The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 54 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Conrad: Deel and Remote rely on third-party payroll systems country by country
“Companies like Deal and like Remote actually have not built underlying global payroll or payroll really of any kind. And so those companies are sort of secretly running on Other payroll systems country by country.”
Conrad: Deel was until recently a Rippling customer for global HR
“Deal was actually, until very recently, a Rippling customer in the United States. They ran, you know, in fact, their global HR on, on Rippling because they didn't have all of these other systems in place.”
Outbound sales drives the majority of Rippling's revenue attribution
“We're going to focus more specifically on outbound, which makes up the majority of Rippling's revenue from an attribution standpoint.”
Plank: Cold calling is more effective today because competitors abandoned it
“I think picking up the phone and calling people is like a lost art. I think a lot of companies just don't do that anymore. And it may even be why it's more effective today is because everyone's cold calling doesn't work. We got to do other things.”
Plank: 50% of Rippling's outbound demos are booked over the phone
“And the reality is that's because 50% of our demos that are booked in outbound are booked over the phone.”
Conrad: Integration is the product for compound startups
“The most important thing to start with is like the, that the integration is the product. You want to build in a space where there are problems because of disconnected systems or business process, and that you have these advantages where if you combine everythi…”
Parker Conrad: Rippling builds shared infrastructure 100x deeper than point competitors
“What we can do is we can go a hundred times deeper on those capabilities than any of our competitors can afford to go, and so whenever we're going up against a point solution competitor that only builds in one area, we know that we're going to win in those are…”
Conrad: Compound startups should expand only where platform advantages compound
“Generally speaking, you want to build products where those five advantages are maximized. And so, you know, the first one was like integration. So you want to build products where the integration with the other products that you've already built matters. Integ…”
Conrad: Generalist sales teams ignore viable products to sell easy SKUs
“If you have a VP of sales that's got, you know, 25 SKUs that they're selling, they're gonna pick, like, the three or four that are the easiest to sort of help them get to quota, and inevitably you get products that are just not gonna be as material An input to…”
Rippling repeatedly raised early prices and removed pricing from its website
“We increased our pricing like multiple times in the early days pretty dramatically. And we, and when we did it, we actually removed it from our website as well.”
Lemkin: Rippling CEO Parker Conrad Actively Recruits Failed Founders for Leadership
“Parker Conrad loves to hire failed founders to run his divisions. Like his little five products, he gets a failed or a modestly successful founder because they have a reason, right?”
Plank: Routing add-on cross-sells back to new-logo AEs never works
“What would happen is they would, when somebody wanted to buy a new product, they would float it back to the new logo rep that closed it maybe two years ago. So a new logo rep's doing like 20 demos a month of new logos that are much, much larger deal size. And …”
Plank: Rippling's 150 outbound SDRs achieve 3% to 7% conversion
“If you fast forward to today, 10 months later, we have about a 150 outbound SDRs. And the conversion that we get is between three to seven percent on the same accounts, right? And so if we now reach out to a thousand accounts, depending on the segment, we get …”
Plank prefers hiring sales-oriented account managers over giving CSMs quotas
“If you have to choose between a CSM profile that's going to own revenue or an account manager profile that needs to be like customer success oriented, a hundred times out of a hundred, I'm picking the account manager that needs to be customer oriented because …”
Rippling's generalist reps lost early deals against Brex and Ramp
“And then once we had a core rep trying to sell as the 15th SKU and compete with a new logo rep at Brexer Ramp, like we were just getting our butts kicked. Like it wasn't, we were just like, this doesn't, like we couldn't iterate fast enough. We couldn't keep u…”
Bendov: Most Startups Building Massive Multi-Product Platforms From Day One Fail
“I think that most of them have not succeeded. Now, this is a counter example, a very good one.”
