Episode 71: Part-1: Indian Hustle & Competition, Building Early Confidence, State of FAAMGs, Brilliance & Future of Bitcoin, Power of a Free Mind w/Prasanna Sankar
About Prasanna Sankar:
Few possess a rare combination of exceptional talent, entrepreneurial vision, and a relentless drive to push boundaries. My next guest on The One Percent Project, Prasanna Sankar, the co-founder of Rippling, is undoubtedly one such individual. In 2010, Prasanna co-founded Likealittle, a college campus social network that experienced an incredible surge, skyrocketing from 0 to 20 million page views in six weeks.
Prasanna's coding prowess has earned him international recognition. Furthermore, during his college years, Prasanna held the esteemed rank-one position at TopCoder, solidifying his status as a true coding prodigy.
In part one of this two-part series, listen in to learn about Prasanna's journey from TOPCoder to Microsoft, strategies for building and optimising for pace and efficiency, views on the future of crypto, the invaluable lessons learned along the way that help him identify the next big thing and much more
Subscribe to the show wherever you listen to it and sign up for The One Percent Project's "Think" newsletter at onepercent.live for curated content that adds value to your professional and personal development.
Listen on:
Spotify |Youtube | Apple Podcasts |Google Podcasts
Key takeaways:
It is important to identify what truly interests and excites oneself, even if it diverges from societal expectations or norms. Betting on one’s passion and embracing contrarian thinking can lead to extraordinary opportunities and pave the way for continued personal growth and success.
Early successes impact decision-making and personal growth in transformative ways. They shape one’s mindset and willingness to take risks in pursuit of higher aspirations. Once individuals achieve something significant and experience a sense of pride early on, settling for conventional or mundane things is difficult.
Optimising for pace and efficiency depends on striking the right balance between regimented management and faster-moving development, aligning with the customer needs and the growth stage of the product or company. In the early stages of a startup, taking calculated risks and embracing rapid experimentation is crucial for gaining initial traction. However, a balance between coordination and autonomy emerges as a company progresses and achieves product-market fit. Eventually, in the later stages, stability is needed as the company becomes more established, preserving the customer experience and adhering to rigorous processes in critical areas.
Blockchain can be the disruptive technology that will significantly impact the tech industry within the next ten years. Businesses like Meta, Google, and Microsoft will have to adapt or change their traditional models to compete with the decentralised and immutable alternative databases like Blockchain.
When one experiences disappointment or lack of interest in traditional paths, it becomes easier to identify something extraordinary. The observations of early signs of explosive growth and disruptive changes happen when one has a free mind, a willingness to explore different areas, is open to curiosity, and is available to take action.
Transcript:
Pritish: Let's talk about early life. How was it growing up in India, and how has that journey been?
Prasanna: Yeah, India definitely teaches hustle and competition like no other. And obviously, it's highly competitive, and I was in related academics. I fell in love with computers early on, and that was my ticket out of this massive competition. Computers also happened to be like a new field where you can have a meritocratic test, you know, without any biases or something, because it's a new field, it's hard to pre-prepare and game. So, I had a greenfield opportunity. I did many of these programming contests when I was young, and I was ranked one in India when I was 18 years old; that was my ticket out of extreme competition. This new sector or field was changing the world very early at that time. And these new programming contests were also fairly new; they only happened after Google put in place a Google called Jam. And that was a nice ticket out of extreme competition, which is college grades and stuff.
Pritish: Looking back, doubling down on the TopCoder makes sense, but at that time, you actually chose to focus on the TopCoder versus the university. So, how did you decide on that?
