5 ms·

ADP Begins to Roll Out a Zenefits Competitor

174 points by DavidChouinard 11y ago

shaaaaawn 11y ago
It's interesting, because if Zenefits had already IPO'd they absolutely would not be able to take this approach. Too much shareholder risk. And this is just as much a David Sacks thing as it is a Parker thing. I have to believe after my 10+ years in Financial Services that David Sacks already disliked ADP from his PayPal days. Zenefits is going to lose this battle, but it's about the war.
hoopism 11y ago
I had never heard of Zenefits but I've read the articles that have come across HN thus far. From the standpoint of a non-customer they come across as more consumed with proving a point than just proving they are better. I think they ought to adjust their strategy.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - hoopism 11y ago
    With all the attention why not try and turn the message into a positive one (highlight what you do and why it's better). A positive message would give people who don't know you a reason to check you out and your existing customers confidence that you are competent to overcome the current situation. Right now it feels like they are just trying to justify why they failed... even if the succeed in blaming ADP they still fail.
    - morganvachon 11y ago
      I think the whole thing stinks from both sides. Zenefits' blog post does seem to walk the narrow line between informing their customers and defaming ADP. Meanwhile, ADP files a defamation lawsuit then turns right around and releases their competing platform, which could damage their case (to my non-lawyer mind, so I could be completely off base there). I can see merit in both parties' cases against the the other, but I can see a ton of shenanigans on both their parts as well.
infinitone 11y ago
And the rabbit hole gets deeper... I'm guessing this Opum product is smoke and mirrors to capitalize on this whole fiasco.
- crazypyro 11y ago
  I think you should give ADP more credit. Even if they don't have the best product, I would assume they would've foreseen competitors in the front-end benefits field and have adjusted their business plans long before this back and forth. Companies that have been in an industry for a long time can often see industry changes coming, even if they don't have the agility to react quickly.
cddotdotslash 11y ago
I admittedly don't know a lot about this situation beyond what I've read in the news the past day or so. However, isn't it the case that Zenefits is simply building an interface on top of ADP's payroll data? And, from what I've read, it seems like they did this without following the proper procedures (did they write some kind of web scraper?). So if that is the case, ADP has every right to block them. If the situation was reversed and a large company was scraping a startup's data to integrate into their own platform, the outrage would be directed quite differently. So Zenefits is plugging into ADP's data, not paying them for access, not following the proper procedures to get access, and selling an interface on top of that data for a 10% fee, and then they complain that ADP blocked them? EDIT: Also, all of their press releases sound very immature.
- ohitsdom 11y ago
  Zenefits has their users create an admin ADP user. Then zenefits uses those credentials to pull whatever data they want. They chose this route instead of working with ADP's third party system (without giving any justification as to why). I might sympathize if ADP's API access was severely limited or extremely expensive, but it appears as if Zenefits made no efforts to go this route.
  - cddotdotslash 11y ago
    Exactly. If I found a third-party company that was having users create accounts on my systems for the purposes of pulling data out, I would block it too, probably more quickly than ADP did. Imagine if a company asked for your Google password instead of using the proper API channels. I don't know many users who would do that.
    - pyre 11y ago
      > Imagine if a company asked for your Google password instead of using the proper API channels This would be more like creating a new Google Apps email account for someone, and allowing them to use it to (e.g.) manage things on your Google Drive (by sharing a group folder with them). How many companies hire a 3rd party accounting / HR firm (or person) to manage their bookkeeping? How many of them create an ADP admin account for these people so that they can manage payroll? How is this that much different than Zenefits?
acconrad 11y ago
This is pretty bad on ADPs part. But after reading the other HN discussion on this topic[1], it seems like this is a company destined for as fast of a fall as it rose. I hate to see big companies muscle out little ones, but I guess if you're going to rustle the feathers of so many, you're bound to make some powerful enemies. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692635
olafskyansian 11y ago
I highly doubt this is a "new" product. They have offered payroll/HR/benefits for eons. What would be game changing is if it is free...
ohitsdom 11y ago
This is getting ugly. Going against a ruthless goliath should help garner public support, but the way they are doing it is very unattractive to me. And as someone currently evaluating payroll solutions for small businesses, I'll be steering clear of them.
- wdewind 11y ago
  Full disclosure I work here so I am biased, but check out Justworks http://www.justworks.com http://www.justworks.com. We offer payroll, benefits (health, commuter, 401k and more), compliance (tax filing, workers comp, epli) etc., all from one company so you don't need to worry about integrations or whom to contact if you have problems.
gamblor956 11y ago
