How To Build The Future: Parker Conrad

**Parker Conrad** (0:00)
A lot of that conversation around Founder Mode, I remember thinking to myself, going all the way to the ground floor, particularly when something's broken, is like, that's the way to go. You gotta just really get your hands dirty, get in the weeds. AI is gonna help companies, 2,000 person companies be run more like 200 person companies, and 200 person companies be run more like 20 person companies. You need to make your business so good. It sort of doesn't matter whether you fit into whatever mold or construct the VCs are looking for.

**Garry** (0:42)
Welcome back to another episode of How to Build the Future. Our guest today is Parker Conrad, who's created a $13.5 billion company called Rippling. So thanks for being with us.

**Parker Conrad** (0:55)
Well, thank you, Garry.

**Garry** (0:56)
Rippling is sort of synonymous with HR, IT, if you want payroll, if you want to understand what's going on with your business. That's really what Rippling is. It's sort of the first thing people turn to. How's it feel right now?

**Parker Conrad** (1:11)
I like that the business feels like it's more predictable and steady. Now, I mean, we're still growing very quickly, but at some scale where it feels like we have, we really understand what we're going to do a year into the future, as opposed to early on where it's kind of like, you don't know what's going to happen next week, and that's always a little terrifying.

**Garry** (1:31)
Yeah. Why don't we start off at the beginning? I mean, what were some of your first memories with computers and tech, just even as a child, starting out?

**Parker Conrad** (1:41)
I mean, growing up, I didn't do that much that was super entrepreneurial, but I definitely, I kind of figured out how to use a computer really early on, and I had, I guess, just made a bunch of money in middle school and high school, fixing people's computers. There was friends of the family, other like my parents' friends that needed help getting a computer set up or figuring out how to get online.

**Garry** (2:08)
You actually were really, really into the Crimson and so much so that it actually took a drain on your studies at Harvard, didn't it?

**Parker Conrad** (2:18)
Yeah. So when I was in college, I started working on the newspaper there and got just really into it, and spent all my time at the newspaper, didn't go to class, and they didn't like that very much. So I ended up getting kicked out, and then came back and graduated after that. A lot of what I liked about that experience was this sort of like esprit de corps of being on this, in this group of people that was like taking on the administration, and really like going out and taking on sort of entrenched, powerful interests, that sort of thing.
And I spent a lot of time after college trying to get back to that sort of feeling. I decided kind of pretty early on, I didn't actually want to be a journalist. But I sort of found that again when I was doing startups. You're taking on sort of usually some big entrenched incumbent of some kind. And that was like, okay, this felt like that experience that I had working on the newspaper at college.

**Garry** (3:24)
From there, you got a degree in chemistry. You're in a biotech firm in LA. When did you decide to pivot over to entrepreneurship that you could start a company because it sounded like you had a lot of things figured out at the biotech firm.

**Parker Conrad** (3:40)
I didn't get a lot of job offers after graduation, and the job that I got was at working at Amgen in Los Angeles. I had a really great time. I was really enjoying myself, but it was also kind of like this very slow career progression. And one of my roommates from college who was working for Amazon came to me and wanted to start a company.
And he was like, hey, let's do something. You know, I'll move down from Seattle. You move up from LA. We both moved to San Francisco. We did exactly the wrong thing, because we decided to start a company. And then we started trying to figure out what we were going to do. We came up with a bunch of ideas that sounded like good ideas, but were actually terrible ideas, which is usually what happens when you decide to start a company and then try and figure out what you're going to do. I did it because I felt like, man, my career is like, you know, it's going well, but you know, I'm not going to, it's going to be a long time before I get anywhere in my current job. And if Mike does this and I don't, I'll be like an old man kicking myself for not having taken that leap. And so we did it and then it was like seven years of slow grinding failure of just like rejection after rejection after rejection with like nothing working and pivot after pivot after pivot.