Having Passion for Your Problems | Zenefits CEO Jay Fulcher

You as a CEO and running multiple companies before, this culture change and coming into Zenefits, has this been a bigger challenge than, let's say, building a product from the start?

Yeah, that's a great question.

There's—

some weeks are different than other weeks, but I would say I knew this was going to be a really big challenge. In many ways, one of the reasons why I kind of wanted to do this, given both my level of energy and enthusiasm and excitement about what I thought the opportunity would be, is I knew it was going to be a big job and it was going to be very taxing. It was going to require all of my facilities and all of my capabilities to go do it. That said, I think I underestimated it. I mean, I think it's even harder than I fully maybe appreciated at the front end. And I knew it was going to be difficult.

Yeah.

One of the reasons why it's even harder is because the stakes are so high. The opportunity for us to build really a phenomenal company with huge value, but also with huge importance. The problems that we're trying to solve for small businesses are ones that really hold them back. One of the things that we say inside the company is, We're really trying to help drive innovation for a segment of the marketplace which is literally the backbone of the U.S. economy. And so when the stakes are that high, then you really feel the pressure to not only perform but to be able to make sure that you can live up to, you know, the aspirational things that we have inside the company around who we want to be and how much we want to make sure that we're performing for our customers. customers. So yeah, it's tough, it's difficult, and I do think that sometimes working at scale with so many customers and with so many employees and with a very, very aggressive broad product roadmap— you know, we, we don't have just 1 or 2 or 3 products, we've, we've got dozens of products— the combination of all of that makes for a really complicated and consuming kind of a dynamic. Again, though, I think it's the stakes that cause everybody who's in the company to be really just driven and excited about the problems that they're solving. The one thing that we do spend a lot of time on is making sure that not only are we executing and solving the problems of today, but I think we're giving a lot of our employees a real perspective around what they may go do from here on out. That combination, I think, is a great bargain because I think I get great talent who are spending a lot of their time and energy and passion on what we're doing today. In return, they're getting some great experience that I'm sure they're going to apply to wherever the road takes them.

Do you think you, as a CEO and building all these companies, is it more of a passion for the problems that you're solving and that that company's solving, or is it you wanting to figure this out because it's a large challenge for yourself? Where does passion versus skill as an operator—

Yeah. I think inevitably there's a fair amount of overlap between those 2 things. I know I am drawn to things where I think I can make a difference. I remember coming in and doing a fair amount of due diligence actually on Zenefits. It pretty quickly became one of those situations where I think I know what to do about that. I know who I could hire here. I feel like I have a good sense of the different things that we needed to do strategically or tactically to put the company in a much, much better place.

Thank you.

But I think the size of the problem is huge. I mean, I think one of the things that you guys do here is talk about how important it is to be bold in your thinking and to be audacious about the size and scale of what you're trying to attack. I think that's huge. I think it's huge. And you don't necessarily at the front end of that process, you know, when you think you've got an idea and you start to do some of the collaboration that's required to to refine that idea a little bit. Sometimes, and at least this has happened for me a couple of times, you end up sort of at a different place once you work through that process than where you originally had thought you might be. But that's the whole point. I think that journey is a really important step. And it's really rare when what you started out to do is actually where you end up. in terms of the kind of business that you're building and what you think your goal and aspiration is. I would just say that the size and scale of the problem is probably the overarching thing that for me has driven me the last 20 years. I want to be involved. I've been involved in everything from media and basically kind of the way the new television industry works, which for me was a really cool right turn out of before that, you know, working on big enterprise software problems, trying to deal with whether it was HR or financials or manufacturing or supply chain, to working in sort of some— one business that's kind of focused on where higher education is going and just how different, you know, the educational challenges today because of technology. than kind of where it's been the last few decades. So all of those things were pretty different. And for me, in my career, I chose that on purpose because I was interested in all those different areas and I didn't necessarily want to kind of repeat one experience by kind of staying in that same swim lane. And it's not easy. It's not the easy path because there's a lot to learn. By the same token, there's so much about company building that I found to be consistent from one idea to the next. There's probably half my skill set that's very consistent across all those things. Then the other part that's really intellectually stimulating is every single one of those companies, every single one of those industries has pretty unique problems. That's really cool. It's really fun to learn all about those industries.