ZenPayroll改名为Gusto，向福利业务拓展，追Zenefits 的节奏？
（HRTechChina编辑部 9月24日报道）
ZenPayroll正式改名为Gusto。
人工处理工资单很容易犯错，这一直以来都是企业者的心头痛，ZenPayroll这家创业公司要帮业主做好这一业务。然而ZenPayroll突然宣布其将改名，并把其业务向福利方向拓展。
首席执行官乔希 · 里维斯透露到，我们早就意识到会改名，在公司发展到第三个月的时候我们就知道会这么做。
里维斯告诉BI团队选择 ZenPayroll 作为其初始名称的来由：眼看就只有二天我们产品要在 [Y Combinator] 演示了，在这之前我们需要打印t 恤（所以就取了这么个名字并且决定以后要改？！）。
不过新名称， 里维斯说，我们也想了好久，最后受服务对象启发而起了这个名字。
公司总部位于 San Francisco，目前业务包括提供一个基于云计算的系统来自动执行税款计算和支付薪金。其基于 web 的服务已经在超过 20,000 的小型企业得到使用。
当它还没改名（还是叫 ZenPayroll ）的时候，公司的目标是帮助 600 万美国的小企业— — 像花店、 教堂和沙龙— — 解决工资条的问题 ，要知道在过去这些机构的工资条通常是由人工完成。
但在上周四公司还宣布，它将推出健康福利和工人赔偿等企业服务，这样雇主和雇员可以使用他们的一站式系统满足他们基于补偿的一切需求。“回看 2012 年我们种子轮融资文件，你会发现我们从一开始就打算这么做，包括福利这一内容，现在我很兴奋把这一计划与公众分享。”
在Gusto的平台上，员工可以访问和管理他们的福利和工资信息。基于已有企业的工资数据里, 夫斯说，它们可以完美实现与福利的无缝对接。
Gusto和 Zenefits在过去曾密切合作过，不过现在这一公告似乎证实了早些时候两家公司成为对手的报告。早在本周前BuzzFeed曾报道Zenefits（一家估值45亿美元的福利管理公司）正开发新系统用于处理工资条，而现在，Gusto打算闯入福利这一领域。
今年早些时候公司宣布了 其6000 万美元 B轮融资（此轮融资由谷歌资本领投），而今估值已达5亿6千万美元。公司每年要处理数十亿美元的工资单，业务遍及美国各大州。公司现有员工约 250 人，和里夫斯说，未来几个月我们还会招募300员工。Gusto除了在 San Francisco 有个办公室外，还在丹佛市另开设了一间办公室。
早期2000 万美元A轮融资的投资方包括支付公司Stripe，Evernote（印象笔记），Eventbrite（在线活动策划服务平台），Instagram （图片社交网络）和 WordPress 的首席执行官，阿什顿 · 库彻、 贾里德 · 莱托以及PayPal, Nest, Mint, Twitter, and Reddit等科技公司创始人均参与此次投资。
（图片来源Inc）
以下为Gusto创始人关于ZenPayroll改名的一封邮件：
Today is a big day for the whole ZenPayroll community.
ZenPayroll is now Gusto.
When we founded the company in 2011, our core belief was that people are the most important part of every business. Four years later, we believe it even more strongly, as we’ve grown to serve tens of thousands of businesses across all 50 states.
We are on a mission to help businesses everywhere put employees first. Today, we’re taking another step towards accomplishing this mission by launching health benefits and workers’ compensation services that make employers’ lives easier, and enable employees to do the best work of their lives.
Our new name Gusto was inspired by our customers and their teams who show courage and passion in the work they do every day. When you work on something you care about, with people you enjoy spending time with, it’s an amazing feeling. That energy. That oomph. That’s Gusto. We believe everyone has the potential to feel this way at work.
HEALTH BENEFITS AND WORKERS’ COMPENSATION
Today, we are also launching two incredible new services: health benefits and workers’ comp. These services are fully integrated with payroll, which removes a tremendous amount of unnecessary manual effort for business owners. Most importantly, both employers and employees can now onboard and manage all forms of compensation in one modern product.
