Martin Babinec and the million-mile question

Martin Babinec moved his family home in 1999 and gave himself a fairly reasonable commuting plan. For eighteen to twenty-four months, he would travel between Little Falls, New York, and the California company he had founded. Then someone else would take over. The commute lasted ten years. The frequent-flyer account did rather better than the original schedule.

He and his wife, Krista, wanted their three children to grow up near family. TriNet, meanwhile, was approaching an initial public offering in the middle of the dot-com boom. Moving east put the household where they wanted it. Keeping the business moving would require considerably more travel than either had bargained for.

When the bubble broke, the planned offering collapsed too. Babinec kept crossing the country as the company rebuilt. He later put his flying at more than a million miles. The journey gave him a prolonged view of two places with talented people and very different prospects for keeping them.

In Silicon Valley, opportunity seemed to draw newcomers into its orbit. Around his home in the Mohawk Valley, young people often went elsewhere to find it. He began asking how much of his own success belonged to the place where he had happened to start.

A business with an unglamorous specialty

Babinec’s working life began far from the usual startup origin scene. He earned an associate degree in business administration at Herkimer County Community College in 1975, followed by a bachelor’s degree at Shippensburg University. Then came human resources work for Navy Exchanges, the international retailer serving Navy communities.

Assignments took him overseas, including Japan and Italy. Managing people across different locations gave him repeated chances to revise his approach. By his own account, each new posting had the considerable advantage that his new colleagues had not witnessed his old mistakes. There are more expensive ways to acquire a management education.

He founded TriNet in 1988. Its proposition was practical: smaller businesses could turn to an outside organization for payroll, benefits administration, and human resources support. These responsibilities existed whether a founder found them interesting or not. A company could have an inventive product and still need somebody to make payroll work.

Selling the proposition took effort. In the late 1980s, HR outsourcing required an explanation before it could earn a sale. Babinec initially imagined a small business. But the economics required scale, and an early attempt to serve small companies broadly failed to give TriNet a secure foothold.

Within roughly eighteen months, money was running out. The company narrowed its attention to emerging technology businesses, whose leaders were more willing to try an unfamiliar service. Angel investors provided $50,000. Finding a particular customer, rather than offering the service to everyone with employees, helped keep the company alive.

The celebration that had to wait

TriNet’s first IPO filing came on March 2, 2000. By the time its roadshow arrived that October, the market had changed. The offering was abandoned. A listing that had looked like the next step became a reminder that a business can finish its preparations and still discover that the door has closed.

Fourteen years later, Babinec was receiving congratulations before the next offering had been priced. He remembered the previous attempt too clearly to join in immediately. Friends saw an approaching celebration. He could still see the last occasion when the preparations had led somewhere else.

This time, the shares reached the exchange. TriNet began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on March 27, 2014, under TNET. The offer comprised 15 million shares at $16 each. Those figures give the event its financial dimensions. The interval between the two attempts gives it its human ones.

By then, Babinec had already handed over the chief executive’s job. Burton Goldfield succeeded him in 2008. The founder stayed on the board until 2022. A photograph of a group applauding at the exchange suits that history: the company had reached the occasion through many people’s work and more than one period of leadership.

A founder learns to leave the room

Babinec has an unusually tidy description of what he wanted to learn as a manager: make himself dispensable. In his Navy Exchanges years, he began looking for capable colleagues who brought skills he lacked. Once responsibilities and expectations were clear, he wanted decisions to happen without waiting for him.

“I learned to work myself out of a job.”

Martin Babinec, on his leadership philosophy

That idea followed him into TriNet. It required shared values, accountability, and processes that could push decisions toward the people equipped to make them. The test was whether the organization worked smoothly when he was absent. For a person with a cross-country commute, this was a particularly useful definition of progress.

Another influence was Jack Stack, associated with the Great Game of Business and open-book management. Babinec met him through an entrepreneur education gathering at MIT. Sharing financial information and teaching employees to understand it offered a way for the whole team to participate in running the business.

His advice to founders also includes learning how to sell, delivering on commitments, and putting the company’s interests ahead of personal position. When he spoke at the University of Rochester in 2019, these habits occupied his list of startup lessons. They sound ordinary enough to be overlooked. Keeping them through a company’s difficult years is a less ordinary assignment.

Making introductions into infrastructure

In 2010, Babinec founded Upstate Venture Connect. The nonprofit gave his question about geography a practical outlet: connect entrepreneurs with people who could help them build companies in the region. Nasir Ali became a co-founder. The work included experienced founders, prospective investors, and people whose useful knowledge might otherwise remain in separate circles.

Babinec laid out three priorities: increase encounters between people who should know one another, encourage more seed investment, and enlist experienced entrepreneurs to lead community activities. Each responds to a different kind of isolation. A founder can lack a customer introduction, an early cheque, or simply someone who has faced the same decision.

He calls this relationship capital. His writing warns against pursuing only people who appear able to invest. An adviser, a peer, or a referral may lead to the relationship that matters later. The first conversation rarely comes with a label announcing its eventual significance. A roomful of people would be easier to navigate if it did.

His method involves giving something useful before asking, crossing familiar institutional boundaries, and keeping track of follow-ups. There is administrative work beneath the sociability. A good introduction needs someone who remembers enough about two people to see why they might benefit from meeting.

His own investments sit alongside that community work. UpVentures Capital backs early companies; StartFast brings another route into the startup network. His book, More Good Jobs, published in October 2020, puts the larger argument into print: communities can help talented people establish the relationships that make building locally more plausible.

Eight days in the car

For a more personal account of what Babinec values, consider a different journey across America. In 2017, he and his son Jared drove a car from the San Francisco Bay Area to Little Falls. Their route, with diversions, covered about 3,300 miles over eight days. It was Babinec’s ninth cross-country road trip.

Jared had been six when the family moved east in an RV in 1999. Now father and adult son could compare observations without organizing the conversation around the next appointment. They visited Stack along the way, bringing a mentor from Babinec’s business life into a family journey.

He wrote appreciatively about the unhurried time together. The car needed transporting, but the errand was only part of the appeal. After years of travel dictated by work, here was a crossing whose value increased when it took a little longer. The same miles could serve a rather different purpose.

A new circle in the Adirondacks

Babinec also took his interest in regional opportunity into an unsuccessful independent congressional campaign in 2016. He subsequently founded Unite NY, pursuing changes to democratic processes. Through Entrepreneurs Across Borders and the UpMobility Foundation, his activities extend into entrepreneurship support and philanthropy beyond any single company.

The community work continues to find new settings. In September 2026, he described an August gathering of twenty people at Bay Pond Park, exploring how UVC might help entrepreneurs across the Adirondacks. The distances between small towns presented an immediate difficulty for an approach that depends on people meeting often enough to build trust.

On October 26, he is scheduled for a Buffalo fireside conversation moderated by Dan Magnuszewski, with mentor office hours also on the program. It is a concrete expression of the work: a conversation, a possible introduction, some time set aside for another founder’s problem.

Babinec returned to Little Falls because he wanted his family’s life there. Years later, he is still working on the conditions that could let other people make a similar choice. The million-mile commute ended. The question he brought home has kept him occupied.