After Zenefits, Will VCs Rein in Their Unicorns?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-17/after-zenefits-will-vcs-rein-in-their-unicorns

by jackgavigan • 10 years ago

108 120 10 years ago

minimaxir4• 10 years ago

Note that this article has new information compared to the previous articles about the Zenefits incident. (namely, a16z's involvement as the catalyst for the ouster)

jackgavigan2• 10 years ago

And also (I think) the fact that Parker created the Macro™.

exw• 10 years ago

No, that information was already mentioned in the second BuzzFeed article:

<<That was how executives discovered the macro, which Conrad had created based on a belief that 52 hours was too long to spend in training, the lawyer for Sacks said.>>

http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/zenefits-program-let-in...

rokhayakebe3• 10 years ago

This thing did not start and stop with Conrad. Many others at the executive and VC level could have been in on it.

rokhayakebe3• 10 years ago

I don't buy this.

I have no issues with Zenefits and I am actually happy they were able to see phenomenal growth. However I must say this whole situation of the CEO stepping down feels staged to me.

It is as if everyone was in on it and this move was calculated by all of them a long time ago. Like when we ready and my stocks are safe and sound blame it on me.

draw_down3• 10 years ago

Oh, you have no issues with Zenefits so the whole thing must be staged! Of course! As if it's so hard to believe a CEO would engage in unethical behavior. Sheesh.

rokhayakebe3• 10 years ago

I have no issue with them because I did not fully read a single article to form an opinion on whether or not they are guilty.

However what I am sure of is there is absolutely no way this 4.5 Billion company was acting illegally and only one person , the CEO, knew about this for YEARS and is responsible for it end to end.

minimaxir4• 10 years ago

Mel Brooks already showed us that doesn't work in The Producers. An exit scam with potential jailtime is not a wise idea.

meritt• 10 years ago

Stepping down? He was fired by the board. He did a damn good job growing the business but didn't bother with the necessary compliance, legal, and bureaucratic steps. The company needs a new type of leader to take them to IPO otherwise we'll have another disaster like we did with Groupon and Andrew Mason.

jsprogrammer3• 10 years ago

The article claims the AH meeting occurred on the 1st, while the HR/PR announcent was a week later.

Of course it was staged: you have a corporate guard change. What don't you "buy" about this story?

pbreit4• 10 years ago

It did seem odd that Sacks would take a #2 role at the time and it was hard not to think that Conrad's days were numbered with that hire.

smaili• 10 years ago

It really is a pity we live in a world where a few can ruin the party for all. I'm sure there are worthy startups out there with a solid product, solid team, and solid practices but they may suddenly die out from VC capital because of the fear/panic triggered by the couple of bad ones.

minimaxir4• 10 years ago

Presumably if they indeed have a solid product, they have a solid way to drive revenue and be self-sustaining in case of events such as this.

gautamnarula• 10 years ago

One issue for these startups could be that their facing competition with deep, VC-lined pockets. I actually faced this to some extent with a bootstrapped startup I ran--we were sort of competing against a startup with millions in VC funding that was handing out promotions like there was no tomorrow, and is still chugging along despite an unsustainable business model. It wasn't the primary reason we shut down, but it certainly didn't help.

jsprogrammer3• 10 years ago

$4.5 billion valuation on $60 million annual revenue from non-compliant activity?

Anyone know the investment thesis on that?

askafriend• 10 years ago

I think the investment thesis is based on the classic economic theory that draws upon complex natural and psychological forces, sometimes referred to by the acronym "FOMO".

wtvanhest• 10 years ago

This is a great read: https://www.quora.com/What-are-revenue-multiples-for-technol...

