"Given employee data lives across dozens of systems, point solutions cannot solve remote employment holistically – they solve symptoms, not root causes."

"Apple released its iconic Apple II computer in 1977 with just 25 employees. One engineer built the file system, one engineer built the input/output, and one engineer built the graphics."

"Microsoft, too, shipped its first operating system with just 100 employees."

"Even in the late 1990s, Google was launched with just 4 employees."

"Accelerating growth in teams and revenue masked declining productivity per employee."

"For each playbook you follow, you’re outsourcing your strategy in return for jumpstarting the respective function."

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

"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."

"But I worry the opposite is true: most companies sink far too many resources into menial tasks instead of company building."

"For fast-growing startups, this overhead requires sacrificing precious time and elevating burn rates."

"It’s not surprising that total factor productivity has stagnated, despite an explosion of productivity software tools promising the opposite. Not only do point solutions fail to accelerate productivity, their sprawl is actually slowing things down:"

"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."

"Many software companies are started opportunistically, so their product roadmaps are evolutionary."

"But the CEO and co-founder Parker Conrad built Rippling through intelligent design. Each product has a whitepaper, each funding round has a written memo."

"The relative ease of building point solution SaaS products drove hordes of new startups to saturate every niche of business system software, optimizing for depth over breadth."

"It was looking to solve the employee management problem, requiring coordination across employee data silos."

"Parker started with the employee data asset: by building on top of the employee record, Rippling could develop a compound product quickly."

"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."

"SaaS playbooks focus on efficiency metrics like maintaining a 1:1 ratio of NNARR to burn – this inadvertently discourages ambition, trading off long-term upside for a narrow definition of efficiency."

"Rippling, on the other hand, has R&D spend that is off the charts compared to other companies of its size."

"Accumulating advantages are rare in software. You can increase brand and product depth, but things get harder as startups scale: as your customer acquisition engine saturates the core market, incremental customers become more expensive to acquire and likelier to churn."

"Bundling is Rippling’s accumulating advantage that offsets classical diseconomies of scale."

"CAC paybacks decrease. Growth accelerates. Retention improves. Cross-sell rates increase."

"Of course, an expansive product increases contract sizes, and thus LTV. But a bundled product also drives sales and marketing efficiencies."

"Once customers know you’re a multi-trick pony, they’ll start looking to you for new product offerings."

"Bundling comes with risks. Because Rippling is bigger than a single software market, it doesn’t neatly fit into each of its product’s Gartner categories, making it harder to find customers."

"Unconventional for a company of Rippling’s size, Parker has no executive assistant. This means you can’t simply slide onto his calendar."

"Rippling’s expansive product strategy requires a unique modular org structure. Each product has a relatively autonomous GM and engineering team."

"Each micro-startup gets to leverage the technical infrastructure, distribution engine, and existing customer base of a large company."

"When employees ask Parker for meetings, he is known to show up at their desk to confront the issues in real-time."

"If you let others define your product category and follow accepted playbooks, you’re playing the game on others’ terms, including their market size."

"Most narrowly, in HRIS, Rippling could steal market share from incumbents including ADP, Paychex, and Workday, representing over $40b in combined revenue."

"Rippling also controls software distribution as the provisioner of end-user licenses, giving it leverage over the business software ecosystem."

"Its wedge was a data asset, not a narrow product. It doesn’t let SaaS metrics dictate its strategy."