Ep. 237: Parker Conrad is the Founder & CEO @ Rippling, the startup that gives you back your time from payroll to employee computers, Rippling makes it unbelievably easy to manage your company’s HR and IT – in one system. To date Parker has raised over $59m in funding from some of the best in the business including Mamoon @ Kleiner Perkins, Garry Tan @ Initialized, Justin Kan, SV Angel and Y Combinator, just to name a few. As for Parker, prior to founding Rippling, he was the Founder & CEO @ Zenefits, the startup he built from $0 to $60m in ARR in just 3 years. Before that he co-founded Sigfig where he grew assets on the platform to over $35Bn across 500k users.
In This Episode We Discuss:
* How Parker made his way into the world of startups and SaaS, came to found Zenefits and what was that a-ha moment for the founding of his most recent company, Rippling?
* What does Parker do with regards to operational scaling that is unconventional but works? Why does Parker believe it is fundamentally better to wait for as long as possible before hiring customer support? Why should engineers also be doing customer support?
* Why should your engineers be heavily involved in the customer support hiring process? What are the benefits of this? How can one prevent their customer support team from being a wall of protection for the product and eng team? How can you ensure seamless collaboration and communication flow between product and customer support?
* Stripe recently announced their 5th office would be… “remote”, so how does Parker feel about the building of remote teams? What are the most important things when establishing your first remote team? What do you look for in those hires? What can be done to ensure a greater feeling of community and closeness despite the distance? What have been some of the biggest challenges for Parker in building out the remote team?
* Parker has been a CEO with 3 different companies now and so how has he seen his style and approach change over the years? What has Parker found the hardest to get good at? When advising founders on fundraising, what advice does he give? How can founders know when is the right time to raise? How should they look to build relationships with investors between raises?
Ep. 238: Join Molly Ford, Salesforce Global Equality Programs Senior Director, and Leyla Seka, Salesforce VP of Mobile for actionable advice they have applied on their own journey. Here are their lessons learned on driving change in gender equality, equal pay and racial equality within Salesforce.
SaaStr’s Founder’s Favorites Series features one of SaaStr Annual’s best of the best sessions that you might have missed.
This podcast is an excerpt of Molly and Leyla’s session at SaaStr Annual 2019.
Missed the session? Here’s what Molly and Leyla talk about:
*Building a community of allies and allyship
*How to drive equality
*What you can be doing as an employee to help drive the culture you want
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
SaaStr
Parker Conrad
Molly Ford
Leyla Seka
Below, we’ve shared the full transcript of Harry’s interview with Parker Conrad.
Harry Stebbings: You are listening to the official SaaStr podcast, with me, Harry Stebbings. And I want to know how we can make this show better for you. What would you like to improve? What would you like to change? Let me know on Instagram at HStebbings1996 with two B’s. And I respond to all messages there personally.
Harry Stebbings: But to the show today- and I’ve wanted to interview this individual for a very long time. A serial entrepreneur and an incredible operator. And so with that I’m very excited to welcome Parker Conrad, founder and CEO at Rippling, the startup that gives you back your time from payroll to employee computers. Rippling makes it unbelievably easy to manage your company’s HR and IT in one simple system. To date, Parker’s raised over 59 million dollars in funding from some of the very best in the business, including Mamoon at Kleiner, Garry Tan at Initialized, Justin Kan, SV Angel, and Y Combinator just to name a few.
Harry Stebbings: As for Parker, prior to founding Rippling, he was the founder and CEO at Zenefits, the startup he built from naught to 60 million dollars in ARR in just three years. Before that, he co-founded Sigfig where he grew assets on the platform to over 35 billion dollars across five hundred thousand users. And I also want to say a huge thank you to Jason Lemkin, Mamoon Hamid, and Garry Tan for some fantastic question suggestions today. I really do so appreciate that.
Harry Stebbings: However, you’ve heard quite enough from me, so now I’m very, very excited to hand over to Parker Conrad, founder and CEO at Rippling.
Harry Stebbings: Parker, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show today. I’ve heard so many good things from Garry Tan from Mamoon Hamid… But thank you so much for joining me today, Parker.
Parker Conrad: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Harry Stebbings: Not at all. But I’d love to get the ball rolling today with you. So Rippling is the fourth startup for you. But how did you make your first foray into the world of startups, one. And then what was that aha moment with Rippling, in a pretty seamless three to four minutes.
