Welcome, welcome to the first episode of
dead cat. I'm Eric, newcomer the writer
and author of newcomer. The newsletter here, with Tom
Dayton and Katie Benner, who will introduce themselves as
we've got a very special guest, Parker, Conrad, Katie Tom, and I
have been friends for years. And I've had this long-running
sort of message thread, signal thread, where we've chatted
about the media and Tech and sort of gossiped about sort of,
you know, the meta story of what's happening in Tech, sort
of reading the stories, in another light.
And so we sort of wanted to try out a podcast where we You know,
talked about tech in the coverage of tech from a totally
different lens in this in this world, you know, where, you
know, technology companies are more ascendant than ever before.
Anyway, so that I mean, that's, that's the very quick
introduction. I think we should just get into
it. Tom, you want to say hello?
Sure. Hey, I thought you give a very
sanitized version of what. Okay, now we're at was I thought
it was where we were giving our marching orders to the
mainstream media in which they would discuss.
Exactly. What we wanted them to and to
pick these tech companies in the specifically - and detrimental
light that we all intend these companies to be viewed.
So I actually thought there was a lot more power imbued into
that chat room, but I guess it was just a place for us to push
it. I misunderstood the point of
this thread. My name is Tom as Eric said, I
am a reporter at Insider. I'm supposed to call it that.
Now, not Business Insider, where I cover, the gig economy, Uber
Lyft, doordash instacart go. Huff frequently.
So that's my, that's my beat there.
But yeah, a newcomer and Katie and I used to work together at
the information, way back in the day.
And I think, actually, all of us at some point covered Uber,
right? Briefly and Eric, you make Isaac
me and another Uber reporter, all at my house, one night in
San Francisco, and Reuters broken, Uber story, and none of
us were able to match it. We were definitely all covering
Uber At the die. Yes.
You can see very Insider regroup but yeah.
Anyway, that's that's that's my background here.
And I used to write about media. So I'm the, I'm the media guy on
this show. Yes, I'm covering the justice
department for the New York Times.
I really just kind of a special guest here but it's really fun
to think about tech again because I will say as a beat it
is more fun in many ways than covering the justice department.
Cool. And yeah, I'll introduce par
girl. But I mean, Parker Conrad, you
know, we got to know him or I've known him for a long time as the
CEO of zenefits covered sort of the rise of that company.
I would have businessweek feature on it when it was new
and exciting. And then, you know, Parker got
pushed out. It was a huge headline story,
and I wrote about that and I'm sure we'll be talking about the
zenefits story, which is given Parker is super interesting
perspective on the media. I mean I also love that Parker
is someone who, you know, Did his college newspaper.
So he sort of got the media there and then, you know, has,
he's very mixed views about what's great about Silicon
Valley and not that sort of, I don't know.
Both both are somewhat in line with the rah-rah story and sort
of super critical of it. So I am very excited to hear
what what Parker has say Parker. I mean, what inspired you to
walk into this death trap of three Reporters on our first
podcast. The gosh.
I don't know. I guess you know you're making
me nervous here. Eric, why did I make a mistake
here? What is it too, late?
I mean I think that I guess I think that there are, you know,
I think I you and I have spoken before about sort of my view of
sort of the media VC complex in in Silicon Valley and kind of
how that impacts the narrative and coverage and sort of the
things that the things, some of the things that I sort of
dislike about that. And so I think there are
relatively few people That are willing to give an alternate
perspective, that I think is government, so that's some of
it. And then obviously like like a
like a lot of people who sort of love and hate and need the
media. You know, I've got a company to
pitch and and and so there's there's always that that angle
so. Okay.
Give us give us the what is the tech VC symbiosis.
We all have our own ideas but you know how would you
articulate it? I think that reporters that are
covering Tech are looking for like repeated players or voices
of authority that they can speak to about the industry and
frequently they don't know startup.
Founders startup Founders. Maybe it's hard to identify
which ones which companies are important and who you should be
speaking with. And It's very easy to sort of
say, oh well, you know, I'll talk to Andreessen Horowitz or,
you know, some brand-name, VC firm.
