# Future Trends in HR, Payroll & Compliance

> A NachoTuesday interview — the C-Suite Insights series from NachoNacho, the B2B SaaS and AI
> marketplace. In conversation with Ayush Sharma, Founder and CEO, Warp.

- **Page:** https://nachonacho.com/nachotuesday/video/Future-Trends-in-HR-Payroll-and-Compliance
- **Guest:** Ayush Sharma, Founder and CEO, Warp
- **Guest on LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayushsharma01/
- **Recorded:** 2025-12-04
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGIWisM5Roc

## Summary

In this interview, Andy Karuza speaks with Ayush Sharma, the founder and CEO of Warp, an AI-native employee management platform designed for high-growth startups. The discussion explores how Warp is disrupting the legacy payroll and HR industry by replacing manual, tedious paperwork with automated AI systems. Sharma shares insights on his background as an MIT-trained engineer, the importance of maintaining an in-person company culture, and how AI-native tools are empowering founders to focus on strategy and innovation rather than compliance and administration. Key Takeaways: AI-Native Automation vs. Legacy Systems : Warp differentiates itself from "dinosaur" incumbents by using AI to automate the underlying manual work of tax compliance and payroll, rather than just providing a digital user interface for manual tasks. The "Engineering CEO" Advantage : Modern AI tools like Cursor allow technical founders to remain active in the codebase even as they scale, bridging the gap between high-level strategy and product execution. Strategic Feature Prioritization : For fast-growing startups, it is vital to treat early product versions as experiments and focus on solving one core "pain point"—such as complex multi-state tax compliance—before expanding into a full-suite platform. Streamlining Operations : Sharma advises founders to avoid complex legal changes, such as renaming a company entity, which can cause years of bureaucratic friction; instead, simple solutions like a "Doing Business As" (DBA) status are more efficient. The Value of In-Person Culture : While remote work is popular, Sharma argues that a high-quality, intentional office space fosters better camaraderie and faster iteration for ambitious teams.