Blatant FUD from Zenefits. ADP's new product is an online payroll/HR SaaS that integrates across its entire product line. Zenefit's product is a glorified remote bookkeeping service in which you enter data into the Zenefits website and they re-enter it manually, and usually incorrectly, into the ADP website and scrape the results, usually incorrectly, so they can post a response several days later to your Zenefits account page. One is a SaaS (ADP) and the other is a remote data-entry service (Zenefits). Completely different. It's hard to argue that Zenefits should even be considered a tech company, since most of their "integration" functionality is driven by manual human labor and not technology. At best, Zenefits is a data-entry service with a nice, shiny UI. EDIT: Also...the new product is actually just an offshoot of an existing product that my firm has been using for nearly a year. The new product, Opum, is simply the small-to-medium business version of one of ADP's existing enterprise cloud payroll/benefits products. It even uses the same (new) interface as the enterprise product.
- nerdy 11y ago
  I don't understand the product or companies well, however what you explain is exactly how I felt after reading their post. This kind of thing doesn't even need to be public, let alone posted on the company blog. Calling ADP out about their "corporate value" at the end was unadulterated mud slinging. It's understandable that they're upset but they should work to keep these problems from spreading outside of their legal team and not get flustered with their competition. From the sound of it they've completely taken their eye off the ball for this distraction and it could easily pave the way for ADP to steamroll them competitively while they sop up their tears.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    >they should work to keep these problems from spreading outside of their legal team When they've already been cut off, it's a bit too late for that. I don't mind if part of the company spends a couple days focusing on this. They need to figure out a plan for the customers that got cut off, too. It doesn't sound to me like they've "completely taken their eye off the ball". What are you basing that on?
- 11y ago
ghshephard 11y ago
How is what ADP doing (blocking access to their service from Zenefits so they can sell Opum), any different from what twitter does when it blocks services like meerkat from accessing their service when they want to build a business around periscope? I'm not saying that either organization (ADP or Twitter) is acting benevolently (obviously, they are both acting in a competitive manner) - I'm just trying to see if the two are acting in a similar manner.
- heynk 11y ago
  In terms of Twitter blocking Meerkat - it's the same exact situation. What is different, though, is that Twitter didn't then sue Meerkat for defamation, when Meerkat complained after getting blocked.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  As far as I understand Zenefits is doing both screen scraping and manual entry into the ADP systems and they may have never even talked to ADP. So instead of hitting an API directly where ADP may expect a large amount of requests Zenefits is hitting their normal website requesting hundreds or thousands of users every hour. I would have blocked them too. It looks far too much like malice from the ADP side of things where it could be bot nets or something else versus a legit company.
kpennell 11y ago
post test
noir-york 11y ago
I believe that this is called a 'free market'. Also, called 'underestimating your competition'. This common misconception that big companies are hide-bound dinosaurs is dangerous for any start up to hold. Most large companies are indeed oblivious, but some elephants - if you tweak them hard enough - turn around and stomp you. Always respect your competition. Some of them may be smarter than you think.
- ams6110 11y ago
  Yep the common idiom is "waking the sleeping giant" as often attributed to Yamamoto after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- beat 11y ago
  Something I've noted about the Silicon Valley startup mentality, and I'm seeing in this discussion, is a lack of understanding of just how difficult enterprise projects actually are. The attitude is often that big companies work so hard for so long and spend so much on projects and still have crap, that they must be lazy and stupid. This is not at all the case. The enterprise is full of smart, hardworking, determined people - as good as Silicon Valley - and they still wind up with crap and failure most of the time. That's not a reflection on the enterprise, that's a reflection on the difficulty of the problems the enterprise tackles. Like I told someone at a Silicon Valley enterprise/health meetup last year... if you saw a startup with $50M annual revenue, you'd think they're huge, right? I've worked on three different projects larger than that, and they're all small potatoes in their enterprises.
catshirt 11y ago
i hope ADP finishes this project soon i stop getting solicitations about it from a new recruiter every week
fourstar 11y ago
Who gives a fuck? In my opinion they are both competing for the same thing. Why even give either of the companies more publicity than they deserve?
paulhauggis 11y ago
"We call on ADP to stop making life more difficult for small business customers and live up to its corporate value: “integrity is everything.”" See: Twitter, Facebook, and even Google. All of these companies have destroyed 3rd party companies by basically using them as a test base for new ideas and features and then directly competing (and many times, cutting off the 3rd party completely). If you are going to base your entire company off of a 3rd party, you better have a plan B if they completely cut you off.
- theaccordance 11y ago
  This isn't that situation - Zenefits didn't build their entire platform on top of ADP; they simply offered an integration for a portion of their customer base that uses ADP.
  - paulhauggis 11y ago
    It is the situation. They based a portion of their business on someone else's platform and it was pulled out from under them. If it wasn't such a big deal, it wouldn't be all over the Internet.
    - theaccordance 11y ago