Also, it's a good idea to assume that the documents which established the valuation likely have many terms which make the published numbers not represent the economic reality of the investment/contract. Liquidation preferences make any comparison between private and public companies extremely difficult, if not impossible.

pbreit4• 10 years ago

Fastest growing SaaS business ever? The non-compliant activity was not crucial for success and easily rectified. The service offered is core to pretty much every business on the planet and touches every single employee in the business.

jsprogrammer3• 10 years ago

Easily rectified? The top shareholder/exec got dumped; the entire business is under multiple states' investigations; employees may have purjured themselves at the behest of the business; and clients may have purchased critical business infrastructure from unlicensed agents (which may affect their coverage).

Clearly someone bought in to the pitch, but what strategy would they believe would easily rectify this situation?

interesting_att• 10 years ago

It's important to note that when the investment was made, enterprise tech companies (like Workday) like were getting a really high valuation, whereas consumer tech companies weren't doing so well. Investors like a16z probably wanted to invest as much as possible before the enterprise IPO market would go south. Moreover, I am sure investors probably had strong liquidation preferences, ensuring a profit in the case of an exit or IPO.

We're now seeing the downsides of their thesis. Workday's market cap has since cratered, down 33% in the past year, indicating a weakening interest in the enterprise IPO market. Zenefits itself has a number of growing concerns- regulatory and competition concerns (ADP is only getting better by the day).

bedhead• 10 years ago

Greater fool theory

draw_down3• 10 years ago

Unless consequences affect the investors or members of the board, and not just the CEO, what is the incentive to change behavior?

rajacombinator2• 10 years ago

A lot of the HN-cynic crowd is forgetting here that if anything, they were bypassing stupid sets of regulations. There is nothing ethically or morally wrong here.

geofft2• 10 years ago

It is ethically and morally wrong for private companies to privately decide that regulations are stupid, without any checks or balances by the people. Today, they might decide that laws that are in fact objectively stupid are stupid. Tomorrow they may decide that laws that are very important to the protection of your rights are stupid.

Or, at most, I will concede that it is not ethically and morally wrong if we concede that the United States is a plutocracy and not a democracy, and there's nothing ethically or morally wrong with a plutocracy.

If these laws are in fact stupid, get them changed. You have tons of money and tons of happy users, right?

easong4• 10 years ago

We have a dysfunctional government that's clearly beholden to various powers, including ones whose business model relies on stupid laws not changing. (I'm not personally sure I would even call our government a plutocracy, since that implies some level of control or organization.) At this point the only way we are ever going to get change is if large numbers of people decide that stupid laws are stupid and ignore them. See, for instance, the multi-decade long campaign to decriminalize marijuana.

More generally, I don't see a good way for our society to collectively figure out the cost/benefit ratio for many regulations other than experimentation (the institutions that should be doing so are permanently out to lunch). It's not ideal, but from my standpoint startup companies pushing boundaries is the best solution we've got for dealing with stagnated industries.

timv2• 10 years ago

I'll leave aside the question as to whether individuals faking their 52 hours is "ethically or morally wrong".

For Zenefits/Parker to facilitate and encourage their staff to do it is most certainly ethically wrong.

Telling your staff that they should cheat the rules, sign a false document and perjure themselves is completely unacceptable. Zenefits employees face the risk of jail time because they did what their CEO told them to do - that should never happen and Parker deserved to go for that reason alone.

rajacombinator2• 10 years ago

Hmm good point, I stand corrected.

pbreit4• 10 years ago

I'm not sure there's a whole lot from this story to apply elsewhere. David Sacks is who you want to be running the show. He has 2 fairly epic successes under his belt (PayPal and Yammer), one of the keenest product minds in the business, nearly unlimited access to funding and talent, moral authority as a founder and lawyer and operator to clean up the mess, etc.

minimaxir4• 10 years ago

"Don't break the law" is arguably a good lesson many startups could learn.

optimusclimb• 10 years ago

Doesn't the YC application process ask you about clever times you've hacked the system or painted a little outside the lines?