Parker Conrad: Well, so actually, I think it’s the third, which is still a lot but not four yet. For me, with Rippling, the kind of central premise of the company is that, I think employee data is a lot more distributed across an organization than most people realize. Most people think of employee data as something that’s an HR thing. And I actually think almost every business system that companies use is full of information about their employees. And that secretly, that’s the root cause of almost all of the, sort of, administrative craftwork involved in running a business.
Parker Conrad: The companies that think, like, gosh, there’s just a lot of work. Day to day running systems, setting things up, all of that kind of ties back to the fact that whenever you hire people or terminate them, or whenever anything really changes, you need to go update all these different systems. And that’s kind of what led me to start Rippling.
Harry Stebbings: But as we said, I spoke to some of the investors beforehand, especially Mamoon, and a couple of friends also said that in terms of running the organization, you have a willingness to do unconventional things to scale and they said, you know, a couple of them, why they work. The first is customer support. So tell me, Parker, what do you do that may be unconventional when it comes to customer support.
Parker Conrad: So I have a really weird view of how startups should do this. Which is that Stripling’s a company that’s now about 90 people. We have over a thousand customers. Sort of in the millions of dollars of ARR. And we don’t yet have a customer support team. We’re just making our first, sort of, one to two hires in the company. And that’s pretty late to be doing that. And what we do, and I think it works really well, is, to date, the engineers in the company and myself, as well, have done all of the customer support for the business. And I really think that that’s the way most startups should do it. For as long as they possibly can. And the reason is, is that support teams often end up becoming walls in the organization to keep customers from bothering your engineering team. Because your engineers are working on important things. And it makes it very, very hard for engineers to really, truly understand what to work on and to have the appropriate context around what needs to be done within the product.
Parker Conrad: And if you can start by having engineers doing customer support and maintain that for as long as possible, I think it’s really hard, once you do hire support, to sort of go back to this model. What’s really neat is the engineering team has sort of like perfect context on what the problems are that customers are facing. And they can make these kind of trade offs in their own head around, should I stop working on this other project to fix this one thing really quickly that’s gonna have a big impact, or should I postpone working on this other thing because there’s this sort of larger investment that we need to make that’s more impactful. And I think that when companies do build out support organizations, a lot of how you do support and product management ends up becoming sort of a way to try and recreate, imperfectly, the dynamic that you have early on in companies where the people building the product are the ones that are talking to customers and handling their pain points. So it’s one of the things that I’m kind of proudest about with Rippling, is that we’ve been able to maintain, first of all, extremely high ratings online for how good our support is without, to date, really having anyone in the support function.
Parker Conrad: And I think that’s made our product a lot better. And I think it’s one of those things that like every tech company should be doing.
Harry Stebbings: So I’m totally with you there in terms of the benefits of engineers being on the front lines of customer support and the danger that happens when you have hand offs like customer support and how much they don’t actually get sent back to the engineering team. My question to you is actually, Parker, how do you structure the time of the engineers in terms of how they allocate it to customer support and then how do you also approach the culture and the mentality element for them of ensuring that they’re aligned with you in realizing that this is part of the pivotal aspect of their role and not just like, an hour a week of annoyance that Parker’s making me do.
Parker Conrad: So really, it’s not that people are sort of in charge of being on support for a certain amount of time. The way we do it, is Rippling ends up, you know we have about 65 engineers in the company right now. And there are kind of seven or eight loosely federated teams. You know, we have a team that works on our payroll product, a team that works on our, you know, hardware product. Each of those teams are relatively small. They’re sort of, you know, six, seven people, eight people. And those teams are responsible for supporting their own products.
Parker Conrad: And so each of everyone on that team sees every support request that comes in about their product. And the engineering leads are in charge of sort of allocating that out and figuring out who’s covering support tomorrow and who’s handling this issue or that issue. And so we’re not at a point yet where within those teams we need much more rigorous tracking systems where someone… There’s ticket assignment. Right now it’s kind of like, within those teams it’s still small enough that it can be done informally.
Harry Stebbings: Can I ask, does this approach scale, Parker?
Parker Conrad: I don’t think it will scale forever. And so I think the goal for most companies should be to sustain it as long as you can because what it does is it really turns customer support into an R and D exercise. You know, every support ticket is an opportunity to think through, how could we avoid having to get this support ticket in the future? Like how could we make the product clearer, how could we avoid the confusion, fix the bug. And as soon as you move away from that, and eventually you have to, but as soon as you do, it gets much harder to create this open line of communication back from the front lines and the support team, back to the engineering team.
