Zenefits Was the Perfect Startup, Then It Self-Disrupted

Post by tyre » Mon, May 09, 2016, 8:28 PM UTC

untilHellbanned wrote: post #158

tyre wrote: post #97

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…

Zenpayroll'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 hu…

Post by __derek__ » Mon, May 09, 2016, 8:33 PM UTC

GavinB wrote: post #3

So a company that blatantly cheated will pay some fines and still be worth billions. The founders and early employees will all be rich, or richer than they were when they started. The investors will get a very healthy return. The lesson: break the rules and grow so fast that by the time regulators catch up, you can put on a show of reforming and still keep most of the value that you created. Admirable disruption or h…

Post by cookiecaper » Mon, May 09, 2016, 8:50 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #156

cookiecaper wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being non-compliant with the law is unjust in a society where people value rule of law. You can't just ignore laws that you disagree with. If you don't like a law, you should write your representative and try to fix it. That's a farce now of course, but we should fix the process so that it's not any more.

It's a lot harder to change a regulation when nobody has any idea what the landscape looks like without it, or how people could function without the incumbents that benefit from that regulation. Someone building a service people genuinely want, creating something useful that didn't exist before, and not doing any harm to people by doing so, may choose to go ahead and build it to prove that it's possible and sensible…

Post by paganel » Mon, May 09, 2016, 9:02 PM UTC

GavinB wrote: post #3

So a company that blatantly cheated will pay some fines and still be worth billions. The founders and early employees will all be rich, or richer than they were when they started. The investors will get a very healthy return. The lesson: break the rules and grow so fast that by the time regulators catch up, you can put on a show of reforming and still keep most of the value that you created. Admirable disruption or h…

Post by zackya89 » Mon, May 09, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

pkaye wrote: post #20

GavinB wrote: post #3

So a company that blatantly cheated will pay some fines and still be worth billions. The founders and early employees will all be rich, or richer than they were when they started. The investors will get a very healthy return. The lesson: break the rules and grow so fast that by the time regulators catch up, you can put on a show of reforming and still keep most of the value that you created. Admirable disruption or h…

Actually this how many successful people do it. It is better to break the rules and profit from it and if caught, pay a small fine and keep your ill gotten gains. I've learned this long time ago (watching coworkers, family, etc) but will probably never do it myself because I'm just not that kind of person.