Zenefits

“Embracing this identity around sort of like fast growing tech company raised a bunch of money. That was a mistake. And I think the right thing to do or what to try and do is associate your company with what you do. Had we been known as, you know, the best heal…”

“Parker actually convinced Riley, who was, had moved over from Zenefits to Outreach to give us, like, a free seat in the early days which was a great play because we became a big customer of theirs.”

“Four months into Zenefits we were in 2014, our target was ten million in ARR. We started 20 14 about 500,000 of ARR.”

“And so what, the way that we kind of described what we did to people was we basically wrote an email that was something along the lines of like, look, I'm sure that you have like you know, an automated process for like onboarding employees and managing HR and …”

“We changed the revenue target to twenty million. Like two days later, Parker couldn't keep the secret and we hit it.”

“We never had accountant partnerships when all of our competitors like Gusto, you know, had an enormous amount of their revenue in the early days came from the accounting channel.”

“Zenefits alone produced as starting as AEs, the head of revenue at Rippling, the head of revenue at Gong, the head of revenue at Modern Health, the former head of revenue at TripActions, like all of these came out of Zenefits alone”

“And so the actual result of hiring a bunch more SDRs and AEs wasn't that we had incrementally more revenue, but sort of less efficient revenue on a per rep basis. We actually had less revenue. We closed less revenue by hiring all of these people because it was…”

“It's almost universally true where the product that you are selling at your business, you have the buyer of that product internally... And so companies probably under leverage that internal resource around you know, what the buyer, if they are selling to this …”

“At Zenefits, I pushed off hiring anyone in this function for too long. I didn't have an appreciation for it.”

“When Zenefits was very young and immature, we had a goal of going from like 500,000 dollars in ARR to ten million in ARR in one year. This was 2014.”

“One of my favorite Parker stories is I joined in late 2013, so my first full year was 2014, and about a quarter in, we were shooting for a revenue target of ten million dollars by the end of the year. We started at something like half a million dollars of ARR.…”

“What most folks do wrong, almost all COs I remember I actually did it with Sam and Parker in the early days of Zenefits, and then they got it right, is they just don't calculate Just the amount of human capital it will take to hit these numbers. And they usua…”

“When we added all of these new SDRs into the mix, not only were they less effective than the more tenured existing reps, they actually made the existing reps far less successful because we had to tap into this TAM base that people were less likely to convert.”

“And they took the model, Parker, and Sam built that model at Zenefits, and then they reproduced it at Rippling. Massive outbound model.”