JonFish85• 10 years ago

Considering Airbnb and Uber, two of the largest and considered most-successful startups are carefully dodging the law, the upside is worth the risk. I disagree with it, but I think VCs don't care much about following legal frameworks until it's too late.

phibit• 10 years ago

Does anyone have any more information about the "52 hour online training program" that "the Macro" allowed them to skip? If that training program is any bit as useless as "online driving school", I can sort of understand how the Macro came to be...

rhizome• 10 years ago

My impression is that it is, but that doesn't excuse them.

467568985476• 10 years ago

It is perhaps a silly requirement, considering that the salespeople still passed the required exam.

But I see it as symptomatic of a cultural contempt for regulations. It seems like a conflict of interest for a company to wantonly decide which regulations are worth following and which aren't. Especially when the salespeople could be personally liable, and the catastrophic outcome is somebody finding out that their $1m surgery isn't covered by their insurance despite promises it would be from the salesperson.

pj_mukh5• 10 years ago

If everyone agrees it is a "silly" requirement (especially because it was circumvented so "easily"), why are we so mad at Zenefits?

We certainly don't want giant companies influencing policy changes (though, that happens frequently). I think a good indicator of whether a policy can justifiably be circumvented is if it actually hurt anybody. Has the "macro" hurt anybody yet? The articles have been vague.

patio11• 10 years ago

California requires 20 hours of training to get a license for health and accident insurance, 20 hours to get a license for life insurance, and an additional 12 hours on ethics training for people wanting to pass the exam for either. These are tick-box requirements that allow you to take the exam you need to pass to get the relevant license. Several providers have online courses you can take for $50 < N < $100 which fill up the required 52 hours and, importantly for the purpose of box ticking, generate documentation certifying that you put in your 52 hours.

Here's the regulator's description of half of the requirements:

http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0200-industry/0050-renew-license...

There exist many tick-box requirements in the vast, vast field that is compliance in regulated industries. There is a political valence to this observation.

My personal favorite one is the time where I had to threaten to fire myself if I ever misused patient information. I threatened to fire myself if I ever misused patient information. I then documented the fact that I had threatened to fire myself if I ever misused patient information. If I am ever investigated on suspicion of failing to have threatened to fire myself if I ever misused patient information (a crime which is separate from misusing patient information), I will be able to produce adequate documentation attesting to the fact that I threatened to fire myself if I ever misused patient information.

throwaway28715• 10 years ago

If that training program is any bit as useless as "online driving school", I can sort of understand how the Macro came to be...

One of my proudest hacker moments* a while back was taking online defensive driving school (to have a speeding ticket excused) and figuring out what to type into the Javascript console to make the 'next' button clickable before the timer on the page ran out. (This technique would have been subverted had there been any server-side checks whatsoever, but nope...they completely entrusted the client to keep the time. I suppose they don't have much of an incentive to make it any more difficult given that the government probably doesn't have a very rigorous accreditation process for these courses.) That cut whatever was left of the required 6 hours down to about 20 minutes. I guess I'm an unethical monster that should never be allowed to run a company. :\

*I know, it's pretty lame in comparison to, say, figuring out how to jailbreak an iPhone, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't proud.

rhino3693• 10 years ago

Dodging the law is risky but can have upsides. Maybe you get Aereo'd or maybe you can pull an Uber. Both airbnb and Uber exploited holes in current regulation.

Just breaking the law is stupid.

draw_down3• 10 years ago

In Portland, Uber acted directly in defiance of city hall. City hall told them not to operate their service in Portland, and they did. I'm not so sure they're as different as you say. Differences in degree, sure.

chejazi• 10 years ago

Breaking the law is part of the "disruptive" entrepreneurship strategy for these companies. Incumbent companies tend to influence the law, not necessarily break it. For a disruptor to break the law, the company needs a lot of money to fight back.