And so, those end up being for reasons that.
Don't I think make a lot of sense, the sort of voices of
authority about the industry. And it's sort of strange in a
way if you looked at more traditional businesses, you
know, if you're writing about the oil and gas industry, would
you talk to the banks that are sort of lending the money for
Capital purchases? And like those are the people
that you would sort of like would be the authorities on the
the oil and gas like no that wouldn't that would that would
be weird. You know it's it's it's sort of
unusual. Like if you thought of you see
is as You know, almost more like, like sort of banks, you
know, that were lending money to businesses.
You know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't sort of immediately
think. Like those are, those are the
people that were going to put at the center of the ecosystem.
But, but that is the way often media about tech works and and,
and investors need that. Because in practice, when you
look at a lot of these early stage deals, I think one thing
that sometimes people Don't from the outside, don't understand.
Is it's often just like incredibly obvious to everyone
on the ground like which that there is a company here that you
know, it's not guaranteed but this company has a very decent
chance very early on of having an enormously successful outcome
and it's obvious to a lot of people there.
And so there are tons of investors that would you know
love to put money into that company and in practice the
founder, you know, just the Of their time, you know these
rounds come together and you know 10 days they can maybe meet
with five or six firms. And so who do they end up
meeting with? Well the end up meeting with the
person that they saw, you know, on the front page of the
business section in the New York Times or, you know, in the Wall
Street Journal or that was, you know, maybe covered recently by
Eric's blog because that's sort of who they've heard of.
And, and so from a Aziz perspective that media attention
is oxygen. You know, it's sort of the
closest analogy I can think of is, it's like it's like
celebrities, you know how they like, that's what what they need
because it's the it's the only thing that's truly
differentiating for them. And it's really how.
I mean you've seen that with some firms like Andreessen
Horowitz that really have built their brand, purely on the back
of that media exposure. Or almost entirely on the back
of that media, exposure to such an extent that I think the right
way to think about that firm is it's not really a VC firm.
It's a it's a PR agency that has a very specific monetization
strategy of investing in startup startup companies.
And like, in that vein, it's not surprising that they've now
decided to like create their own content arm and all that kind of
stuff. Because like, they always were
sort of a media company. First, and foremost.
Yeah, putting and reason aside, because I think, They are such a
specific example and you're, you know, you have a history with
Andreessen, which might be interesting to talk about later.
But in this formula, the media, the reporters are kind of
unquestioning in their willingness to feature venture
capitalist. You know, why is it?
Do you think that reporters aren't scrutinizing?
The Venture Capital firms in the way they might be scrutinizing?
The startups themselves, you know, I don't, I don't know, I
guess I would sort of ask maybe ask you guys that.
I mean, sometimes. Times.
Sometimes, it seems to me that reporters are looking for
authority figures, you know, they're looking for it, you
know, they're looking for an authority figure and then like
sort of the looking for Daddy's, parental figures.
I agree with partner and the reality of how these companies
are run. But from the outside, you look
at it and you're like, oh well, you have, you know, these people
are board members, you know, they write the CEOs like you.
No sort of that's their boss. You know, that's not and that's
that's not the reality of the situation but I think it's it's
sort of, you know, like in other beats you know if you're if
you're talking about something that happened at the justice
department, you ultimately want to speak with like Merrick
Garland or like, you know, like his his spokesperson right.
You know. And so like you're looking for
like who's the person at the top and I think that reporters have
sort of conclude And perhaps in accurately that that those
people are the investors and it perturbs.
And distorts a lot of the things about the ecosystem that there's
that perception, that's why you see all these people like
marching out of business school and they all want to become
Venture capitalists, you know. Because like, you know, that's
sort of where the perception of kind of, you know, where where
the where the power is and you know where the sort of the power
behind the throne or whatever, whatever you would call it.
