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 CEO had to run such a gauntlet, maybe Iceman back in 1986. The guy deserves more credit than he has gotten. Though it's not surprising the press missed this part of a story as they tend to do when they smell unicorn blood in the water.
I also don't think it's too surprising he is stepping down. How long can someone work on cleaning up someone else's mess? While under-compensated for it. And while putting better more interesting potential opportunities on hold.
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.
He was only COO for a year before the CEO got fired and he took over. I think it's fair to say that it's partially his mess but also fair to say that a lot of the mess got created before he started as COO.
>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.
> 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.
I think because Trump is not a middle ground for most people. It's almost one of those topics you try not to bring up for fear that you would offend somebody whether you drop criticism or praise.
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.
I think what's interesting is that Sacks was put into this position at the request of the board and shareholders. For the most part, this will be a interesting transition for Zenefits as they deal with the wave after wave of bad news...
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.
Seems appropriate considering he was supposed to have Conrad's back but seemed to happily throw him under the bus when the Zenefits issues came to light.
This will be a good way to close out that chapter and for everyone to move on.
FWIW,asides the throwing of Conrad under the bus, Sacks seemed to have done a pretty good job (from the outside) of steadying the Zenefits ship after last year's collusion.
I expect Buzfeed to have the gossip back story by early next week.
“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 the next level.”
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.
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.
Its the newspapers who will realize that the free lunc his over when nobody needs their crap anymore.
Put up paywalls and dont even make it remotely easy to actually pay. Then bitch about you not having an account, still want you to click on a thousand facebook and twitter links and have ads that slow the site down to a standstill and what not.
Newspapers are really not having it easy huh. Throughout the web, you either run a subscription or monetize with ads. Newspapers do both and cant even hire an engineer who doesnt shit out a javascript turd that will never load.
> Its the newspapers who will realize that the free lunc his over when nobody needs their crap anymore.
I'm just amazed that you can expect the 5,000 people at the Wall Street Journal to work for you for free, and then accuse them of pursuing a "free lunc".
The lead has changed to: "David Sacks confirmed he is stepping down as chief executive of Zenefits, less than a year after taking over the troubled health-benefits broker."
The "still the CEO of Zenefits" quote from his last-to-know PR person is now gone.
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 CEO had to run such a gauntlet, maybe Iceman back in 1986. The guy deserves more credit than he has gotten. Though it's not surprising the press missed this part of a story as they tend to do when they smell unicorn blood in the water.
I also don't think it's too surprising he is stepping down. How long can someone work on cleaning up someone else's mess? While under-compensated for it. And while putting better more interesting potential opportunities on hold.