Rippling CEO Parker Conrad's Theory of the Compound Startup: Disrupting How We Think About Software

one of my favorite Parker stories is uh I joined in late 2013 so my first full year was 2014 and about a quarter in we were shooting for a revenue Target of 10 million dollars by the end of the year we started at something like half a million dollars of ARR we were going for 10 million and one quarter in Parker sat down myself and the head of marketing at the time so the go to market team he was like all right nobody panic but I just want to do a quick thought exercise of what it would look like if we switched the goal to 20 million in ARR this year so we're gonna double it um but just like throw a step up against the wall see what sticks and so we went through this what started as a thought exercise and I think within 24 or 48 hours we changed the revenue Target to 20 million in ARR um and so uh one thing that was just super motivating for me having Parker as a leader was that type of uh push and motivation and I know that was happening within the go to market organization alongside all of the different uh departments that reported into Parker this is sort of like how can we be better how can we move faster how can we deliver more um with that Parker is going to be talking about the first rule you know about building software is wrong uh his theory around the compound startup Parker's probably the best person in the world to deliver this talk uh now being the founder of two compound startups each valued at several billion dollars so Parker come on up and I'll join you remember materially for the fireside chat if there's one rule that almost everyone universally agrees with about building software it said focus is really important so two of my favorite Silicon Valley characters here are Bill Gurley and David I was only CEO of that company for a very brief period of time Saks uh both both agree that focus is really really critical and even sort of way beyond that you know this is sort of a consistent truism very strong conventional wisdom that focus is really important and you want to narrow what you're doing so that you can go really deep and I think that this conventional wisdom is wrong or at least extremely limiting and there exists a set of companies that could be built that are often not built that break this Rule and so there are a few things that that are problematic with this um one is that it sort of limits you to problems that are contained within one sort of vertical or one sort of type of business system and a lot of the deepest problems that we face as companies are problems about you know collaboration across the business how different different systems interface with one another um that that sort of strategy of narrowing what you do doesn't really lend itself to solving those kinds of problems um it's also been picked over like at this point like uh you know 15 years ago you could start a SAS company in any vertical and you'd be the first one and it would probably be pretty successful but now like every every space has got two or three things in it and so the focus narrow Point solution approach there's not a lot of opportunity left and then you get to this issue where like how do you how do you go to product number two if everything about your company is oriented around just having one product in it and so the alternative here is something that I call a compound startup which is a company that is building multiple products in parallel that are deeply integrated and seamlessly interoperable with one another um and uh I think there are a few advantages of this one is that the area is relatively unexplored there are a lot of places where because the conventional wisdom is so strong in the idea that you shouldn't do this there are these undiscovered islands of product Market fit that are sort of just beyond the horizon line that if you can Sail Out and sort of make it there everything else about your company will work there are some critical advantages from a product perspective of building a compound startup I think it's obvious and very well understood what the product advantages are of building a really focused narrow Point solution the product advantages of building a compound startup they're really really five the first is that most compound startups the products are much more deeply integrated with one another the second is they're usually really deeply integrated with some underlying system of Records so in Ripley's case that would be employee data there are a bunch of ways in our product that employee data allows for many new product capabilities there's a lot of functionality that's unlocked because all of our products are deeply integrated with employee data you get to extract out a lot of stuff you can find elements of your product or elements of these products that end up being repeated you can build them once and then build them really well go really deep on these Concepts so at Rippling these are things like reports reports and analytics workflow automations role-based permissions custom policies there are a few others and like on those things on these critical pieces that end up being used across every single product that we build what we can do is we can go a hundred times deeper on those capabilities than any of our competitors can afford to go and so whenever we're going up against a point solution competitor that only builds in one area we know that we're going to win in those areas we're going to have better permissions we're going to have more sophisticated analytics capabilities etc etc you also for clients you get a shared ux which means that your clients already know how to use your product so when they buy the next thing if they buy it from you they already have super powers um in your system that don't exist for them if they buy the Standalone system so one great example of this that you see is with Salesforce you know anyone