ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
Thank you.
ADP Begins to Roll Out a Zenefits Competitor; Thread Closed [n]
Where "n" is simply a number that is listed elsewhere that describes the reason for closing. Note that can scale to any number of reasons or explanations either existing or new as if it's a footnote.
Thanks.
The link is still gone from the main site (only available in a comment) and its removal was justified by "we have to pick one".
Zenefits doesn't have any intrinsic rights to ADP's system. Twitter killed off plenty of companies when it decided to shut down the 3rd party ecosystem. Facebook obviously maintains similar strategic control over it's API. How many case studies must there be for companies to understand that building on another company's platform always carries business and strategic risks?
A trivial example: we have roughly fifteen contractors working for us. I had them all sign up for Zenefits so we could pay them (and track 1099's appropriately). Come the first of the month, we tried to pay the contractors, only to discover that we had a cap of $2,500 TOTAL for any given week.
This isn't mentioned anywhere obvious and caused huge problems for us. In the end, we had to Paypal everyone money at the last minute.
Next up was trying to pay a founder as the sole employee in a single state. No matter how much we try, we can't seem to figure out how to make this happen - the Zenefits software assumes that we need a tax ID for the state but the state itself insists that we don't need one (since it's a solo founder, working from his home, there is no LNI and no income tax either).
Then there were the countless issues with email addresses (an infinite loop that seemed to be caused by the fact that I used an email address with a plus symbol on it)
The support people are very nice but so far none of them have managed to actually resolve an issue for me.
Anyway, not impressed.
We're back on ADP after our company was bought as that is what the parent company uses.
Now granted, with half a billion dollars and some technical acumen major innovation is possible. But the events of this week and the bearing of the CEO paint a picture of a company that is not aware of and focused on that hard problem.
If you want to leverage the large company rates as a small company, you need to explore the PEO model, which Zenefits does not support, but ADP does (and several others).
Zenefits does not get any special deals; you get the same deal as every other 'small business' broker.
Zenefits doesn't want or need intrinsic rights to the ADP system. They do need (and deserve) the same level of access as a human working for a client using ADP. They might provide little to no value or be a worthless company but NONE OF THAT MATTERS. The client paid for ADP access and has every right to use whatever means they deem necessary to input or output data from the ADP system.
Thats not actually what the client pays for though. The client paid for access to ADP's system according to the Terms of Service that ADP sets. If those terms of service and the rights they engender are not acceptable to the client they are welcome to find another provider.
I've frequently posted my dislike for ADP on these boards and I took my business elsewhere.
Surely ADP has a superseding right to determine how information enters and leaves their system? I'm not suggesting that's good or bad, just pointing out that it's their system, being a customer doesn't give you carte blanche to do whatever you like.
Hell, look at what happened to Aaron Swartz.
No. They do not own this information.
ADP is clearly responding to a capacity issue but Zenefits is attempting to frame it as a competitive one.
What is the scale of Zenefits' access? Do they function like a human or as a machine? Isn't treating machines differently than humans a well accepted standard of the tech industry? Why else would Robots.txt exist?
What is going on that the founder/CEO has enough time to chastise an engineer candidate on Quora and put out factually inaccurate posts on topics like healthcare reform (he had something out on LinkedIn a few weeks back) but doesn't have the foresight to build a "real" integration with a payroll vendor that has one available (and an established track record of integrating with competitors in many cases mind you).
You read the glassdoor reviews of Zenefits and you get this picture where no one knows what they are doing. All symptomatic of a company in hyper-growth mode, I get that. The questions becomes, does Parker have the leadership chops to see this through?
Am I the only one that finds it strange their reviews seem to alternate between "worst company ever" and "greatest job ever"?
One of the reviewers wrote:
> Don't "advise" your employees to go to this website and leave good reviews to cover up the truth.