This is just the beginning. We exist to serve our customers. Helping them build great businesses and put their employees first is what motivates us every day. In the coming months and years, we’ll continue to add exciting ways to make employers’ and employees’ lives better. Stay tuned.
Please reach out if you have any questions for us. We’d love to hear from you.
Josh, Tomer and Eddie
Co-founders of Gusto
Good Email Club帮你从收件箱中找出传递“正能量”的邮件
我承认，有时一封内容粗鲁、刻薄的电子邮件会毁掉我一早上的心情，特别是它是我醒来第一眼看到的东西时。
看起来， 简卡尔·比森（JeanCarl Bisson，IBM 的技术布道者）和 艾达什·乌普拉（Adarsh Uppula，人才招聘创业公司 Gogohire 的联合创始人）也曾经遇到过这个问题。正因为如此，他们在本周末的 TechCrunch Disrupt 黑客马拉松上打造了一项称为“Good Email Club”的服务。
比森和乌普拉将这项服务与 Microsoft Outlook 和 IBM Watson 进行了整合——Good Email Club 利用 Watson 技术来分析用户 Outlook 电子邮件中透露的情绪。接着，它会确认传递“正能量”的电子邮件，创建一个文字转语音的阅读列表。
换言之，一觉醒来，你会听到收件箱中态度最积极的消息，以此作为一天的开始。我猜你可能仍然想看到一些让人不太爽的电子邮件，但乌普拉称这种邮件的数量会减少，毕竟你需要以积极的心态开始一天的工作。
尽管 Good Email Club 是专门为 Outlook 帐号开发的，但比森也表示该应用可能会支持任何一家电子邮件服务提供商。
若想实现这一目标，比森和乌普拉就必须继续从事这个项目的开发。他们二人表示，他们对任何可能性都持开放的态度，或至少自己会试用 Good Email Club——虽然该应用的商业前景有限。
“我也不清楚会有多少人付费使用。”乌普拉说。
这并不是比森与乌普拉合作的第一个项目。他们二人已经在黑客马拉松比赛上多次相遇——比森估计他已经参加了 100 多个这样的比赛。比森承认，将 24 小时的辛勤工作浓缩为 1 分钟的展示，这个过程确实很难，但他也表示，“我们总是会取得一些成绩，然后努力学会新东西。”
Good Email Club Reads You The Positive Emails In Your Inbox
I’ll admit it: Sometimes a mean or pushy email can ruin my whole morning, especially if it’s the very first thing I see.
It seems like JeanCarl Bisson (a technical evangelist for IBM) and Adarsh Uppula (co-founder at hiring startup Gogohire) have had this problem, too. That’s why they built a service called Good Email Club at this weekend’s TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon.
Bisson and Uppula integrated the service with Microsoft Outlook and IBM Watson — Good Email Club uses Watson to analyze the sentiment of your Outlook emails. It then identifies the positive emails and creates a list for reading via text-to-speech.
In other words, imagine starting your day off right by listening to the best messages in your inbox as you drive to work. I suppose you’ll still know that there are probably less pleasant emails waiting for you, but Uppula said they’ll hold less sway because you started positively.
And while this was built for Outlook accounts, Bisson said this could potentially work with any email provider.
For that to happen, Bisson and Uppula would have to keep working on the project. They said they’re open to the possibility, or at least to trying Good Email Club out for themselves — though the commercial prospects might be limited.
“I’m not sure how many people would be paying for it,” Uppula said.
This isn’t the pair’s first project, either. They actually met through hackathons, and Bisson estimated that he’s been to more than 100 of them. Bisson admitted that boiling down 24 hours of work into a one-minute pitch can be tough, but he added, “We always walk away with something and try to learn something new.”
