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They are anything but the perfect startup. As an early ZenPayroll engineer, I'm biased but also informed. That company was a shitshow from day one. Their reckl
by tyre 11y ago
They are anything but the perfect startup.
As an early ZenPayroll engineer, I'm biased but also informed. That company was a shitshow from day one. Their recklessness caused a few sleepless nights for our team including one time they overwrote every bank account number (by scripting our front end, after asking SMB users for their passwords and storing them in spreadsheets.) This caused tens of millions of dollars in failed transactions. For _payroll_.
Rule 1 of startups: build something people loved. The last line of the article:
“Unless something else goes really wrong with Zenefits,
we’ll stick with them for a while,” says BlogMutt’s Yates.
“It’s too much of a hassle to switch.”
They are the epitome of what's wrong in Silicon Valley, not what is right. Not caring about employees, setting a bar for professionalism as high as a reality TV show, and, to quote Thomas Hobbes, "restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." Not to mention ethics violations and breaking laws that (unlike Uber and taxis) are on the books to protect protect health insurance.
This was not a grey area.
The Valley has yet to prove that it can build sustainable companies. We can get to about 6 years of hyper-growth, but outside of that it is really questionable. Look at Square, Twitter, and Box post-IPO or the myriad large startups that refuse to IPO. You've got Google, Apple, and Facebook, but that's hardly proof of repeatable success.
- econner 11y ago> The Valley has yet to prove that it can build sustainable companies. I was with you until this line. The valley has been producing sustainable companies for decades. Some companies fail. This is the way things go.
- untilHellbanned 11y agoZenpayroll's hands aren't clean either. I have a friend who helped build out one of their offices. There was an absurdly long courtship of literally backbreaking labor (she was going for an administrative role) mixed with dinners with executives only to be told that she wasn't a fit. Her follow up emails to figure out what could have possibly went wrong weren't returned. Oh the irony of a HR startup treating other humans as resources (to be discarded).
- tyre 11y agoI won't argue with you there. The interview process is quite involved and oftentimes far too many cooks in the kitchen. It comes from a good place (a bad hire is much worse than missing out on a good one), but not giving feedback is inexcusable. As for the irony, I could not agree more.
- philovivero 11y agoConsidering my viewpoint on hires being almost the opposite of that (an occasional bad hire is acceptable risk to get a good one) I'd be interested in the rationale. But then, I've never been one to beat around the bush when it comes to parting ways with an employee who's clearly not working out on the team.
- tyre 11y agoThe rationale is that a bad hire is very expensive. Not just salary, but emotional and temporal investment. Let's say you need to hire a salesperson and hire the wrong one. You fire them after two months and now have to context switch into hiring again. For small startups, firings have an effect on the entire company. Absolutely make the right choice and let someone go if you have to, but it still has an amplified cost across the team. I personally take responsibility for the emotional cost on the candidate. Asking someone to invest themselves in your company and then letting them go is a rough experience for the employee. It is the manager's responsibility to not churn and burn through people.
- patrickread 11y agoYea, I agree with this one as well. Hire slowly; fire fast. But, even if it's fast, firing wastes a bunch of time for a bunch of people. Missing out on a good one sucks, but in the best relationships both sides will wait for the right timing if necessary, in my experience.
- melvinmt 11y agoI'm confused, are Zenefits/Zenpayroll the same company?
- tyre 11y agoNo, though I understand the confusion. Actually because of name confusion (not just with Zenefits) ZenPayroll rebranded to Gusto.