I don't understand how he wasn't charged criminally for that.

> And the new CEO—the old COO—sent out a memo that sex in the staircases and alcohol in the office are not OK.

This was a deciding factor for a lot of people choosing not to work at Zenefits.

I know I wouldn't want to work somewhere that frowned upon getting drunk at the office and having sex with my co-workers in the office stairwells.

  I know I wouldn't want to work somewhere that frowned upon 
  getting drunk at the office and having sex with my co-
  workers in the office stairwells.

Friends with Zenefits: Two co-workers who have a sexual relationship in the office without being emotionally involved or committed to each other. The sexual encounters only occur at the office during working hours.

early investors who accused the old CEO of turning Zenefits into a criminal enterprise for using unlicensed brokers to sell insurance.

I guess they somewhat misinterpreted the Y-Combinator preference for entrepreneurs who are a "little bit naughty."

OTOH, most of these training videos exist for stupid reasons. They don't make brokers any better at navigating ethical dilemmas -- as the content is usually 100% obvious -- nor make them any more predisposed to be ethical. And they training videos did that, and they do actually watch them, said brokers don't remember any of it two days later.

The training, and its mandate, basically exist to protect someone else from liability: "see, we told them you can't lie to potential customers, not our problem!" And that, in turn, probably exists only because we tolerated that defense:

"Yeah, I [did obviously unethical practice] ... but no one never told me I couldn't!"

So we all go through the motions of watching a mandatory training video that tells us nothing we didn't already know and won't remember anyway.

The result was their brokers ended up being very ignorant of insurance products and practice.

Ethics is a small portion of the requirements. It's mostly basic stuff on what insurance is.

Zenefits fell down there as well--they had many gaps in their producer licensing. They've now open sourced a compliance app to track this. https://www.zenefits.com/blog/zenefits-now-leader-licensing-...

(Most insurance agencies get by with a spreadsheet for this...)

They also list all their licenses here

https://www.zenefits.com/licenses/

I'm looking at the headlines and thinking whether the clock has begun ticking.

There may be somewhere between 250 and 300 total billion dollar "unicorns" at this point. So far as I've seen the last two years, the Zenefits companies are still rare.

The money parade doesn't end until the Fed pulls the plug on hyper low interest rates. It started there and it ends there, as it did the prior two easy money periods of time (late 1990s and mid 2000s). Until then, the trillions in cash sloshing around will keep seeking better returns via various forms of higher risk speculation.