HR startup Rippling has grown into a $13.5 billion company with more than 3,200 employees. Despite that size, its founder and CEO Parker Conrad still approves every expense report over $10 and is still the one who handles routine HR tasks like payroll. That’s because he uses his own product for such tasks every day.
“One of the things I appreciate most about the company is that I’m the primary user of Rippling at Rippling,” he said on a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Found podcast. In addition to payroll and expense approval, he also uses the product for everything from managing benefits and setting HR policies to device management systems. “I think that’s a really great feedback loop. Because it means that if something doesn’t work well or is a pain to use, it gets fixed very quickly because I use it on a daily basis.”
Of course, Conrad’s experience with the platform doesn’t necessarily reflect that of his customers, since he knows the basic details of Rippling better than a typical HR manager who didn’t invent the product. But by using Rippling directly, he can still give his team specific feedback on how the product should work, he says.
“I often have this backlog of administrative work to do, but every time I do that, there are often Slack pings going out to individual product and development teams saying, ‘Hey, this didn’t work right, or this was slower than it needed to be, or the experience wasn’t clear,'” Conrad said. “That leads to a lot of iterations on the product side.”
This is just one area of leadership where Conrad takes a contrarian approach. He also said he doesn’t believe in top-down management, where managers manage other managers.
“I think the only way I’ve been able to solve problems is to get to the root of the problem,” Conrad said. “When something goes wrong in sales, you have to look at the last 20 sales calls and see what’s happening in the interaction between the representatives of that team where something isn’t working and the customers.”
And when he notices problems elsewhere, such as in customer support, he reads through the “last 50” support calls and even works “as a support agent” himself for a few days, he says.
He calls this approach collecting “anecdotal data.” Anecdotes are much more effective at helping a CEO identify problems than a dashboard of data on how the company is performing in certain areas.
This is a very different style from that of founders who believe they can get results through force of will or by making demands. It is more akin to the style of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who maintained a public email address where he went through customer feedback and complaints. But with Bezos, instead of going “on site” to observe and put himself in the shoes of his employees in the style of an “undercover boss,” he would relay such complaints to his managers and ask them to write detailed analysis papers, Bezos told CNBC in 2020.
Conrad also doesn’t believe it’s right for founders to identify their weaknesses and hire people who are better suited to those tasks. He calls this approach “bullshit” and says founders should learn to master the areas in which they are not so strong.
“You should find the things you hate about the company, and you should run up to them, embrace them, and really face them and focus on those things, because those are the things that are probably going to kill you,” Conrad said. “Those are the things you probably avoid because they’re uncomfortable to focus on. I’ve definitely seen that in myself, and the things you really hate are the things you should be spending all your time on.”