Oh yeah well that explains that.
update: typo
contrast this: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/HealthTap-Reviews-E453567.h...
to
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-HealthTap-R...
or
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-HealthTap-R...
or
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-HealthTap-R...
etc
Also, I had to wean off from using the Mint app because I was concerned about violating my bank's TOS by giving login credentials to a third party, and if something happens in future my claim will be a bit weak. So are SMBs not violating ADP's TOS by providing them login info?
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable answer to me. Especially after reading the question. It gives me a bad taste, I wouldn't want to work with that guy. He's the annoying guy at the table who is like "I work at x" and wants everybody to go "oooh," not "wtf is zenefits?" It reeks of the almost ubiquitous entitled tech engineer stench.
If anything, this makes me appreciate the integrity of Conrad.
Edit: Here's a link that has the quote about rescinding the offer: http://www.quora.com/Zenefits-CEO-Rescinds-Job-Offer-May-201...
Meh. It's something I would have done myself in the same situation.
This is why I'm glad I'm not famous...
First, it shows really poor judgment on the part of the junior engineer. Dear God, did you think that people can't identify you, specifically? It's not like Zenefits is giving out 10 job offers a day.
Second, you're likely to jump as soon as you get the chance. Neither employer nor employee have any commitment to one another. Okay, fine. But, as an employer, will you completely leave me hanging at a critical time or will you stick a couple of months to complete your task before jumping. Given your lack of discretion, probably you'll leave me hanging.
Third, are you going to air dirty laundry in public? Every company has some, even successful ones. Startups are worse. Again, lack of discretion.
So, yeah, I'd rescind that offer very fast. He'll be lucky if Uber doesn't rescind his offer. I guarantee if I were HR at Uber I'd be trying to pick him out to rescind it.
Would I air that publicly? Probably not.
However, this kid should consider himself lucky that the CEO called him out publicly so he knows what he did wrong. If I were the CEO, I'd probably just rescind his offer without comment. I'd call Uber HR, and they'd rescind his offer without comment.
And, he'd be wondering what the hell happened.
As a CEO I'd want candidates getting a second opinion privately so they were reassured when they decided to accept my offer, and the only reason I'd see "not ruling out much worse offer from other company" as a major black mark is if being savvy in commercial decisions was an important aspect of the role.
A savvier candidate would probably be trying the "That's great, but I also have an outstanding offer in a similar total comp range from Uber. At this stage I think I'd fit much better into your team, but if you could move a little on the financial side of your offer I'd be much more inclined to confirm without waiting have that followup conversation with the Uber hiring manager" approach anyway. And quite possibly succeeding...
Where you work will have an impact on your career (I think that's obvious). Part of that is simply the social proof of which company. It helped my career by working for various YC companies, for instance. Were they necessarily better than non-YC companies? No, of course not, but people put stock in it anyway.
The first company you work for may very well have an outsized impact on your career compared to subsequent positions. You should make that decision carefully.
Most importantly, when I go to work somewhere, they shouldn't expect that I will work there the rest of my life. Staying at a company 2-5 years is pretty normal. That's a short enough timespan that you should be thinking about how the company will impact your career after your time with them is done. Furthermore, part of the behavior of a good manager and company is to encourage and facilitate your career growth, even though they realize that doing so may very well cause you to grow out of your position at that company.
He's also a kid, looking at his first career out of college. Did you know the right things to look for immediately and inherently? Do you now? Did some of the things you looked for then end up getting discounted as you got more experience? Do you maybe think you shouldn't hold it against him that maybe he also doesn't know everything?
So no, I wouldn't say that that kid was wrong for thinking about several different aspects of the opportunities he was presented, name-recognition amongst them, even if I would contend that he should maybe put less of an emphasis on it, but that's just the thing he might have heard when he asked the question. Nor do I think that he's more likely to up and leave the company when the going gets rough.
The problem isn't that he doesn't understand everything. The problem is that he doesn't seem to understand "discretion".
