The first employee to take the stage for Zenefits was sending a message to the almost-1,000 people in the audience at the company’s first user conference at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. Bud Bowlin, a Zenefits senior benefits advisor and “older millennial” (he’s easily north of 50), sent the message that there’s clear benefits experience at the company. One of the first things he said was also a clear message: “We have a CEO who believes that doing the right thing is the only way to do business.”

Microsoft announcing its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn on Monday made for great headlines. Unfortunately, those headlines were mostly focused on the wrong things.

These are dark days in Silicon Valley. A chill wind blows through the incubators of Palo Alto and in the canyons of SOMA in San Francisco. Just last Thursday, The Wall Street Journal told us that the sky is falling with startup investors hitting the brakes. This on the heels of the previous week’s CBInsights report, which said basically the same thing. And neither of those were the most terrifying story that I read recently. This was: The next hot job in Silicon Valley is for poets. Just think — someone will be really proud they earned their MFA from Middlebury when Howdy the Slackbot goes all T-800 on some office somewhere. Winter is coming.