Sequoia One review: the PEO for startups that forgot to update its website

A PEO aimed at the venture-backed company

Sequoia One is a co-employment arrangement, the same structure as TriNet or Insperity, sold to a narrower audience: startups with investors, a board and a plan to hire quickly. That audience has specific needs. Founders want a benefits package that looks credible in a recruiting conversation, a payroll system that will not break at forty employees, and someone else to deal with the paperwork.

It delivers those things. What it does not deliver is transparency. Sequoia One sells a bundle and quotes a bundle. Underneath the bundle is a health plan that belongs to the arrangement, a service fee priced on your headcount and payroll, and a workers' compensation program you did not buy separately. None of that is unusual. All of it is invisible until you ask for the split.

One clarification worth making, because it comes up in every conversation: Sequoia One is part of Sequoia Consulting Group, the HR and benefits firm. It is not Sequoia Capital, the venture fund. Startups hear the name from an investor and assume a relationship that does not exist. The PEO has to earn its renewal like anyone else.

There is no price, and there is no range

Across the PEO market, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce puts fees at 2% to 12% of monthly payroll, or roughly $50 to $250 per employee per month. Sequoia One sits somewhere in that band. Which part of it, nobody will say until a salesperson has your census.

That is the same story as every other PEO, so why does it matter more here? Because Sequoia One's customers are early-stage companies with a runway and a burn number. A founder at 25 employees with eighteen months of cash needs to model personnel cost eighteen months out. A fee that can land anywhere between 2% and 12% of payroll makes that model useless. The founder ends up budgeting the high end and paying for caution.

The health plan is the arrangement's, not yours

This is the same objection I make to every PEO, and it applies here. In a co-employment arrangement you are not the plan sponsor. You choose a tier from the menu, set a contribution, and the plan behind it belongs to the PEO. You cannot take the plan document to three carriers and ask for a comparison, because you are not the party they are pricing.

For a young, healthy startup team, that is usually fine in year one. Then someone gets diagnosed, or the team ages five years in three, or a hire needs a specialist network that the arrangement does not offer in their county. At that point the founder discovers that the flexibility they assumed they had was never in the contract.

• Ask for the summary of benefits and the full plan document. Compare the deductible, coinsurance and out-of-pocket maximum against KFF's 2025 averages of $9,325 single and $26,993 family.
• Ask which networks are available in every county where you have employees, not just your headquarters.
• Ask what the renewal methodology is. If your group's claims do not drive your renewal, you are priced inside a book you cannot influence.
• Ask whether you can leave the health plan and keep payroll. Sometimes you can, and it is the cheapest way out.

The startup pitch is a recruiting pitch

Sequoia One markets itself as benefits infrastructure for companies that need to look established. That is a real need. A twenty-person startup competing for engineers against a public company needs a benefits page that does not embarrass it in an offer letter.

But a benefits page is a marketing surface, and it is worth asking what is behind it. A PEO can make a thin plan look complete because the brochure is well designed. The candidate reads the deductible, not the network breadth, and nobody finds out about the gap until the first claim.

The deeper cost is that the bundle becomes permanent. A startup that had ten people when it signed is at sixty people two years later, paying a percentage of a payroll that has grown six times, for the same administrative work it had at ten. Nothing about the service scaled with the bill. The invoice did.

There is a specific moment this hurts. It is the Series A, when the founder is negotiating a headcount plan with a board and every dollar of gross margin is being scrutinized. The PEO fee shows up as a personnel cost line that grows with every hire the plan calls for, and nobody in the room can explain why administration for sixty people costs six times what it cost for ten. The answer is that it does not. The fee is simply indexed to the thing that grew.

Founders are usually good at spotting this in every other vendor. Nobody pays their cloud provider a percentage of revenue. Nobody pays their law firm a percentage of the round. Benefits administration is the one line item in the budget priced that way, and it is the one line item nobody renegotiates because it sits inside a contract most founders never reread.

Leaving Sequoia One

The exit is the same project as any PEO. Read the agreement for the notice window and the plan-year date. Line up replacement coverage before you notify. Bind your own workers' compensation policy. Re-register for payroll taxes in every state.

1. Read the notice clause today Notice periods are tied to the plan year. Missing the window by a week can cost a full year of the fee you were trying to escape.
2. Get a group quote on your actual census You need a start date and a rate table before you give notice, not after.
3. Ask for the claims history Request the experience data for your group. It is your data and you will want it when you leave.
4. Export payroll records Payroll history, employee records and tax filings. Getting them after the account closes is slower than getting them before.

For a startup, the exit has one extra wrinkle: it tends to land during a hiring or fundraising period, when nobody has time. Do it in a quiet quarter. The exit is a project. The fee is a monthly tax on growth.

What to ask on a Sequoia One call

• What is the service fee per employee per month, and what percentage of payroll does that equal today?
• What will that fee be at 60 employees and at 120, holding the plan constant?
• What is the health coverage cost alone, by tier, on my census?
• Which networks are available in each county where we have staff?
• What was the average renewal increase for clients my size last year?
• What is the notice window, and what date does it attach to?
• If we raise a round and hire thirty people, what changes in the fee?

Who Sequoia One fits, and who should buy the plan alone

The honest summary: Sequoia One is a good HR department for a startup that does not have one. It is an expensive way to buy health insurance for a startup that does.