that's in sales operations the next product that they built that they buy whether it's like cpq or you know any of the other skus that Salesforce sells people in sales Ops who use Salesforce are going to want to buy that next product from Salesforce because they're going to already going to know how to use it and then lastly you have this pricing Advantage which is that compound products can optimize pricing over the entire bundle of skus and they don't have to make it all back on one specific product and that allows you to run circles around competitors from a pricing perspective in a lot of cases you see this like Microsoft it's the classic example of a competitor that uses this to great effect that's why slack is owned by Salesforce now because like teams is free in the Microsoft bundle um and the knock on this is always well how do you you know if if you build a lot of things how can you be good at any one of them um aren't you going to end up building superficial versions of each of these products and the answer is like that doesn't work um and so the challenge of a compound startup is that you need to be good at parallel execution across all of these different products because you're never you're only as strong as your weakest link um and so if you have one crappy product and a customer is buying seven things from you and six of them were great and one of them they're dissatisfied with they're going to churn and so you can't afford to build something bad um and that's hard for sure that makes execution very challenging um so I want to talk a little bit of an example Rippling is launching this week into the UK market so we're now offering our our full system um you know payroll hris all of our different products um in the UK to UT UK companies um and the UK Market is actually a really great example in my view of what happens um when competitors and companies get too focused which is that if you look at the way companies run payroll in the UK there are payroll ends up being sort of like a hash function of all of the changes in your company since the last time you ran payroll like almost anything happens in a company and like you then it has some implication for payroll and so when companies are managing all of this in all these different systems it ends up getting really difficult to do this and so companies today in the UK some will have an hris system but sometimes we're doing stuff out of spreadsheets and sometimes you know they'll usually have payroll system but then pensions and hours and annual leave is all managed often in separate systems and then you got to sort of upload a file to your bank at the end and and get and get your employees paid and anything can go wrong at any point between any of these systems which makes it a tremendous amount of work and so what does that look like well um you know there are a bunch of disadvantages to managing this stuff in spreadsheets obviously um um but then once you get stuff over into payroll um you've you know you've got to deal with all of the change management in the payroll system as well as an hris um all kinds of stuff can go wrong my favorite example of this is with uh with annual leave when people go on annual leave you've got to pay them out at an hourly rate that's based on the historical like average rate that they've had over the last year based on like a net of overtime and things like like net of overtime and things like that which means that whatever system you're using to track leave has got to be aware of like over time and and what you paid out over the last year and then that's got to flow into payroll and then you've got to like deal with this like Bank file there's a whole bunch of challenges with that and the alternative to this is you have one system that just kind of does all of this together and that that's effectively what what Rippling is and what we do um and by the way one really interesting proof point on this is rippling's a 2 000 person company um I am the only admin for our system in Rippling um so I personally run payroll for our 2000 person company across about a dozen different countries around the world uh natively in rip Lane and uh I do that you know as a part-time job um and um in the UK Market we did a sort of a quick study recently and found that a lot of even like SMB companies in the UK someone spends five or six days a month just dealing with payroll um and so it's an enormous amount of work that can be just dramatically compressed when you take this sort of compound all-in-one approach of the problem um and uh it also helps you know you really see this in Stark relief with new joiners um when you have new joiners in your company um because everything's managed in one place everything happens in one place you click this button says you want to hire someone we send out employment agreements we collect all of their details we get them enrolled in all the right systems um and and it takes you 90 seconds and then they're ready to go and a lot of you will see if you don't see the pain viscerally of managing all these different systems in separate places you probably see it when you hire someone because that's when you see all of this all at once um and actually Rippling interestingly our broader product um is much more than just what you think of as traditional HR and payroll software um and so this idea of a compound startup and and focusing on employee data and everywhere that employee data lives within your company has ended up bringing us into a bunch of other areas and so right now Rippling has actually three separate clouds we have our HR Cloud our it cloud and our finance cloud and so when you click that button to hire someone we don't just manage everything related to HR and payroll we also set them up in all of your different apps you know slack Dropbox GitHub email so Salesforce and so on and you know get them their new computer and ship that out and manage it for