来源：TC
Jobot：通过微信帮你找工作微信机器人在中国有着巨大的市场。微软在中国最受欢迎的消息应用上运营的聊天机器人就有 2000 万个粉丝—— 而且它还是被狂热崇拜的对象 ——这表明消息聊天的对象不只是局限于你的朋友。
那何不如就来这里找工作或是进行面试技巧练习呢？这正是 Jobot 的目的所在——这一项目诞生于本周末的 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon。
该服务基于微信平台，后者是一个广受欢迎的中国消息应用，拥有着超过 5 亿的月度用户。Jobot 从本质上讲是一个聊天机器人，它会通过提问来评估出最适合用户的公司。该服务使用 IBM Watson 系统，会为每个用户制定个性化的分析模式，比如文化适应性和工作氛围。这些收集自用户的信息可以帮助他们找到相匹配的未来雇主。
Jobot 不仅帮助求职者寻找潜在雇主，它还会帮助他们练习回答那些他们在招聘环节中可能会被问到的问题。
在每个回答的基础上，Jobot 会使用一个自动化的系统来管理问题，不过该服务的一名开发人员大卫·柯里尔（David Collier）表示，人们可以随时轻松插入任何一个环节。如果程式化问题问完了，而招聘人员还想要更多的详细信息，这会对应聘者有帮助。同样地，柯里尔告诉我们，由于公司本身也可能需要寻找特定类型的求职者，比如一些像实习生这样的初级职位，Jobot 也会非常适合他们。
现在，该服务还在不断完善中——首先，它还不是一款官方认证的机器人。此外，柯里尔还表示，他们计划对分析进行调整，以便让企业能够使用 Jobot 进行预先筛选。他们很有可能还会开发一个管理面板，病尝试与 Glassdoo 和领英进行集成。
柯里尔此前已经为微信开发了一个英语学习应用，并且还与其他消息应用进行合作，他表示，“微信上有 11 亿的用户，凭这一点我们可以有把握地说，伟大的事情即将发生。人们已经把消息聊天融入到日常生活——我们打算将这个转化为资本。”
Jobot Helps You Get Hired Using WeChat’s Messaging App
WeChat bots are huge in China. The machine-powered being that Microsoft runs on China’s most popular messaging app has 20 million followers alone — and it is a cult hero — which shows that messaging isn’t just about chatting to your friends.
Why not use it to find a job or practice your interview technique? That’s what Jobot, a creation from this weekend’s TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, aims to do.
The service uses WeChat, the hugely popular Chinese messaging app with over half a billion monthly users. It’s essentially a chatbot that asses the best kind of company a user should work for using questions, powered by IBM Watson, to develop personality insights like culture fit and sentiment, for each user. The idea is that information gleaned from users can help them find the right cultural match in a future employer.
Not only does it let job finders seek out potential employers, but also helps them practice responses to the kinds of questions that they’ll be asked during the recruitment process.
Jobot uses an automated system to manage questions based on each answer, but David Collier, one of the brains behind the service, said that a human could easily step into the process at any point. That might be useful once the formulaic questions are out of the way and a recruiter wants more specific information. Likewise, Collier told TechCrunch that companies themselves could get involved in the project to seek out specific types of hires, entry-level positions like interns might be best suited.
Right now, the service is a work in progress — for one thing it isn’t an official bot. Aside from fixing that, Collier said there are plans to tweak the analytics to give companies the option to use Jobot for prescreening purposes. An admin dashboard and potential integrations with Glassdoor and LinkedIn are also on the cards.
“With 1.1 billion users on WeChat, we can safely say there are great things in store. People already have chat integrated into their daily lives — we plan to capitalize on that,” Collier, who has an English learning app for WeChat and works with other messaging apps, said.