It's okay, it's cute. I mean, please say no, if you
don't want to but would it not be instructive then to look at
zenefits through this lens? And I don't think we introduce
benefits and I think we said what it was, but it was the
company that you started that was enormously successful
specifically in Silicon Valley terms, meaning, the valuation
grew and grew and grew meeting investors were is an HR like an
HR portal. So we're basically trying to buy
more stock essentially in your company ever, higher prices and
your company helped, you know, other corporations.
On board employees and take care of HR functions through you,
through easy-to-use, software was a great idea.
And from the media's point of view, we saw this stratospheric
rise of your company and that attention was sort of built by
the valuations, which are granted by the VCS, which then
make them a huge part of the story because the main data
point, And maybe this is flawed, but the main data point
especially at the time, reporters used to decide which
company mattered, was, was the valuation, especially at that
period and Rocket fueled by Andreessen, which was probably
at. It's like at then, you know,
philosophical voice of the Silicon Valley mouthpiece Peak,
right? That look like from your point
of view, as you were watching the attention turned to your
company in large part, because of this, both VC, fueled
valuation and BC fueled, you know, conversation with the
Press, Yes, so what did that look like inside to you?
Yeah, I mean so you know, there are some things that I can talk
about about zenefits and there's some things that I just can't
and so I probably can't go as deep in this conversation as I'd
like to at some point in time I it's definitely true.
I mean you say that sort of like the Press was fueled by the
valuation which was in turn fueled by like sometimes the
Press was field directly by the VCS themselves.
Like I remember At one point, you know, Kim listen Vic from
Andreessen Horowitz, coming to me and saying, hey, we have, you
know, a reporter from The New York Times, who wants to
profile, a Silicon Valley company and asked us like, which
company should he do? And we told him the company
that, you know, that he should do is then if it's and the clear
implication is like, you know, we sort of instructed like the
media You know, which company to cover and now they're going to
cover York. I mean, it was very like, at
least in the way that they are now.
I don't know what it was like from the reporter's perspective,
but in terms of how they described it to me, it was like
we are telling them to cover your company and that, you know,
became a think. This is just became a story that
Farhad Farhad wrote for the New York Times.
And so there were definite, at least from my perspective, it
was like, wow. No, these, these guys are You
know, they exercised a fair amount of direct control over
sort of the media narrative and, you know, and Eric, you and I
have talked about, you know, just the dinners that, you know,
Margot would have for reporters, you know, at her house right?
Met you. That's right.
I remember, you know, it was incredible to see, you know,
everyone, just the extent to which like invites to Those
dinners were important, you know, like there's an ecosystem
there between VCS and, and the, the tech media that I think puts
the VC firms at the center of these stories in it, in ways
that are sort of sometimes, Miss sort of other other Dynamics.
Those dinners are extremely canny the way that they're
handled. Because first of all reporters
want to be invited to them. Because it shows that, I mean,
if you're at a big publication, you kind of Default get invited
to it and you know the information it was always an
issue at first because for certain places we didn't
register but reporters are always kind of, you know,
screwing around there. Like rats trying to like make
connections with entrepreneurs like you or for VCS thinking
about like this is, you know I like much more.
Yeah more than PCS. I mean as a reporter is still
deep in this bead who's really set up a publication around the
VCS I think for some of The reasons we're talking about.
I do think there's a there's a reality that like the VCS are
just more scalable sources, you know.
They, they know the facts that I want like a great scale.
Where is the founder? Maybe knows a lot about their
company. Nobody wants to leak stuff about
their own company, well. So one question is like, how
does this play out in terms of the type of the, the way that
sort of, you know, coverage, you know, happens for tech.
And, and one way that happens is that often A set of things that
a lot of VCS will agree on that ends up getting sort of
repeated, without a lot of questioning.
You have an example. One example would be that.
We pay too much for startups to invest in them and we would
prefer to pay less for startups to invest in.
Yeah, but also to your point that sentiment belies the fact
that the one of the reasons VCS are paying so much isn't just
because the prices are too high. It's because they're taking in
too much capital in a world where other institutional,
investors are trying to get a return.