Airbnb and Uber are managing to fight the regulatory hurdles with ~5x is ~13x the valuation of Zenefits, respectively. While Zenefits is ~5x the valuation of Aereo, it seems they have some catching up (read: fundraising) to do.

tommynicholas2• 10 years ago

I work building compliance software, and the Zenefits situation stood out to me immediately as very different from other stories. Ben Thompson nailed the reasons why - the comparison doesn't hold:

https://stratechery.com/2016/zenefits-and-regulation/

lmm• 10 years ago

The limited-liability corporation is fundamentally flawed when it comes to massive negative externalities. Even if regulators take AirBnB and Uber for every cent they have (and I hope they do, both have shown themselves to be fundamentally inimical to the rule of law), the people and organizations that funded their criminality will get away with nothing worse than losing their investment.

mrshoe• 10 years ago

This story starts out reporting on a board ousting a CEO after a public scandal involving non-compliance with various laws, which incited multiple government investigations.

It then takes an abrupt turn and starts repeating everyone's favorite Silicon Valley trope du jour: the unicorn bubble is bursting, the fundraising environment is tightening up, and the halcyon days of multi-billion dollar valuations for everyone are over.

There's really no connection between the two.

jmspring• 10 years ago

One tangential connection...Startup makes progress flouting the law, they hit a wall they can't overcome (get persecuted for). Uber has run the same risk (more lax laws), but approach was basically the same.

steele• 10 years ago

Possibly due to word count incentive

sandworm1014• 10 years ago

Successful startups all, and I mean ALL, have serious compliance issues. They probably do not not realize their problems. Some actively try to avoid knowing, such as by shunning legal advice that may inform them of inconvenient obligations. Part of the going public and/or being bought out process involves measuring the rate of non-compliance.

A unicorn wants to go public, but that means first getting your compliance ducks in nice rows. The growing realization that unicorns are in fact very non-compliant pushes them towards the easier route of being acquired/merged. So there is a direct link between compliance and the very existence of unicorns.

twright0• 10 years ago

Successful startups all, and I mean ALL, have serious compliance issues.

This feels like a very hyperbolic claim. There are definitely high-profile examples of startups that had compliance issues and are struggling to bring them under control or remain in arguably grey areas (Zenefits is an example of the former, Airbnb the latter). But it's hard to imagine that it's a truly universal problem; many startups are in industries without heavy regulatory rules. Can you elaborate on what makes you believe this to be the case?

cylinder• 10 years ago

This is a startup that literally sells compliance services! The fact that SVers are dismissive of this is actually very troubling.

Zigurd• 10 years ago

Correct. What went wrong at Zenefits and other places was failure to correctly execute the kind of submarine approach to compliance exemplified by PayPal. Lots of startups skate near the edge and sometimes get dinged by regulators. The question is whether you do it to excess and/or make yourself a target. Failure to navigate this can make you an ex-unicorn, but it says nothing about unicorns in general.

wpietri• 10 years ago

The obvious connection to me is that when the numbers are excellent, you have to do something pretty egregious to attract scrutiny. But when the numbers are ok or bad, suddenly people become much more interested in the details.

I note that the Zenefits CEO was ousted after missing targets and during a time when I think we can all at least agree that the industry is less exuberant. Maybe he would have gotten sacked anyhow, but missing the numbers sure didn't help him.

tyre• 10 years ago

I'm skeptical of the source of this article. My guess is Zenefits spoke off the record to do damage control in Sacks' favor. I have no proof but will lay out why below.

In a Feb. 1 meeting at its blandly luxurious Sand Hill Road offices, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz urged the chief executive officer of one of its most prized and promising companies to resign.

1) The first sentence references a meeting that very few people would know the details of. Likely only those at a16z plus a few executives around Parker/Sacks. Unlikely Parker is talking to the press, given the legal issues swirling.