Parker Conrad: You end up having these kinds of structures in companies where you can’t have 20 support people going and bugging an engineer. So they sort of collect a bunch of issues and it gets passed up the support organization hierarchy and up to the executive team and through the product executives and eventually, you know, back down to sort of individual engineers. And there’s just so much that’s lost in that game of telephone and there are a lot of things that kind of slip through the cracks. And if you build really effective product organizations, you can start to get back to the sort of initial perfect state where the person building the product is the person supporting the product. But it’s like, you can’t really, I think, get much better than that. And so I think you wanna kind of sustain that for as long as possible.
Parker Conrad: One thing that we’re doing is actually, the way we’re thinking about support in these teams is that we’re actually having these individual engineering teams hire support almost into the engineering team. So the support reps are still reporting up through a support lead, but they’re culturally and physically co-located with the product and engineering teams that they’re working on. So, you know, the payroll support team is like sitting with and views themself as part of our payroll team and the insurance support team sees themself as being on the insurance team first and foremost and the support organization second.
Harry Stebbings: I’m really interested, because you said that about sitting alongside. And what I straight away though too, was kind of an unconventional thing that’s actually become a lot more mainstream in terms of its acceptance, being the element of remote work. We saw, I think it was last week, that Stripe’s fifth location will be remote work as a location.
Harry Stebbings: I do have to ask, in terms of remote locations, how do you feel about the movement toward remote? What’s your approach with Rippling and how does that factor into how you think about operational excellence and building and scaling the team?
Parker Conrad: So at Rippling we have about two thirds of the company that’s actually in Bangalore. In our Bangalore office. So our San Francisco office is actually the smaller of the two locations. And my view on remote work is that I think that remote teams is the worst way to build a company except for all the others. Today, I just think really isn’t possible. It would be nice to be able to sort of locate everyone in San Francisco and I think that just isn’t possible but I think there are still enormous advantages to having a real presence in the city, particularly for the executive team. I think companies are being forced into the situation of having distributed teams. I mean one of the things, I think that it changes a lot of the way companies need to operate. You have issues across time zones. So our company, there are people who kind of work a really early shift and leave early and there are people who come in late and work a late shift because they need to have time on either end to talk with the folks in India or the folks in India need to speak with the folks in the U.S.
Parker Conrad: You see things like Zoom that become really critical, obviously, for teams that are, you know, you have to have like really solid just error free communication services. And I actually think there’s a place for Rippling in this because one of the things that happens is the administrative complexity of managing all of these different business systems and employee onboarding and stuff like that. You know, at a traditional company when you hire someone, they sit down with HR for the first day or two to kind of bang everything out. Someone hands them a computer, gets them their company t-shirt, gives them some forms to fill out. And you can’t really do that for someone who’s in a different state.
Parker Conrad: And one of the neat things about Rippling is by bringing all that online and tying it together, you hire someone in Rippling and their computer ships out automatically. They get access to all these systems at the click of a button. Their box of company swag, you know, ships out to their home address. You can deal with things like employment eligibility like I-9 verification online as opposed to having to do it in person. You know all of that stuff, you know, becomes a lot more critical as companies get more distributed and you have people that work for your company across the world, not just in the U.S.
Parker Conrad: So you need suddenly, these business systems, you know, most of which have been built in sort of like a U.S. only fashion. You really need to be able to handle someone who’s based in India or Brazil or in the U.K. and you need to be able to pay that person through the system and you need to be able to treat them as, you know, just part of the same org chart as everyone else in the company. And, you know, Rippling was really built from day one in that kind of internationalized way to support a lot of these distributed teams.
Harry Stebbings: Can I ask, in terms of the distributed teams, now you’ve been through that process of building out, as you said, two thirds of the team there in India. What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you started that process of building out the distributed team?
Parker Conrad: I think, you know, it’s just really critical who the kind of first couple hires are in a distributed team. And I think we got very lucky with this. A person that we hired to start our office in India is someone just really incredible who’s done a great job building that organization. I wish we had more of him. And I think we kind of lucked into that. And thinking back on it, it’s almost like the person that starts when you do these kind of remote offices, the person who kind of starts the office is almost like a company founder themselves. They’re gonna just set a lot of the tone for the norms of behavior at the new location, how things operate, how do people interact with one another. So it just ends up being really critical who you choose to do that.