you going going forward and then we also separately have our finance Cloud where we manage expense reimbursements bill pay corporate cards uh things like that um you know so and everything sort of then you know operates seamlessly um and then beyond that um uh companies end up this problem gets multiplied by country um so most businesses are a lot more remote or a lot more distributed than they used to be and I'm sure many of your companies are hiring people outside of just the UK um and so you end up replicating like separate stacks of software to do this you know in the UK where maybe you're using sage and then in France where maybe you're using CLA and you know in Germany where you might have a system like datav and a whole bunch of other Associated systems around it and the nice thing about Rippling is we've actually built sort of global payroll Global hris um you know all of these capabilities into one sort of native system so that you sort of combine all that into one um so to sort of summarize here like if if you're if you're thinking about building a compound startup the most important thing to start with is like that the integration is the product um you want to build in a space where there are problems because of disconnected systems or business process and that you have these advantages where if you combine everything you can unlock a lot of new product capabilities really simplify things for the user and find areas where you can you can pull out functionality that you build once um because you end up like so many companies end up how many you know probably a zillion companies the audience here have all had to build some version of reports and analytics for customers of different permissions or workflow automations or things like that so if you can find those things you you can pull out you get these incredible efficiencies for product development you want to you want to try and find ways to help customers save money where you can charge more overall but per product they're saving money because they're sourcing multiple skus through you and then there are a lot of organizational challenges where you've got to often organize the company into business units with sort of strong entrepreneurial leads that can run individual products it relatively independently to sort of paralyze execution so thank you I'm gonna Sam's gonna step up and join me now Sam and I actually uh were on stage for the very first saster with Jason I think like 10 years ago now it was really cool I had very fond memories and uh so it's good to be back uh good to be back here round two yeah round two uh awesome job thank you so uh I'll probably come at this from the go to market lens given my my background so lots of questions sort of stemming from uh potential customer growing Revenue those sorts of things uh from the customer standpoint two slides ago you talked about International payroll which is just one of the skus that you offer if if I'm a customer and they're big they're big companies that have built it been built in that specific category and probably multiple categories where you are offering skus and so if I'm a customer I need International payroll what are the advantages or why would I go with a company like Rippling where I'm one of 22 skus that you're focused on versus a point Solution that's potentially a big company a deal or remote something like that that is more of a point solution that already exists in this space it's a good question I think it's actually because of the ways that we can simplify the problem for you by being a compound company um and in fact many of the problems with those systems relate to this Central original sin that they have which is that companies like like deal and like remote actually have not built underlying Global payroll or payroll really of any kind and so those companies are sort of secretly running on other payroll systems country by country um you know I think you know deal uses CLA in France and and probably sage in the UK and humi at one point in Canada deals actually until very recently a Rippling customer in the United States they ran you know in fact their Global HR on on rip Lane because they didn't have all of these other systems in place and so the problems that you have as a company if if you're using one of them is is first that it's a very core Foundation to build on from a product perspective because what they're doing is every time you submit payments in you know deal or remote or one of those systems there's this Army of Ops people that are like loading it into all of these other systems around the world and then like running payroll and then getting the data back to you and that's why you have to run payroll like you know 15 days in advance or 30 days in advance or however long it is right now and of course that comes with a lot of problems you know stuff goes wrong it's a pain in the butt um and you also like you don't have the depth of systems that you need to run your business in those countries like you don't have full hris full compliance full-time off tracking you know all of these other things that sort of surround payroll and so if you want to run a report and be like well how much did I spend on engineering last month there's no place to do that because you've got you know one place for your employees in this country and another system for your employees in that country or you know maybe you overlay it with a completely separate HR System that actually like is never up to date because actually it's not connected up to the system you're using to pay your employees and and so you you run into the problem of having disconnected systems when you use these Focus Point Solutions and that causes an enormous amount of administrative pain within your company that makes sense this this has been a bit of a bit of an evolution for you um I I think you know many years ago you were co-founder at Sig fig which was uh probably