Days after Chief Operating Officer David Sacks gave that information to Lars Dalgaard, an Andreessen partner who sits on Zenefits’ board, Conrad was out, say three people familiar with the matter. At Conrad’s suggestion, they replaced him with Sacks

2) Sacks gave the information to a partner, then Conrad (basically blamed for fraud) suggested they replace him with Sacks. Which raises some questions:

  a) Why trust Conrad? He's fired + off the board + likely under legal investigation.
  b) As COO, no question as to whether Sacks knew anything or that they needed fresh blood? Also, he was suggested by the person who was just removed for fraud.

Lastly, we get a picture that sounds a lot less like Conrad giving a voluntary recommendation:

At the meeting, Conrad tentatively agreed to resign, relinquish his board seat, and make Sacks CEO, say three people close to the company.

dufalop• 10 years ago

I rather agree this article seemed to connect two related but definitely not connected things.

That being said, it is interesting how many visible unicorns are either flaunting the law or outright frauds (i.e. zenefits, uber, airbnb, theranos).

Happily or sadly (per your point of view) - it's seems still worth it. The Zenefits ex-CEO lost his job but he never ever needs to work again (and can afford the best of the best lawyers if needed)

tommynicholas2• 10 years ago

This is such nonsense. Zenefits allegedly broke the law under Conrad's leadership and he was ousted. This is not a sign of any macro changes - companies that break compliance regulations that could send their employees to jail have never been in fashion.

Read Ben Thompson's piece about how this differs from more "gray area" compliance breaches:

https://stratechery.com/2016/zenefits-and-regulation/

skewart3• 10 years ago

A number of commenters here have compared Zenefits' questionable compliance with Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. What Zenefits was doing is fundamentally different, and much more problematic.

Lyft and Uber skirt similar kinds of seemingly useless regulation but they're completely up front about it. They don't pretend that their drivers are licensed or get any benefit from having licensed drivers in any way. They're simply offering a different product than what taxis offer - getting a ride with a random unlicensed stranger.

Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb are betting that reputation systems (ratings, reviews, etc.) will provide assurance for consumers just as well if not better than government regulation. So far the market is showing they just might be right.

Zenefits seems to have been driven by a similar cultural distaste for onerous and probably out-dated regulation - who can blame them? But instead of letting the market decide how valuable that regulation actually is they simply cut corners when they hoped no one would find out.

That deceptiveness, more so than the regulation dodging itself, is ultimately really bad for a B2B business.

themagician2• 10 years ago

Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb can't avoid regulation forever. They've just been lucky so far. Eventually there will be a high profile incident—someone important will get raped or murdered. The political response will be 1000x what their lobbyists can handle.

It is inevitable. The reality is that this is how a lot of regulation starts. It doesn't always come from an anticompetitive place. We just forget that we actually asked for the regulation. Once we have, it's nice to always be able to blame the government or some regulator when something goes wrong. And then someone else can come in and "disrupt" the market by using a loophole of pretending like the regulation doesn't apply to them, when it's clearly intended to.

lifeisstillgood• 10 years ago

Excellent point. I think it is worth noting regulations can be classified into acute and chronic. Acute taxi regulation would have been disallowing criminal records after a series of rapes or robberies.

Chronic problems would be over charging - put it this way, the day before taxis were forced to charge a certain amount each mile, all taxis would have been free to charge different amounts as uber and lyft can.

We do ask for regulation - and always in response to symptoms. Regulation is not pre planned rational thought ...

discodave• 10 years ago

And by important you don't mean the women who have already been raped or assaulted by Uber drivers right?

Pyxl101• 10 years ago

What regulation are Lyft and Uber allegedly skirting?

JohnTHaller• 10 years ago

Airbnb regularly pretends that their rentals are legal in their advertisements to consumers despite knowing that the majority of their revenue in places like NYC is derived from illegal whole-apartment-without-the-owner-present rentals.

pbreit4• 10 years ago

I think the bigger difference is that the rules that Uber, Lyft & AirBnB are bending directly result in customer benefit whereas in the Zenefits case, there is little or no or even negative customer benefit.