## Full transcript

(00:08) Andy Karuza: Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to another Nacho Tuesday. Today I have Ayush here with Warp. Without further ado, we would love for you to introduce your company and what you guys do. Ayush Sharma: My name is Ayush. I'm the founder and CEO of Warp. Warp is building an AI-native employee management platform for ambitious companies. We help companies—especially startups and high-growth companies—simplify their employee onboarding, payroll, and compliance with all tax jurisdictions. This includes all payroll-related tax compliance, benefits, and a lot more. (00:46) Andy Karuza: Great. Your platform is built for fast-growing startups. How do you see HR, payroll, and compliance changing over the next three to five years? Ayush Sharma: I think one big shift that has happened here is this: you're seeing this play out in a lot of other fields right now very quickly, but I think HR and payroll—not enough people realize that this is also going to happen. That is the one big contrarian belief that we have at Warp. The broader meta-trend here is that so much manual work is being automated using LLMs and AI. A great example of that would be something like Harvey, which has raised almost $8 billion recently to give legal teams superpowers for reviewing documents, building legal contracts, getting back to people quickly, and just being more productive. I think we will see similar trends happening in HR and payroll. Future founders, ops teams, and finance leaders will spend way less of their time dealing with repetitive, manual, tedious tasks like paperwork and reviewing basic things like tax IDs with various government accounts. Instead, they will spend more of their time on important strategic things, like where their company should be going and how they should manage their culture. It's almost starting to happen, and we're here to accelerate that. I think it will be big. (02:23) Andy Karuza: Absolutely. Given that a lot of founders want to work on the actual product and the things they specialize in, I understand that you were passionate about building products as well. Do you have a product development background? Ayush Sharma: Yes. My quick background is that I studied computer science, physics, and math at MIT. I ended up doing an undergrad and a master's, so I spent about five years in Cambridge. I specialized in large-scale machine learning systems and distributed systems, doing a lot of research work in that direction. What's interesting about that background is that I think I'm an engineer first and then a product person right after. That combination has allowed us to build one of the best products in this massive, old, somewhat incumbent space very quickly. To the point that users and customers are overwhelmingly loving the product and giving us great feedback, and we've seen incredible growth. We've raised about $25 million total in just under two years from starting the company. We have hundreds of ambitious, fast-growing startups, including folks like Bland AI, Redto, Paraform, and many more. I think it all comes down to being able to take a unique product and engineering approach to a space that's largely been dominated by sales-led, distribution-focused companies. That's how I operate. (03:58) Andy Karuza: Yeah, the dinosaurs. You can definitely leverage newer technologies to beat them to market or come up with new features and iterate really quickly. How do you see AI playing into product development these days? Ayush Sharma: It's a great question because I feel like something shifted meaningfully in the last two years, even just being the CEO. It used to be the case that if you were a very engineering-oriented technical founder and you were the CEO of a company, it would be a necessary but sad decision to step out of coding and building things day-to-day. You had to go more high-level at the company—setting strategy, hiring people, and aligning them with a vision. But what's amazing about building products today is that an engineering-at-heart CEO can fire up Cursor or Claude Code, or whatever your favorite AI coding editor is. You can ask it questions. We have a vast codebase because we built a lot of product very quickly, so it would have been impossible to just go in and try to understand all the moving parts cold. But with tools like Cursor, you can ask how a certain portion of the feature or the codebase works, and then you can tweak it to make real contributions—actual PRs that get merged. I do that all the time now. I code important, useful features, which is something you just couldn't do as a CEO even two years ago. (05:56) Andy Karuza: Yep, that's a good point. You can just jump right in and roll up your sleeves. How do you evaluate features you want to focus on? I know a lot of founders struggle with trying to build too many features, and then their MVP gets totally messed up. What are your thoughts on prioritizing features as you're building a product and bringing it to market? Ayush Sharma: First, you have to really know what core unique problem you're trying to solve. You want to treat your first version of the product as a very directed experiment. If you're running a scientific experiment, you have a hypothesis about a problem, a need, or an important thing you could solve for a specific user. For us, we started by noticing that early-stage founders were spending way too much time figuring out nuanced tax withholding, unemployment, and insurance requirements in various jurisdictions. California, for example, is very complex. The first version of the product we built was simple: you hire somebody, and we will automate the underlying tax compliance work for those jurisdictions. Early on, we concentrated on California and New York. As you start to grow, there is a mindset shift. We tripled our headcount in the last year, quadrupled our revenue, and are on track to process billions of dollars within the next year or so. You have to change your mindset from being very precise with the product to being comfortable juggling more moving parts. You will invariably run into a greater degree of complexity. It's important to recognize when you've crossed that boundary. Even then, you have to say "no" to most things and focus on the most important big problems. You only have so much bandwidth, so it's better to apply that towards the big things as opposed to the tiny tasks that keep coming up. (08:54) Andy Karuza: I see that a lot too. Founders get focused on a feature they want to ship or a specific customer request, but they fail to evaluate if that feature is actually something their entire ICP wants. Ayush Sharma: Totally. (09:19) Andy Karuza: Nice. You built Warp from the ground up. What are the biggest misconceptions about payroll compliance that you've seen along your journey working with startups? Ayush Sharma: It's funny, one of the biggest misconceptions is that because there are many legacy incumbents in the space, people think it's a solved problem. You believe that until you start a company and grow quickly; then you realize how much manual work is actually handed back to the employer—to the founders, finance, or legal teams. I personally worked at a startup and handled some of that myself, which was my brush with this space, and I realized how janky the existing tooling is. It inspired us to build something amazing, and that's Warp today. The biggest misconception for people who haven't scaled a company is that this is a solved problem. The reality is that most software is just a UI layer on top of manual work. What we are building at Warp is not the UI layer, but an AI-native platform that eliminates the underlying complexity and manual work. (11:08) Andy Karuza: Yeah, so automation is one of your key value propositions. Where do you see AI playing a role going forward as you grow? Ayush Sharma: There are many areas, and we have to be focused on where the most important problems are. As I mentioned, the big thing was building an AI-driven compliance tax engine that understands requirements