硅谷
2015年09月21日
硅谷
招聘网站 Hired 有了新掌门
Hired 管理层近期做了一些调整：公司总裁梅胡尔·帕特尔（Mehul Patel）已被晋升为首席执行官，而前任首席执行官、创始人马特·米基维兹（Matt Mickiewicz）则出任首席产品官。
帕特尔曾供职于 Lyft、甲骨文、CNET 和 Kaggle 等公司，两年前加盟 Hired。帕特尔告诉我，这其实并不是像一些人所认为的那种大规模调整。实际上，他透露管理层更迭计划已酝酿了很久，甚至在正式宣布之前，他本人就已承担了越来越多的管理责任。
帕特尔说：“这并不是一次重大调整。”那为什么要选在此时做出这种调整呢？他补充说，“种种迹象表明，这种模式是成功的，我们开发出了适销对路的产品。我们的业务增长正在提速，所以更换首席执行官似乎也是一个不错的时机。”
帕特尔其实在今年 7 月份便已成为 Hired 的首席执行官，只不过他对自己的晋升相对低调（我认为，对于任何一个之前看到过他 LinkedIn 主页 的人来说，他们其实已经知道帕特尔获得晋升。）
Hired 最近还任命了该公司历史上首位首席营销官——朱尼·哈姆（Juney Ham），此人是投资顾问创业公司 Upside 的联合创始人。
在业务增长方面，帕特尔表示 Hired 自 2012 年创建以来，年营收始终以两倍的同比速度增长，预计明年的营收将达到 1 亿美元。Hired 已经在 9 座城市投入全面运营，还在另外 4 座城市进行试运营。Hired 刚刚签了一份租赁合同，在旧金山的 Mid-Market 区租用了 2.5 万平方英尺的办公地。
Hired 的客户包括 Facebook、Twitch 和 Uber 等公司。此外，据帕特尔估计，Hired 工程团队 95%的人员都是由该公司自己招来的，作为一家以人才招聘为主的创业公司，这也是自然而然的事情。
Hired 表示，它会结合计算机算法和人为因素，以严格的程序对求职者进行筛选，所以雇主根本不必一份份地仔细查看厚厚几摞简历。接着，招聘企业会给求职者发来一封信，里面对他们将要获得的待遇做出细致描述，如果他们最终接受了这份工作，还将从 Hired 获得 2000 美元的奖励。
也许最为重要的是，求职者不用与试图填补某项岗位空白的招聘企业直接打交道，而是要与 Hired 人才顾问合作，他们会基于求职者的具体要求做出职业推荐。
Hired 最初专注于技术岗位，后来将业务范围扩大到销售领域。帕特尔表示，最终 Hired 可以被用于“营销人员、人力资源师、会计以及建筑师等——所有知识型员工应该都可以通过这种方式找到工作。”
Recruiting Startup Hired Has A New CEO
There’s been a bit of a leadership shuffle at Hired: President Mehul Patel has been promoted to CEO, while the previous CEO, founder Matt Mickiewicz, has become chief product officer.
Patel (who has also worked at Lyft, Oracle, CNET and Kaggle, and who joined Hired two years ago), told me this isn’t as big a deal as you might think. In fact, he said there was a longtime transition plan in place, and even before the official switch, he’d been taking on more and more business responsibilities.
“It’s not a dramatic change,” he said. So why make the change now?
“All the signs were this model is working and we have product market fit. The growth rate of the business is increasing, so it seemed like a good time to have the CEO transition.”
Patel actually became CEO back in July, but the company has been relatively quiet about it (though I guess the promotion was apparent to anyone who looked at his LinkedIn page).
The company recently hired its first CMO, too — Juney Ham, co-founder and investment advisor of startup Upside.
On the growth front, Patel said Hired’s revenue has been tripling year-over-year since it was founded in 2012 and is projected to reach a $100 million annualized run rate next year. The service is fully launched in nine cities and in beta testing in another four. And the company it just signed a lease on a 25,000 square foot office in San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood.
Companies that have used Hired include Facebook, Twitch and Uber. Plus, naturally, Hired itself — Patel estimated that about 95 percent of the engineering team came in through the Hired service.
Hired says it screens job candidates through a rigorous process combining algorithms and human curation, so employers don’t need to sift through a giant pile of résumés. Candidates are then wooed by the companies with “reverse cover letters,” they get transparency into compensation and they receive a $2,000 bonus from Hired if they accept a job.
The service was initially focused on tech roles, but it has since expanded to sales jobs. Ultimately, Patel said Hired could be used “for marketers, for human resources, for accounts for architects — all knowledge workers should be able to find a job this way.”
