Curious how others feel about this narrative. As an SI we see the pain isolated systems cost businesses and the great deal of money required to make them fit into a larger ecosystem. That said as a rippling customer, their breadth and lack of depth is constantly on display. We’ve had several challenges with there “secondary” services. It costs money to be good at everything, my feeling is this style of getting off the ground is just as much a capital constraint as it is a revenue/gtm one.
He’s got a good valuation going selling ideas and figuring out how to implement later though…
I have worked for companies that chased breadth and companies that focused. The focused group contained the only real successes.
Breadth is a killer. It requires resources (eng, PM, executive) that are not available in young companies. Where it was pursued, the management imperative to build the broad set of capabilities without resourcing meant that almost everything sort of sucked. It was in one instance the result of a strong founder chasing every shiny buzzword even without a strong business justification.
Go with focus, unless you have proven-strong management and actual big-tech resourcing.
There are a couple of obvious problems with the breadth-first approach. While I think everyone would agree that a great platform beats a bunch of great one-function apps, building a great one-function app is much cheaper and less risky than trying to build a platform. The number of people who know some narrow problem they can solve better than existing solutions is exponentially greater than the number of people who know how to build a broad platform that solves most problems better than existing solutions. And the reality is that most companies who pay for platforms will still buy one-function apps if the platform's functionality is inferior enough to replace that aspect. They are much less likely to buy another entire platform, however.
I doubt Parker actually personally believes what he's saying here, it seems more like marketing from a company that is trying to sell a platform than it does the thoughtful opinion of an individual.
Explains why everyone I’ve talked to that uses Rippling (including our company) hates it.
The size that you can grow to while maintaining singular focus is getting bigger and bigger. Parker’s situation is probably different because he was able to raise a bunch of money early on after Zenefits bequeathed him with SV stardom. He had early signs of success because he was able to acquire customers through what seems like an incomparable feature completeness, at the cost of shit UX and buggy software (IME). For example: they literally didn’t file our tax documents despite telling us they did, resulting in thousands of dollars of fines.
I might be overly cynical based on our pretty awful experiences, but feel vindicated because we’ve moved to a smaller, leaner, more focused HR startup named Warp and haven’t had half the issues we did with Rippling.
I have not met Parker in person, I have not used Rippling. But I like the approach of building a vertical end to end tool. I started https://taghash.io with just deal flow CRM for VC, over time customers demanded portfolio management, when we built it, others asked for fund, LP management. As we incrementally built our product, sales (mostly referral & inbound) became easier.
We were no more getting compared to a spreadsheet or no code tool because of being a single vendor managing end to end lifecycle of a VC/PE firm.
Why would anyone even care about what Parker Conrad thinks about building software?
I appreciate his company building but he is no John Carmack. So sit down bud.
Also why Saas are struggling is not because they were focused on something narrow. It's because they were not innovating and pushing the edge of technology and VCs were funding the same type of company multiple times to reduce risk etc.
Did you read the article. It isn't actually about software, but how to build software businesses.
John Carmack is an absolute legend in multiple ways, but Parker Conrad makes some good points here regarding how to organize a business.
I don't take what he says as gospel, but it may fit in certain situations where you're taking on incumbents, or where there are many players focused on just the small SaSS tools.
In May 2015, Conrad made the news after he revoked a job offer he made to an engineer who asked for advice on the question-and-answer website Quora about whether he should accept a job offer from Zenefits or Uber.
2016, California finds Zenefits almost entirely out of compliance on insurance regulation.
2017, Tennessee fined Zenefits for "a pattern of" failing to self-report compliance issues. Then California fined them $7M for "disobeying insurance laws".
I read it. At this point Techcrunch is paid advertising and as pg said, I could sense PR all over it. Also Rippling is like ok. It's not some amazing business either. Gusto I think did a better job with their software. Rippling's sales team is known to be aggressive and slimy.
Seems to me that building for breadth can trigger overengineering. You build functionality that isn't wanted, but is a logical consequence of your platform and the other functionality that you do have use cases for. This is an expenditure of resources with no guarantee that anyone will use it. In turn, it's likely that this functionality will harbor bugs and design errors, precisely because nobody has really used it for anything.
I'm all for building extensible platforms, with scripting and/or good APIs, but any effort put into something for which there is no definable use case is probably wasted.
Rippling is terrible. I had major major issues with their software and an even worse customer service experience. The best thing I can say about it is the UI is better than ADP but ADP at least works.
He’s got a good valuation going selling ideas and figuring out how to implement later though…