Today, @foundersfund led a $145M round in @Rippling at a $1.35B valuation. I’ve been the company’s COO for 5 quarters, and have learned a ton. I thought I’d share three lessons, since @parkerconrad canceled our 1:1 to deal with media. 1/7 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-04/rippling-s-funding-round-gives-founder-second-unicorn-chance

(1) It's been said, but now I get it in my gut: if you have to ask whether you’ve found product-market fit, you haven’t. Like most things, it’s lognormal: better PMF yields way, way better biz performance. At a certain point, most assumptions about how to build a co. break. 2/7

(2) Build teams bottom up. Hire doers first, not execs. I used to criticize companies for putting umpteen people under a single manager. Now I get it: employees need to tolerate thin management resources while the company scales up, and that’s OK. 3/7

(3) Let fires burn. Your instinct as a disciplined manager is to survey the landscape and carefully deal with every issue. That is impossible at this pace. Some fires are less important than you think, and they burn themselves out anyway. 4/7

(4) And a bonus learning, one I knew already: strong culture is a company’s antifragility. Knowing what you stand for, and why it matters, makes the company stronger when it takes a punch. It’s hard to prioritize cultural rituals, but you must, and we do. 5/7

Back to work. There’s just so, so much opportunity to capture. Other companies in this space seem to have lost sight of that. At least we now have the balance sheet to capture more of it. But RAISING MONEY IS THE EASY PART. 6/7

Oh, and we’re hiring for just about everything except Office Manager. Shrug emoji with a mask on. :) Come join the fun! https://www.rippling.com/careers/  7/7