Sam Blond: Rippling pays promoters $25 to post onboarding on LinkedIn
“Rippling does this really creative strategy where when you are onboarded by one of their customers, so part of their product is onboarding, and when a new hire goes through this onboarding process, Rippling sends them an NPS survey. Anybody that marks that sur…”
Conrad: I Personally Run Global Payroll for Rippling's 2,000 Employees
“Rippling's a 2000 person company. I am the only admin for our system in Rippling. So I personally run payroll for our 2000 person company across about a dozen different countries around the world, ah, natively in Rip Lane. And, ah, I do that, you know, as a pa…”
Conrad: Building the Broadest All-in-One Platform Is the Way to Win
“Customers didn't just want all in one, they wanted the allest and onest. And that was the way to win.”
Conrad: Rippling customers almost never buy one SKU, typically buying seven upfront
“Customers very, like, almost, people almost never buy just one rippling product, and they almost never buy all of them up front, and so usually customers are buying, like, call it seven SKUs,”
Rippling schedules demos directly for reps rather than requiring self-sourcing
“I was always a big believer in, and really still to this day, like we put demos on reps calendars. We did not hire reps to be like, go out and, you know, kind of build your own pipeline.”
Rippling doubled revenue per customer with zero drop in win rates
“We increased pricing pretty dramatically and nothing changed. Like the wind rates didn't go down at all. You know, we just started making two, three times more per customer.”
Lemkin: SMB Sales Models Make Cultivating Homegrown Sales Leaders Much Easier
“The more SMB you are, the better it works because you get so many at bats, right? When I look at our old sales team, the first salesperson ended up running sales for years. The first guy at rippling is the CRO today. And they were great, but they didn't cut. T…”
Lemkin: Half of EchoSign's 20 sales reps became tech CROs
“We only had 20 something sellers and 10 of them went on to be top CROs, right? CROs at Brex, CRO at Ripley now, Gong, also CRO at Gong. Seismic, a long list of others, half of them went on to be leading”
Rippling moved its CSM organization into the sales org around 2022
“In fact, at the time, the CSM org reported into our VP of customer experience who owned like implementation and support. And so we actually moved it over into the sales org probably about two years ago.”
Kelly: Rippling maintains an eight-to-one SDR-to-manager ratio for better coaching
“We actually are very conservative with the number of reps that report to managers, and that really helps from, like, a day-to-day coaching perspective, especially in this, like, remote environment. When managers have a little bit more bandwidth to help coach t…”
Rippling gifts $25 to high-NPS users who post on LinkedIn
“And what they do is they give an NPS survey At the end of that onboarding. So when I joined Founder's Fund, I onboarded to Rippling. And the NPS survey, I mark it, whatever I mark it, based off of my experience onboarding, I probably marked it a 10. And then I…”
Conrad: Rippling built payroll, device management, and identity on day one
“We actually started very purposefully at Rip Lane with three things. So on day one we had like, literally, like, two or three people working on payroll, building payroll and HRIS, two or three people working on device management, so, like, mobile device manage…”
Conrad: Rippling kept ~130% NDR despite 10% drop in seat-based retention
“We went from our customers hiring tons of people and getting tons of free seats because they just are constantly adding new employees in the system. To a 10% drop in our, you know, annual NDR cohorts from a seat basis. But our NDR stayed at like a 130%.”
Conrad: Rippling uses internal ML ad engine to route cross-sell leads
“We have an internal, effectively like an in-house system that is effectively like an ad system that we use internally that, that basically individual product teams can, Place, like, ads and promotions inside of our product, and we have a lot of, I hate myself …”
Conrad: Multi-product companies oscillate sales structures every 5 to 7 years
“I think what happens is, like, your company will probably go back and forth, you know, every five to seven years or so between these two extremes of one sales team versus You know, individual sales orgs per product based on, like, what you're bad at as a compa…”
Parker Conrad: Rippling's hardest challenge is defining brand positioning without market comparables
“I think it's probably the thing that we have found to be the most challenging about our business is like,
The sort of brand question of like, what is rippling and how do we describe it?
because there isn't something, there isn't another analogous thing like t…”
Conrad: Employee data is critical outside HR, including finance products
“The thesis of the company is that actually employee data matters in a lot of other areas outside of HR. Like one of those examples being things like finance products, like, you know, expense management, bill pay, corporate cards, where actually An understandin…”
Conrad: Rippling Generates Over $5M Net New Revenue Monthly From Cross-Sell Alone
“The cross-sell business at Rippling is, you know, now over five million dollars in net new a month.”