Prasanna: I was good at one, interested in one, not good, not interested in the other. And being right about that gave me a lot of confidence to make bigger and bigger bits later on. The same thing happened when I was in school; during my grade 12 exam, many of my family members came in and said, hey, listen, you need to really do well here because your future depends on it. And I was always sitting at my computer. I fell in love with my computer as an outlet. People wanted me to prepare for academics and stuff. And it turned out that betting on computers at that time was the right bet. So, I had a little bit of early confidence that no, you follow what you want to do, and you can go places. And then TopCoder was like a natural extension of that. Yeah, maybe you should not bet on what everyone is betting on. And that theme has evolved over my life and given me more confidence to make bigger bets on contrarian things. And I think that is true of many people at the highest performing areas where I see them as a continuous breakout. Each time they have an outlier moment, they've done something amazingly well. And that momentum compounds in their life. They get more confidence, and they make bigger and bigger bets. And the extreme case is someone like Elon or Sam Altman making 10-year bets, which are absurd and crazy. That is sort of the extreme version of delayed gratification.
Pritish: You touched upon a great point that early on, the confidence of building something, early-on wins, even in early life, actually helps you better judge certain decisions and also gives you the ability to be more flexible in taking decisions that could be outside the norm.
Prasanna: And it's also, once you've done that and you feel proud about that, it is extremely hard to go back into the matrix and operate normally.
Pritish: Tell us about your journey to Microsoft and your experience at Microsoft.
Prasanna: I did really well in these programming contests. Got a job at Google very early, and Google was an extremely prestigious job back in the day. They didn't do much hiring. They didn't even have an India office back in the day, or it was fairly new. They never came to my campus for recruiting. I went to one of the top schools in India, the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, and Google wasn't hiring from there. I got a job there, fairly young, in my third year or something, where nobody has ever gotten even their regular jobs. So, I was like famous in college. People called me Google Prasanna. Google was my dream job. When I went to Google International Court Jam to the headquarters when I was 18, I was looking around. Everyone was rich; everyone was a millionaire. They were chilling near the pool, and I asked my folks why they weren't working. Why are they chilling near the pool? So, it was really my dream job. I wanted to get into Google, and I got it. Suddenly when I got it, by the time I was graduating, Microsoft made me a huge offer. They were building a team for the Bing search then, and they made me like a disproportionately better offer. And I turned down Google and went to Microsoft. And that was a very confidence-boosting move because I grew past my dreams. Group asked what I set for myself, which is already way higher than anyone has ever accomplished. So, it was just insane for the whole college to imagine someone just saying no to Google, someone who turned them down. And I did that, Microsoft was my first job. I thought that would be the most interesting thing because my background was in optimizations, performance, and things like that, and they were building Bing search, and I excelled there. Initially, I did extremely well. I improved one of their performances by 3.2x, which has just saved them millions of dollars, which I thought was huge; I just came out of campus and saved them millions of dollars. I was super proud. I enjoyed it a little bit in the beginning. For the first three months or so, I gave it my all. I then post that I got disillusioned. I thought everyone was moving insanely slowly. None of them wanted to do anything. They're here. They're lifers here. This is their last job, their first job. What the heck am I doing here? The code that I wrote over a few weeks, it took six months, nine months to get in, get checked in, and I was just like, dude, my life is just completely wasted from here. So, I had to do something, I had to do something else, and I just stopped going to work for a long time, actually. And then it took them probably six to nine months to notice that there was a guy who was getting paid, who was never showing up to work and to fire me actually.
Pritish: You talked about pace. The main challenge in Microsoft was the pace. So, there are two extremes to pace. One is a corporation which wants everything to be secured, understood, and documented before they take a step. On the other hand, startups say, let's commit to the core, and we figure out what happens. I think the right path is actually in the middle. So how do you build and optimise for pace and efficiency?