across hundreds of jurisdictions and automates manual filings. That's still an important area, but there are other interesting opportunities. Our customers are growing very quickly—some going from five people to 50+ in ten months. We want to understand what they will need 6 or 12 months from now and be ahead of those requirements. An example of the manual work that remains is reconciling and understanding differences between payroll amounts from cycle to cycle. If you have a thousand-person company with bonuses, commissions, reimbursements, and deductions, things constantly change. Often, companies have a human expert reviewing those changes in an Excel sheet for hours twice a month. We can eliminate 80-90% of that work. We can have an LLM review all the discrepancies from the last cycle and explain them in human terms. Why is my net pay higher this month? Well, your commission was calculated this way. We can self-serve that to employees so they don't have to ask the HR manager. (14:14) Andy Karuza: Yep, those questions can really clog things up. What's next for payroll beyond just paying people? Ayush Sharma: When we started Warp about two years ago, we were simply doing employee onboarding and payroll. In that time, we have shipped at such an incredible velocity that I think we've leapfrogged many products that have existed for 10+ years. Today, we do payroll for all US employees across all 50 states, US-based contractors, and global contractors anywhere in the world. We handle all the HRIS stuff: onboarding, documentation, offer letters, and NDAs. We handle federal, state, and local tax compliance automatically. We also do benefits like healthcare, 401k, dental, and vision. We have a product for employees to upload receipts for automatic payout, and we recently shipped a powerful company calendar and PTO engine. We have built all of that faster than any company that has ever attempted to do this. We are still excited about solving more problems. Customers keep asking us to solve things for them, which is a fortunate position to be in. I can't give specifics on product releases yet, but the general direction is that we are building the definitive AI-native employee management platform for ambitious companies. That means solving all the interlocking pieces of the puzzle for high-growth companies with employees everywhere. (17:37) Andy Karuza: Very nice. For early-stage startups watching this, what is one tip you would offer them to avoid from day one? Ayush Sharma: I can give many examples, but I'll offer two tactical ones. One: if you're thinking about changing the name of your legal entity, don't. I once made a tweet about this. Changing your legal name is very time-consuming. Once you do it, all the IRS and government databases still have your old name. Anytime you try to get a bank account or check the legitimacy of your business, it will flag you, and that will continue for two years after the change. A much simpler solution is to use a DBA (Doing Business As). We have a legal entity, and our DBA is Warp. It's much cleaner and you won't run into those hairy problems. The broader advice is that early on, people don't think enough about a platform that will scale with them. If you're an ambitious founder, you should think about your company in the success case. A lot of founders hedge by thinking about what's cheaper today, but the best founders think long-term. They think about what happens if they win. I think that's why some of the fastest-growing companies use Warp; they wanted a platform that could solve these problems and scale as they grow. Also, putting up with subpar tools can impact how you think about building your own company. Great products inspire builders to build great things. (21:02) Andy Karuza: Yeah, it's okay to have a big vision and work backwards. I can't tell you how many times I've received a wire from a company and wondered who they were because the name didn't match their brand. DBA is definitely the hack there. What kind of regulatory changes are you tracking that might cause shifts for companies? Ayush Sharma: I'll give one internal and one external answer. Internally, we're in an interesting moment where LLMs and AI are using software and tools like humans do—browsing websites, parsing information, and filling out forms. We've seen the rise of browser agents. It's going to be interesting to see how government agencies feel about that because there's no real clarity right now. I suspect as long as there's a compliant use case that helps businesses and agencies avoid mistakes, it will evolve positively. At Warp, we've seen how much compliance burden you can eliminate if you have an LLM system taking care of it. Externally, there are interesting trends in the benefits and healthcare space. Startups are starting to offer benefits like gym passes or ClassPass memberships. Especially with younger, healthier employee groups, this is a meaningful health benefit. It's a holistic way of thinking about benefits as insurance costs keep rising. (25:27) Andy Karuza: That's a great point. What are some of the top benefits employees look for these days? Remote work is popular, but what can startups leverage to attract talent? Ayush Sharma: I have a counterintuitive answer: more startups should take their office space very seriously. Many early-stage companies don't think about this enough. I'm sitting in our office with the team right now, and we get complimented anytime someone visits. I was very intentional when looking for this space. It wasn't the cheapest option, but it's important to have a space where your team feels motivated. We are an in-person culture by default, five days a week. You want to look forward to coming in, rather than being in a dimly lit white box. A more tactical answer is that if you're an in-person company, commuter benefits are great. We shipped this feature at Warp; you can easily build a benefit policy for people working in the office. They get paid a pre-tax amount, which is essentially tax-free money. It builds better camaraderie, which is hard to do over video calls. (28:20) Andy Karuza: Oh, totally. What's next for Warp? Where do you see the company in five years? Ayush Sharma: If Warp succeeds in a massive way, it means we have built the definitive AI-native, enduring platform where great businesses run all of their people operations. That's our success criteria—the mission we're driving toward every day. We believe it will be built by people who really care about the product experience. If we do that, we will free up important human hours from some of the best people in the world, allowing them to solve ambitious, innovative problems instead of dealing with tedious paperwork. Businesses are the engine of innovation. Improving the efficiency of entrepreneurs could be the difference between someone building the next SpaceX or drowning in grunt work. We take that very seriously. (30:39) Andy Karuza: Well, sounds like you guys have a great vision and you know how to build a good product. Where can people learn more about Warp? Ayush Sharma: We are hiring engineers, product, and design people like crazy. We've tripled our headcount this year and will likely 2x or 3x again in 2026. If you're a great engineer, you can email me directly at https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&source=gmail&q=joinwarp.com. You can also check out our product at https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&source=gmail&q=joinwarp.com. If you're a fast-growing company dealing with compliance pains, let us know—year-end is the best time to make a switch. (31:37) Andy Karuza: Jump on it at https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&source=gmail&q=joinwarp.com. That’s W-A-R-P. You can also find it in the NachoNacho B2B SaaS and AI marketplace. We're very excited to see where you take the company. You're solving a big problem and have a great vision. Ayush Sharma: Love it. Appreciate the partnership, Andy. Pleasure chatting. Andy Karuza: You too. Bye.

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