Harry Stebbings: I do have to ask, in terms of critical, I got asked by Garry to ask this critical question. And he said that you have a very ambitious and slightly crazy idea in terms of the [inaudible 00:14:48] of the app store for SaaS. And when we chatted before, you said about all IT software being thought of as HR software. And so can I ask, Parker, I was trying to think through this, are these rather bold and potentially brilliant ideas the same? And how do you think about them and unpack them.
Parker Conrad: Well so I think the kind of crazy idea behind Rippling is that if you think about what IT people are doing most of their day and what’s kind of the cornerstone of IT security, it’s really about making sure that the right people have access to the right systems in your company and they have the right levels of access and the right configuration within those systems. That’s sort of a large part of what IT and IT security is ultimately responsible for. But if you think about that, almost all of those decisions are based on these underlying concepts, like who are your employees and what do they do for your company and what’s their job function? Like, are they in sales or in engineering, are they SDRs or account executives? Are they managers or directors? Because that’s what sort of defines everything about what they should have access to and how they should be configured and how they should be set up across almost all of these different business systems. And those kinds of concepts are really inseparable from these underlying HR concepts, like department and role and level and work location.
Parker Conrad: And I think that a lot of the sort of IT systems that have been built to date have really missed this because they think of the world in terms of users and users have attributes like a username and password and maybe groups and policies assigned to them. But I think most of these systems, like, for example, OCTA. OCTA really should be build where the sort of centerpiece of the data model is the employee. And the employee has attributes like they’re a 1099 hire or they’re a W-2 hire or they’re full-time or part-time or exempt, non-exempt, salaried, hourly, they have a whole set of department, a department hierarchy that’s associated with them. Levels, work locations, teams, titles, managers. Those are the things that are driving almost every decision that IT people have to make about how they manage all these systems. And if you could bring those things together, the world gets a lot easier because the sort of underlying HR characteristics of the employee are what’s driving everything that happens in IT.
Harry Stebbings: I don’t think that sounds nearly as crazy as I thought it was going to be. It sounds totally logical when you present it like that. I do have to take this chance though, Parker, as I said, before the show I spoke to many friends of yours and mine and I had to do an AMA, ask me anything with Parker. So these are the questions that I’m too fascinated not to ask. How does that sound? You ready?
Parker Conrad: Sure, of course.
Harry Stebbings: Okay, so you’ve been a founder and CEO multiple times. Can I ask, how has your style and maybe, approach to being CEO, changed over the years?
Parker Conrad: I think one thing that I think happens to a lot of repeat founders is you develop just a much better appreciation of all of the different functional areas of the company and sort of why each of them need to be excellent. And really great companies, they tend to be really good at all of the different functional parts of the business. Google is obviously great at product and engineering but they also have an incredible legal organization, incredible finance team. And I think a lot of first time founders come at things from a particular perspective. And you know, early on, just have to focus on building something that people want. And sometimes once you get beyond that, it’s hard to understand, you know what the hell do all these other sort of parts of the company do? And you know, I think I have a particular appreciation for why do you need to have the best people in, you know, all of these different functional areas in the company and sort of why that’s critically important.
Parker Conrad: So, you know, we just raised our series A, and so we’re in the process of building out that executive team right now. That’s definitely something that I just feel like I’m in a much better position on then I was in previous endeavors.
Harry Stebbings: Yeah. No, absolutely, it makes sense. It’s actually Elad Gil who said that management upscaling is one of the core functions of CEO-ship. Would you agree with him in terms of kind of the prioritization around management upscaling as one of your core roles as CEO?
Parker Conrad: By management upscaling–?
Harry Stebbings: Making sure you have the best management team and making sure that you kind of create a pathway where they can level up with every stage and not have kind of severe management churn at every level.
Parker Conrad: Yeah. I mean I think there’s this constant tension as the company grows. The best thing for everyone is that the people who kind of started in a lot of those roles, they have so much context on how things were done and why certain decisions were made. And when things were working at the company, why it works… That, in the best world, you have people early on who can continue to grow with their job. That doesn’t always happen. You know, sometimes you have to bring in new folks above them. But definitely whenever you do that, there is a challenge because the person coming in is lacking a ton of context about the organization. And when things are moving really quickly you lose a lot by just the time that they need to kind of get up to speed.
Parker Conrad: So some of it is, yeah, trying to bring all of your executives along and have them grow into their roles. And some of it is, quite frankly, probably a lot of it is trying to get, I think, like early on, over hiring for a lot of these executive roles. So that if you really believe that you’re building a large and impactful business, you know, hiring the person that is gonna be appropriate for the job at 20 million in ARR or 50 million in ARR when you’re only at four or five. Now that’s easier said than done. That can be really hard to do. But that’s ultimately, like, if you can do that, that makes things so much easier down the line.