Sure. But you know you look at for a
long time you know, Bill girly was out there talking about how
all these startups were valued and everyone like the media
loved him for it you know it was it rests here was an Insider
sort of like speaking truth to you know his own and everyone
viewed it as heroic and no one was sort of saying like maybe
it's this maybe a little bit self-serving.
You know, like why will girlies who I, you know, I like it.
I've profiled is expert at saying one thing and doing
another, you know, are writing blog posts that sort of
implicitly indict, Uber or we work.
Well, you know, to sort of hedge against, you know, his firm's
own actual Behavior, Nasser. And and of course, I think like
and I look, I've never met Bill girly, but it strikes me that
bill girly was a big fan of valuations, being lower for
early-stage startups and and has always been a big fan Fan of the
idea that public markets investors are paying too little
for these companies when they IPO, which, you know, maybe
those two things conflict with each other, maybe they don't.
Are you able to talk about how this sort of like interplay
between valuations and venture capitalist in the media?
You know from your point of view, whatever it is.
You can say how that look to you as an if it's hit a road bump
And some of, yes, I will say that.
The thing that I remember most about benefits as well.
Frankly, our story about people having sex in the stairwells or
something. It was it was condoms in the
stairwell. Hey, we found, you know, a
condom in the stairwell of this Building and that's completely
unacceptable. And the office manager of our
company, sent an email out to everyone at the company saying,
this is completely unacceptable and look there were 30 35 other
companies in that building, it's not even clear that it was
someone at zenefits. But that story got, you know, we
were the ones that sent out that email and that's the email that
they got a hold of and that story got written and Rewritten
and Rewritten in a way that, and okay.
Yeah, by my senses, the zenefits thing was it was, I mean, it was
really a feeding frenzy as far as reporters were concerned.
I mean, they were reporters. I think actually every ykd Eric
and I all at some point, did some sort of zenefits Insider
ep's, maybe not like a feature at the same level as you.
No Eric maybe did or will Alden no longer a reporter but he kind
of, you know, wrote probably the most intensive pieces on it.
I mean what did it seem like to you from that perspective as
this many stores are coming out and reporters are essentially
making their careers out of you know, this sort of Story.
I mean obviously there was there was malfeasance that we were
discussing here and certainly when it came to, you know,
flouting insurance regulations in different states.
You know, you could argue that were Stakes Beyond just And of
condoms in the stairwell, but did it?
I don't know. I mean, I've always wondered
from the entrepreneur perspective, as reporters are
essentially, you know, we're getting pay raises out of
writing stories, like this ultimately, I mean, what is it?
What is it from the other side? I wasn't, I wasn't aware that.
Were you getting pay raises Eric?
It was that a none of us have gotten pay raises in a long
time. Well, not nothing.
It's not like they're like it's more just like, oh, if you write
good stories, you're going to do better in your career, you know
what I mean, right? Tom, are you?
Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, look, I've like gone on
vacations before and I've been like, man, you know what
afforded this vacation like Snapchat, really fucked up a
couple years ago and it's, I mean, look, it's true.
It's the nature of the job and obviously we aspire to Greater
reasons as to why we write these stories and tell more important
things in just that. But, you know, there is another
side to what there are people that were writing about that.
I've always wondered. Look, one thing I will say, is
that when stuff like this happens, there are people that
have institutional apparatus behind them, you know, then
have, you know, PR firms, PR agencies, established media
relationships, Lanny Davis people like like wonderful human
beings, like Lanny Davis, who rep, David Yaks, and who David
hired, you know, immediately, when this went down and who,
from what I've heard from, from other reporters that, you know,
David Sachs and Lanny Davis were kind of on the phone everyday.
Sort of pitching stories about me for six months.
What kinds of stories that I picked?
