Rippling and the Return of Ambition

Bundling is a tailwind to sales conversations. Why pay $30 per employee per month for five different products ($150) if you can get a comparable offering in a single bundle for $50? And companies with smaller budgets can buy additional products that were out of reach as point solutions. This is one of the few true accumulating advantages in softwar... See more

Employee data encompasses more than a username and password: start dates, compensation, role, function, group within the company, and even third-party app credentials all give context on the employee. In the same way that Salesforce deeply understands external customer relationship data, Rippling understands internal employee data. 

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. 

Rippling customers can configure custom workflows that allow salespeople to give customer pricing discounts based on their level within the org. Or ingest Zendesk tickets to see payroll costs per support ticket resolved. Or run reports across silos of business data.

If Rippling becomes the system of record for employee data, it will rewire the entire business software landscape. With a breadth of software integrations, Rippling can become the connective tissue across traditionally siloed applications. 

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.

The administrative crisis is a fundamental bottleneck to company growth. 

Questions like "what software systems can this person access?", "what tax regimes must we comply with?", and “how should we compensate this person?" all require the employee record that Rippling owns.

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.