Inside Gusto’s brand-new San Francisco headquarters, where employees work on living room furniture and take off their shoes at the door

Katie Canales/Business Insider

Gusto’s founding is a classic Silicon Valley tale.

In 2011, Joshua Reeves and a few techie friends launched the company out of a house in Palo Alto, where the founders had access to top coding talent and proximity to the most powerful VC firms in America.

That’s where the startup stereotype ends for Gusto, a billion-dollar enterprise that makes human resources software for small businesses.

Reeves takes pride in helping small businesses do great work, but he also wanted Gusto to be a great place to work. It’s avoided the reckoning on fratty company culture by providing a homey environment, transparency in the way they work, and “ridiculously generous” benefits. Fortune magazine named Gusto one of the 100 best workplaces for millennials, and employees write glowing reviews on Glassdoor.

The company opened a new headquarters in the once industrial, now ultra hipster Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco earlier this year. We took a look inside.