Harry Stebbings: Sorry, this is really unfair of me, but you’ve built up brilliant exec teams before. What have been your biggest lessons in terms of really attracting that A star exec talent and bringing in the 20 million ARR man or woman when you’re at four, so to speak, and really getting them there at that stage?
Parker Conrad: I think one thing that, you know, really does help, is independent signals about the company. Having really great investors with great brands that invest in your business. One of the values that I think VC firms really do bring to the table is that brand really signals something to prospective customers, to porters, the media, the larger community. But most importantly the job candidates who don’t have the time to do the kind of diligence that VCs do look at it and they say, well, Kleiner Perkins believes in this company? I should really check it out. That makes a huge difference.
Harry Stebbings: You know, I do totally agree with you there. But I’m so pleased you said about the [inaudible 00:20:58] because I do want to touch on the series A before we move into the quick fire. Obviously you said, you raised the series A, huge congrats for that. But kind of famous now for without having a deck for it. So tell me, you’ve been through the process now multiple times in terms of fundraising. I guess my question is what do you know now about the investing class that you wish you knew when you founded your first company? And how do you approach a founder advice when it comes to fundraising?
Parker Conrad: So my advice about fundraising is to really wait as long as possible to do it. So usually what I tell people is you should only go out and raise money when it is just so beyond a shadow of a doubt that people are gonna want to invest in the company. And my experience with fundraising has always been that it takes a week or never. And I’ve had both. And it either, like every fundraising process I’ve ever done has either lasted about a week or it just kind of never came together at all. And so I think that when you’re fundraising, most people decide, well it’s time for us to go out for a series A and sometimes you gotta do that, ’cause you’re running out of money and life sucks. But usually what you want to do ideally, is you want to sort of completely hold off on doing anything, talking to anyone, telling anyone about the metrics of your business until you’re at a point where it’s so clear that this is an investable company that you can go out like a lightning bold and just sort of shock and awe investors with what you’ve accomplished to date. And that’s, I think when fundraising processes go really well for businesses.
Harry Stebbings: Can I ask… I often hear on the show that founders should always be raising. Others say no, you need to condense it and very disciplined on a two week timeline. Collect term sheets after two weeks and run a very efficient process. What would your advice be around building relationships over the long term versus kind of the much more efficient and disciplined and structured approach.
Parker Conrad: I think there’s a balance on this. And I think the way I personally like to do it, is have meetings with folks ahead of time and talk with them about product, about the company, about, sort of, your view of the market. But sort of, not really release any data about the company and sort of use that as the way, when you do start fundraising, that’s when you’ve kind of assembled, okay, we’ve got a real package of all of the metrics that you need to see as an investor and now we’re ready to go. And we’ve been talking with you and hopefully you’re interested in the idea and the vision and pain point that we’re solving and now here’s everything you need to kind of evaluate the company and start with that.
Parker Conrad: The important thing there is you talk with people and maybe you build a relationship but you’re very clearly not fundraising. And you’re not fundraising because you’re not sharing any of the underlying metrics about the business yet. If you’re kind of constantly fundraising, it’s really hard to get a deal done because there’s no urgency around the process and more importantly, everyone’s kind of out of sync. If you do get a firm that’s interested, it’s very hard to round up other firms so that you can get into a– even if that first firm is absolutely your ideal partner. If you don’t have a few other folks at the table, it’s hard to sort of get things done on good terms.
Harry Stebbings: No, I do agree with you and I think that’s a very valid point. I do want to move into my favorite, though, Parker, being the quick fire round. So I essentially say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. Are you ready?
Parker Conrad: Sure.
Harry Stebbings: Okay, so tell me, your favorite book and why.
Parker Conrad: You know, I think the Lyndon Johnson biographies by Robert Caro. I think it has such an incredible amount of insight into someone who obviously became president of the United States. And kind of all of his detail he has around his thinking and his decision making… And how, sort of mapping out the entire thing. It’s a really interesting read.
Harry Stebbings: What would you most like to change about tech in Silicon Valley, Parker?
Parker Conrad: I would love, I mean I don’t know if this is directly about tech but I wish that we could change the way that immigration works here. And that we could be bringing in, you know, sort of all of the talented, every talented engineer that we could find around the world. And not just, you know, not preventing them from coming to Silicon Valley but finding ways to try and pull them in. I think that would just be so much better for the U.S., for the ecosystem, for job creation.
