parkerconrad

One thing that's changed a lot in the past decade -- when I left my first startup, SigFig, in 2012 (after 7 years of slow, grinding failure -- company has since had a renaissance let by my cofounder, who stayed), it was really unclear what I was qualified to do next. As a founder, I had a lot of general skills but few specific or tangible ones - I'd spent a lot of time in sales, product management, marketing and generally doing the admin basics like taking out the trash, but I wouldn't really have considered myself qualified to run a sales team, lead marketing, or generally run any of the functions at a "real" company that I'd dabbled in as a founder.

I tried interviewing for jobs -- but from the perspective of employers, it was unclear what specific skills / experience I had - (most ppl would not have heard of the company I started, so it felt a lot like a 7-year gap on my resume). I was 32, but mostly was only able to interview for entry-level positions. I got very close to a job as a PM at Quora (thank you Marc Bodnick, @ccheever, Adam and Sandra)

We'd pitched 70 different VCs over the course of the co -- I emailed all of them to let them know I was leaving hte company, and asked to meet with them to get advice about my future plans. I only heard back from one person -- Brian Ascher at Venrock, who ultimately b/c an investor in my next co.

I ended up starting another company in part b/c it just didn't seem like there were many other good options.

This has changed a lot -- many cos, from growth-stage startups to stereotypical BigCos really want to hire former founders into positions that have meaningful scope and ownership and impact. At Rippling, we have some crazy ratios here -- around 40 ppl out of 350 are former founders, it's a candidate profile we actively seek out and view it as a badge of honor.

Congrats Garry -- I just wanted to chime in with others to say that Garry was an incredible investor in our seed round -- always helpful, and has been very loyal in good times and bad. If you can work with him I highly recommend it.

ADP has for years, and still does, allow bookkeepers, accountants, and HR services firms similar to Zenefits to access client accounts via 3rd-party administrative logins that clients themselves set up in their payroll.

The way this works is that you, as an ADP client, call them up and says "hey, I've asked my HR firm, XYZ-HR, to manage my payroll. Can you create an account for them to access my payroll system?" ADP creates this account, and XYZ-HR then handles all the payroll admin work going forward -- adding employee, terming them, inputting hours worked, managing deductions, etc.

This is how this has worked for years, and it's how thousands of companies do this via ADP. Even today, as an ADP RUN client, you can call in and add any third-party person you want as an admin to your payroll system -- as long as it's not Zenefits. ADP has marketing materials that describe this feature, both for companies and HR / bookkeeping / accounting firms. This is how Zenefits was accessing client's payroll, and doing so in order to take on all the administrative work related to payroll that you don't want to handle. We weren't "hacking" anything. We were doing this at our customers' request, with their full knowledge of what we were doing, and ADP set up these accounts with @zenefits.com email addresses, knowing it was Zenefits.

There is nothing improper about how we were doing this.

Our view of this is that growth is not inconsistent with improving the service - and, actually, quite the opposite, our growth is what gives us the ability to solve a lot of the challenges in this industry.

This is particularly relevant in your case (an installation error on Aetna's end). One of the biggest problems with health insurance for companies < 1,000 employees is that everything is done via paper / pdf / fax machine. This is of course a pain in the ass, but more importantly it's a source of large and irreducible error. Insurance companies average about 10% to 20% error rates on the stuff that we send them even if Zenefits is 100% correct. These errors aren't unique to Zenefits -- any broker or other company doing this stuff would have them -- and we spend a lot of time following up with carriers to verify, etc....

Here's the important thing -- our growth means we can make insurance companies build APIs for us, some of which are live right now, and many more of which will be live in the coming months. Only with this full electronic integration can these processing errors go away, for us and for everyone else. APIs == zero errors. Existing paper / pdf method can never fully eliminate errors b/c we (zenefits) don't control the guy on Aetna's end who is keying information into their system.

Algentis companies are our favorite kind of client. We'll save you $2,000 / year per employee if you switch from Algentis (you won't have to pay any more algentis fees) and you don't have to change your existing health insurance (ie everything about you current plans, pricing, insurance cards, etc stays exactly the same). Best of all, it will only take you 60 secs to switch. We just need your policy numbers for your insurance, and then we'll set up payroll for you outside of Algentis -- usually through ZenPayroll, but can do it with whoever you'd like.

We love Zenpayroll, but, sadly, no official relationship despite the name.

A different way to look at this -- someone who believes in the affordable care act, and wants to build companies that will help this law succeed.

Not right now -- but something we'd like to do down the line. Am curious what you'd want / how you'd use it. Feel free to reach out, parker [at] zenefits dot com

Wow, I am a big fan of bloom health (zenefits cofounder here), and would love to meet / talk! (you can reach me at parker [at] zenefits.com

It's small-group right now, each company is its own group. Right now we are CA only but plan to expand rapidly in other states -- although it might take quite some time before we're everywhere.

401K is in invite-only alpha right now. There are a few vendors we work with -- Schwab, The online 401k Company, Sharebuilder, and Vanguard. In practice, these are the best options for small businesses out there.

We don't get paid by 401K companies, so we don't have an incentive to recommend anything other than what we think is awesome for you.

Also, one thing we've promised our early 401K clients -- if they want to work with a 401K company that isn't on our list, we'll build an integration specially for them.

Yeah, the problem with TriNet and other PEOs, though, is that they cost thousands of dollars per employee per year -- while Zenefits is free. They do more than we do, of course, but a lot of small companies only need someone for benefits administration, mostly.

If you need sexual harassment training, & other liability-reducing stuff, TriNet makes a lot of sense.

Wow, thanks Hacker News! (One of the Zenefits Co-founders here). One quick thing to point out -- we are actually YC W13, not w12 (small slip-up from TechCrunch on this point).