Jillian Corkin on benn.substack

Wow! So timely -- I was just reading Ben Thompson's Stratechery interview with Parker Conrad about Rippling. Here's a key excerpt: "BT: I guess the question here is, this is a very interesting vision, and one of the reasons why I’m so intrigued by Rippling is I’ve been writing literally since the beginning of Stratechery and it’s hard to believe, but it’s been nine years now, about the need for tying together all these SaaS products, and I’m just searching who’s going to be the center of gravity in an organization? My contention is that the reason why Microsoft ends up winning again and again, is you have these SaaS startups that are in their silos, they’re going to make the best possible user experience, and then Microsoft comes along and their alternative isn’t as good and the start up says, “Oh, I feel good. No problem. Ours works way better.” But they’re looking just at their functionality, they’re not thinking about the company as a whole. And Microsoft’s like, “Look, it doesn’t work as good, but it works with everything else that you have because you’re already using a bunch of Microsoft stuff.” So the question for Rippling is, there’s this vision, there’s a mountain, how do you actually get to the mountain without going through the valley of, “I have to actually convince people to use my product”? PC: We have two things that we do. One are the integrations that I described, but the other is that we build a lot of our own products. One of the things that we do that I think is somewhat different than other startups, is that there is some conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that I think is wrong, that companies should be extremely focused and do one extremely narrow thing, but go very deep. It might have been advice that worked ten years ago when you could build a billion dollar SaaS company by just peeling off one small feature from one of these monolithic business systems, these on-prem business systems, and turning it into a standalone SaaS service. Now that that opportunity has been picked over and there are a million different point solution SaaS companies. I think that now in order to really make a dent in a lot of these markets, you need to build something more like what you’re describing, which is a coordinated set of interrelated services that interoperates seamlessly, and that’s a lot of our philosophy of building products." I just recently learned about Rippling, i love their thesis -- this one struck a chord for me https://luttig.substack.com/p/rippling?s=r integration is a strategic differentiator.