I don't know. I mean, I, you know, I heard
about a lot of that sort of second hand, but, you know,
there are people like me who are just kind of like, hold up at
home and kind of ignoring all of it and, you know, largely, you
know, not talking to to anyone but isn't isn't that an argument
for the VC's actually being powerful that like that when the
come With the company happens. And reason orbits is super sort
of the power broker in a way that suddenly the founder isn't
or you know, I mean a conflict in your story to me which I
mostly agree with is just you know, andreasen brings in David
Sachs who caused some of your like there are things where the
VC firm clearly had a big role in the company and, you know,
you want to point to them for some blame but you're also like,
oh they're not really big player.
You know I think one one thing is certain sort of understanding
like the nature of like the VC VC s sort of power over
companies and one thing that I've come to understand is it's
not about board control you know, I you know I had control
of the board at Santa Fitz and I think it's really, you know what
happens is The The Authority that that VCS have over
companies is a media Authority. It's a, it's a, it's a public
at, you know, it's say, it's sort of saying.
Like, look, if you, you will do what we want you to do, or we
will publicly go to war with the company, you know, and we will,
you know, sale, these bad things about you in the press and
disavow, the investment. All that kind of stuff, which is
a surprisingly common tactic that firms employee far more
frequently. Lie in terms of that having, you
know, sort of telling Founders that then actually sort of
pulling the trigger and doing it.
And, you know, that is, I think the nature of the authority that
investors often have over these companies is like, far more this
like moral Authority with the public.
And, you know, that's that's something that that I that I
disagree with. So I just want to make sure that
we have all the people who've just mentioned correct correctly
identified because there are people who might not know what
happened. It's benefits.
But David Sachs he came and he replaced you as CEO.
Is that correct? Yeah.
And he was brought in by Venture capitalists by Andreessen,
Horowitz date. Me David joined a year and a
half two years before I left, and he was CEO of the company
for a period of time. Hmm.
And he, what was that your higher or did feces?
Him to join. He was deaf.
He was definitely introduced to me by the VC firm.
I mean I remember there was this moment right around that.
Actually the time that that that piece ran in the New York Times
where, you know, we were like I said if it's growing so quickly,
I mean we were we went in that year when David joined we went
from you know, 20 employees to 450 and I remember talking to
Like Lars dalgaard who is our board member for injuries and
Horowitz in sort of August of that year.
And I said, look I think we've got a, you know, pump the brakes
a little bit and like, slow down because it's just like, it feels
like everywhere. It's just hard to keep up with
and because, you know, when you're growing really quickly
little things that go wrong quickly, spiral out of control
and become like, very hard to address and Lars looked at me
and he said, don't you dare, if you do that, You don't know that
when you are ready to grow again whether you're even able to you
know whether the sort of focus of the market has turned
somewhere else and he said look let's let's hire a CEO.
Oh and I you know there's this great guy that we've been
talking with who's David and that's and then I met with David
and that's idea joint. He was impressive to you as I
mean, he's like a I was impressed about is like sure was
a big name, you know, PayPal, you know, like I mean it was a,
you know, superficially. You know, he was, you know, he
was an impressive, Brent, you were connected to the mafia,
this is good. I mean, I feel like we I mean
now we've talked about zenefits a lot.
So I want to make the Clear. The clear argument against you
is just, you know, first that there was the macro this tool
that help people stay on their sort of licensing test, when
they're supposed to send a certain amount of time.
Yes it didn't progress them through it but it was a tool
that sort of was meant to skirt, you know, the legal requirements
and then to you know, there were in fact, and this is what we'll
Dalton was reporting legitimately that there were,
you know, Brokers that were unlicensed, you know.
There were license one state but not in the state.
They were selling in and that there's an argument certainly
for injuries since acts that they were going to have this
huge that they had legitimate legal problems and the company
was going to have to move past them and I mean it's a classic.
I mean I think literally I found was it Ben Horowitz or Marc
Andreessen who had written a post that when you turn on the
CEO you need to turn on them like 100%.
So you have these problems, you say, okay it's you know the
responsibilities sort of rolls up to the Top and like we don't
have voting control. So we really need a gun for this
guy. And then I mean that's that's
sort of the strategy. I don't know.
Do you disagree with that portrait?
