Zenefits

“And I think Zenefits would be a perfect example of that. You know, they're, they get paid from the commission through the insurance broker, so they can give their software away for free. And no one else figured that out. So they had an automatic leg up.”

“Zenefits will go one to a hundred million in revenue in 24 months.”

“No, no company's execution is perfect, but if you have the media's microscope on you, your imperfections or your errors in judgment, or they get magnified. And so I think that's what happened in this case. Compounding factor is that Zenefits operates in a regu…”

“I always think that he is like a very impressive founder and someone who is like relentlessly bent on growing his company.”

“So for example, a few years ago, I invested in a set of companies based solely on the fact that I would have used them at my first startup. I would have used Stripe for payments. I invested in Stripe. I would have used Mailgun for email, and so I invested in M…”

“So I had a Twitter post about this about, I don't know, nine months ago. And I said my three favorite unicorns that I think are in trouble were at that time, jet.com, Zenefits, and Magic Leap.”

“I think we've seen a bunch of companies that are going through big challenges in the startup community today, even, is that they raised on large valuations, and they're in the process of restructuring their business, whether it's Zenefits and that entire space…”

“In the very first board meeting, Josh said, we have this competitor called Zenefis, who I had met. I knew what the company was doing. They're going exceptionally fast. They've got a business model that's working really well, and they're outpacing us significan…”

“A big part of how I think about Rippling is that this is a way for me to sort of prove, mostly to myself, But also to the extended community, to my friends and family, to the general public, and all that kind of stuff, that this is how things might have turned…”

“If I had fought at my last company, being forced out by A-sixteen Z and David Sachs, and had stayed in place, like, if we could replay the videotape, what would the outcome for that company have been? I believe that it would have been very different”

“At my last company, I had board control and everything, but when investors sat me down and said, look, if you don't resign, we're going to sue the company, we're going to go to war with you know, suddenly you're like, crap, how do I survive that?”

“I got to this point where I was convinced that you know, David was not really interested in making Zenefits successful. And, you know, almost every decision he made at the company was wrong. You know, he the decisions he made from a product perspective, from a…”

“David was not really interested in making Zenefits successful. You know, almost every decision he made at the company was wrong. The decisions he made from a product perspective, from a strategy perspective, the people he. Fired the people he promoted, like al…”

“The only one he could name was Zenefits, and they broke the law.”

“I think Parker was wrongly scapegoated and run out of town at benefits. Then he, and he proved it by going to build rippling into a business that's much bigger and better than reference benefits ever was in the exact same space.”

“But what happens seemingly universally, even at the best companies in the world, like Zenefits in 2014, is there are outlier performers That perform at something like three X to the bottom performer. And so you get a team of like 10 people, even when you're in…”

“The reality is the importance of picking the right company it just really defines one's career. I attribute so much of my success to joining the right businesses. Now, like, I was able to perform within those businesses, and, you know, for context, we're talki…”

“I just wanted to join this guy's company because he was going to build a hundred billion dollar business. You know, we didn't realize that outcome with Zenefits. He's going to with Rippling.”

“You should never do anyone where you can't see the future through the founders.”

“We had huge hiring goals and I remember we hired people off of just 30 minute phone screens and that was it. So it was a true, like just needed to get butts in seats as fast as possible.”

“I should have sold, we got, we could have returned the fund once over in whenever the fidelity markdown was, like literally putting an SPV together to sell Zenefits and then the markdown, the fidelity markdown happened and it killed the SPV. That was one, that…”

“We had just invested in Gusto, which was a competitor that was growing not quite as quickly as Zenefits. But the reality is Gusto has endured and become a massive company, and Zenefits didn't.”

“I think there were some small mistakes made, but they were company-wide. They were under all departments, not just his. Everyone knew about it. They weren't ethical mistakes, and he sort of, you know, took the fall.”