4 years after HR outfit Zenefits blew up, its controversial founder is back with Rippling, another startup to automate human resources. It’s already worth $300 million and growing fast. Can Parker Conrad find redemption?
arker Conrad was 32 when he founded human-resources startup Zenefits. Within three years he’d built it into a Silicon Valley tech darling worth $4.5 billion. Then, everything unraveled as the company’s growth stalled amid compliance problems that included brokers selling health insurance in states where they weren’t licensed to do so.
Since then, Conrad’s comeback seems to be working. More than 2,500 businesses from Compass Coffee to DivvyUp Socks have signed up, paying a monthly fee, starting at $8 per user per month, for Rippling’s employee-management software. The startup’s revenue last year reached an estimated $10 million.
“I’ve had some really big successes and some really deep and profound failures, and that cycle has repeated itself a lot in my life,” says Parker Conrad. “You’re always trying to defeat your demons.” The company took off, and with Andreessen Horowitz and other top VC firms behind it, hit that $4.5 billion valuation in spring 2015, up from $500 million the previous year. “Zenefits was already the hottest startup of 2014. Now it’s making a case to grab the same title in 2015,”Below the surface, though, trouble was already brewing. In the fall of 2015, Zenefits came under increasing public scrutiny for allowing brokers to sell health insurance in states where they weren’t licensed.
“I’ve had some really big successes and some really deep and profound failures, and that cycle has repeated itself a lot in my life,” Conrad says. “You’re always trying to defeat your demons.”uring a recent video Zoom call, Conrad, wearing a gray Rippling hoodie and speaking from his San Francisco home, where he, his wife and his two kids are hunkered down during the coronavirus, shares his screen to show off Rippling’s software.
“People were out there building HR department software instead of building employee software that could be used broadly across the organization,” Conrad says. “I think most of the irreducible administrative crap work that people hate about running a company comes back to this problem of needing to maintain information about your employees across the business.”
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