I mean, you know, look, I, you know, I think there's not enough
time this podcast to get into the sort of ins and outs of all
the of all that of all. Sure enough.
Can I ask you Parker about your, you know, in starting Rippling,
which is the benefits competitor.
Yeah, yes. Yeah, yeah.
And I remember, And you know, you were raised in that initial
round and the stories were coming together, that like here
comes Parker Conrad again and it was something of a comeback
story. Something of a I can't believe
they let this guy in the building again story and you
know, ultimately it's doing very well.
We used Rippling actually at the information switch from zenefits
to Rippling at some point down the line.
So that's one account one. But you know, what did it what
was that process? Like for you, as you were
starting a new company coming back as the guy that had been
deposed. As for the previous one and
effectively, doing the same thing.
So first, I mean, I would I would disagree that it's the
same thing. I think it's extremely
different. It in ways that I mean I'll try
to articulate and then you may say yeah but it's the same thing
I think that the biggest difference for me is that, you
know, the central Insight at my last company that sometimes
sometimes people Miss is that, you know, sometimes people think
zenefits was just online health. And that was actually really
what it was, what made the company work is that you had
this button to hire someone and you would click hire and they
would sort of show up automatically in all of your HR
systems. You know, they'd get set up in
payroll, we get their agreement signed, they would show up and
medical insurance, dental, insurance 401 k.
And before that company came along, those things were all
completely separate systems. Like these were separate places.
As you have to set up employees and there was a lot of
administrative work associated with that and now of course,
that's become sort of like par for the course across a lot of,
you know, payroll and HR systems.
I think one of the big difference with Rippling is the
belief that, you know, employee data is important for almost all
business systems within a company, not just the HR ones
and that, as a result of that, there's this Actually the root
of most of the administrative pain of you know, most at most
companies comes back to this fact that man, all of the
different business systems that you use are different places
where you need to manage employee information one way or
another, you know like why is it, you got it.
It's a pain in the butt. You got to set people up with
email access with slack access with access to Dropbox and
Salesforce and GitHub. And you need to manage email
list, memberships and slack Channel.
And policies that apply to them and all these different systems,
and all of these things are fundamentally about employee
data. You know, it's about someone
gets access to sales force because they work in the sales
department. They, you know, they need to be
subscribed to an email list because they're a manager on
your customer support team. And so if you have an underlying
system that understands all of that, you can give people that
same button, where they click a button to hire someone.
But in this case, People get set up everywhere you know they get
their computer shipped out to them.
They get access to all these different Business Systems, they
get added all the right email list, sock channels and
policies, and groups and license types or whatever.
And yes, they get enrolled in insurance and set up in payroll
and all this different stuff in it.
That was there was a sort of much bigger opportunity as a
result as a result of that. And I think what happened is,
you know, zenefits was probably starting to move in that
direction. Towards the tail end of my time
there, but as soon as I left all of those projects immediately
got killed because they were sort of the Ancien Regime and so
they all got sort of shut down immediately.
And you know, you know the the new CEO came in and you know, he
started firing people and he fired all the wrong people, you
know? And he fired a lot of people
because they were, you know, In some way, associated with me or,
or at least I saw it as like, these are all you're laying out.
And of course, any Founders going to look at.
You know what? Someone comes in afterwards and
say, like they're doing it all wrong, but I sort of felt like,
man, this thing that I wanted to exist this product that I
thought I wanted to use that, I thought was the way that
business should do, this stuff wasn't going to exist, you know
that then if it's was kind of going off in this different
direction and you know, other editor's were not going to build
it and at the same time, you know, I, you know, was feeling a
lot of frustration about what was going on in the media and
sort of what was being written about me in the press and places
like that. And I sort of felt like the only
way that I was going to speak, you know, to the extended, you
know, Kind of Tech Community to the media to my friends and
family. The only way I was going to be
able to do that was to like build this specific company and
turn it into like a hundred billion dollar outcome.
And then if I could do that at some point, that would force
some kind of reassessment of all of this and how far into the
hundred billion, there were all kinds of reasons.
