confidence they’ll have a retirement they can look forward to.
Since its launch, Guideline has grown to support more than 20,000 small business clients, managing more than $4 billion in assets. Guideline handles the heavy lifting — from plan administration and employee onboarding, to compliance testing, government filing, and recordkeeping — to make small business owners’ jobs easier.
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Miguel Armaza is Co-Host of the Wharton Fintech Podcast and Co-Founder of Gilgamesh Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund focused on fintech in the Americas.
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