Rippling and the Return of Ambition

Each micro-startup gets to leverage the technical infrastructure, distribution engine, and existing customer base of a large company. But the GM model requires complex coordination of resources across the company – new product leaders need to push the marketing team to highlight their capabilities, train the sales team on selling their product, and... See more

Rippling rejects these norms entirely. It ignores the mimetic warfare of the Gartner quadrant. Its wedge was a data asset, not a narrow product. It doesn’t let SaaS metrics dictate its strategy.

Unconventional for a company of Rippling’s size, Parker has no executive assistant. This means you can’t simply slide onto his calendar. The result is that he spends far less of his time in meetings, and far more on product, than the average founder. A compound product requires undivided attention. 

Reminiscent of the foundational computing companies, Rippling shows what ambition in modern business software looks like. In the age of software incrementalism, Rippling is an anachronism.

Its strategy starts with the employee record, contextualizing each employee within the company. As the source of truth for employee data, Rippling can solve the administrative crisis holistically across software systems.

But cheap cash, big teams, and playbook dependence come at a cost: incrementalism. 

SaaS wisdom teaches us narrow lessons: start by conquering a narrow market and expand from there, add at least as much in ARR as you burn each year, and build your product either horizontally or vertically.

Incrementalism is squandering Silicon Valley’s potential. Many of the nation’s most talented people are iterating on a tiny product surface area. First principles thinking is being replaced by shortcuts like NPS optimization and bookings-to-burn ratios. 

Rippling abstracted this common infrastructure into Unity: a set of middleware capabilities on top of its employee graph. Rippling only needs to build middleware once, and then can amortize the investment across all its modules, freeing engineers to work on new product functionality. As Unity gets stronger, the entire product suite becomes deeper. ... See more