Introduction Rippling’s premise is that businesses should have a single system for employee information across every department within the company. That’s not the way it works today. OVERVIEW OUR STRATEGY Most businesses have dozens of systems that main- Our strategy, in a nutshell, has 3 parts: tain a list of their employees, and for the most part, none of these systems talk to each other or to any Part I: If you can be the system of record for central system about who these employees are. employee data, you can build a really successful business. Sometimes, these business systems only need to know a little bit about each employee — maybe just Being the system of record for employee data is lucra- each employee’s username, and a password, so that tive because this system has platform power that the system can authenticate employees when they can be used in other business software and services log in. Other systems go deeper, and need to know categories that need to access this underlying em- each employee’s department, manager, salary, home ployee data. address, and more. At one extreme, if you’re the system of record for employee data, you can build adjacent products with Whenever something changes about an employee, exclusive access to your system. That’s what we did at many (and sometimes, all) of these systems need my last company, Zene昀椀ts. Zene昀椀ts was a system of to be updated, and because they don’t point to any record for employee data within the HR department, central authority, they each need to be updated sepa- and in order for clients to connect their insurance rately and by hand. up to Zene昀椀ts, they had to make us their insurance We believe that the e昀昀ort to maintain this fragmented broker. employee data across all of a company’s business Because this connectivity made life easier for the systems is, secretly, the root cause of almost all the client, most Zene昀椀ts clients chose to make us their administrative work of running a company. broker. But we could have arbitrarily done this in any There should be a single system of employee data number of other areas with a strong tie to the em- that sits underneath every other business system. ployee record, besides insurance. Companies and their employees could come to this And, you can take a di昀昀erent approach, which we pre- one place, and make changes to employees in this one fer at Rippling — you can partner broadly with other system, and that system would handle the propaga- companies and be a reseller: you can allow other tion out to every other business system. companies to operate in your system, you can bring That’s what Rippling is, and that’s what we do. them new clients, and in exchange, they pay you a cut of their revenue. This belief — that the system of record for employee data is valuable — is the least unique, and probably the least controversial, part of our strategy. 2 Rippling Memo