a point solution um and then you were founder and CEO at zenefits which was was more compound startup and now you're Rippling which is sort of like the Ultimate Compound startup um so you you've probably learned a lot uh as as it pertains to point solution compared to compound startup throughout this Evolution what are some things that you've learned just generally speaking maybe that you wish you had known back in the days of Sig fig back in the days of benefits that you know now you know the biggest thing is I think even even when I started Rippling um the uh you know I had I hadn't started using this word compound startup but we were we were always kind of a little bit apologetic about sort of what how much we were doing like it was always there was this deep conviction that this was what needed to happen that the market this is what the market needed and customers didn't just want all in one they wanted the allest and honest and that was the way to win um uh but when when we would talk with investors it was you know one of the questions you get from investors is always like if this doesn't work why doesn't why won't it work or what's the you know if you you know if it you know why are you going to lose um and for us it was always like well you know it's this thing like the knock on us is that you know maybe we're we're doing too much and like we've got to overcome the fact that our strategy is very specifically and purposefully taking on all of these things in parallel and actually like what I realized over the course of of of doing ripling is that like everything that is great about the company like all of the company's biggest strengths come from this like it ended up ended up being like the source of our greatest enduring Advantage um it's why the company has really unusual growth persistence um you know like highly anomalous in terms of how much our growth rates have persisted year over year um really high ndrs we have like a lot of companies this year we went from our customers hiring tons of people and getting tons of free seats because they just are constantly adding new employees in the system to a 10 drop in our you know annual ndr cohorts from a seat basis but our ndr stayed at like 130 percent and the reason is is because you know those cohorts buy so many new products because the cross-sell motion that we have um that you know our ndr stays extremely high and again that's all all a function of like our whole compound approach and the different products that we have um you know the cross-selling business at Rippling is you know now over five million dollars in net new a month you know even before you get to like new logo sales um and so like really all of like the things that make our business really incredible come from this thing that started out as something that you know we were kind of like like I know this is like not what companies are supposed to do um you know sorry but you know um and and that that that was sort of a confidence that developed over time and and you were when you said you didn't I don't know I think you said I didn't know the term compound startup when I when I started Rippling or used that term but I think you knew that you wanted to be not a point solution you wanted to be all in one in the conviction that was that was the thing that I walked away from zenefits with was like that you know when you know when zenefits was really working it was that you had you could click this button to hire an employee and they would show up automatic hopefully across all of your HR systems in zanafitz's case and and and and we just had like this this strong belief that people wanted that button but they wanted it to work for everything across their business um and I talked to companies uh regularly with from sort of the investor seat that um they are starting as a point solution with aspirations to evolve into um what we're talking about as a compound startup but uh they may just call it like a multi-product offering this happens pretty regularly in the revenue stack where I get pitched and it's like you know we're going to start with uh let's just take like a Gong like version it's a bit of a point solution and then they want to transcend and become you know take over Salesforce take over a lot of the other uh rev stack solutions for like knowing what you know now and maybe for folks in the audience that are founders of a company that is a point solution how would you think about like adapting from being a point solution into a compound startup is it possible to do that after day one is it just what comes to mind uh it's it's really hard I mean there there are sort of two two sets of problems one is they're so and and the answer is like I'm not sure that you really can I think you kind of have to almost like refound the company or you know sort of like rewind and reverse and start over and and go in this different direction um tactically the reason that that big businesses it's real so hard for them to launch like a second product is there so many built-in assumptions that they have around there being a single product um you have everything from just like the way your sales force instance is set up to the way your sales team is compensated to all of your the way all your training Works to you know how your product marketing and your product teams are aligned it's very hard to just suddenly have like two things where there was one before but the bigger thing is like almost by definition compound startups are solving like different problems than Point solution products um like if you um you know if you take the example with gone I mean I don't know the company super well and I'm speaking it you know off the top of my head but you know if you you start with this thing that you're solving this problem around call recording transcription um you know and and and sort of like insights about you know for management about how reps are doing and now