I'm about to give someone access to very sensitive HR information across multiple companies. Do I really want to do that when he just demonstrated that he can't make a simple job inquiry with enough discretion to not piss the CEO off? Doubly so since it was a GOOD job offer.
Edit: I still contend you're making a mountain out of a molehill. This kid asked a reasonable questionable in an unreasonable way. He could've avoided a lot by simply redacting the names of the companies; I think we both agree on that. That said, I kind of expect a kid fresh out of college to make a few mistakes with regards to professionalism. An organization hiring those individuals should be set up to mitigate that damage and gently steer them in the right direction, not crucify them publicly. While I expect the occasional flub of professionalism from new employees (and I think on a scale of unprofessionalism, this ranks pretty low), I expect a great deal more from CEOs of corporations with a valuation in the billions. Both messed up with regards to professionalism, but one made a much bigger screw up, and it was the one who I would most expect to behave professionally.
And do you put out a handbook or other disclaimer stating that the employer and employee have zero obligation to each other and can terminate the relationship at any time?
And, yes, this goes both ways.
If I, as a boss, can see the writing on the wall, I will attempt to protect my employees. While that includes internal protection in a political firefight, it also includes calling up friends at other companies to see if they might have a job for people on my team if I can see that it's going to be ugly. I have also helped usher people out of my company because I simply couldn't get them what they were worth.
It's called "being a professional". It's also called "this industry is damn small, don't piss off the good people in it."
Sometimes you get caught completely unaware and get sacked without notice, but it's really rare. Most senior people can tell when things are about to get bad generally a month or two in advance--if not more.
Professional courtesy would be telling someone you want/need them for the next X months and making a real commitment to the worker instead of having a public policy of 'no obligations' while secretly expecting the worker to 'be a professional' and to show undue loyalty.
It's called "politics". And it occurs when two or more humans get together. There are always hidden agendas, different goals, etc.
Learning to navigate it is an essential prerequisite if you want to accomplish something that requires more than your singular individual skill.
And, for your information, yes, people like you wind up on the short end of the stick because you ignore politics. People like me get new jobs, better opportunities, advance warning, etc. because I have helped out people in the past. The combinations of being both technically qualified and politically savvy is quite powerful.
You don't owe any loyalty to a company, but if you piss off the people, it will bite you in the ass.
Zenefits doesn't have an issue with sharing private information with the public.
> However, this kid should consider himself lucky that the CEO called him out publicly so he knows what he did wrong.
This person should consider himself lucky that the CEO did this, so he knew the bullet he dodged.
It seemed pretty obvious to me that the guy was just trying to make the best decision for himself. The right thing would have been for the CEO to let the guy talk it out and come to the conclusion that Zenefits would be the best opportunity for him, not to attack him publicly for trying to figure out the best career path.
"attack him publicly" - interesting choice of words there.
The defamation they claimed happened is that Zenefits "alleged that ADP intentionally sought to cause harm to ADP’s clients solely to gain an unfair competitive advantage against Zenefits.”
Even if you argue this is defamation per se (and not per quod), about a matter of private concern, they'd still have to prove "4. That [name of defendant] failed to use reasonable care to determine the truth or falsity of the statement(s).
"
(california jury instructions for this charge will be here: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1700/1704...)
There is a near 0% chance they can prove a lack of reasonable care here. Plus, they open themselves up to discovery on any memos, etc they've written about this decision internally, which almost certainly show the statement is truth.
Note the above is the best case. If it's determined to be a matter of public concern, or defamation per quod, ADP's chances go down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679312
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9688442
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9686175
It looks like they were asking for users' login credentials to scrape ADP's frontend, and that Zenefits had never talked directly to ADP. The scraping broke when ADP added DOS protection to their portal; they claim that Zenefits was responsible for 25% of their traffic despite serving only 0.25% of their clients.