Prasanna: Yeah, I actually think the right path depends on the stage. So, I think about the evolution of startups. This is actually an old adage in Silicon Valley. I think Ben Horowitz first said it, I'm probably repeating it. The way to think of a startup is, let's say you want to conquer Nazi Germany; how do you do it? You first send in the commandos who take the insane risk; these James Bond types, they don't coordinate or have a lot of teamwork, so to speak. They storm the beaches; they distract the watch towers. They take insane risks, right? This is sort of a pre-product market fit of a startup. And for founders, there are 5% odds of defeating Google, which is like an opportunity for a lifetime. And then if there is Hitler in a stadium and you have to blow it up, and there are going to be millions of civilian casualties, no problem. You do it. So that is one of the early, and in this case, the civilians are customers; early startup products are shitty products. Customers get it; they’re so buggy. There are a lot of issues. So, that’s the early stage of a company, and I've been there. My first startup was growing so fast, insanely fast. I remember spinning up servers all night, me and my co-founder, and we were like, we did it, we finally did it. And then, we calculated how long this will; we doubled our servers and calculated how long it will last. And it was two days. So, traffic was actually doubling every two days. So that was the rate at which that thing was growing, and you talked about committing and then seeing what happens. No, we weren't even committing. I was editing code and production. I restart the server and see what happens. That was an insane time. I was sleeping two hours a day. So, I've seen that extreme as well. I think it's like the right tool for the job and like what your problems are, what your biggest risks are, and you're always trading off. And then to complete the analogy, and there is post-product market fit, when you're having really high growth that the military sort of comes in, they storm the beach. They're still taking risks, but the odds of success are 30-80%, somewhere in that range. There is some level of team coordination but also a decent amount of autonomy. There are small units of 10-15 people within them. They have coordination. They have some order. But then the teams are fairly autonomous themselves. They're going and fighting their own front lines. And then, finally, the last stage is the corps, when you've already captured the land, you have to set order in it, you have to tame the chaos in it, and then you get the Google, Microsoft territory where you preserve the territory. You have a lot of customers. Your job is to provide a stable experience for the customers. There are tools for the job, and at Rippling, for example, obviously, we are in the military stage. It's a post-product market fit, a fast-growing company that doubles yearly, and so on. So, there is a lot of chaos, but there are parts of the product where our customers demand excellence, just no chaos, no mistakes. For example, our payroll system. So, there is a lot of process before something happens; people must get paid on time. That's way more important to our customers than how fast things change and how many features evolve, and then you see it even at the extremes, like Elon's company, can you think of Elon's company being run by the cops? But there are parts of SpaceX that the cops run. For example, even today, you have the NASA mission, launching people into space. And that is using five-year-old rockets. This technology that's using five-year-old technology, Falcon Nines, not the latest one, which is BFR. So, five years to ship the production is what you're seeing there. So even in Elon's company, some places operate like cops. Pritish: What you are getting at is that in a mature company, there are parts that definitely need a very regimented way of management. And there could be parts that could move faster, which are basically in development, and it completely depends on what the customer needs are and what growth stage the product is.
Prasanna: Totally.
Pritish: Let's talk about your journey and what made you decide not to take a hundred million acquisition offers that you were getting from Google and Facebook.
Prasanna: One of our biggest investors is Marc Andreessen; who is Marc Andreessen? He was on the board of Facebook at that time, and we were growing so fast. At that time, we had 20% of all US college students using the site. So, we had around 10 to 20 million users. So, we were getting five to $10 per user, and Facebook was making that much every year. So, it's as if we just turned on ads for one year, and the site didn't die, which in retrospect was a bad bet; the site did die. But we could have made that money if the site didn't die for a year and it was just turned on ads. I mean, it depends; you must do a lot for advertising. It's impossible to build it within that time frame, but that was the theory that it is still extremely enterprised, and then Marc was like, this could be the next Facebook, do you want to take a shot at it or not? And you wanted to take a shot at it. I think that was the right poker move for the cards in our hands. It was a little bit emotional, but it's okay. It was the right decision with the information at that time; perhaps one year later, it was clear that it was the wrong decision, but you didn't have the information at that time. And then, now, looking back, I still feel it's the right decision. It is what led me to accumulate a billion dollars. So, you can't fold. You have to keep doubling down on the things that are working.
Pritish: So, what was that piece of information that didn't exist a year ago when you made that decision? What changed?