you want to take take on Salesforce you've you've kind of got to step back and be like well what we're now solving is this problem this like business process problem on like how do you put your customer facing teams on Rails um to sort of deliver a consistent experience to customers and like one part of that may be like the call recording experience and it might be that a company that actually started out that was like Hey we're gonna do the compound startup for this sales stack and do I I don't know something like CRM but also call recording and Lead routing and you know calendaring like chili Piper and calendly and like a whole you know and did that all all together like like maybe yeah I can see how that would be way simpler for a lot of go to market teams to not have to deal with all this crap in different systems because for whatever reason Salesforce has never gotten around to sort of rolling up their ecosystem but you kind of have to start from that I think it's very hard to like you know pivot from one of those things into like the full Suite um let's talk about product launches uh there were there were a couple questions earlier in my session about launching new products from your perspective I think you've done this how many skus do you have it's like probably about two dozen now okay so so 24 different products that you've launched you've probably launched them with varying degrees of success and uh Fanfare any takeaways in terms of things that have gone well with launching a product versus uh lessons on on the flip side I I mean I generally think that product launches are something that we're like not very good at um like we're generally like not great at like PR and like you know ten tend to sort of like not not be sort of like really seeking the Limelight from a press perspective um um what what I think has gone well for us with launches is is focusing on like what comes after the launch and just sort of like getting through the launch because you know the launches you get this thing where you get you know a lot of attention for like 48 Hours sometimes it lasts for like two or three weeks and then it's kind of crickets and so what we've done I think reasonably well is building out everything that happens after the long launch and so for us that means building out a cross-sell motion for a product and the cross-sell motion is both about having an account management organization I mean there are actually a couple elements to it for us one is an account management organization that is focused on selling um you know new skus to existing customers they obviously do a lot with customer success but unlike a lot of customer success organizations I mean they're a real sales organization that's quoted and that is able to make customers successful and solve their problems by bringing them like Rippling Solutions another piece of it that I I think is actually really interesting is what we found is that in a lot of cases this is about building Standalone sales organizations so a lot of our products like our Global team has a standalone sales organization our finance cloud has a standalone sales organization some of our upcoming product launches you know our our ATS product that's coming soon is going to have a standalone sales organization um and then the third that's really interesting is we have an internal effectively like an in-house um system that is that is effectively like an ad system that we use internally um that that basically individual product teams can place like ads and promotions inside of our product and we have a lot of I I hate myself for using the term AI or machine learning because your valuations I have it but we have like some AI something you know there's like you know sort of assessing like for this specific customer in this specific contact at that particular customer at this moment in time which you know all of the sort of individual creatives are competing with each other and the sort of machine Learning System is making a decision about sort of what what to optimize for and what to show the customer and they're what are they most likely to convert on and that's what then drives a lot of like leads across to the account management team and so getting those pieces right like the the sort of internal cross-all advertising the sales organization for the product the account management organization that's what makes it you know like it doesn't do anything for you in the first like three weeks but it gives you like a consistent cross-sell Motion in the period after launch and that's what we tend to focus on and one of the questions that was asked to me uh this morning was around um determining when to specialize sales people on specific product lines versus allowing the existing team to sell and I think you do a bit of both I don't think you have 20 to you said uh two dozen so I don't think you have 24 dedicated or specialized sales reps that are selling each individual SKU so some of those are sold as part of maybe a bundle or a sales rep can sell multiple products at once how do you decide which products are specialized it versus uh which don't have dedicated sales people it's her so I would say that I mean first of all there's actually this is there's a tremendous amount of disagreement internally at rip Lane about how to do this um I am like personally on team uh every product should have its own independent sales org um and a lot of other people are on the other side of the of this question um I think what you get um the issue with having one sales team is eventually you run out of like training capacity um like the team cannot learn like yet another product and they get like really frustrated with being like yanked into training sessions for each product launch you know Rippling we launch we aim to launch five new skus a year so five new like products every single year and it's just too much for like one set of people to like absorb