来源：techcrunch
硅谷
2015年09月20日
硅谷
就业技能培训平台LearnUp获得A轮800万美金融资
LearnUp成立于2011年，总部设立于旧金山。
LearnUp主要业务为就业技能培训和职业指导，并且LearnUp会为用户联系一些大公司帮助他们找到工作。
LearnUp此次获得A轮800万美金融资。此轮融资由New Enterprise Associates 和 Shasta Ventures领投，其他投资方为Greylock Partners、Floodgate和 High Line Venture Partners。
硅谷
2015年09月18日
硅谷
企业在线问答公司AnswerDash（Qazzow）获得种子轮290万美金融资AnswerDash成立于2012年，总部位于美国西雅图。
AnswerDash通过技术嵌入功能答案帮助企业更好地回答消费者的问题，从而帮助企业削减相应的用户支持开支，同时保持用户不流失。
本轮融资由Voyager Capital 领投，Arnold Venture Group、Summit Capital、The W Fund、WRF Capital跟投。
UW spinout AnswerDash raises $2.9M to support growth of online contextual help platform
What started as an idea inside the Information School at the University of Washington is now a full-fledged business that’s raising cash from venture capital firms.
UW-spinout AnswerDash today announced a $2.9 million seed investment round led by Voyager Capital, with participation from existing investors WRF Capital, Summit Capital, the W Fund, and Arnold Venture Group.
AnswerDash, formerly known as Qazzow, wants to fundamentally change how online businesses answer questions that customers might have.
Rather than forcing people to comb through an FAQ or use a written-based solution like email or live chat, AnswerDash’s technology embeds answers within a website’s functionality.
The company helps its clients offer customers instant, contextual answers to a question they may have while browsing a given web page on desktop or mobile. When a user clicks on something they have a question about — this could be an image, link, header, etc. — AnswerDash employs a machine learning search process to retrieve the most relevant questions and answers.
The idea is to reduce the amount of time customers search for answers online, ultimately helping businesses improve the consumer experience while retaining revenue that previously could have been lost due to user frustration.
“By enabling users to quickly and easily find their own answers to commonly asked questions, AnswerDash prevents costly and repetitive help requests that would otherwise arrive via e-mail, phone or live chat,” explained CEO Bill Colleran. “AnswerDash also reduces the likelihood that online shoppers will abandon their shopping activity because they fail to receive answers to their questions simply and intuitively.”
Colleran, a former longtime CEO of Impinj, joined AnswerDash in June when he replaced co-founder Jake Wobbrock, who started AnswerDash back in 2012 with fellow UW professor Andrew Ko and their Ph.D student, Parmit Chilana.
AnswerDash co-founders Jake Wobbrock and Andrew Ko.Wobbrock and Ko have held the CEO and CTO roles, respectively, at AnswerDash for the past three years —Chilana went on to become a professor at the University of Waterloo — but will return to their careers in academia this fall.
Wobbrock told GeekWire that “this was always a planned transition.” The co-founders will remain involved with AnswerDash in an advisory capacity, while Wobbrock will serve as a board observer.
“Our goal as academic co-founders was to take the technology we created out into the world,” he said. “We wanted to get the startup going, get it funded, build a great launch team, refine our product, and get customers and value proof-points. Once we had achieved this, we knew that the best people to take the company to the next level would be seasoned industry executives with years of experience building companies and taking products to market.”
The leadership baton is now passed to Colleran, who previously spent 14 years leading RFID technology-maker Impinj, and VP of Engineering Kevin Knoepp, who joined the team in January after spending more than two decades as a back-end technology executive.
“AnswerDash will continue its evolutionary arc from a small, research-based product team to a vibrant, innovative and fast-growing SaaS company,” noted Colleran.
Colleran said that the company has “matured dramatically” since starting three years ago. Now that the startup has established product-market fit — it has “dozens of customers” like Chef, PetHub, and PipelineDeals — it will use the fresh cash to expand its sales and marketing efforts while continuing to improve the AnswerDash platform.
Colleran has lofty ambitions for AnswerDash, which makes money with a tiered subscription model based on the amount of usage its tool gets and also produces unique analytics to clients that can provide insight into what types of questions customers are asking while browsing through a given website.
“AnswerDash’s service enables more efficient, succinct and clear communication over the web and on mobile devices, so over time our market will grow to include almost every website and mobile app,” he said. “That’s a huge opportunity.”
Total funding for the 13-person company is now $5.3 million.
来源：GeekWire
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