Prasanna: We lost users. The product itself was a social product. It was a social flirting app, and two thirds of our users were women, which surprised me. They were shy to talk in person, so they used the app to express their crush, and they expressed their crush once, or twice or in 3 months. And then, at some point, they ran out. And this is a product, to which surprisingly, it keeps happening every two years, three years. There is a super-head company that builds the same product and goes insanely viral, becomes the top app on the app store, and it dies. I've watched this play out many times. A few years later, there was an app called Yik Yak. It rose to fame and died again. The founders there had the benefit of hindsight. So, they cashed out a lot, $20 million or something. They took out a lot of secondaries. And then the third time this happened is there's a guy called Nikita Bier who sold an app, and he had the insane benefit of hindsight, so he just sold the whole company at the peak to Facebook, which shut down. And then he came out and started the same company once again called Gas. Two-three years later, it happened again. When a new batch of college students comes in, the app works again, and he sells it again to some company for $50 million or something. So, it is one of the oddest things that I've seen in my life. People keep starting it, and people keep investing in it, people keep buying it only to shut it out.
Pritish: What are your views on Meta, Microsoft, Bing, and Google in the present-day scenario, given that you've seen the decisions they have made in the last 10, 20 years, do you think they are the most well-positioned going forward?
Prasanna: I'm very bearish on them, mostly because everyone is bullish. For a lot of periods, if you go back and study the NASDAQ, you have periods where insane monopolies accumulate. And this monopoly takes over a large portion of the NASDAQ or the S&P, and it always has different themes at different times. There are chemical companies in the seventies, and these companies looked invincible at each point in time. At around 30-40% of NASDAQ, they somehow die. They happen to die. And we are already seeing chinks in the armour. For example, we are seeing Google's business; what’s going to happen with the LLM threat? I think it’s a little overblown, but once these companies are viewed as unbreakable, you’ll see some threats. Meta is in a similar situation. It's completely turning over its entire business. It stopped growing for the first time, and it's completely making a new bet because it's existential for Meta. It is trading at very low multiples of cash flows today, probably 10-15 at best. It stopped growing. So, the market is betting that it's the last 10-15 years of Meta. It could be wrong, but we are already seeing these companies go from invincible, trillions of dollars in market cap to getting hammered quite a bit. And Amazon is another similar story. It has been underrated for a long time, and then suddenly, for a brief moment, it got overrated and probably still is. It has still not made a profit. It has still not shown extreme free cash flows. Cloud was supposed to be the one thing that produced and drove a lot of profits, but now that got competed away. On the one hand, I agree that it is in the nature of software that all this wealth got created. I got extremely rich because of this software. The thing where to distribute one extra unit of software, to put one more user on the software that you've written; it caused zero. And that's what rained trillions on Bill Gates. He founded the first software company, Microsoft. And with the internet, that has gotten really accelerated quite a bit. You now see that the cost of the extra user is zero, capitalism’s equilibrium as everyone uses the best software. Why should anyone use the second best? So, it creates a natural consolidation effect, and the winners really do take all, even without any network effects. Network effects also exist on the internet, and that creates powerful companies. But even without network effects, the brands are so strong here that it produces insane consolidation effects, and that's what created the fangs and the trillion-dollar market caps and it's unsustainable. They're getting attacked from all sides right now. The U.S. hates it because it influences U.S. Politics and stuff like that. These guys have gotten too powerful. They're almost monopolies. The other countries hate it. Europe hates it because they are the indirect taxers of the internet, and they don't pay any taxes to Europe. Money all runs away into tax havens, so Europe completely hates it because wealth creation didn't happen there. So, they don't enjoy the market cap gains like the US. They don't pay any, not even any taxes. So, it's almost like a pipe that sucks away money from Europe and adds no net benefit to Europe other than maybe people like using the Facebook product or something. So, Europe hates it. China has a nice take on it. China hates it. They wall their garden. They say I'll make my own version. And that worked fabulously. So now Europe looks like a fool, Europe and India, that had open markets. We believed in open markets. We looked like a fool because all the market cap got created in the U.S. disproportionately benefited, and all we see in our economy is taxation. Our views of politics get shaped somewhere in the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco; who needs to win the Indian elections get shaped there, and Europe hates it for similar reasons. So, it's like an indirect takeover of the U.S. on all these countries’ sovereignty. There are lots of ways by which these guys are getting attacked. And the way by which these guys are getting attacked, that I am most bullish on, that I am betting, and I'm going to bet a good portion of the rest of my life and my fortunes on is actually crypto. Now, crypto is the way by which you guys, the internet users, can band together and doubt these rent seekers and decentralise this whole thing. Facebook and Amazon can charge a huge rent and command a huge market cap, only because they control a private instance of MySQL, which hosts all the data that they, only they, have route access. They can change the rules of the game on MySQL at any point in time. Whereas blockchains provide an alternative where MySQL is just completely decentralised, and no one can change the rules of the game. It is just run by open-source foundations. So, I think that's the new internet, and the attack that they pose is severely underestimated, and it's going to strike within the next ten years. It's going to be fundamental to these guys' business models that the world is going to change fairly fast.