Here's a good take: https://stratechery.com/2016/zenefits-and-regulation/

skewart3• 10 years ago

That's an excellent point. And Ben Thompson is super insightful as usual (I'm a huge fan of his).

I certainly do think the value prop to consumers for Zenefits' rule breaking was not very clear. However, I'd argue that lack of clarity stems from the fact that they were breaking rules in small and kind of sneaky ways, and not in a clear way baked into the core of the product.

If they were totally unappologetic about bending laws from the beginning - ie their pitch was more like "Zenefits lets anyone sell insurance and provide other services to small businesses, making these things more accessible and affordable" - then I think people would credit all benefit they get from Zenefits to its rule bending, and put up with a lot more of it.

Instead, Zenefits was kind of trying to have its cake and eat it too, which just pissed people off.

To be fair though, I suspect that creating an explicitly unlicensed insurance brokerage would be much, much harder to pull off than an explicitly unlicensed taxi service.

tjl• 10 years ago

AirBnB might benefit the customer, but can negatively impact others in the area. For example, if someone is renting out an apartment in a secure building, just giving the keys to an arbitrary someone you're decreasing everybody else's security. Similarly for a house, if a house is being regularly rented by different people, it impacts the rest of the neighbourhood.

In my building, renting out with something like AirBnB is against their occupancy agreement. While I don't know everybody in my building, I certainly know everybody on my floor. I used to know everybody in the building, but a number of people have moved out and I haven't learnt all the new people yet. I'd be really pissed if I found out that someone was offering an AirBnB rental right next to me.

techsupporter• 10 years ago

Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb are betting that reputation systems (ratings, reviews, etc.) will provide assurance for consumers just as well if not better than government regulation. So far the market is showing they just might be right.

Like Zenefits, the government regulation that Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb are skirting has one important consequence: It protects the rest of us who are not their customers from them. If a Yellow Cab driver does something dumb, malicious, or against the rules, I can complain to the city regulatory authority and that agency can take action. If it fails to take action, I can pressure my elected leaders to correct that stance. If it takes action in an open way that is transparent to the populace and finds that I am not correct in my complaint, so be it. I need not be a customer of Yellow Cab to complain about the actions of one of its drivers.

Replacing public rules enforcement with "reputation systems" is completely useless if I never enter into a business arrangement with those companies. As it stands, the only way I can complain about any of them--especially with Zenefits actively working to hide its bypass activities from the relevant authorities--is to be a customer and poorly rank some allegedly-independent-contractor. Or I can use Twitter and complain publicly but get drowned out by the noise.

That's no substitute, in my opinion.

jacalata• 10 years ago

Lyft and Uber both spent years pretending that their drivers were insured while carrying passengers despite very clear evidence to the contrary. Even today they pretend to prospective drivers that they won't end up screwed if they have an accident while 'on the app' but without a passenger. Airbnb did the same thing.

notahacker• 10 years ago

The main difference is that Lyft, Uber and Airbnb sell mostly to consumers who are quite happy to make their own decision about which state regulations to bend when it's in their interest.

Zenefits sells to HR departments whose raison d'être is to make sure the company complies with its duty of care to employees, including observing all the relevant regulations. The idea one of their partners might have been using inadequately trained and unlicensed insurance brokers that didn't really know what they were doing to sell their employees expensive health insurance plans is kryptonite for that partnership.

(and I say this as someone who always ran the blindingly obvious "how not to take a bribe or sexually harass your colleagues" compulsory videos in the background whilst getting on with more productive work)

davidu• 10 years ago

I believe (after the investigations are concluded) that a word used to describe the operations for Zenefits will be 'fraudulent.'

For the rest, as you state, they have been largely clear about their opposition to perceived out-of-date regulation and have worked tirelessly across the country and world to have new rules or exemptions or trials put in place.