Harry Stebbings: Tell me, Parker. What moment has change the way you think?
Parker Conrad: So probably for me, the biggest one was at the very first company that I started. We went out to raise a series B round in January of 2009, which was the absolute worst time to raise a round of venture capital funding. And our company was in like, no position to do it. I mean, it was not in a place where it was an investable business. And we talked to 70 different investors about trying to invest in the company. We got turned down by like, basically everyone. I sort of took away from that, the difficulty in raising capital unless you are in a position where like, everything was working.
Harry Stebbings: That’s a brutal process. Tell me, the biggest mentor to you and what have you learned the most from them.
Parker Conrad: Probably, just really more of a good friend. This guy named Dave Peterson who was in my original YC batch. And Dave is one of these just like, really sort of incredible hustlers. In thinking about customer acquisition and how do you develop top of the funnel demand. And I think I’ve learned a ton from him about how to just make things happen.
Harry Stebbings: Absolutely, love that. Tell me, what’s your biggest challenge for you today with Rippling, Parker?
Parker Conrad: The biggest challenge right now is going from a company that was really for most of its history just an engineering team, that then became a company with an engineering team and a small sales team attached to it, to one that now sort of needs all of these different functional areas. The company built out. So we’re, today, a 90 person company with about 65 engineers and very little beyond engineering and sales and marketing. But we’re very quickly adding support function, legal, finance, HR, you know, all of those different other areas.
Harry Stebbings: No, absolutely. And it’s an exciting and big roll out. Tell me, how do you deal with shit hit the fan moments? What’s your coping mechanism?
Parker Conrad: Mostly it’s just sort of understanding that this too shall pass. And I think one of the things that’s been different for me, working on my third company, versus the first two, you know everything feels a little more muted. So the highs are a lot less high and lows are a lot less low. Because even on good days when things go really well, you’re always kind of like well, yup, something’s probably going to go wrong tomorrow. And so, you know, you don’t get as much as an upper from when things are going really well. But by the same token, when things go really badly, there’s always the sense of like, look, I’ve been through this before and survived, and so, you know, we’re gonna make it through this as well somehow.
Harry Stebbings: No, I totally agree. Nothing’s ever as good or as bad as it seems, I always think. Tell me, the final one, the next five years for you and for Rippling. Just how big could this be, Parker?
Parker Conrad: Well, so I think the really big idea behind Rippling is that companies have this administrative pain of managing lots of business systems, that I think comes directly from the fact that you need, all of these systems need to know, you know, who your employees are. And employees have to be set up in all of them and that’s what makes it difficult to have lot of different systems. But there’s sort of a twin pain for all of the companies that make business software. Which is that for a lot of SaaS companies, you know, you go out and one of the biggest objections that you get as a business is like, ugh, not another system. You know, I don’t want to deal with, like, something else in my company.
Parker Conrad: And I think that there’s this iceberg effect in SaaS, that the only systems that make it, or the only products that become companies are the ones that are so big and core to what a company does, that they can kind of clear that, sort of, not another system bar. And I think that, you know, if Rippling, our goal is I think is if we can bring the marginal work required of managing the N plus one system within a company down to zero, then I think businesses would buy a lot more of them, and I think there are companies that become viable that maybe do one very niche thing in really incredible way that can be built on, or alongside, a lot of the infrastructure that we have as a company. And because it’s sort of painless, employers don’t have to go manage all the information about their employees in this other system. Someone’s gonna build fancy org charts and that’s gonna become a whole business that’s hard to do today because like just managing the data about your employees in that third party system is so hard.
Parker Conrad: But with something like Rippling, you know, as Rippling is successful, that becomes a viable business that can sort of plug into the underlying employee data as a service that we provide and have a really sort of viable experience for companies.
Harry Stebbings: Listen, Parker, as I said, I heard so many good things from Mamoon and from Garry Tan, so it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today. I couldn’t be more excited for the future of Rippling.
Parker Conrad: Great, thank you very much.
Harry Stebbings: I mean, just what an incredible guest. If you’d like to see more from Parker, you can find him on Twitter at ParkerConrad, likewise, I’d love to see you behind the scenes here at SaaStr. You can do that on Instagram at Hstebbings1996 with two B’s.
Harry Stebbings: As always, I so appreciate all of your support and I can’t wait to bring you another set of exceptional episodes next week.
