Parker Conrad (Rippling CEO) built an $11 BILLION customer-obsessed business

Parker Conrad is a three-time entrepreneur. He's currently the CEO of Rippling, a unified system and single platform for businesses to manage all of their HR & IT - payroll, benefits, computers, apps, and more - in one unified workforce platform. Today, we're sitting down with Parker to talk about growing his startup, the importance of an employee graph, and how customer support can define a business.
www.rippling.com/
/ parkerconrad
00:00 Why we're here today
01:24 Meet Parker Conrad, Rippling CEO
04:43 Rippling's focus on employee data
08:34 The idea of a compound startup
12:03 New wave of business systems
15:20 Creating an employee graph
19:00 Rippling: a team of teams
22:22 Rippling's reporting capabilities
24:34 A different way to support customers
31:00 Routing through machine learning
33:11 How to use the extremes of your data
I'm Garry Tan, venture capitalist and founder at Initialized Capital. We were early investors in billion-dollar startups like Coinbase and Instacart, and I'm a Forbes Midas List Top 100 VC. We want these videos to be about helping people build world-class teams and startups that touch a billion people. Our startups have gone on to create more than $200 billion in market value so far, and Initialized has over $3.2B in assets under management.
Please like this video and subscribe to my channel if you want to see more videos like this!
Follow me on Twitter and Instagram so you'll never miss my videos and ideas-
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Directed by Chris Hall
Filmed by Michael Bliss & William Cenote

[@DanielleNewnham]

Garry, by putting these high quality interviews online, you are offering a masterclass in business to those who can't/won't go to business school. In fact, these are way better than business school because I have yet to met a business school professor who has actually run an actual business! Bravo - this is how we help level the playing field.

[@StreamAgency]

Well said.

[@whatttarun]

Gem of an interview. Especially the part where parker talks about so much of the conventional wisdom around building a company around narrow problem not being right anymore.

[@chrishallnyc]

Parker is so grounded even after building 2 unicorns. Super inspiring in a world of fluff

[@AZNGoSu]

So many gems in this interview. I’ll have to come back and listen from time to time!

[@alxcnwy]

Incredible interview - Parker’s perseverance and authenticity is so inspiring. The 90th percentile perspective is such a great insight (maximize the minimum instead of the average). Love this format Garry, thank you and please keep doing these!

[@JohnCooganPlus]

what an awesome interview. that tidbit about watching the 90th percentile is super valuable.

[@MohitKumar-jt9nn]

Superb interview. Mr CEO You are rocking .

[@tundeoduguwaiii1902]

Great interview Garry!... thanks for making it.

[@abhalla]

Thanks for the consistently great content.

[@rpgbx]

What a wonderful interview!

[@besteaglesux]

Thank you for the content!

[@paulcnichols]

Very clear vision. Seems obvious when Parker talks about the Salesforce analogy.

[@AndyWhyte_]

Simply superb. Thank you.

[@franktfrisby]

Listening to this, what I appreciate about Parker is that his goal to not just do one vertical slice but deliver a wholesome experience for the company/customer that brings convenience and ease.

[@TheWorldReactsYT]

More Office Hours

[@alejandrojn4778]

Your 90% percentile rule for CS is gold. So true, outliers kill your operations. Once under control, everything falls into place

[@dncube]

I think it was founded in 2016. Had heard in Parker's interview previously I think. Parker is a great guy. After Zenefits launching similar company just after takes guts. Generally people feel discouraged and burnt out bcoz of bitter experience mainly and here's Parker thinking, I didn't get it right the first time so lemme do it right now.

[@TbChallenge]

Amazing interview

[@walkerwilliams4353]

These interviews are too good, so much useful information and Parker is one of the best operators I've ever seen. My only wish is that we could have MORE of these, where you go deep with companies on how they are building their organization. Like I'd also love to listen to an entire interview on how Rippling (and other companies) think about growth, marketing vs. sales, etc.

[@kaischmid9118]

First Wave: Focus SaaS startups that deliver point solutions to specific problems. Second Wave: Compound SaaS startups that deliver multiple solutions in a seamless connected way. (e.g. Ripple)

[@gaurav7047]

But isn't APIs doing just that? Bundling the fragmented softwares together so that they can communicate as one?

[@ThePeteLy]

Hey Garry, love the show and what you offer to your communities and congrats on all the success 👍 just wondering how does one get to have a short chat with you about early, early stage consumer platform design and prototype building? Would definitely love the opportunity to validate the idea with a serious pro! Thx Garry

[@joelkaiser6127]

Compound startups ftw!

