I grew up in India. Joined D.E Shaw and worked in India for 7 years. Towards the end, I had a good gig going.
“Soon I realized, if you can solve problems and you have access to easy capital, you can do everything. So I decided to move to Bay Area.”
My friend was a Product Manager at Sigfig. He was bugging me a lot to talk to them so I did that. I just liked them so decided to join Sigfig.
However, because of the broken immigration in US I had to first go to Singapore for 9 months, wait for H1b to kick in and then join SigFig.
However, in couple of years Sigfig’s cofounder had a disagreement. So Parker (Co-founder, CEO Zenefits) quit. At Sigfig, Parker had the responsibility to handle HR stuff among other things.
Parker deeply resented 2-3 hrs he had to spend doing HR stuff at Sigfig. That was the genesis of Zenefits.
Parker asked me if I will be his co-founder. I knew it was an amazing idea and would make lot of money. But I needed a work visa to join him. So Zenefits had to hire me as a DBA because it was the cheapest H1B!
Just under 3 years since founding, today Zenefits has 20M+$ in revenue and lots of happy customers. Its been quite a journey.
I am happy to answer questions!