Nalu Concepcion, co-founder of Idler, didn’t set out to build AI infrastructure. They actually started as a t-shirt shop.

She and her co-founders Ivan and Tony, all engineers, wanted to do something creative so they kept experimenting and pivoting. “Eight or nine times,” Nalu laughs.

Today, Idler builds reinforcement learning environments to train coding agents on expert tasks. 

“Our vision is that one day coding agents will be useful to automate all types of economically valuable work,” shares Nalu. “It’s a bold claim to make, but I believe it's possible.”

Nalu had also run a small business before and remembered how painful the operational side could be.

“I did compliance for a previous company I ran, which was much smaller and part-time. And that in and of itself was already a headache.”

This time, she wanted to build instead of doing paperwork.

Problem

Compliance kills building time

At the start of YC, Idler was moving fast.

“Every hour mattered. Especially as a technical founder, you don’t want to spend your best coding hours on admin,” says Nalu.

Compliance, payroll, and onboarding were non-negotiable. But spending valuable energy on it? Not an option.

Solution

One call and done

Nalu found Central through YC. What sold her was how easy it was to start: one call, no annual contract, no pressure. If it didn’t work, she could walk.

That first setup call took less than an hour.

“It was done for me immediately. We were finished by the end of the hour,” says Nalu.

Midway through YC, she got curious. Rippling looked cheaper on paper, so she decided to test it.

“I tried onboarding to Rippling, which ended up being four separate calls, each an hour long, many before 7 a.m., which was crazy,” she recalls.

The more she explored, the worse it got.

“I went through the hiring flows on a few other providers just to see how they felt from a UX perspective. And hiring was really difficult on those platforms,” says Nalu.

During peak YC crunch, that experiment cost her hours of focus.

So she switched back fast.

Results

Expert human help, not tickets

What surprised Nalu most about Central was how human it felt. Fast, simple, and backed by real experts.

“Working with Central has been one of the most delightful user experiences that I’ve had when it comes to our ops stack,” she says. “Central feels very human, especially in the age of AI and automation.”

Every question got a personal answer. No escalations or support tickets needed.

One moment stood out when Nalu set up benefits for the first time.

“Adri from Central just walked me through everything. She knew it all: plans, options, requirements, right off the top of her head,” recalls Nalu.

“After our call, I looked her up and was like, ‘Who is she? How does she know all of this?’ Turns out she studied operations at a scale I didn’t even know existed. It was super cool to see that kind of talent be part of Central’s team, but also immediately accessible to me. I didn’t have to go through anyone to have a conversation with her,” says Nalu.

No context switching

For Nalu, Central doesn’t interrupt her day.

“I actually really like that the main mode of communication is the Slack channel, and that I don’t really go into any dashboards”

Everything happens where her team already works. No context switching.

If you’ve ever done any coding, it’s tough to switch contexts very frequently. Minimizing the amount of ops we have to do as a company really helped me build a better product at the end of the day.”

Now, she says she doesn’t even think about payroll or compliance.

“It’s just autopilot,” says Nalu.

Peace of mind

Founders love optimization, but some things just need to work. When asked about her advice to founders:

“With payroll, it’s easy to think you should go with the cheapest provider or the one that’s been around the longest. But payroll is compliance heavy and there are a lot of ways it can go wrong. It’s expensive later to fix those mistakes, legally or mentally"

That’s why she stuck with Central.

“Central for me is a no-brainer in the ops stack I’d recommend for payroll. It’s all in one, and it’s very human. The people behind it are experts, and that’s a big weight off my back.”

“Relying on Central means I make fewer mistakes early on. So later, when the product is growing and I’m stressed, I don’t have to go back and deal with annoying ops concerns. That’s what Central is for.”

Now, she spends her time where it matters most: building Idler.