The key insight behind Rippling is that businesses benefit from a suite of interoperable applications rather than narrow point solutions, which allows for better product development.

The idea behind Rippling was to manage employee data across all business systems, making it easier to onboard employees across various platforms like payroll, email, and project management tools.

Rippling aims to build a suite of integrated products based on a deep understanding of employee data, which we refer to as the employee graph.

The opportunity for Rippling lies in the fact that employee data is widely distributed across organizations, and we can solve the problems created by this fragmentation.

We took a different approach with Rippling, focusing on building software for two years before scaling, unlike my previous experience with Zenefits.

At Rippling, we build multiple products in parallel, which goes against conventional wisdom that suggests focusing on one narrow area.

The founder of Rippling had prior experience and deep product insight from his previous startup, which justified the longer development time before launch.

The mistake we made at Zenefits was focusing on grabbing market share early without automating our processes, which we did differently at Rippling by building everything in software from the start.

At Rippling, I handle a lot of the administrative work around HR personally, including running payroll and managing payroll and employee benefits for 2,000 employees across a dozen countries, while we also have a strong HR team for compliance and other functions.