Rippling - Manage Your Employees Better
Workforce management software
We’ve all answered the question “how do you work in teams”.
I often give a noncontroversial answer and think nothing of it because the question is typically a gimme. Some people are better than others at working in teams but it’s important to be able to do so nonetheless.
Working in teams is one of the most universal and important experiences we share in our lives.
In your family, on your soccer team, in your high school social studies project or orchestra, college computer science group, or at your current day job, even in your friend group:
You’re a member of a team.
Teams, and the people that comprise them are (as human capital is) pretty difficult to manage. All the members have their own unique values, personalities, intentions, goals in life, ways they work best, and more.
More formally in a business, individual employees have differing jobs, responsibilities (department / function), attributes and privileges (benefits, pay, devices) and more. It’s no wonder the management of people is a massive space. Given remote working trends driven by COVID and more, it couldn’t be more difficult to manage employees. Let’s imagine the administrative pain of remote employee management from John Luttig’s post on Rippling:
Consider the lifecycle of a remote employee. First, you must register them with the correct state tax agencies. Then you need to ship them a laptop, ensure it has the right security settings, and provision their accounts to systems like Zoom or Slack. Once they’re onboard, you must manage their benefits, comply with a web of local regulations, and enforce IT security settings without being on the same network. And when they leave, you need to somehow retrieve their device and comply with employment law.
Disconnected employee data and workflows are a massive tax on productivity.
Given employee data lives across dozens of systems, point solutions cannot solve remote employment holistically – they solve symptoms, not root causes. Companies must either pay the administrative tax to support a remote team, or miss out on top global talent.
The administrative crisis is a fundamental bottleneck to company growth.
As I was writing this, our company for this week, Rippling, raised yet another round! Rippling is an S.F.-based workforce management platform. Rippling raised $250 million at an $11.25 billion valuation in May 2022. The company was founded by Parker Conrad, the former CEO of Zenefits (which has quite an interesting story, consider reading here). The investment was led by Kleiner Perkins and Bedrock Capital. Other investors in Rippling include Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks, Founders Fund, Initialized Capital, YC and Threshold Ventures. Rippling lets a company effortlessly manage employees’ payroll, benefits, devices, apps, and more —in one place.
Rippling offers two distinct products, a set of HR cloud products and an IT cloud product.
On HR Cloud, Rippling allows for management of:
Payroll - Payment, compliance, documents (I-9s, W-2s), tax filing, reporting / reports, and more.
Time and Attendance - Tracking hours, approval, compliance, management, PTO, and break tracking
Talent Management - Recruiting, onboarding, learning, engagement
Benefits - Connect existing plans, set up new health insurance, 401(k), commuter, and automate all compliance
Learning Management - Add or mandate training, track progress, ensure compliance and certification
PEO Services and more
On IT Cloud, Rippling allows for:
App Management - App provisioning, single sign-on (SSO), password management, multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Device Management - Device setup, device security, device offboarding, ordering, shipping & storage
The platform fundamentally changes the game for companies of any size and does so with a few core overarching features:
One unified place to manage all people operations for one source of truth
Automate any workflow across people operations
Analyze data across HR, IT, and third party integrated info
Streamline compliance policies and permissioning
At its core, Rippling is a horizontal software platform for workforce management in a sea of point solutions.
Rippling has built a horizontal software product built on top of the employee record, where others have built niche, point solutions for various issues associated with workforce management.
For one, because Rippling has built the underlying infrastructure known as middleware (permissioning, reporting, approvals, compliance) once, it can then use this middleware across all of its products and incremental product additions. In contrast, other companies have to build out this middleware each time, from scratch. This means Rippling needs a large and ambitious R&D team and substantial investment, but it empowers the force of the platform, and makes upsell and cross-sell of other products in the Rippling product suite extremely smooth and cheap.
Rippling faces some tough competition from longstanding enterprises.
Gusto offers an extensive HR platform that is particularly popular with startups
TriNet provides professional employer organization (PEO) capabilities,
Paychex offers payroll and HR,
ADP provides HR management software
Paylocity offers payroll and HR
BambooHR provides HR software
Oracle, Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, and Ceridian are titans in the industry of HCM software
Paycom, TCP, Paycor, UKG, greytHR, Zenefits (what founder Parker Conrad left to start Rippling) and more are other competitors in the space.
The question is, how ripe is this space for consolidation, and what is the formula for success? Software solutions that are highly bespoke and are flexible as companies grow are the ones that will win. More data and more actionable insight from that data is going to enable clients to improve productivity and efficiency in managing any compani’s true key resource -
People
Speaking of managing people, this weekend we organized a dinner for my friend Antoine, we watched Top Gun 2, and took a quick trip to Avalon, NJ for MDW.
First things first, Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel to the original (1986 release) was awesome. A beautiful tribute to the original with state-of-the-art aerial shots, a great story, a skilled cast, and a plethora of moments that get you and your fellow viewers pumped up and proud (my Leterboxd review here). Was an awesome movie and crazy Tom Cruise can play the same character with ease 36 years later…
My close friend Antoine spent his last weekend in NYC. He’s going to travel a bit and we sent him off with a massive meal at Chinese Tuxedo. If you haven’t been, a great birthday / special occasion spot that’s Asian fusion cuisine. Favorites are the dimsum, Johnny fried rice, lobster noodles, snapper, and of course the duck.
GW