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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.

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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.

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

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