Zenefits taps Yammer founder David Sacks for COO position

Zenefits, a company that offers cloud management of human resources, announced on Wednesday that David Sacks, founder and former CEO of Yammer, will be its new COO.
Sacks has been involved in startups and the tech industry since the 1990s, when he joined PayPal as its COO. More recently, Microsoft purchased his company Yammer in 2012 for $1.2 billion and he has been spending much of his time investing in a wide variety of tech companies, including Facebook and Uber.
Read: San Francisco-based Zenefits expands to Scottsdale, bringing 1,300 jobs
“David is widely acknowledged as one of the best leaders and managers in tech,” said Zenefits CEO and co-founder Parker Conrad. “As the founding CEO of Yammer, he was one of the first people in Silicon Valley to adopt the now conventional wisdom that enterprise software could be built with consumer-grade simplicity and user experience.”
The San Francisco-based Zenefits opened an office in the heart of Old Town Scottsdale this November, where it plans to bring in more than 1,300 employers. The office space is located in the Galleria Corporate Center, which also houses Yelp and Weebly.
Related: Video: Galleria tech companies bring unique flavor to Old Town Scottsdale
“I have never seen a software-as-a-service company grow revenue this fast,” David Sacks said. “By comparison, it took Yammer three years to achieve what Zenefits has done in one. Zenefits has reset all the benchmarks.”
Zenefits works to streamline and automate many of the time-consuming aspects of human resources management, such as benefits, health insurance and payroll. The service is offered for free to users and makes money by collecting fees from the third-party vendors that it connects.
Photo courtesy of Robert Scoble via Flickr.