Being disruptive isn't the same thing as breaking the law with willful abandon.

luckydata• 10 years ago

of course not.

jonesb6• 10 years ago

I don't think they included a safety switch on those things.

manishsharan• 10 years ago

Can someone tell me why is it such a big deal when person sells an insurance without having a proper license? Its not as if the insurance policy itself is fraudulent. The buyer is buying the insurance policy and not the credentials of the broker.

Other wise it seems to me that is requirement is just as unnecessary as requiring cosmetology license for hair braiding ( see http://www.texastribune.org/2015/04/06/bill-would-untangle-m...)

jmount• 10 years ago

I think the broker does make a number of attestations that if not properly done are fraud and render the policy void (as the insurance companies wrote the law).

rosser2• 10 years ago

At a guess (and completely a guess), legal compliance. Insurance laws can vary widely, and subtly state-by-state. A licensed broker will understand the relevant intricacies and be able to sell you a policy that is compliant with them.

If you buy a policy from an unlicensed broker, and it turns out not to be in compliance, the carrier probably isn't obligated to pay out, whether you're paid up on your premiums or not. The carrier doesn't want to be at fault for not having to pay out, so they offload that onto the broker, and "protect" the consumer (really, though, themselves) with a licensure regime.

Insurance companies, being in the business of managing and mitigating risk, have all kinds of meticulous i-dotting and t-crossing procedure and regulation. This is — again, at a guess — just another example of that.

ubernostrum3• 10 years ago

Because even for people who are actual high-level experts on it, correctly representing what a policy does and does not offer, and explaining that in a way that's factually correct, compliant with the local laws governing insurance, and understandable without being misleading to a potential customer, is incredibly difficult, to such a degree that your comparison of it to hair braiding should be prima facie evidence of lack of good faith on your part.

rosser2• 10 years ago

your comparison of it to hair braiding should be prima facie evidence of lack of good faith on your part.

I wouldn't go that far. It's just the naïveté of "Why there gotta be so many laws obstructing my disrupting?!" taken to its logical extreme.

shanacarp• 10 years ago

It is for a similar reason why buying from a broker stocks, bonds, futures, ect have to pass the series 7 and 63/65/66 from FINRA. Insurance is a financial product, letting someone buy the wrong insurance because they misunderstand it and you will make more money from that purchase is a form of fraud.

throwaway479384• 10 years ago

My company used Zenefits for a while, mainly because one of our execs is friends with one of theirs. We had many, many problems with payroll. When you have employees repeatedly coming to you because their paychecks are screwed up, you've got to do something. We ended up switching away, and now use ADP for payroll instead. We've had no problems since. (This was before the big public slap fight between Zenefits and ADP, which was made even more amusing given our experience.)

I would not recommend anyone use Zenefits for any reason, regardless of whether it turns out they complied with legally-mandated training requirements or not. The fact that they were so incredibly sloppy is just inexcusable. You cannot mess around with people's pay like that.

(Posted with a throwaway account for hopefully obvious reasons.)

pinkunicorn• 10 years ago

Honestly this looks like an advertisement to ADP.

grahamburger• 10 years ago

I'll bet your employees hate ADP. I know I do. Would it kill them to make a useable web interface? It's not like we've been doing this for 20 years or anything.

cmdrfred• 10 years ago

I was thinking of doing a write up on ADP's workforce product recently, some things about the website I've noticed. The site uses cookies to determine if you have two windows open of the site. The problem is this doesn't work correctly and I often have to blow out my cookies to log in. On mobile I have to turn on screen rotation to be able to use the menu bar on the top of the screen, then I have to turn it back to be able to see the punch in buttons.

hoodoof• 10 years ago

"Will VCs Rein in Their Unicorns? "

The language indicates that the VC's are the controlling owners of these companies.

tempodox2• 10 years ago

Question: Is there any fixed definition of the term “unicorn”?

tempodox2• 10 years ago

...valuations often became detached from the underlying fundamentals...

The most valuable asset of a startup seems to be hot air.

After Zenefits, Will VCs Rein in Their Unicorns?

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