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Zenefits, a Rocket That Fell to Earth, Tries to Launch Again
- Nothorized 10y agoHow much companies have succeeded at reinventing themselves after a scandal ?
- rfrank 10y agoHow many people even believe that Zenfits has effectively addressed its compliance/culture problems? I know I don't trust them.
- lrkrthrwwy94107 10y agoAs a former employee, I can say it's totally different than it used to be. Everyone associated with the problems has been shown the door, major house cleaning. The atmosphere is much more serious now, it's a completely different company. That said, many early employees would have corrected these problems if they were widely known. It was not the lax environment some articles made us out to be. Everyone had to pull their weight and we were very serious about getting everything right. It was a huge disappointment to discover that some department leads allowed this stuff to exist, reducing the value of the many late nights myself and others put in.
- rfrank 10y ago> That said, many early employees would have corrected these problems if they were widely known. How can anyone on the outside be sure there aren't comparable problems which still aren't widely known? I just don't see a reason to believe what Zenefits says because their marketing literature says compliance a lot more now.
- lrkrthrwwy94107 10y ago>How can anyone on the outside be sure there aren't comparable problems which still aren't widely known? I'm not sure how any company can provide this proof. However, the rage felt by all the truly dedicated individuals who watched their equity decline in value has drastically changed the culture, everyone is on watch to make sure that doesn't happen again. In addition, new technology and new teams have the explicit purpose of monitoring and maintaining compliance, which I believe are effective. The internal shift to being a "compliance company" is not just marketing speak, it is real.
- rfrank 10y agoYou can't, which is one of several reasons why the original fuckup was so serious. Your track record matters. Why would a new customer go with Zenefits over someone who's always taken compliance seriously? If equity value is what's motivating people's desire to not illegally cut corners, I see little reason to assume they won't revert to previous behavior once the spotlight is off, especially as time passes and personnel changes.
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- derefr 10y ago> someone who's always taken compliance seriously Personally, I don't believe there is such a thing. The only careful doctor is one who has made a bad decision that killed a patient; the only careful military officer is one who has had a strategy of theirs fail and lost soldiers under their command. Everyone else has too much bravado, and no emotional revulsion to shortcuts, and so can't be be trusted with real responsibility.
- dsacco 10y agoYou seem to be claiming that the only people who can be trusted in mission critical scenarios are those who have seriously failed with a non-negligible impact before, as though that is a rite of passage to true understanding. How are you defining failure? I disagree with the idea that meticulous caution can only be learned by personally failing first. I believe it is fully possible to learn and emotionally internalize the necessity of proper protocols, rules and behaviors in a variety of safety and compliance contexts by learning from the failures of predecessors, and without needing to commit those failures personally. If this were not the case, wouldn't e.g. insurance companies weight risk analysis algorithms more favorably towards drivers with an accident history, and penalize drivers with no accident history? (This is a simplistic example, but you hopefully get the idea). Do pilots need to experience catastrophic crashes in order to achieve true risk awareness? Do companies need to experience serious security breaches in order to take security seriously? (Many of the most secure companies in the world, perhaps most of them, have never had a headlining security vulnerability). To continue with your analogy, I see no a priori reason to assume that a doctor is incapable of following e.g. comprehensive checklists to limit surgical error without first experiencing a failure that causes a patient's death. Likewise, I see no a priori reason to assume the same doctor would improve by virtue of having a patient die in surgery. I think that claim requires evidence to be taken seriously, to say nothing of your secondary claim that people who have not failed have "too much bravado" to be trusted with responsibility.
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- morgante 10y agoAt this point, I actually trust them more than your average startup. They have cleaned house and really made a deliberate effort to shift the culture. Firing a lot of people (starting with the CEO founder) is a decent sign of really wanting to change. The newer people definitely seem much more level-headed and less aggressive. Of course this is all subjective, but trust always is. There's also the part that further scandal would almost certainly destroy the company completely. So Sacks is likely making an effort to avoid scandalous behavior even more than the average startup. Compare Zenefits's response to that of Theranos, where Holmes remarkably still has her job after being literally banned from the industry.
- brianwawok 10y agoEnron? Johnson and Johnson? The Democratic part of Illinois? People generally forgive as long as a few token guys go to jail.