      10% is not "their entire platform" http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/09/payroll-giant-adp-cuts-off-small-business-clients-access-to-zenefits/#.wg0aq7:Vih9 http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/09/payroll-giant-adp-cuts-off-...
wnevets 11y ago
zenefits post about ADP is making me dislike them and I've never used their product.
bhouston 11y ago
It is likely possible to identify the email address + name that are blacked out email because of its pixel dimension if that is a major concern: http://snag.gy/DQEAX.jpg http://snag.gy/DQEAX.jpg Just figure out the application and OS/browser rendering the email and compare each possible email/name combination with this. It is like a one-way hash with a fairly small set of possibilities. May be a few hits though, rather than just one.
jtwebman 11y ago
I guess it really depends on what ADP's terms of service say. It is their site and service. Clients can choose to stop using them. The Zenefits teams seems very immature, maybe they should pivot and start offering more full services.
phantom_oracle 11y ago
Reading this story, the lawsuit story and in trying to keep up with this entire fiasco... You end up feeling both sorry and a sour taste in your mouth for both companies. They're both obviously very good at "spin" and drumming up PR to win support of their audience. I previously thought things would get settled amicably, out of court, with Zenefits saying "sorry", ADP saying "its okay" and the 2 companies settling on some decent structure to use ADPs API (or whatever thing they use for 3rd party access). Now we are dealing with a situation where this is basically corporate-warfare hitting the "lala-land" of Silicon Valley. Google, Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies generally have this corporate warfare amongst themselves and they also sometimes move in on other industries, catching those players off-guard. With that in mind, and also the fact that Zenefits can no longer be classified as a startup - with +50 (or is it +100 employees) and a startup valuation of US$+4,5 billion - this is just another case of corporate warfare. I shall now neither pity or care for either party of this story, because no matter how good the "spin" from each side is, this is just business as usual. Any wall-street raider using HN may agree. Edit: I'd also like to see how much longer this "post" stays as link number 1 on this platform, instead of getting "washed away" like yesterdays ADP link. Then we can also know for a fact that YC is actively pushing the agenda with their corporate interest in Zenefits (and proof that not all "good links eventually surface to the top", without someone pulling some admin-user strings at the top)
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > With that in mind, and also the fact that Zenefits can no longer be classified as a startup - with +50 (or is it +100 employees) Ha, because of all of the manual entry they have to do as of February 2015 Zenefits had over 500 employees. When the CEO went on TWiST just a week or two ago he said they were over 1,000 and hiring 100 new employees a month. They're burning hard and fast.
  - pkaye 11y ago
    Why do they have to do manual entry?
    - 11y ago
xacaxulu 11y ago
I'm gonna bet that ADP wins this one.
univalent 11y ago
Zenefits needs much much better Mar-Comm. This is getting embarrassing.
CPLX 11y ago
Frankly, the simple fact that there is a headline on the Zenefits site that says "ADP Begins to Roll Out a Zenefits Competitor" shows that they have seriously lost their focus.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Yeah if anything they should have "leaked" this story of a news outlet. Putting it on the site is just insanity.
makeitsuckless 11y ago
I'm filing Zenefits in under the heading "companies that confuse 'disruptive' with 'douchebag'".
ams6110 11y ago
IANAL but I belive the stock advice when you are facing a lawsuit is to shut up about it. "We don't comment on matters under litigation" is the standard line, and for good reason.
tomasien 11y ago
I can understand that many people probably don't feel Zenefits is totally in the right in this dispute as a whole, but I struggle to see how you can dispute that ADP is being ridiculously two faced. I'm not sure how thinking ADP is better than Zenefits or that web scraping is bad or whatever people saying about Zenefits is relevant to the fact that ADP filed a lawsuit in federal court saying they're NOT making a Zenefits competitor and then sent out emails to customers saying explicitly that they ARE making a Zenefits competitor. Whatever else you think about this situation, that is obviously pretty screwed up.
beat 11y ago
This strongly suggests that the shutoff AND the defamation lawsuit were part of a planned strategy - that they're deliberately goading Zenefits' notoriously outspoken CEO. Which does not bode well for their lawsuit, but I don't think they're out to win that anyway.
jilberish1990 11y ago
Couple of points: 1)Zenefits has always known this could happen or at least they should have. You have to play nice with ADP. Because if they don't work with you, you are dead. 2)Zenefits has a super young CEO who doesn't know what he is doing. Where is David Sacks in all of this? Isn't he the adult supervision here? Maybe he hasn't run anything at this scale before? Maybe he and his Yammer gang don't know how benefits and healthcare work? 3)What were the VCs who invested at $4.5B thinking? Any technical due diligence would have brought this up. You had to clear this as a diligence item before you put a dollar into the company. 4)The lawsuit is a shakedown. Its time for ADP to collect its dues. Its nothing more than that. I expect ADP to extract a huge premium and then play nice with Zenefits in an out of court settlement. Everyone will have a face saving PR release after that. But isn't it interesting that this happens after they pick-up their $500M round? I have heard rumors this was going to happen in September last year. ADP waited until now. What a pest. 4)Time for Parker to go and be replaced with someone who has run billion dollar software companies before. And that's not Sacks.