and still be like effective at all the others and so it's kind of driven us to sort of need independent sales organizations and we're increasingly doing more and more of that over time um but the other benefit that you get is that the individual sales orgs can just go way deeper on that individual product like you get some of the advantages of being a focused Point solution company when you have you know when each of your individual product sales organizations can have a VP of sales and that VP of sales is going to think about you know that product and their point solution competitors all day long and they're going to figure out like how to beat them and how to attack the market in the right way um versus like you know if you have a VP of sales that's got you know 25 skus that they're selling they're going to pick like the three or four that are the easiest to sort of help them get to quota and and inevitably you get products that are just not going to be as material an input to your sales number that year but still like could be like really successful that just get ignored if you don't sort of break it up and have individual people that are responsible for those things and so I'm a big fan of of separate sales organizations for this I think it kind of bounces back and forth and so like the knock on this is like I think like Salesforce internally like struggles a bit with having sort of you know the sales experience for customers having multiple sales teams going after customers and not having like a coherent and cohesive experience for customers on this and so like a lot of things I don't think there's one right answer and I think what happens is like your company will probably go back and forth you know every five to seven years or so between these two extremes of one sales team versus you know individual sales orgs per product based on like what you're bad at as a company at that moment in time and sort of reorganizing will probably help you get better at the other thing and then over time you'll sort of the one of these muscles will start to weaken and you'll need to sort of go back the other direction makes sense um the way that I framed it earlier today when somebody asked the question was uh a bit of solving for the outcome if if the goal is to generate the most revenue for the company try and construct the team with the the construct that you believe delivers that ultimate outcome if it's like you know usage based on a certain product try and design the the team that solves for that outcome and again it's a bit subjective but if you start from the outcome and then work your way back from there maybe a a way to make the decision or framework uh to use when you were talking Parker about um you know it's hard for a sales rep to understand and learn and go very deep on 20 different products where my mind went was the same thing is probably true for the market and so if you are offering 25 different products and Rippling is known as sort of like all in one HR and IT how do you handle that from a brand standpoint like how do you when you're a point solution it's like very obviously and finance Mr I went to brexit well sure let's forget about the last one but how do you like how how do you establish a brand so that when people are looking for one of these 25 products they know to come to you and not sort of like muddy the water with all the different campaigns that you're doing whether it's payroll uh I.T provisioning um international pay again 25 of these things I think it's probably the the thing that we have found to be the most challenging about our business is like the sort of brand question of like what is Rip Lane and how do we describe it um uh because there isn't something there isn't another analogous thing like this and so um what happens in practice is customers come tend to come to us nobody's like really looking for a Rippling they're looking for you know a subset of what we do they're you know maybe there are companies the audience that are like oh man yeah I I hate dealing with sage and you know like process there is super broken and so we want to talk to Rippling about that and maybe there's a separate company that's like I would never switch payroll but I'm interested like man it's a lot of work you know when I have new joiners in my company that need to you know they need to get up and running with you know all these different apps and systems and and computers and I heard that you guys solved that problem but not interested in switching payroll and so what we see in the U.S is people tend to come to us with one of those problems and what we do in sales and by the way customers very like almost no people almost never buy just one Rippling product and they almost never buy all of them up front and so usually customers are buying like call it seven skus um and so there's this opportunity to sort of cross-sell them things after the fact which is where that cross-sell motion comes from but usually our our job in the sales process is to convince customers like hey look you think that you're coming to us with this one problem which is like setting up new joiners in slack and email and Salesforce and GitHub and solving the administrative pain around that but actually the problem that you have is the fragmentation of employee data across all the Business Systems in your company and like let me try and convince you that the problem that you're seeing here is a symptom of this deeper underlying disease and I can point to like 20 other problems that you have in these other areas you know maybe it's like in payroll and hris for example that are stem from the same underlying condition and if you if you are willing to solve this problem at a slightly more fundamental level Rippling can actually solve all of that for you and so a lot of times we get customers in who come in with with a very opinionated view of what it is that they're shopping for that end up