- nsp 10y agoEnron no longer exists, nor does their accounting firm (Arthur Andersen)
- brianwawok 10y agoOkay missed one ;)
- ditonal 10y agoFunny how the article tried to pose Gusto as having a moral high ground when Gusto is even more unethical and sketchy.
- jackmott 10y agoCan you expound on this claim please.
- ditonal 10y agoFired a friend right before vesting cliff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12222622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12222622 Relentless PR pushes, rebrands, etc. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- SilasX 10y agoThat first link refers to a veto of an employee selling their stock; I can't find a reference to a firing before vesting cliff. Do you mean a different link?
- huac 10y agohe meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12222047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12222047
- oldmanjay 10y agoAhh...because it's personal
- tyre 10y agoI wrote the first linked piece, was not fired and quit well after vesting.
- mplewis 10y agoWhat makes Gusto "even more unethical and sketchy?"
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- quizme2000 10y agoNBC replayed a John Kerry Cyber Security sound byte and the Zenefits logo was in the background. They were a sponsor of the Virtous Circle Conference. Not sure if Zenefits should have been asked to sponsor this event. "A virtuous circle is often described as a self-reinforcing system that creates positive benefits throughout the economy."
- jimmywanger 10y agoJust curious, what is the benefit of staying with the Zenefit name and brand? It's fairly toxic, as it is associated with debauchery and fraud. Wouldn't you want to raze the brand to the ground and start with something else, even if you're keeping the same tech stack and sales contracts?
- brightball 10y agoNo such thing as bad publicity? Any other name will need to reach people all over again.
- hueving 10y agoSo who wants to restart Enron with me? Hipster energy company trading artisanal clean energy derivatives.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoOk, that is priceless. Sounds like something Brad Bradstone would head up.
- pavlov 10y agoThat would be in the same spirit as the food-replacement startup named Soylent.
- daveguy 10y agoJust don't buy the green version.
- jedberg 10y agoThis may interest you: http://www.npr.org/2015/09/23/442761531/one-mans-mission-to-bring-back-hydrox-cookies http://www.npr.org/2015/09/23/442761531/one-mans-mission-to-... It's about a man who bought the Hydrox brand to try and revive the cookie. People do it with old brands all the time. If you google "buy expired trademark" you'll get a ton of info. Although most of those people are buying old good brand names. :)
- siliconc0w 10y agoI bullish on Zenefits, the 'scandal' seemed highly manufactured. So much ink spilled over 'The Macro'. Any member of HN would have likely done the same thing. The sales staff used very common software to avoid starring at a screen for a legally mandated 52 hours to avoid what is basically just layers of industry protectionism. It didn't pass the tests for them. The other things called out also seem like cheap shots like throwing parties for high preforming sales staff or not having a lot of backend automation which no startup has and which might not even be possible giving the partners they need to work with and the backward state of many of these protected industries.
- jimbo999 10y agoWhat do you mean by "just layers of industry protectionism"? Are you referring to labor law?
- siliconc0w 10y agoI'm referring to compliance/licensing requirements that have little to do with protecting consumers and everything to do with creating barriers of entry. Things like 'mandatory hours of instruction' which in no way translate to useful applicable knowledge. See also real estate broker or bar exams.
- colechristensen 10y agoWait, why do you think the state bar associations, their admission processes, and the requirements that attorneys pass them are bad?
- stickfigure 10y agoWhy do you think they are good? Serious question - would you comfortably hire an attorney based solely on a pass/fail credential?
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- ksylvest 10y agoZenefits still doesn't have an API right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6111669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6111669
- Herodotus38 10y agoAm I the only one who thought that this article was going to be about the Ukranian (formerly Soviet) rocket named Zenit? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenit_(rocket_family) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenit_(rocket_family)
- j2kun 10y ago> Trying to turn around a failing technology company is almost always a futile task — just ask Marissa Mayer at Yahoo or whoever it is who now runs BlackBerry. It's amazing how one can respect the difficulty of a job while simultaneously insulting "whoever it is" that does that job. It takes three seconds to google "BlackBerry" and see in the automatically generated card: CEO: John S. Chen (Nov 4, 2013–). Is this supposed to be some sort of journalistic negligence-cum-style?
- mathattack 10y agoPayroll, benefits and insurance are a tricky business. For customers, there is only downside for mistakes. If a company goes with a player with a good reputation then they have a good defense if something goes bad. ("I used the best") If they bring in Zenefits post-scandal and there's a problem, how do they explain it?