174 points by DavidChouinard 11y ago

It's interesting, because if Zenefits had already IPO'd they absolutely would not be able to take this approach. Too much shareholder risk. And this is just as much a David Sacks thing as it is a Parker thing. I have to believe after my 10+ years in Financial Services that David Sacks already disliked ADP from his PayPal days. Zenefits is going to lose this battle, but it's about the war.

hoopism 11y ago

I had never heard of Zenefits but I've read the articles that have come across HN thus far. From the standpoint of a non-customer they come across as more consumed with proving a point than just proving they are better. I think they ought to adjust their strategy.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- hoopism 11y ago
  With all the attention why not try and turn the message into a positive one (highlight what you do and why it's better). A positive message would give people who don't know you a reason to check you out and your existing customers confidence that you are competent to overcome the current situation. Right now it feels like they are just trying to justify why they failed... even if the succeed in blaming ADP they still fail.
  - morganvachon 11y ago
    I think the whole thing stinks from both sides. Zenefits' blog post does seem to walk the narrow line between informing their customers and defaming ADP. Meanwhile, ADP files a defamation lawsuit then turns right around and releases their competing platform, which could damage their case (to my non-lawyer mind, so I could be completely off base there). I can see merit in both parties' cases against the the other, but I can see a ton of shenanigans on both their parts as well.

infinitone 11y ago

And the rabbit hole gets deeper... I'm guessing this Opum product is smoke and mirrors to capitalize on this whole fiasco.

crazypyro 11y ago
I think you should give ADP more credit. Even if they don't have the best product, I would assume they would've foreseen competitors in the front-end benefits field and have adjusted their business plans long before this back and forth. Companies that have been in an industry for a long time can often see industry changes coming, even if they don't have the agility to react quickly.

