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 failed transactions. For _payroll_.

Rule 1 of startups: build something people loved. The last line of the article:

  “Unless something else goes really wrong with Zenefits,
  we’ll stick with them for a while,” says BlogMutt’s Yates.
  “It’s too much of a hassle to switch.”

They are the epitome of what's wrong in Silicon Valley, not what is right. Not caring about employees, setting a bar for professionalism as high as a reality TV show, and, to quote Thomas Hobbes, "restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." Not to mention ethics violations and breaking laws that (unlike Uber and taxis) are on the books to protect protect health insurance.

This was not a grey area.

The Valley has yet to prove that it can build sustainable companies. We can get to about 6 years of hyper-growth, but outside of that it is really questionable. Look at Square, Twitter, and Box post-IPO or the myriad large startups that refuse to IPO. You've got Google, Apple, and Facebook, but that's hardly proof of repeatable success.