Early Days as an Entrepeneur | Zenefits CEO Jay Fulcher

Awesome. Thank you, Jay, for joining us.

Thank you very much for that welcome.

Yeah.

Here's a mic. That was so awkward, odd welcome.

That was awesome.

Thanks.

Great. Michael, do you need the microphone?

Cool.

We're good.

Awesome.

So thank you so much, and for your team for making this happen. Definitely, out of all the speakers we've had this session, The caliber of your experience is outstanding. And, you know, we're nearing the end of our actual session, so we wanted to bring in people with tremendous experience to talk about their journey, both, you know, when you started all the way to being CEO of Zenefits.

Yep.

So if you could speak a little bit and summarize your journey, especially at the very early beginnings, it's kind of hard to find online. And would love to see what you were doing when you were their age and getting to where you're at now.

Yeah. So I'd be happy to do that. And it's great to be here. And it's good to always kind of visit with these kinds of cohorts of folks. It's cool that you're coming off of your survival week and coming through. I was telling Juan when we were getting introduced, You start going through the companies and the list of things, and I'm reminded, God, I'm getting old, because I've been doing this for a while. The early days for me, I went to the Harvard of the West, San Jose State University. That's a joke. What was interesting about that was that I actually went there to play football. I was an athlete and was Really mostly focused on my football career. I had an older brother that had a great college career and then ended up in the NFL. And so I was pretty much sure that that was going to be my future until I discovered that, you know, physically I was sort of at my peak at 17, and it was a downhill slide by the time I got into college. And I was just another quarterback. And so coming out of that, thank God I was a pretty good student, and I was always really interested. You know, I have a history professor for a father, and I was always really interested in the world and a variety of different things. And anyway, I ended up at San Jose State actually not studying anything related to technology. I was interested in a variety of different things, and I really couldn't get very focused on any one thing, but eventually ended up with a business degree. And coming out of San Jose State, I kind of talked my way into running a small customer support team. I didn't have a customer or a computer science degree, as I said. I hadn't really done a lot of coding. I'd done a little bit. And in those days, we were still talking about basically Unix systems. We weren't really in the client-server era yet. And so I was running a small group that was handling customer support calls. Within about 6 months or so, I had a lot of my former teammates working with me running this support group. We were at a Friday night parking lot picnic for the company, and the CEO finds me and he says, I need you to come to my office. This is a relatively small company, maybe 500 people or so. It wasn't a startup. It was more established than that. The company was doing really well. I thought— I couldn't think of What mistake I'd made, what the problem was or whatever. Why does the CEO even know who I am? Why is he calling on me? Anyway, I go to see him and he asked me, so you guys are taking support calls and you guys seem to be doing pretty well on that. Although in those days we lacked the technology to measure everything about how effective we were being. But he said, looks like you guys are selling software along the way when you're supporting. And I said, yeah, you know, it seemed to me like when we get the customers on the phone, That's the perfect time to begin to expand the conversation and start to talk to them about our value proposition. This was long before, in those days, anybody really thought about doing anything other than just serially doing the job that you're in. And he basically informed me that my little group was, was the number one selling entity within the company. We were selling more software than even the outside salespeople. So this was basically before SDRs were a thing, before there was an inside sales team. We were starting to experiment with some of these concepts, and it was working really well. That was sort of the start for me. That just caused me to understand that not only is the technology and the value proposition and the size and the audaciousness of the problem that you're trying to solve really interesting, but frankly, one of the things that really got me going was figuring out organizationally and from a team perspective, how do we get the right team dynamic to happen to solve that problem in a really creative way, in a really efficient way. From that early-stage opportunity, they didn't let me run that group for long. They then put me in a sales job pretty much immediately. Within my first year, I was actually their number one salesman in the world for them. Being in a selling job, I had no clue that that was going to be something that I would be good at, but then a year into it, it was really a natural fit for me. It just became pretty obvious that that was going to be my entry into sort of technology as a sales and marketing person. And so I was in a sales, individual sales job a couple of different times through a couple of different companies, and then got exposed in a company where I'd done really, really well to a recruiting call from SAP. And in those days, you know, today SAP, all of you guys have heard of SAP, you know Kind of, they've got their West Coast headquarters here in Palo Alto. In those days, it was a very unknown German company. They'd done hardly anything in the US. The documentation was still in German. You know, US customers were buying the product mostly because they were driven by Y2K concerns. They were driven by the year 2000 and all the implications of that. And so I ended up at SAP working directly for Hasso Plattner, which was the founder of SAP. And so one of the really cool things in the formative years before I started my— started to build and, and launch my own companies was in my 20s, I really had— and I would— I tell a lot of entrepreneurs this these days— don't miss the opportunity to work for some established businesses where you can learn some incredible things. You don't need to be there forever. It doesn't take more than 5, 6, 7, 8 years of your time. But those were incredible lessons for me, being at both SAP, working for the founder of SAP, and then coming off of SAP. It was my first company that was a startup called Red Pepper Software. And I was running sales and marketing for that little group. I really had not had the experience yet to be running sales and marketing. And we basically, the company was bought. It was not sold. It was bought because SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle all had an interest in the company. What we were building was really, really interesting, and they all had an interest. And so for me, that was kind of my first foray into being a part of a startup. We were 30 people. 16 months later, we sold the company for $250 million. Again, not so much because we wanted to sell it, but because by the time you've raised money, you have an obligation to your investors. The price at which people were willing to pay money and the return that we could provide our investors was we had a responsibility to say yes to that kind of a transaction. Then I went to work for PeopleSoft, who had ended up winning this kind of auction for Red Pepper. And again, there, in the same way that I worked for the founder of SAP, I got to work for the founder of PeopleSoft and the founder of now Workday, Dave Duffield. So I'm just really fortunate. I've been in the right place at the right time with some really, really smart people who were good enough and kind enough to sort of invest in me. And so some of those early preparation steps were huge before I really started to then kind of build my own businesses, which I've been doing now for the last 15 years or so.