cddotdotslash 11y ago

I admittedly don't know a lot about this situation beyond what I've read in the news the past day or so. However, isn't it the case that Zenefits is simply building an interface on top of ADP's payroll data? And, from what I've read, it seems like they did this without following the proper procedures (did they write some kind of web scraper?). So if that is the case, ADP has every right to block them. If the situation was reversed and a large company was scraping a startup's data to integrate into their own platform, the outrage would be directed quite differently. So Zenefits is plugging into ADP's data, not paying them for access, not following the proper procedures to get access, and selling an interface on top of that data for a 10% fee, and then they complain that ADP blocked them? EDIT: Also, all of their press releases sound very immature.

ohitsdom 11y ago
Zenefits has their users create an admin ADP user. Then zenefits uses those credentials to pull whatever data they want. They chose this route instead of working with ADP's third party system (without giving any justification as to why). I might sympathize if ADP's API access was severely limited or extremely expensive, but it appears as if Zenefits made no efforts to go this route.
- cddotdotslash 11y ago
  Exactly. If I found a third-party company that was having users create accounts on my systems for the purposes of pulling data out, I would block it too, probably more quickly than ADP did. Imagine if a company asked for your Google password instead of using the proper API channels. I don't know many users who would do that.
  - pyre 11y ago
    > Imagine if a company asked for your Google password instead of using the proper API channels This would be more like creating a new Google Apps email account for someone, and allowing them to use it to (e.g.) manage things on your Google Drive (by sharing a group folder with them). How many companies hire a 3rd party accounting / HR firm (or person) to manage their bookkeeping? How many of them create an ADP admin account for these people so that they can manage payroll? How is this that much different than Zenefits?

acconrad 11y ago

This is pretty bad on ADPs part. But after reading the other HN discussion on this topic[1], it seems like this is a company destined for as fast of a fall as it rose. I hate to see big companies muscle out little ones, but I guess if you're going to rustle the feathers of so many, you're bound to make some powerful enemies. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692635

olafskyansian 11y ago

I highly doubt this is a "new" product. They have offered payroll/HR/benefits for eons. What would be game changing is if it is free...

ohitsdom 11y ago

This is getting ugly. Going against a ruthless goliath should help garner public support, but the way they are doing it is very unattractive to me. And as someone currently evaluating payroll solutions for small businesses, I'll be steering clear of them.

wdewind 11y ago
Full disclosure I work here so I am biased, but check out Justworks http://www.justworks.com http://www.justworks.com. We offer payroll, benefits (health, commuter, 401k and more), compliance (tax filing, workers comp, epli) etc., all from one company so you don't need to worry about integrations or whom to contact if you have problems.

gamblor956 11y ago

Blatant FUD from Zenefits. ADP's new product is an online payroll/HR SaaS that integrates across its entire product line. Zenefit's product is a glorified remote bookkeeping service in which you enter data into the Zenefits website and they re-enter it manually, and usually incorrectly, into the ADP website and scrape the results, usually incorrectly, so they can post a response several days later to your Zenefits account page. One is a SaaS (ADP) and the other is a remote data-entry service (Zenefits). Completely different. It's hard to argue that Zenefits should even be considered a tech company, since most of their "integration" functionality is driven by manual human labor and not technology. At best, Zenefits is a data-entry service with a nice, shiny UI. EDIT: Also...the new product is actually just an offshoot of an existing product that my firm has been using for nearly a year. The new product, Opum, is simply the small-to-medium business version of one of ADP's existing enterprise cloud payroll/benefits products. It even uses the same (new) interface as the enterprise product.

nerdy 11y ago
I don't understand the product or companies well, however what you explain is exactly how I felt after reading their post. This kind of thing doesn't even need to be public, let alone posted on the company blog. Calling ADP out about their "corporate value" at the end was unadulterated mud slinging. It's understandable that they're upset but they should work to keep these problems from spreading outside of their legal team and not get flustered with their competition. From the sound of it they've completely taken their eye off the ball for this distraction and it could easily pave the way for ADP to steamroll them competitively while they sop up their tears.
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  >they should work to keep these problems from spreading outside of their legal team When they've already been cut off, it's a bit too late for that. I don't mind if part of the company spends a couple days focusing on this. They need to figure out a plan for the customers that got cut off, too. It doesn't sound to me like they've "completely taken their eye off the ball". What are you basing that on?
11y ago

ghshephard 11y ago

How is what ADP doing (blocking access to their service from Zenefits so they can sell Opum), any different from what twitter does when it blocks services like meerkat from accessing their service when they want to build a business around periscope? I'm not saying that either organization (ADP or Twitter) is acting benevolently (obviously, they are both acting in a competitive manner) - I'm just trying to see if the two are acting in a similar manner.