I kinda want Zenefits to win here, because I one day dream of having employees and from what I've seen Zenefits is much easier to deal with than ADP. But the specific actions they've taken here look really bad. It's as if a third-party site asked users for their Google logins and then used it to aggressively scrape personalized search results off the SRP; such usage would get blocked by DOS protection, and it'd have nothing to do with Google targeting a competitor and everything to do with them protecting the security and integrity of their systems.
The case number is 4:15-cv-02560-DMR You can use PACER to get more info
The complaint charges: (1) DEFAMATION;
(2) INTENTIONAL INTERFERENCE WITH PROSPECTIVE ECONOMIC RELATIONS;
(3) UNFAIR COMPETITION;
(4) FALSE ADVERTISING;
(5) LANHAM ACT VIOLATION
Everything but the first claim is just dumb.
When you originally set up Zenefits, you created an Zenefits admin user in your ADP RUN payroll account to let Zenefits manage your payroll—set up new employees, manage deductions, remove departing employees—on your behalf.
Yesterday, without your permission, ADP systematically deactivated these accounts—accounts that you set up, in your payroll system, to allow Zenefits to work on your behalf. The reason for this is that ADP believes it can one day build software to compete with Zenefits, and in the meantime they would like to do anything they can to impede Zenefits.
ADP is claiming that they are taking this action for “security” reasons—but this is clearly not true. For years, ADP has let customers add third parties—a bookkeeper or an accounting firm, for example—to their payroll system to manage payroll on a company’s behalf. What Zenefits does is no different. In fact, even today, ADP will let you add a third-party administrator to your payroll system unless they have a Zenefits.com email address.
What’s high-handed about their approach is that Zenefits is still completely compatible with ADP payroll. All they’ve done is make it more inconvenient for you, their customer.
By default, we will start emailing you whenever there are changes that need to be made to your payroll system. We will detail exactly the changes that need to be made, and you can make them yourself in payroll. It’s less convenient this way — and frustrating that ADP has decided to create more work for their own clients in order to attack Zenefits. But beyond this, nothing will interrupt your use of Zenefits.
We are also working on other options for restoring automated payroll. Zenefits’ mission is to make running your business as effortless as possible, and our support team will follow up shortly with additional information on how to resolve this issue.
We think it’s outrageous—and unethical—that ADP is making these changes to your payroll system without your permission, and is creating this complication for you in their attempt to block Zenefits’ service—essentially treating you like a pawn in their corporate chess game.
If you’re as upset with ADP as we are, you can sign this Change.org petition. In addition, if you’re interested in switching from ADP payroll to Intuit Payroll, we’re paying customers $1,000 and helping them to make the switch. We’ll include instructions for this in our follow up communication.
We remain committed to working with ADP to find a solution to make this problem go away for all our mutual clients. In the past, we’ve directed many payroll customers to ADP, because payroll is not a service we provide. We’ve tried contacting them, but so far they have refused to return our calls. If they have any genuine concerns, we are happy to resolve them, but they have yet to express them to us.
And from who they are exactly protecting their customer data?
> When you originally set up Zenefits, you created an Zenefits admin user in your ADP RUN payroll account to let Zenefits manage your payroll
It should be obviously clear for any sensible person that Zenefit would have access to your data as much as the admin user has.
It is not dissimilar from creating an account for a person and results of this should be understandable for anyone who has at least some idea about the management.
This is good enough for reasonable care. :)
Even if it wasn't, ADP would have to prove that Zynamics didn't bother to do any investigation at all before making the statement (IE not quite negligence, but at least something)
This seems "highly unlikely" given the situation.
Basically, Zenefits accuses ADP of blocking access solely because of a single traffic spike. On top of that, it accuses ADP of changing their reasons for cutting off Zenefit's access. They then accuse ADP of "spreading FUD"--and lying--about Zenefits for the purposes of quashing the competition.
