When people ask me what I learned from my experience at SigFig, I always tell them that I didn’t really learn anything at all, except that failure sucks, and you never, ever want it to happen again, but also, it’s the kind of thing that gets you up in the morning. One of the things we talk about at Zenefits is that we want to hire people who have a chip on their shoulder—an intensity to prove they can accomplish something, or prove people who have doubted them wrong. I felt a lot like that myself when I started Zenefits. I needed to prove I could accomplish something—that I wasn’t a failure, even though it felt to me like I was. That’s how a lot of this stuff got started.

Parker Conrad

Categorized in : U.S.

We never had enough money—or we were always too cheap—to hire any kind of administrative staff, so [my co-founder] and I were always the ones dealing with sending out offer letters, setting people up on payroll or signing them up for health insurance. It was a couple of hours per month that I deeply resented, i would stop off at Kinko’s on my way home to fax in their insurance applications, because that was the only way to get things in to the insurance company. I remember every time thinking, ‘This is ridiculous. I can’t believe they don’t have systems for this.’.

Parker Conrad

I really enjoyed my time at Amgen. It was a lot of fun, and I did pretty well. But I realized it was going to be a very long, slow career path, i thought, ‘Man, I will kick myself for the rest of my life if Mike goes off and does this and it’s a huge success, and I didn’t do it with him.’ I didn’t want to miss out. If I knew what I was getting myself into, I probably wouldn’t have done it, to be totally honest.

Parker Conrad

We lived illicitly in this retirement community for six months, which was the worst six months of my life, every time you drove in, you had to check in with a security guard, and we would say we were there to visit Mike’s grandparents. The downstairs neighbors were very nice and gracious and didn’t tattle on us, although they easily could have, and the security guards just rolled their eyes.

Parker Conrad

The problem I had at my last company wasn’t just that the health insurance piece wasn’t online, it was that every time you hired or terminated an employee, there were 20 different places where you needed to set that employee up or remove them. Over time, as things changed about them, all of these different systems had to be updated individually and separately. That was such a pain in the ass. [With Zenefits] you have one central system of record—like a hub—and it connects to all of these different spokes. Companies and employees know there’s one place to make changes, and it automatically updates all these other systems and makes it as seamless as possible.

Parker Conrad

I think [ADP has] always had a bit of cognitive dissonance about Zenefits. On the one hand, we don’t do payroll—we’re a sales channel for them for payroll. On the other hand, although people think of ADP as a payroll company, they make a lot of money by taking that core payroll business and upselling clients on all of this other stuff, i think what happened for ADP is that at a certain point, their view of us flipped from uncertainty to a decision that they absolutely didn’t like us. Who knows? They might decide in six months to a year, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a mistake, we’d much rather partner with Zenefits—they have a lot of customers in the market, and we don’t want to block ourselves out of all of those customers.’.

Parker Conrad

What keeps me up at night is our own internal stuff, if somebody’s going to kill Zenefits, it’s going to be Zenefits. We’ve got to keep moving quickly.

Parker Conrad

The really cool thing is that all that work for the employer is sort of fixed, no matter how many of these various different spokes it’s got connected up to our system, if you want to hire someone, and you have one thing you can connect up to Zenefits or a hundred things you can connect up to Zenefits, it’s all the same for you. It’s ‘I want to hire this guy, here’s when he starts, and here’s how much money I pay him.’ That convenience is what makes Zenefits so powerful.

Parker Conrad

This is something much bigger than HR. All of the boring crap that you don’t want to deal with, you can put on autopilot, i want to make this something that’s almost a new category. It’s not an admin tool. It’s not really a [human resources management] system. It’s a much more ambitious effort.

Parker Conrad

There's a lot of just administrative work that comes along with having employees.

Parker Conrad

having employees just work

A good headline is far more than a summary. It has to characterize, in a few brief words, the most important themes and news items of the article it accompanies.

Parker Conrad

words good news important

Some days you're the fire hydrant, and some days you're the dog.

Parker Conrad

some you fire dog

I was spending all my time at the 'Crimson' - like, 70 hours a week - and I didn't go to class for, like, a year. I failed out of school. I had to leave Harvard, really, halfway through my tenure as the 'Crimson' managing editor. It was this incredibly humiliating and shocking experience.

Parker Conrad

leave experience time school

I'm too old to understand Snapchat.

Parker Conrad

old too understand snapchat

If you move or get married, that has to be changed with HR, payroll, medical insurance, life insurance, etc. It is a huge administrative headache that requires a full-time staff.

Parker Conrad

insurance you medical life

At Wikinvest, which got renamed Sigfig, we were constantly just two or three months away from not being able to make payroll.

Parker Conrad

just being three two

The only thing I learned is that failure sucks, and you never want to do it. There's not a lot to be said for that particular lesson.

Parker Conrad

never you failure want

I'm not going to run my business on the basis of quarterly numbers.

Parker Conrad

going run business numbers

The way we designed self-driving payroll, it ends payroll as an independent system that you're entering information in by hand.

Parker Conrad

you information independent way

It feels good to have people who support you and back you and believe in you.

Parker Conrad

good you believe people

There's nothing easy about building a company at all. I find it really hard, just painful and difficult, and if you are successful, it's even worse than if you fail.

Parker Conrad

nothing you building easy