heynk 11y ago
In terms of Twitter blocking Meerkat - it's the same exact situation. What is different, though, is that Twitter didn't then sue Meerkat for defamation, when Meerkat complained after getting blocked.
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
As far as I understand Zenefits is doing both screen scraping and manual entry into the ADP systems and they may have never even talked to ADP. So instead of hitting an API directly where ADP may expect a large amount of requests Zenefits is hitting their normal website requesting hundreds or thousands of users every hour. I would have blocked them too. It looks far too much like malice from the ADP side of things where it could be bot nets or something else versus a legit company.

kpennell 11y ago

post test

noir-york 11y ago

I believe that this is called a 'free market'. Also, called 'underestimating your competition'. This common misconception that big companies are hide-bound dinosaurs is dangerous for any start up to hold. Most large companies are indeed oblivious, but some elephants - if you tweak them hard enough - turn around and stomp you. Always respect your competition. Some of them may be smarter than you think.

ams6110 11y ago
Yep the common idiom is "waking the sleeping giant" as often attributed to Yamamoto after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
beat 11y ago
Something I've noted about the Silicon Valley startup mentality, and I'm seeing in this discussion, is a lack of understanding of just how difficult enterprise projects actually are. The attitude is often that big companies work so hard for so long and spend so much on projects and still have crap, that they must be lazy and stupid. This is not at all the case. The enterprise is full of smart, hardworking, determined people - as good as Silicon Valley - and they still wind up with crap and failure most of the time. That's not a reflection on the enterprise, that's a reflection on the difficulty of the problems the enterprise tackles. Like I told someone at a Silicon Valley enterprise/health meetup last year... if you saw a startup with $50M annual revenue, you'd think they're huge, right? I've worked on three different projects larger than that, and they're all small potatoes in their enterprises.

catshirt 11y ago

i hope ADP finishes this project soon i stop getting solicitations about it from a new recruiter every week

fourstar 11y ago

Who gives a fuck? In my opinion they are both competing for the same thing. Why even give either of the companies more publicity than they deserve?

paulhauggis 11y ago

"We call on ADP to stop making life more difficult for small business customers and live up to its corporate value: “integrity is everything.”" See: Twitter, Facebook, and even Google. All of these companies have destroyed 3rd party companies by basically using them as a test base for new ideas and features and then directly competing (and many times, cutting off the 3rd party completely). If you are going to base your entire company off of a 3rd party, you better have a plan B if they completely cut you off.

theaccordance 11y ago
This isn't that situation - Zenefits didn't build their entire platform on top of ADP; they simply offered an integration for a portion of their customer base that uses ADP.
- paulhauggis 11y ago
  It is the situation. They based a portion of their business on someone else's platform and it was pulled out from under them. If it wasn't such a big deal, it wouldn't be all over the Internet.
  - theaccordance 11y ago
    10% is not "their entire platform" http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/09/payroll-giant-adp-cuts-off-small-business-clients-access-to-zenefits/#.wg0aq7:Vih9 http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/09/payroll-giant-adp-cuts-off-...

wnevets 11y ago

zenefits post about ADP is making me dislike them and I've never used their product.

bhouston 11y ago

It is likely possible to identify the email address + name that are blacked out email because of its pixel dimension if that is a major concern: http://snag.gy/DQEAX.jpg http://snag.gy/DQEAX.jpg Just figure out the application and OS/browser rendering the email and compare each possible email/name combination with this. It is like a one-way hash with a fairly small set of possibilities. May be a few hits though, rather than just one.

jtwebman 11y ago

I guess it really depends on what ADP's terms of service say. It is their site and service. Clients can choose to stop using them. The Zenefits teams seems very immature, maybe they should pivot and start offering more full services.