That last statement, especially, is pretty dangerous under defamation law as it's pretty close per se defamation, in which case ADP would only have to prove the statement was made in court to win. There's no defense to that except proving that ADP was lying about Zenefits.
Based on what both parties have said, and what we know about how Zenefit's system actually works, a jury could definitely find that Zenefits defamed ADP and I would say, based on prior experience with juries, that there is at worst a 50/50 chance from ADP's perspective if this goes to trial.
http://blog.zenefits.com/adp-2/
If Zenefits had knowledge of this product prior to making their statement (quite likely), then this is nearly certain to be good enough to support the statement they made.
(Note: I really could care less either way, i'm just trying to give an objective legal viewpoint :P)
> ADP is not likely come close to winning
As a customer, my takeaway would be "If ADP doesn't like what i tell people about it, it's going to actually sue me".
I see the lawsuit as a stretch too but it certainly turned the PR table on Zenefits and rapidly. There is far more cleverness in ADP's strategy than is obvious.
Suing competitors rarely makes people think you are wonderful. Suing competitors to create uncertainty is in fact, a great way to end up in a huge antitrust lawsuit.
Without getting into the legal contours of each, I'd say the defamation claim is at the bottom of the list of Zenefit's legal concerns here.
[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/268286803/ADP-v-Zenefits-Defamatio...
But discovery cuts both ways. They could easily find a Zenefits email that says "lets blast them for this, who cares if it is true or not, it's about perception."
I agree they probably won't win, but never rule out a smoking gun.
Maybe it's not about winning the lawsuit though. Could be about a PR play to show that ADP is serious enough about what they said prior to the lawsuit to follow it up with a lawsuit.
Could be about forcing the other side to take what they are asking them to do (retract) seriously and perhaps and take back the negative comments. And so on.
Uber and AirBNB have scared the heck out of huge incumbent industries and cities/governments and had scraps to be sure. But they don't have the consistent missteps as Zenefits. They know when to fight and when to take a lump or two, stay quiet, and bide their time.
ADP might lose this lawsuit (I have no idea), but Zenefits is already looking much less impressive.
I'm far more locked into the consequences of the bad decision if I go with the sketchy SaaS provider and employee benefits broker
I feel like AirBnB, and even more so Uber, have had plenty of very public missteps. Both Uber's CEO and execs have come under fire for some dumb things they've said:
http://pando.com/2014/02/27/we-call-that-boob-er-the-four-mo...
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-dig...
That clearly doesn't mean you can't be successful, but I wouldn't say Zenefits has done or said anything worse than these other companies have.
If an employee applied to work for my business and one of their "concerns" was how our company would appear on their resume (in contrast to another), I would similarly discard their application.
The mistake wasn't the hiring decision, clearly it was getting into an argument with a prospective employee in a public internet posting.
That shows a serious lack of judgement and poor leadership.
And moreover this isn't a photo sharing business he's running, when you're asking people to trust you with their income and their medical coverage you are going to be held to a higher standard.
Yes. Getting into acrimonious debate with a prospective junior hire about their future career prospects is almost the definition of a misplaced sense of priority.
It's a not a good sign when your CEO argues with a "junior hire", however if he's successful at growing the company and creating value, it will be painted as part of his winning formula.
I continue to be amazed by the horribleness of benefits web front-ends. I recently did a simple task in our Hewitt system, and it required five pop-up windows. It's just so, so terrible.
I've used ADP myself as a startup founder. Yeah the interface is annoying. So is Craigslist, whatever. That line of argument isn't necessarily dispositive, both of them have been reasonably adept at solving the problem I engaged with them to solve.
I use ADP and I think their front end is horrible. It works but it's enough of a pain point for others to switch.
I would say if you have as much power as ADP does, everything that happens is a moment for self-reflection.
ADP EZ-Labour - not so EZ, but plenty of labour. There are 20 work days in a month. There are 20 rows in the timesheet form. Every one of them has 8 drop-down boxes, and every one of them needs to be filled with your work status, project code, etc, individually. No group actions. Seriously.