Pritish: Brilliant! I believe that crypto has a split opinion, by the way. I think somebody has said it well that great products and great leaders always polarise. So, you see the polarisation on crypto. How do you see that panning out in the next ten years?
Prasanna: I think crypto had a great ten or fourteen years, somewhere in that range. What an amazing time it has been like. I remember I bought my first Bitcoin in 2012. This was when I was running like a little, I had only $10,000 to my name, and I came across the Bitcoin White paper, and I was mind blown. One thing I've learned to develop over these multiple bets, which turned out to be right, and took me to the right place at the right time, was to identify when something special is happening in the world, starting from the TopCoder. The next one was Y Combinator, and then it was LikeALittle, and then when I saw Bitcoin, it was very clear that it was way rarer and more special than anything I've seen. You had an anonymous founder who solved a Math Fields-worthy problem and an economics game, a theoretical problem to make it happen in the world, who was also politically sophisticated and not attracted attention in the early years. He actually said no to WikiLeaks using Bitcoin. So, it is just fascinating, insanely fascinating. He just thought nine moves deep once the source code is built. Bitcoin source code has never been changed to date, and it still continues to operate. It is just one of the most fascinating economic experiments in history. So, I put half my liquid network worth, which is $5,000, into Bitcoin at a hundred dollars of Bitcoin. Back in the day, it was special. Back then, I was a Bitcoin maximalist and missed many of the intermediate things happening in crypto. The rise of Ethereum, the DeFi, the Proof of Stake. I thought a lot of these won't work, which happened to work, and that is what sort of brought me back, gave me some slaps on my face saying, wake up, dude. Wake up. You're wrong. Your predictions were wrong. No, it's not Bitcoin that's winning. Ethereum has already won, and Proof of Stake has already won. It doesn't matter that this problem didn't get solved for 75 years. As soon as it got solved within the next five years, there is a way more elegant, efficient solution that actually works. So, it is just a narrative violation for me. I didn't believe that would happen, but it happened. So crypto has come a long way. It's almost unstoppable at this point. And Satoshi was smart enough to recognize even in his white paper or in his forum posts that the final boss of the Super Mario game is actually the nation states, the government, and we are meeting the final boss now. The governments are coming out with guns blazing. Crypto has lost a lot of its core ethos due to this attack, and it's going to get worse. One of my friends Meta Cohen, whom I've known for ten years, started out with $10,000 at a similar time. He's the one who spoke to me passionately about Bitcoin when I saw it in 2012. He had a hundred percent of his net worth in Bitcoin at that time. So, he's the one; he’s probably the Warren Buffet of crypto. He converted $10,000 into a billion dollars over the last seven-eight years, and today you cannot create another Meta in crypto because the markets have significantly closed off. The U.S. is attacking. The launch of any new tokens. Meta Cohen didn't have any connections. He was just a random dude on the internet who was reading and curious, and all these coins that he bought, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot, all of these had public launches. Anyone could have bought it on the day it got launched. We no longer live in that world. We live in a world where Andreessen Horowitz corners ten percent of any of the most important tokens. All these sorts of things are happening in private. Much of the growth is happening on the private rounds. When you need access, he will need to know you, and so on and so forth. You know, we lost a lot of the decentralisation ethos due to that attack by the government. Some players who stood and fought like Tornado Cash have shut down, and founders have been thrown into jail. Things have escalated quite a bit. The stakes are dramatically higher. And in fact, the irony is what's actually going to happen in the next bull run; the biggest catalyst of it is going to be the government. So, I think what is going to happen from here is that the next few moves are governments going to ban crypto the way they can. Most people will try in some way or the other. And then they're also going to say, crypto's bad, blockchain is good, I will embrace the blockchain, and they will launch their CBDC- Central Banking Digital Currencies. And what they don't realise is that it will actually be the wave that creates the next 10x in crypto market caps that will push crypto's adoption from the current 5% to 50%. That is going to be the internet moment because, back in history, if you look at 1970 and 1980, Steve Jobs ran an ad saying, ‘Welcome IBM.’ Seriously, he ran a first-page ad when IBM entered the PC markets. And he had graphs and charts in that ad, which showed that each time on a platform, when the old incumbent comes in and tries to win market share on the platform, that grows the market a lot. And that happened as soon as IBM entered, and they spent like a billion dollars in marketing saying, you should buy a PC at home, everyone took it seriously. IBM had such a brand, and suddenly, consumers realised, okay, maybe I should buy a PC in my house. And then they went searching for the best PC to buy. And Apple computer sales took off. It was 10xed on the back of not Apple spend, but IBM spend, just as Steve Jobs predicted. And that's what will happen once people enter the CBC and understand why they need to hold a wallet. They can use decentralised apps, and they can decentralise the exchange things. It's an instant settlement. Once they understand it, having two internets will be harder and harder. One is the local bubble, which is all the apps built on top of CBDC. And the global bubble. It's the apps that are cross-national. There is going to be one bridge; there is going to be some leakage somewhere, and then these two worlds connect, bringing in the next billion users into crypto.
Pritish: Brilliant. I think that's an amazing breakdown. But it also feels that it is a very long game.
Prasanna: Absolutely. Totally.
Pritish: So, you talked about being an early adopter of TopCoder, Y Combinator, LikeALittle, and crypto. So, is there a mechanism you follow to understand what's next, or do things come to you, and then you recognise that this could be the next big thing?
Prasanna: Yeah. I think one of the most important things that people underrate, I believe, is the toil of walking in the desert. I've probably been in the desert for the longest in the sense that I wasn't good at academics. So, there were lots of periods where I had downtime. I wasn't doing anything. I was trying to go from one curiosity to the other. And then, when you have a lot of your free time opened up, your curiosity is free to wander and look at what is interesting about that. And then that's what clicked computers for me. And when Microsoft didn't work out for me, I didn't go to work for six to nine months. And I just had a lot of time to, I stumbled across Paul Graham’s blog posts, and so on and so forth. So obviously, to have a free mind is pretty important to note. And then, if you've walked in the desert without water, you've gone through for a while in the traditional parts, and you found nothing interesting. You didn’t fully engage deeply in it like I didn't engage in academics or Microsoft, and so on, then you know, okay, what is ordinary? And you're looking for something that's special. And what is special often in the early days is actually very explosive. It becomes one of the most insanely obvious no-brainers to which no one could say no. For example, if you take TopCoder, you can either study four years, top year college, and try to get a job at Yahoo, or you do really well in these programming contests, and before you finish college, you got a job at Google, which paid two times more or something like that. Everyone knew they wanted Google, not Yahoo, yet nobody was doing these programming contests. It just was like, even two steps of connecting the world, which is hard to do, and it becomes an extreme no-brainer when you look at it if you look at it with a clear mind. Another thing was Y Combinator. I was bored of Microsoft and came across Paul Graham’s blog posts, and he had a provocative claim that Bill Gates would've been rich no matter with or without Microsoft. He would've made millions, not billions, and he would've had fucking money anyway. And I was like, dude if you can do that, almost like a guaranteed manner, within five or ten years of your life, why would you work at Microsoft and climb the rating ladder and try to get 10% raises? It just seemed like a no-brainer. And then the stats were showing it. YC had already started by then, and PG had a metric he was measuring at the time called Founder Millionaire