The one and only Parker Conrad stopped by TechCrunch’s Found this week to talk to us about his company Rippling, as well as the X spat heard around the Valley.
Conrad founded Rippling, an all-in-one HR technology company, after being ousted from his old company Zenefits — an experience he was not shy to touch on when we asked about it. In a sense, he said, Rippling is the company he’s always wanted and is probably what Zenefits would have been had he been allowed to stay, minus some differences.
“One thing that’s just nice is that when you start a company in a sort of related industry again, one of the great things you get to do as an entrepreneur is you get to undo all of the mistakes you made the last time around,” he said. “We really came to see employee data as not just this thing for HR software but as a primitive that was really critical for business software.”
Conrad also spoke about the company’s business model and defended building it as a one-stop-shop, rather than a company with a focus in one area. For the most part, he said that business software companies have been built “wrong” for the past twenty years and that businesses that focus on one area end up having to have a bunch of different software to run across their business. “There’s a lot of inefficiency in that,” he said.
“I think that actually the secret to building better business software is building a system where you can build multiple parallel business software applications that are natively built into the same system,” Conrad continued, as he began to list off some advantages of that… all of which can be heard in this week’s episode.
Afterward, Conrad gave his thoughts on the alleged “AI bubble” some have touted and spoke about how he sees so many companies “AI washing” themselves. He also gave some business advice for founders, mainly to find the problem areas in a company and to tackle them — even if it makes you uncomfortable. And then, in the end, we couldn’t help but ask about the very public spat he had with former investor David Sacks — who helped push him out of Zenefits — asking why he did it and what other founders can learn from speaking up for themselves.
He said he never expected his tweet about Sacks to get so much attention. “I reached a point where I was like ‘look, there’s nothing that this guy has said about me or that he could say about me that he hasn’t already said, or that he would take from me that he hasn’t already taken.”
To hear more of the conversation, tune into the podcast and stay tuned for some interesting new Rippling updates.