I wasn't able to serve Really talked about it.
There were, you know, I wasn't, you know, that's not, I wasn't,
that's not where that kind of politicking wasn't really where
my my talent slide and but this was something I could do, you
know, like I felt like I had a point of view about what the
market needed and sort of how to get there.
And that that was the thing I was going to focus on and then
if I did that, you know, and so we're you know, I'm 45 pounds.
Now, the story is not, how could you, how could you raise, raise
VC, money again? I mean, sort of, I mean,
basically, the YC crowd sticks with you, Sam Altman, initialize
back. You, I mean, what did you did
you change anything about how you worked with VC's in this or
what or you're just sort of stuck in that trap?
I think I'm extremely grateful. They're there were a bunch of
investors that backed me and supported me when it was not a
popular thing to do. And I will be forever grateful
to, you know, to yc2 Gary tan to Mamoon @k p and all those folks
and yeah and other sort of new investors like CO2 and folks
like that. I think in general, like most of
the investors who really understood what happened?
Did not have any issue with it and and the investors that went
really Upon diligence sort of came out of that.
Be like, we have no concerns did Ben Horowitz, try and scare
anybody off. There were definitely like
people. There were definitely, I don't
know about been specifically, but certainly certainly.
There were, there were people like, like Saks or others who
called up, you know, people in that process and said, don't
invest. And sometimes they did that
success preemptively. Like not as a reference
priapism. Like, oh absolutely would go
around preemptively. Yeah, no, I mean, there was a
firm that I had a GP meeting scheduled with on a Monday and,
you know, I think David called him right before and on Sunday,
they called me up and said up like so and so just talk to
David. He's poker buddies with him and,
you know, sorry I've got to cancel the GP meeting.
I'd like to just, you know, for change course for just a second
and note that you have been starting companies for a really
long time. I think the first company you
started was in 2006. Is that correct?
Yeah, that's right. And it was, it was a financial
services start up of some sort Sig fig.
And so was many things over the course of time that I was there.
You know, your first company wasn't 2006 and I note.
There's an interesting description of your History in a
profile of you from last year. Basically that you start your
first company in 2006 and you're pushed out of the company
because you have a falling out with the co-founder and then
zenefits you leave that company obviously after a falling out
with both investors and with David Sachs and so in this in
this latest iteration of the company or starting, can you
talk a little bit about what it is?
As you learn, you know, you know these these tough Departures,
what it what what has what have you change about yourself in
response to? You know, these startups that
have come and gone for you? You know what, what how do you
see things differently than you did in 2006 or even when you
started zenefits about yourself? I think it's really hard.
I think the only the only thing. I mean I've obviously I've Had
some big successes in my life. And I've had a lot of pretty
catastrophic failures and a lot of big ups and downs.
And, and I think like the only people in Silicon Valley, always
sort of want to sort of mythologize failure.
And the only thing that I've ever really learned from
failure, is how much it sucks and how much you never want it
to happen again and beyond that, I'm not sure that there are a
lot of meaningful deep lessons from it.
To be totally honest. Cool.
All right, this is awesome. Thank you for doing our first
experiment. I think it's like a fascinating,
you know. Yeah.
It's an interesting story and I'm aware has Rippling a raised
secret new funding around. Or what's the secret do?
Funny rods. What's a what's a funny?
It's the latest valuation weapons down.
Cool. Thanks, guys.
Parker. Thank you.
And I hope you have a good time. Beautiful part of me.
Oh thank you. Cool.
And thanks for hanging with a bunch of really annoying
questions at the end. No, no problem.
I'll touch you guys later. Hey everybody, this is Tom here,
quickly, before I sign off, I did want to make sure that I
credited, the great music that you heard in our intro and
outro. That is by Young Chomsky who is
at Young Chomsky on Twitter, very graciously.
Let us use his previously composed piece about Silicon
Valley as our music. So thanks so much to him and see
you guys all back here next week.
Goodbye, So work on Sally. Goodbye.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
Goodbye. Goodbye.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
Goodbye.