What's so frustrating about benefits front-ends is just how much low-hanging fruit is sitting there uncollected. I'm not asking that ADP implement some awesome canvas-based rendering with AJAX storage and async field update - I just want a lousy 'apply all' button and maybe working tab order between the form controls. Jeebus.
I'm sure there are several other great time tracking ones, too. Is there a particular reason you must use ADP's timecard tracking?
Our accounting department uses EZ-labour to keep track of our work on different projects and for registering time-off and vacation. Realistically most of us only work on one project, but accounting wants the time cards filled out anyways.
EZ-Labour is unfit for personal time-tracking. For one thing, the UI is clumsy and repetitive. If I work on one thing consistently for a week, I have 5*8 slowly updating combo box fields to enter at the end of the week.
For another thing, the work categories are defined by the accounting department, not by the users. The categories aren't useful for me - they're useful for accounting.
Also, you can't always fix errors. There's at least one bug in EZ-labour where accidentally entering hours on a weekend can't be removed.
EZ-Labour's front end could probably be improved a LOT, quite easily. But it's Enterprise-Grade Software - no one who made it is using it, no one who is buying it is using it, no one who uses it has an opportunity to fix it, and there's clearly no user-feedback being incorporated into the design. It's bad software being shovelled out by a big, dumb, blind company. That's really what characterized Enterprise-Grade Software - it's produced by a silo-ed organization and there's no opportunity for feedback and iteration, so it never gets past it's shitty v0.1 state.
This is why people pay them, there user interfaces are bad. However it is bad interfaces over reliable services... there competition in this case offers great interfaces over other peoples services.
Is this really accurate? Doesn't Zenefits exist to merge several services, only some of which ADP provide? And while many people have said that ADP's front end is bad, it seems like you've taken those claims a step further by claiming that people only pay Zenefits to avoid having to use it (rather than cross-platform integration which is their real purpose).
We seem to understand never to "judge a book by its cover"...except when it comes to web interfaces.
I liken it to tech's war on banks. Everyone loves to make fun of the fact that banks still use "old" technology like mainframes, but when was the last time a bank went down? I will go with a old school bank over a NewCo tech bank any day when it comes to nontrivial things like storing my money.
Just because you can't see the uptime of non user facing banking backends doenst mean they don't run into problems
After conversing with the Zenefits CEO on twitter, it seems to me there is a culture of smugness at Zenefits and feeling amongst their management that they can seemingly do no wrong. Heaven forbid you complain about their poor platform quality or mention that they are growing at an unsustainable rate thereby letting quality and service fall by the wayside - then they just kick you off or tell you to go away.
Well, that has changed thanks to ADP (who I have had actually GREAT experiences with). Zenefits sort of deserves it in this case, in my humble opinion.
Zenefits is just a thin wrapper around other companies real products and businesses.
I suspect Zenefits true business plan is a trojan horse. Get between a business and its clients, replicate the wrapped business and whamo you put the existing vendor out of business and grab all their revenues.
How else could Zenefits justify their sky high valuation other than for them to be a trojan horse?
"Zenefits also asked the ADP client to take a screenshot of the temporary username/password screen for the account and email it to a Zenefits email. “
"ADP identified several potential concerns with Zenefits’ approach, including clients granting Zenefits admin user credentials to allow Zenefits access to the clients’ employee and company data in a manner that may not meet ADP’s security standards, and allowing Zenefits to make changes requiring a payroll admin level access. “
And this is ladies and gents why you should really worry when you base your business on scraping
Contrary to popular tv shows, there is only so much that can happen. Lawsuits drag on whether someone is trying or not :)
Barring some outliers, the difference between lawsuits that are dragged out and ones that aren't is not a factor of 10, it's probably a factor of 1.2.