Conrad: Compound startups require entrepreneurial business unit leaders
“And then there are a lot of organizational challenges where you've got to often organize the company into business units with sort of strong entrepreneurial leads that can run individual products relatively independently to sort of paralyze execution.”
Rippling built a Bangalore-based sales team to efficiently target US SMBs
“We built a sales team that we have today based out of Bangalore that today I think is like 15, 16 people, a director, a couple of managers. And those folks are like incredibly efficient from how, you know, compared to kind of how much revenue they close.”
Plank: Expecting immediate measurable results ruins channel sales strategies
“I think one of the things that I think people make the mistake that people make or one mistake people make in channel is they expect, like they expect immediate results and they expect to be able to measure the impact of the channel, like incredibly directly. …”
Scrase: Checkr embeds directly into Gusto, Rippling, Greenhouse, and Paylocity
“We also, though, at that, for that segment, we have a very large channel business as well. Think like Gusto. They're Payroll providers, Gusto, Paylocity, where we're embedded in that experience. Same for applicant tracking systems like Greenhouse or HRIS like …”
Lemkin: Rippling's Original Sales Representative Became Its Chief Revenue Officer
“The first guy at rippling is the CRO today. And they were great, but they didn't cut. They came in as the first rep and there's many reasons, but one reason is if you're closing in 500 deals a year, you get a lot of reps.”
Lemkin: EchoSign revenue alumni became CROs of Brex, Rippling, and Gong
“Our revenue team went on to be the CROs of Brex, Rippling, Gong, So many leaders, like others, like 10 of them, and like that we had this monster team and I missed, I didn't, what I didn't know was how good I had it in some areas.”
Lemkin: Rippling Reproduced Zenefits' Massive Outbound Sales Model
“And they took the model, Parker, and Sam built that model at Zenefits, and then they reproduced it at Rippling. Massive outbound model.”
Rippling reached a $14B valuation with hundreds of millions in ARR
“Rippling is a 14 plus billion dollar, many thousands of employees, I think 1500 folks in the revenue organization, several hundred million dollars of ARR, and Matt grew that organization and that revenue number from making cold calls in Parker's basement just …”
Plank: Rippling achieved 0.5% to 1% conversion on programmatic outbound
“At the time we were getting around like a 50 bips to one percent conversion on programmatic outbound. So we would reach out to a thousand accounts and we would get basically somewhere between five to 10 demos right through the programmatic outbound.”
Plank: Rippling tied AM comp to retention and massively beat churn baselines
“And we're going to actually tie comp to retention as a number. And like, just dramatically changed the behavior and the impact and results this year. Like our baseline of churn and from the account management org is like just a number that we just massively be…”
Rippling uses three distinct sales teams to sell complex product suites
“There's three teams that sell stuff at Rippling. There's the core new logo rep who touches every single new logo on the way in the door. There's the account management team who owns every single customer post sales. So those are like mutually exclusive. And th…”
Blond: Rippling currently generates several hundred million in ARR
“Rippling today is several hundred million dollars in AR.”
Kelly: Two-thirds of Rippling SDR managers started as SDRs
“Most of my managers, I'd say, 20 of my 30 today were SDRs at Rippling.”
Blond: Zenefits AEs became revenue leaders for Rippling, Gong, and TripActions
“Zenefits alone produced as starting as AEs, the head of revenue at Rippling, the head of revenue at Gong, the head of revenue at Modern Health, the former head of revenue at TripActions, like all of these came out of Zenefits alone”