buying a much larger suite and sometimes they they St you know they end up somewhere in between and that's fine and over time you know there are opportunities for them as they grow more confident with the product to add things down the line uh you you have built 24 products you also integrate with what thousands hundreds maybe um so you aren't building every single point solution that exists in the possible stack of uh products that you could build what's the decision framework that you approach build versus partner with so the the the real thing that I think about is there are these five Advanced there are many disadvantages many hard things about building a compound startup but there are these five advantages that you have um and generally speaking you want to build products where those five advantages are maximized and so you know the first one was like integration so you want to build products where the integration with the other products that you've already built matters integration with employee data we look for products where employee data matters and that's not necessarily to say that we build HR products because the thesis of the company is that actually employee data matters in a lot of other areas outside of HR like one of those examples being things like Finance products like you know expense management bill pay corporate cards we're actually an understanding of who your employees are and you know who should be on what policies and who needs to approve for who else and like that actually matters tremendously in in those areas you want to build products where um the middle we we talk a lot about middleware at riplane which are the sort of platform components the elements that we try and build once and then reuse across our products things like reports and workflow automations and permissions and approvals you want to find products where the the middleware capabilities the platform components you've already invested a lot in matter a lot for those new those new products so for us it's like what are the new products where yeah analytics workflow automations approvals permissions like those matter a lot for that new product you want to build a product where we're generally speaking you you have a buyer in common so this advantage of having a buyer that's already bought in to like I know how to do stuff in Rippling I don't want to buy some other thing um you know that only works if you have a buyer in common and all else being equal you want to look for areas where there are things that you can do with pricing that allow you to sort of run circles around competitors from a pricing perspective and that's sort of roughly how we prioritize things make sense we have about five minutes left I don't want to monopolize all of the time and questions for Parker if anybody has a question please just come up to the mic and uh go ahead and ask you always have a fantastic compound business um but I assume that you obviously have to start somewhere I.E you probably start with an on point solution and broaden into compound um where do you begin that journal how do you think about that so I I actually kind of disagree with that because I think what happens is the companies that start with one thing with like this plan yeah yeah but someday we're going to build like the next thing they they very rarely get to the next thing like the first thing just sucks up more and more time and energy and effort you go deeper and deeper and it's never really done um so we actually started very purposefully at rip Lane um with three things so on day one um we had uh like literally had like two or three people working on paper building payroll and hris two or three people working on device management so like mobile device management and computers and the ability to sort of like order computers from us and have them ship out and then manage security on the devices and the third was what would be called like identity apps and identity um so setting people up in in apps and single sign-on and and that sort of stuff and so even like before we launched like our launch set included like all three of those things um and we thought it was really important for the story to be able to tell customers like you know that we're not it's not just like payroll and HR it's this broader sort of thing that includes all of these different products that all are in their own ways reservoirs of information about employees within your organization only those three not the next three sorry that's the last question yeah so we started with all those three and obviously stuff started to come later so we started expanding the product set a lot later on um but uh those we started with those three because they seemed they were the the deepest reservoirs of employee data that we could find within the company like the payroll on HR side for obvious reasons but actually you know what the the market that people call identity right now is actually fundamentally about employee data as well it's just employee data in the I.T Department instead of the HR department and so that's that's why we sort of built that as well because we thought look you shouldn't have separate systems for employee information because the user happens to be an I.T user versus an HR user like you should have one underlying thing and that's what's actually going to dramatically simplify this because like when you hire someone in the HR System they get provisioned all the I.T stuff but conversely when you're doing things in the it room called you have full observability into all of the HR data so you know like their department and their teams and their start date and you know who their manager is and that actually ends up being really important for a lot of I.T systems as well all right with that we are at time I apologize we didn't get to the last question um thank you so much Parker thank you so much for everyone that attended Take Care thank you [Applause]