[@Thepitchuk]

Can't believe how many of these Gary wrote the first cheque for!

[@dy2cakc1]

Non obvious problems being solved by great founders.

[@bluelightning2k]

I know I'm taking the wrong message from this - but the production value is SO high. I'd like to see a behind the scenes! At least what mic, processing, etc

[@GarryTan]

Sony FX6 with 16-35mm f2.8 main camera on a slider, FX3/A7S3 with 85mm f1.2 for close ups, arri light panels 10 feet up with soft diffusion. Sennheiser AVX lavaliers.

[@coreyle]

Thank you for this! I am actually looking at working for rippling!

[@GarryTan]

Go for it!

[@MrMonsterrally]

If the communication inefficiency of large interoperable companies is not solved, we’ll continue the cycle and have thousands of focused startup companies again in 20 or 30 years. Every engine needs oil to run. Who is producing the oil?

[@MrMonsterrally]

Loved the interview btw. Forgot to write that in the comment!

[@mbakayaw6124]

Compound Startups are definitely Interesting in Context to Africa, here you cant build one thing because the other affects it, so you find yourself taking on adjacent problems and building for them to eventually compound a huge value, we call this "laying rails" or "building infrastructure first" , and startups that do this well here are Unicorns or well on their road to being so. Here we are literally building ecosystems first with this startups then in that ,the future becomes more specialized.

[@codewithadonis2889]

As someone who is also building a similar type of software, this interview is a real gem. So much valuable advices, most of clients for business software really like when the support service is responsive and easy to access. We can get on a call really quickly with any user of our platform on demand. There is a real need of having a business software that can expand accros company's department, it is a real pain for managers at company to use totally differents system to make different stuff on the same user data, like having one application for scheduling and another one for payroll for example.

[@stopinvadingmyprivacy8375]

hope someone close to parker can convince him to take better care of his health. seems like it's taken a severe turn downhill since he started rippling. super impressed by what he's built, tho!

[@TheWorldReactsYT]

I beg you , we need OFFICE HOURS 🙏🙏🙏🙏

[@GarryTan]

OK COMING FOR YOU!

[@TheWorldReactsYT]

Thank you soo much ❤️❤️❤️

[@James-mk8jp]

Is that a whiteboard or a window behind Parker?

[@Houseofyards]

How do you have an ARR of $800k when you just launched the new product 4 months ago?

[@GarryTan]

8 customers paying $100K a year 32 customers paying $25K a year 128 customers paying $6K a year Etc…

[@Phyx1u5]

its a shame they aren't taking applicants

[@tanomsakkhacharoen1387]

I kept hearing Rippling will getting into file sharing and documents management without them saying it 😀

[@gaurav7047]

But isn't APIs doing just that? Bundling the fragmented softwares together so that they can communicate as one? This is regarding the comment by Parker, that he sees a rise in rebundling of saas

[@realestatecoachestv]

One thing I like about Gary’s videos is the production quality. I watch chamath’s podcast on KZbin and every time I cringe at how bad their video is for Billionaires who should understand production values smh

[@prathams8685]

Good hair Gary

[@evantaurins8899]

It all comes down to bundling and unbundling

[@dyazdi8910]

The support is not good. It’s really hard to reach people. I use rippling.

[@dbundi]

3rd?

[@humzakhurshid1952]

1st one.

[@supriyamanna715]

4th

[@mr.unknown9383]

Second

[@redditrecap7]

Feels like Soon Garry will beat Musk

[@chapterme]

Another amazing interview Garry! Learnt a lot about Rippling and how it's creating a new wave of business systems and supporting customers! Love your energy and thank you for donating 100% of revenue to Code2040 🙏🏻 Thank you for adding chapters because very few channels add chapters, considering the time and effort involved in creating them especially with timestamps. It is really helping me navigate through your videos. I'm reaching out to see if you would be interested in automatically adding timestamp chapters to your videos. I created ChapterMe, an AI tool, that helps you by automatically generating timestamp SEO chapters that you can easily add to your KZbin video description. We've made it dead simple to use ChapterMe and it takes less than 5 mins to create timestamped chapters for a 60 min video! This saves a lot of time, money, and effort for you and your team. If you are interested let us know. We can get automated chapters up and running for all your videos in less than 10 minutes!

[@TheWorldReactsYT]

More Office Hours

[@comscinerd2070]

Wow that sounds like an obvious useful tool so many youtubers could use

[@chapterme]

@@comscinerd2070 Thank you 😎

[@AnenthVishnu]

What's that human size white box behind?