kalvin

Update: we just deployed a fix for this, thanks for reporting! (We recently enabled Cloudflare caching which exposed a pre-existing CSRF issue, now fixed)

We just deployed a fix for this, thanks for reporting! (We recently enabled Cloudflare caching which exposed a pre-existing CSRF issue, now fixed)

We can't see any failed donations around this time, and we've had many successful ones, so we'd love to get more info from you to debug if you're willing. My email is in my profile. Thanks so much for the help!

We have Zoom on our Slack workspace and we'd remove it immediately if this were the case, but it appears to be false. The full list of permissions required by the official Zoom Slack integration is at www.slack.com/apps/A5GE9BMQC-zoom, and doesn't have read access to any channels, private or public, except for "some URLs in messages".

Wow, this is great. Props to the Clerky team. If this had existed in 2015 we would have used it, instead we paid a few thousand extra.

For anyone starting a mission-driven company, there's not really any practical downside to incorporating as a PBC, though it's still relatively new and untested. It's much less effort than becoming a B Corp, which you can choose to do afterward.

I see some confusion on terms--

PBC: legal corporate structure in 25+ states and growing, but still uncommon

B Corp: a more widely known certification from B Lab

You can be a PBC without being a B Corp but all B Corps need to become PBCs by a certain year iirc

(We incorporated Nava PBC as the first, and I think only, government contractor that's also a PBC.)

Another upvote for Garry and Alexis from a YC alum! Garry was such an empathetic, helpful person throughout our startup journey.

We went with a broker based in DC, Joshua Lavine, for health insurance, since that's where we [eventually learned that] we needed to base our plans from. Great experience (well, the DC small business health exchange is a separate sad story.) Health insurance is so complicated and state-specific you really want someone knowledgable.

We went with Captain401 (a YC startup) because we needed a fast turnaround and they had amazing service. Too early to render judgement otherwise. OctaveWealth is another seemingly competent YC 401k startup. If you're not in a rush and don't want to trust a startup with your company's 401k plan (though assets are safe regardless), Vanguard is great, and would have been our backup option.

PSA: Go with Gusto (formerly Zenpayroll) instead for payroll. We signed up for both Zenefits and Zenpayroll several months ago. Zenefits was a nightmare. Zenpayroll has been an absolute delight.

They obviously don't offer identical functionality, but they're getting more similar now so this is a comparison of where they overlap.

Customer support: Both Zenefits and Zenpayroll are very responsive, but Zenefits provides significantly less helpful responses, the kind you'd expect from first-level big-corporation support. Zenpayroll is much better on this front.

Software: Zenefits is clearly not a startup driven by product or engineering. It's fine given it's free, but still has tons of rough edges and bugs everywhere (e.g. it's easy to click submit twice all over the site and create duplicate entries.) I know it's better than the incumbents, but Zenpayroll has a far better product and it really shows even in basic usage-- it's kind of amazing this level of quality now exists for payroll.

Health insurance: If you have an extremely simple situation and are a startup in CA, Zenefits is probably fine. We have about a dozen employees based in DC, SF, and NYC. Instead of telling us to go elsewhere, Zenefits spent two months and dozens of hours/email threads/phone calls making slow "progress", telling me information that ended up being inaccurate, omitting critical information, replying to one out of every three questions, saying repeatedly it would get done, and finally telling me they just couldn't do it.

The Zenefits rep could not have been worse-- if he'd been actively hostile or more clearly ignorant, that would have been better since we would have short-circuited sooner. (Yes, I did complain about the rep... they routed me right back to him on the same call.) Afterward, I called Zenpayroll and their rep was super knowledgeable and set expectations clearly. It was night and day. We also tried talking to Zenefits' partner Ubiquity for a 401k, and had a negative experience there as well.

We've now heard many, many versions of our story above. I wish Zenefits all the best since they've made a lot of startup founders' lives easier (including ours, for new hire onboarding), but boy do they have scaling issues... all I'm saying is, if you have the option of both Zenefits and Gusto for a particular service, 100% go with Gusto.

Garry, thank you for your kindness :)