Parker Conrad likes to save time, even though it’s gotten him in trouble. The former CEO of Zenefits was pushed out of the $4.5 billion human resources startup because he built a hack that let him and employees get faster insurance certifications. But 2.5 years later, he’s back to take the busy work out of staff onboarding as well as clumsy IT services like single-sign on to enterprise apps. Today his startup Rippling launches its combined employee management system.
“It’s not an HR system. It’s a level below that” Conrad tells me. “It’s this unholy, crazy mashup of three different things”. First, it handles payroll, benefits, taxes, and PTO across all 50 states. “Except Syria and North Korea, you can pay anyone in the world with Rippling” Conrad claims.
Second, it’s a replacement for Okta, Duo, and other enterprise single-sign on security apps that authenticate staffers across partnered apps. Rippling bookmarklets make it easy to auth into over 250 workplace apps like Gmail, Slack, Dropbox, Asana, Trello, AWS, Salesforce, GitHub and more. When an employee is hired or changes teams, a single modification to their role in Ripple automatically changes all the permissions of what they can access.
And third, it handles computer endpoint security. When an employee is hired, Rippling can instantly ship them a computer with all the right software installed and the hard drive encypted, or have staffers add the Rippling agent that enforces the company’s security standards. The system is designed so there’s no need for an expert IT department to manage it.
“Distributed, fragmented systems of record for employee data are secretly the cause of almost all the annoying administrative work of running a company” Conrad concludes.