Live data from Hacker News

David Sacks Stepping Down as Zenefits CEO

wsj.com

11–20 of 38 posts

Re: David Sacks Stepping Down as Zenefits CEO

#11

tl;dr since some of us won't have wsj access: “David Sacks is still the CEO of Zenefits and remains very committed to the company,” she said in a statement. “This is not a role that David sought, but he accepted it without any compensation at the request of the board to get the company past a crisis. Now that the crisis is over, David is leading a process to determine what senior talent the company needs to get to th…

The "web" link allows you to access WSJ w/o any subscription.

Re: David Sacks Stepping Down as Zenefits CEO

#12
post #6

Feels like an old school Friday night news drop. Man, Zenefits has had it rough in the press recently. I think Sacks has done an extraordinarily good job as CEO. Hard to put oneself in the CEOs shoes here, but this guy had to make multiple huge decisions and changes to Zenefits over the past year. Sacks' consistency of right calls and handling things deftly under a ton of pressure, I can't remember the last time a CE…

> And while putting better more interesting potential opportunities on hold. Yeah, news here is Sacks thinks this is no longer the number one opportunity in the valley. Probably when they turned their back on the enterprise market. And now internal numbers might not show rocket ship growth in SMB market. Can't "push" into 20 employee companies, and the "pull" must not be there.

Meanwhile, Gusto's software is really excellent. I started using it a few months ago and it's one of the best business apps I've ever seen in terms of thoughtfulness-of-UI.

Re: David Sacks Stepping Down as Zenefits CEO

#13
post #8

Surprising. From This week in startup's interview that came out 3 days back, it appeared David Sacks had no such plans: https://soundcloud.com/twistartups/twist-e692

Did you see Jason try to get him into discussing politics and he wasn't having any of it? I thought he was just being diplomatic but they're friends and I am willing to bet Jason was just trying to bust his chops fully knowing what was going to happen.

What I didn't know until digging tonight was after Peter Thiel founded the Stanford Review that David Sacks was one of the editors who succeeded him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stanford_Review

Re: David Sacks Stepping Down as Zenefits CEO

#14
post #6

Feels like an old school Friday night news drop. Man, Zenefits has had it rough in the press recently. I think Sacks has done an extraordinarily good job as CEO. Hard to put oneself in the CEOs shoes here, but this guy had to make multiple huge decisions and changes to Zenefits over the past year. Sacks' consistency of right calls and handling things deftly under a ton of pressure, I can't remember the last time a CE…

This was partially his mess as well since he was COO before becoming CEO, no? And he has a very significant investment in Zenefits which he made when becoming COO, so while he does not draw a cash salary, it's hard to say he is under-compensated given the investment opportunity and his ownership stake. I do think he had a very difficult job as turnarounds are tough, and he made a good effort.

Re: David Sacks Stepping Down as Zenefits CEO

#16

tl;dr since some of us won't have wsj access: “David Sacks is still the CEO of Zenefits and remains very committed to the company,” she said in a statement. “This is not a role that David sought, but he accepted it without any compensation at the request of the board to get the company past a crisis. Now that the crisis is over, David is leading a process to determine what senior talent the company needs to get to th…

The "web" link allows you to access WSJ w/o any subscription.

On a meta HN note, whenever a WSJ article gets submitted, invariably someone mentions the existence of the web link and the method in which to bypass the paywall. It's almost as if we are better served by having a bot that creates a comment informing users of the existence and purpose of this link in situations where the domain is known to have paywalls.

Re: David Sacks Stepping Down as Zenefits CEO

#17

tl;dr since some of us won't have wsj access: “David Sacks is still the CEO of Zenefits and remains very committed to the company,” she said in a statement. “This is not a role that David sought, but he accepted it without any compensation at the request of the board to get the company past a crisis. Now that the crisis is over, David is leading a process to determine what senior talent the company needs to get to th…

The "web" link allows you to access WSJ w/o any subscription.

The web link does not work for every HN user. WSJ always displays the paywall for certain geo-locations, even when Google is the referrer. This applies to Germany and multiple other countries.

Re: David Sacks Stepping Down as Zenefits CEO

#18
post #14
post #6

Feels like an old school Friday night news drop. Man, Zenefits has had it rough in the press recently. I think Sacks has done an extraordinarily good job as CEO. Hard to put oneself in the CEOs shoes here, but this guy had to make multiple huge decisions and changes to Zenefits over the past year. Sacks' consistency of right calls and handling things deftly under a ton of pressure, I can't remember the last time a CE…

This was partially his mess as well since he was COO before becoming CEO, no? And he has a very significant investment in Zenefits which he made when becoming COO, so while he does not draw a cash salary, it's hard to say he is under-compensated given the investment opportunity and his ownership stake. I do think he had a very difficult job as turnarounds are tough, and he made a good effort.

>This was partially his mess as well since he was COO before becoming CEO, no?

There's a difference in the scale of the offense (but in either case people weren't physically harmed), but contrast this with the thread about the Wells Fargo CEO stepping down, where people here thought the CEO should go to prison for the culture he set at the company.

The SV guys get sympathy and an "'atta boy!"

Re: David Sacks Stepping Down as Zenefits CEO

#19

I don't know why anyone would want to be the CEO of such a troubled company without either a huge golden parachute or a huge payoff in the event of an acquisition.

>I don't know why anyone would want to be the CEO of such a troubled company

He was already COO. Does he bear no responsibility for the "trouble"? Do you think that falls solely on the CEO (which he ended up becoming)?

Re: David Sacks Stepping Down as Zenefits CEO

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "web" link allows you to access WSJ w/o any subscription.

The web link does not work for every HN user. WSJ always displays the paywall for certain geo-locations, even when Google is the referrer. This applies to Germany and multiple other countries.

Not sure that is strictly true. I live in Germany and the web link gives me WSJ with no pay wall.
Post reply on HN