Parker Conrad

Co-founder & CEO, Rippling · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutive@parkerconrad ↗LinkedIn ↗rippling.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Parker Conrad is an American entrepreneur who co-founded and leads Rippling, an all-in-one workforce, HR, IT, and finance software platform. He is also widely known for co-founding portfolio management startup SigFig and serving as the co-founder and former CEO of cloud HR platform Zenefits.

6statements → 2claims → 2claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2.17/5average debate potential → 4.0/5argument clarity · the sources → 1said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 assertions · 2 insights · 1 disclosure · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Parker argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Utah threatened Zenefits with fines for offering free software to businesses
“In Utah, the insurance commissioner in Utah decided to take action, said that, listen, one of their missions as a DOI was to make sure that there was fair competition between all brokers in the state, and everyone was on a level playing field, and they said th…”
Parker Conrad Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:13 a16z Podcast | How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Business

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Utah legislation clarified that Zenefits was never illegal under existing state law
“Technically what the bill did is I think it actually didn't change the law. What it did is it clarified that the existing Utah law never made benefits illegal in the first place. So it was a clarification rather than a change to the law”
Parker Conrad Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:51 a16z Podcast | How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Business

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
0% certainty 3
none yet certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.0 / 5 directness 3.9 · coherence 4.2 · precision 4 · compression 3.4

redirected or did not address 1 of 8 assessed questions (13%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

273 words/min while actually speaking · 13.6 um and uh per 1k words · 22 false starts per 1k · 39% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,316 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Parker Conrad said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Utah threatened Zenefits with fines for offering free software to businesses
“In Utah, the insurance commissioner in Utah decided to take action, said that, listen, one of their missions as a DOI was to make sure that there was fair competition between all brokers in the state, and everyone was on a level playing field, and they said th…”
Parker Conrad Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:13 a16z Podcast | How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Business
Insight
B2B SaaS lacks the natural political advocacy base of consumer tech
“They're just these natural constituencies for consumer technology companies, because there are so many consumers that are using their service. But for like a B to B SaaS company like us, where we're selling to businesses, they're just, Fewer constituents that …”
Parker Conrad Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:33 a16z Podcast | How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Business
Assertion Contradicted
Utah legislation clarified that Zenefits was never illegal under existing state law
“Technically what the bill did is I think it actually didn't change the law. What it did is it clarified that the existing Utah law never made benefits illegal in the first place. So it was a clarification rather than a change to the law”
Parker Conrad Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:51 a16z Podcast | How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Business
What-if
Zenefits should have recognized the Utah dispute was political, not legal
“I think what I probably would have done differently in the case of Utah is I probably would have, I wish I had realized earlier in the process that we were in sort of a political battle rather than a legal battle with the Department of Insurance.”
Parker Conrad Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 10:50 a16z Podcast | How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Business
Insight
Small business B2B clients are highly influential political allies for startups
“Small business owners in our case, like tend to be politically very well connected. And so when you have, you know, small business owners who, you know, in Utah who have, you know, if you have a company that has You know, 50 or a hundred employees, like, that'…”
Parker Conrad Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 15:08 a16z Podcast | How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Business
Disclosure
Zenefits gives its HR platform away free, monetizing as an insurance broker
“We give the core system away for free, and we make money in, in a variety of different ways, but one of them is that we act as a broker on companies lines of health insurance.”
Parker Conrad Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 0:51 a16z Podcast | How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Business

The other half of the tape: Parker Conrad's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Sonal Chokshi 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011112019episodesmentions
0112019episodes it came up in
000.50.5112019episodesmentions per episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Busi Jan 2, 2019 14m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.