No Priors Ep. 83 | With Rippling COO Matt MacInnis

Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, Elad and I have a spicy one. We're here with Matt McInnis, the COO of Rippling, the juggernaut workforce management platform that unifies HR, IT, finance, and more. They're launching a new AI product that looks at the work output of employees and generates performance management signals. Sound terrifying? Let's discuss. It's so good to have you.

Thank you for having me.

So I think a lot of our audience will know Rippling or use Rippling-

Yep.

... but for anybody who's missing it, what does the company do?

Yeah, it's an all-in-one platform for HR, IT, and finance. We do all the boring stuff, but the important stuff to help you run your company. So we wanna, like, adminis- uh, eliminate the administrative burden of running a company. That's all the, like, official language, but most people come to us and say they need payroll, and we have payroll. They need a device management solution, we have one of those too. So we do all that stuff.

The rumor is, you know, many hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, growing fast. Anything else you can say about scale?

Uh, it's going well. We got about 3,500 employees. We've got tens of thousands of customers using the platform. So I'd say we're doing something right.

I guess also one of the things that you all have really pioneered is this, uh, notion of reintroducing compound startups or bundled products across a suite of different things. How many different products do you offer now, and how-

Oh, man.

... what's the velocity in terms of adding new ones?

We have on the order of like 25 unique SKUs that, uh, a customer can buy from us. Products come in different shapes and sizes. And so like w- we ship small new things every quarter, and then we, we definitely do, like, big things every couple of quarters or so. We're about to ship, like, scheduling, which, you know, again, sounds unsexy but is actually really cool. We shipped an applicant tracking system for recruiting, you know, tacking these sorts of things under our HCM suite. We d- we do a lot of this partially because we have so many founders in the business. We have over 150 people who have started companies that now work at Rippling. It's like an explicit strategy to go out and try to either give talented entrepreneurs whose business ideas didn't quite work out, like, "Hey, hand raised, I've been there," uh, a safe place to land and continue either pursuing what they were interested in or do something new at Rippling, and so that's worked out really well for us on the velocity front for shipping new products. The compound startup thing obviously has been in the zeitgeist a little bit in the Valley. It's just obviously a huge tailwind for us that businesses generally wanna consolidate as much of their software onto a single platform as they can, so we're gonna keep pursuing this and keep recruiting awesome, talented entrepreneurs and ship new stuff all the time.