Rippling’s funding round gives founder second unicorn chance | Hacker News Reader

Rippling’s funding round gives founder second unicorn chance

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32 pointstotaldude8721 comments

Every time I hear about this dude I only can remember that he publicly rescinded the offer of an engineer who asked in Quora on whether he should take an offer from Zenefits or an offer from Uber.

A harmless and rightful question that many people do ask themselves when considering an offer (taking x or y job offer) and the dude treated it like it was some sort of cult loyalty matter.

I hope he has learned from his past mistakes since he seems pretty smart and driven.

I just can't stand those cult-like cultures some companies/founders try to create. And I'm talking also about those companies that pose like they are a family and everyone is together no matter what. Drinking their own kool-aid... That's so far from the real transactional nature of a job.

To create good working cultures founders should start by realizing that the relationships between employees and employers are no different from the relationship between a buyer and seller. Both parties should seek for transparency, respect and fairness in their relationship. It shouldn't be some sort of lifestyle type of decision and they should never be challenged to pick between their personal life and their professional life. Your employees will never be as passionate as you're about the mission's company so if you want them to really stick and do their best, start by realizing they are not you.

> Every time I hear about this dude I only can remember that he publicly rescinded the offer of an engineer who asked in Quora on whether he should take an offer from Zenefits or an offer from Uber.

Hah, same here. I'd avoid the guy like the plague as an employee (and maybe even moreso if I were an investor). Not to mention that Zenefits was marred by a few HR scandals, too. Just goes to show it really must be "who you know."

re: "who you know" -- this may indicate the opposite.

Consider how "looked down" this kind of investment would be, if the CEO has a bad record.

Yet, they still invest -- why? Because they think they will make a good return

"Who you know" is about people being treated certain ways by the people they know regardless of reputation or underlying attributes.

While obviously terrible behavior on the part of Zenefits, it highlight that there's a weird line you have to walk as a potential employee.

You need to pretend that you are 100% committed to the new company, even when you barely know them. And if you have counter offers you need to maintain that charade while simultaneously keeping open a bidding war.

So while that employee was entitled to check their options, their 'sin' was that they did it publicly.

We are in the process of closing our Rippling account. A few things that happened:

- They signed us up on an introductory deal, claiming they’d reach out before the deal expired. This never happened and we got billed for tons of services we had not ever used.

- We used their 1password copycat to share passwords between team members. We discovered that a former employee we had terminated through rippling had access to tons of sensitive accounts several days after their departure date. They claimed there was a bug and it took them a week to solve it.

Basically, highly negligent behavior.

We had a similar experience, and to be honest, I am disappointed that a founder with prior bad behavior is so easily forgiven and able to seemingly repeat this type of behavior in SV as it makes it harder for founders with less comfort with aggressive tactics to compete. Long term it will undermine consumer trust and do real damage to the market.

Interesting. Rippling is the only company I’ve ever interviewed at that, with full knowledge that they were doing so, offered me a job working more hours for significantly less pay than I was currently making. When challenged, they calmly assured me that it was a good deal, asked me to value the equity at something quite above this new valuation, and urged me to take the offer. Bold, but not the way I would choose to try and grow a company.

I didn't have a great experience with their recruiter or interviewers either. Maybe things have changed in the past year as they've grown bigger, but they were pretty unprofessional at the time.

Isn't that how start ups work?

Would they have been correct about the value of your equity?

that's the same with many startups, that you'd need to work longer and for less salary. but more potential upside on equity. they would have been telling you that the equity could be worth more in the future if they IPO etc. not that it'd be worth more in this round of funding.

Rippling pays top dollar in the Indian job market. Know a couple ex-FAANG engineers who are quite happy with their compensation and work.

One thing I will say about Rippling, their sales team is clearly incredible. And this fraudster asshole of a founder must be good at what he does too.

I've used their device management and single sign on products, and those are horrible. Much worse than the competition. Maybe their payroll and benefits management is fine? But so is Gusto, and Zenefits, and Just Works, it's basically a commodity at this point.

It all makes no sense to me at all, but hey it seems to be working out. Wild.

I guess it's another example of how unintuitively massive the enterprise software market is, as patio11 has written a lot about.

We use Rippling, and it's fine as payroll software. I chose it over Gusto because the complete integration between IT and HR is a really great and as far as I can tell unique offering.

In addition to payroll I get a "good-enough" password manager, MDM, SSO, integration with Gsuite, equipment purchasing. In theory, one-click and an employee is commissioned or decommissioned. If/when it works, it's a great idea. Having worked in a SOC2 compliant enterprise (we aren't and don't expect to be) previously, this would have saved me from purchasing several services AND given me documentation to pass my audits.

There's totally unique value there, and I wonder why they're basically the only ones to do it, though it's not currently as smooth as advertised.

This guy, again? How can I bet against any company founded by the guy responsible for the "creation, distribution and use of software designed to evade broker licensing education requirements."[0]

[0]https://dfs.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2020/03/ea170407_y...

We use Rippling at work, and I'm not quite sure what justifies a billion dollar plus valuation. (not to say it doesn't, I'm just super curious)

Anyone care to weigh in? I suspect there's a lot of things that behind the scenes as an employee, but to 5x it's valuation in a year... must be special.

It's almost certainly based upon a multiple of revenue. That multiple will be adjusted for growth, margins, and sector-specific hype.

I'd argue that it's almost certainly NOT valued on a multiple of revenue at this stage. still a lot about the founder, market size, story etc

Rippling is targeting a number of different markets with the key being that it's all under one roof and hopefully tightly integrated. The IT market is where Rippling started and one where I'd expect them to be fairly successful. The company I work at currently pays $5-$10 a user/month for each of password manager, SSO, MDM. They used to also offer MSP support where they basically managed your IT for you. If the consolidated version is good, you're hopefully paying less overall and spending a lot less on IT projects. This by itself makes it a competitor to a number of billion dollar companies. It looks like they are now doing HR software ala Zenefits. For IT departments, this is really nice because you don't need a custom integration with your SSO provider anymore. And of course as Zenefits showed you can make a billion dollar company by just managing HR benefits.

Well, at the very least cancel culture has not yet permeated the SV / VC bubble.

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