phantom_oracle 11y ago

Reading this story, the lawsuit story and in trying to keep up with this entire fiasco... You end up feeling both sorry and a sour taste in your mouth for both companies. They're both obviously very good at "spin" and drumming up PR to win support of their audience. I previously thought things would get settled amicably, out of court, with Zenefits saying "sorry", ADP saying "its okay" and the 2 companies settling on some decent structure to use ADPs API (or whatever thing they use for 3rd party access). Now we are dealing with a situation where this is basically corporate-warfare hitting the "lala-land" of Silicon Valley. Google, Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies generally have this corporate warfare amongst themselves and they also sometimes move in on other industries, catching those players off-guard. With that in mind, and also the fact that Zenefits can no longer be classified as a startup - with +50 (or is it +100 employees) and a startup valuation of US$+4,5 billion - this is just another case of corporate warfare. I shall now neither pity or care for either party of this story, because no matter how good the "spin" from each side is, this is just business as usual. Any wall-street raider using HN may agree. Edit: I'd also like to see how much longer this "post" stays as link number 1 on this platform, instead of getting "washed away" like yesterdays ADP link. Then we can also know for a fact that YC is actively pushing the agenda with their corporate interest in Zenefits (and proof that not all "good links eventually surface to the top", without someone pulling some admin-user strings at the top)

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
> With that in mind, and also the fact that Zenefits can no longer be classified as a startup - with +50 (or is it +100 employees) Ha, because of all of the manual entry they have to do as of February 2015 Zenefits had over 500 employees. When the CEO went on TWiST just a week or two ago he said they were over 1,000 and hiring 100 new employees a month. They're burning hard and fast.
- pkaye 11y ago
  Why do they have to do manual entry?
  - 11y ago

xacaxulu 11y ago

I'm gonna bet that ADP wins this one.

univalent 11y ago

Zenefits needs much much better Mar-Comm. This is getting embarrassing.

CPLX 11y ago

Frankly, the simple fact that there is a headline on the Zenefits site that says "ADP Begins to Roll Out a Zenefits Competitor" shows that they have seriously lost their focus.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
Yeah if anything they should have "leaked" this story of a news outlet. Putting it on the site is just insanity.

makeitsuckless 11y ago

I'm filing Zenefits in under the heading "companies that confuse 'disruptive' with 'douchebag'".

ams6110 11y ago

IANAL but I belive the stock advice when you are facing a lawsuit is to shut up about it. "We don't comment on matters under litigation" is the standard line, and for good reason.

tomasien 11y ago

I can understand that many people probably don't feel Zenefits is totally in the right in this dispute as a whole, but I struggle to see how you can dispute that ADP is being ridiculously two faced. I'm not sure how thinking ADP is better than Zenefits or that web scraping is bad or whatever people saying about Zenefits is relevant to the fact that ADP filed a lawsuit in federal court saying they're NOT making a Zenefits competitor and then sent out emails to customers saying explicitly that they ARE making a Zenefits competitor. Whatever else you think about this situation, that is obviously pretty screwed up.

beat 11y ago

This strongly suggests that the shutoff AND the defamation lawsuit were part of a planned strategy - that they're deliberately goading Zenefits' notoriously outspoken CEO. Which does not bode well for their lawsuit, but I don't think they're out to win that anyway.

jilberish1990 11y ago

Couple of points: 1)Zenefits has always known this could happen or at least they should have. You have to play nice with ADP. Because if they don't work with you, you are dead. 2)Zenefits has a super young CEO who doesn't know what he is doing. Where is David Sacks in all of this? Isn't he the adult supervision here? Maybe he hasn't run anything at this scale before? Maybe he and his Yammer gang don't know how benefits and healthcare work? 3)What were the VCs who invested at $4.5B thinking? Any technical due diligence would have brought this up. You had to clear this as a diligence item before you put a dollar into the company. 4)The lawsuit is a shakedown. Its time for ADP to collect its dues. Its nothing more than that. I expect ADP to extract a huge premium and then play nice with Zenefits in an out of court settlement. Everyone will have a face saving PR release after that. But isn't it interesting that this happens after they pick-up their $500M round? I have heard rumors this was going to happen in September last year. ADP waited until now. What a pest. 4)Time for Parker to go and be replaced with someone who has run billion dollar software companies before. And that's not Sacks.