Rate: the rate at which founders were becoming millionaires. And a million dollars was a lot of money back then. You could retire from it. And the founder millionaire rate of YC was 50%. So literally half the founders are becoming millionaires. Why would anyone not do that and work for a big company? That seemed insane. You can flip a coin, and if the coin lands head, you never have to work a day in your life, and you can keep flipping. Or you can work for 30-50 years. That's nuts. So, the early ones, when you have explosive growth where things are changing the world like that, there are early signs that it's just a complete no-brainer. There is just nothing to even think twice about, and it happens a lot. For example, when Uber came to India, there was a time when drivers were making two LPMs. Before that, they were making 20,000 a month. You suddenly had this new thing that came out: why wouldn't you drive Uber? Why would you drive your regular auto? So that's what the sort of explosive changes in the world creates, especially for early participants of the bubble. So oftentimes, I think one is to be free enough to notice these things when these things are happening. To be available, not to get bogged down by commitments and things like that, that you can't change your life on a whim. And when Rippling happened, Rippling is the one that made me a billion dollars. It was the ultimate no-brainer. There was a company called Zenefits, which I was a part of. I was privy to what made it work, what didn't make it work. And it went from zero to 50 million dollars in two years. And the company collapsed not because of market conditions, but because of suicide, just like mismanagement. When the company collapsed, no one was coming in for that price. It's likely a hundred billion price because those revenue growth numbers indicate that. So, it's a hundred billion price. It's almost like Google is collapsing. There is clearly a demand. Yet, for some structural reasons in the market, nobody could enter that market. The big guys couldn't enter because they were all vertical players. For them to even compete with benefits, they had to build two or three products, which stretched them thin. They were already suffering from overgrowth because of the changes that Zenefits introduced in the market. So, they couldn't go from one to three products, like such a massive company. That's huge for them. They can't go from one to ten products now. So that the big guys couldn't compete. The small startups couldn't compete because they had to build many products before they could go to market. We had to burn 10 million before we went to market. So, the small startups were priced out. So, due to some peculiar Goldilocks conditions, Rippling was just super special. It was obvious that it would make me billions of dollars. I just picked a billion dollars off the road. I said as much to anyone I met, any of the early employees I tried to convince to join me early on, and the irony was it didn't work for the people who are the Googlers and the traditional people, although that would've changed their life the most. But the people who actually got convinced are startup founders. They were running perfectly fine startups. They could have raised millions of dollars on their own startups. They were accomplished entrepreneurs. They threw it away for a few percentage points of Rippling, 1% or something of Rippling, and that was a right bet to make. Even though their stakes were much higher. They were able to see it much clearer, and they made hundreds of millions of dollars on this bet. It was the right bet to make. So, the early Rippling team turned out to be a lot of ex-entrepreneurs who could, on their own might, have raised millions of dollars in venture capital for their own company. Instead, they chose to work as an employee at Rippling, which was the right bet to make retrospectively. And so, in a weird way, you know when that's happening. You have to not come up with excuses. When we started Rippling, I just had my first son born. I couldn't spend a lot of time with him when we were founding Rippling, but it is what it is. It is the price to pay. These things don't happen all the time.
Three ways to support the podcast
#1 Share the episode with family and friends on social media with #OnePercentProj using the share button on the site.
#2 Take few seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. This helps new folks find us organically. Rate
#3 Leave a review if you feel inclined. We read every single message and love feedback. Review