State court is kind of a crapshoot, for sure. But you are super-unlikely to get away with this stuff in federal court (which is where ADP filed).
Most federal judges get tired of this stuff very quickly, and start sanctioning.
That's crazy talk. You can double the length of a lawsuit in one simple stroke just by having your attorney say "Sorry that week is bad for me can we do [date]" every time there's a continuance or adjournment. You can set return dates for any motions you initiate to the last date permitted, you can meet every filing deadline in the last hour, etc.
The legal system has many built-in safeguards and protections for all parties but guaranteeing timeliness just isn't one of them.
The real driver of court delay is the judge, not the litigants. I've had judges routinely sit on motions (fully briefed) for 9 months in ND Cal. Then one party or the other will move for reconsideration and it's another six month delay. It's just the nature of the beast; judges in the federal system carry very heavy caseloads, particularly ND Cal.
This is precisely why i said why is said. Because the litigants are not often the cause/controllers of the delay, despite their best efforts :)
Now, certainly, if the judges/etc were more efficient, yeah, you could pull out a factor of 10x. But the way things are, for a simple defamation suit, i can't see you getting more than maybe a 2x factor through various tactics.
Exactly. The exact vagaries of how each clerk sets calendar dates and whatnot wasn't my point. My point was that I have never seen a civil litigation forum in the U.S. where either party doesn't have half a dozen methods that can effectively double the amount of time it takes to get through the same procedure.
Most defamation suits take around a year or so to get to trial. As a litmus test, the recent Jesse Ventura defamation suit took two years to conclude.
This doesn't include appeals either, which can drag the process out even further.
Depending on where the trial is set, and how expensive Zenefits legal counsel is, this could be a huge financial burden for them to undertake and quickly drain their resources.
There's a lot of focus on Zenefits bombastic personality, and the whole "we're gonna drink your milkshake" rhetoric. That will scare huge incumbents into moving into very defensive positions quickly. Offering to spend $600,000 getting companies to drop ADP in favor of Intuit or another payroll company doesn't help either.
One thing I find curious was that I thought that Zenefits had 10,000+ businesses using the service as of three or four months ago. According to what's been reported, 600 ADP connected business have been cut off, which was stated as being 10% of their total business. That math doesn't back out.
I wouldn't be surprised if the "10,000+" businesses included prospective businesses, companies that tested Zenefits out without committing to it, and former customers.
Basically MDY made a bot for world of warcraft. It would play the game for you to earn in-game gold.
Blizzard did not like this and had forbidden it in their ToS (Just like ADP has disallowed certain aspects of what Zenefits does- automated access, etc..)
Blizzard won the case. The main element was 'tortious interference' - MDY was interfering with the relationship between blizzard and its customers. It does not matter if the customer wanted to use the bot or not- MDY was encouraging the user to violate blizzards ToS.
Basically ADP wont 'win' this court case, it wont even stretch out too long. However, both companies will probably have to feed the lawyers 5 million for this... which is not a big deal for one, and is probably 10% of capital on hand for the other. Its more a statement than a lawsuit with an expectation of success.
Well , they just raised $ 500m, so looks like just 1% of the new capital raised ( or wasted , whatever way you put it )
Zenefits' web application is a shitshow of JavaScript errors. It is amateur hour over there.
"My biggest problem with Zenefits is that it isn't a buzzword like Uber. Most people won't know what Zenefits is (or so I think). I think that this isn't as exciting a brand name to have on your resume when applying to the likes of Google."
Full question: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-start-my-career...
The response was more, if you know that you'll find the work at Uber or another company more exciting, then we wouldn't want you to work here.
It was really a matter of phrasing/tact on the applicant's part and hubris on this CEOs part - you want people to be excited about working for you, but you also want the humility to be able to see how it fits in their career path.
http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/2lue6fyli/california-northe...
A defamation lawsuit tells a lot about how vulnerable a company is. Take down Zenefits and hundreds of others emerge.
Lol