Parker Conrad says founders have been building software wrong

Curious how others feel about this narrative. As an SI we see the pain isolated systems cost businesses and the great deal of money required to make them fit into a larger ecosystem. That said as a rippling customer, their breadth and lack of depth is constantly on display. We’ve had several challenges with there “secondary” services. It costs money to be good at everything, my feeling is this style of getting off the ground is just as much a capital constraint as it is a revenue&#x2F;gtm one.<p>He’s got a good valuation going selling ideas and figuring out how to implement later though…

Explains why everyone I’ve talked to that uses Rippling (including our company) hates it.<p>The size that you can grow to while maintaining singular focus is getting bigger and bigger. Parker’s situation is probably different because he was able to raise a bunch of money early on after Zenefits bequeathed him with SV stardom. He had early signs of success because he was able to acquire customers through what seems like an incomparable feature completeness, at the cost of shit UX and buggy software (IME). For example: they literally didn’t file our tax documents despite telling us they did, resulting in thousands of dollars of fines.<p>I might be overly cynical based on our pretty awful experiences, but feel vindicated because we’ve moved to a smaller, leaner, more focused HR startup named Warp and haven’t had half the issues we did with Rippling.

I have not met Parker in person, I have not used Rippling. But I like the approach of building a vertical end to end tool. I started <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taghash.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taghash.io</a> with just deal flow CRM for VC, over time customers demanded portfolio management, when we built it, others asked for fund, LP management. As we incrementally built our product, sales (mostly referral &amp; inbound) became easier.<p>We were no more getting compared to a spreadsheet or no code tool because of being a single vendor managing end to end lifecycle of a VC&#x2F;PE firm.

Why would anyone even care about what Parker Conrad thinks about building software?<p>I appreciate his company building but he is no John Carmack. So sit down bud.<p>Also why Saas are struggling is not because they were focused on something narrow. It&#x27;s because they were not innovating and pushing the edge of technology and VCs were funding the same type of company multiple times to reduce risk etc.

Seems to me that building for breadth can trigger overengineering. You build functionality that isn&#x27;t wanted, but is a logical consequence of your platform and the other functionality that you do have use cases for. This is an expenditure of resources with no guarantee that anyone will use it. In turn, it&#x27;s likely that this functionality will harbor bugs and design errors, precisely because nobody has really used it for anything.<p>I&#x27;m all for building extensible platforms, with scripting and&#x2F;or good APIs, but any effort put into something for which there is no definable use case is probably wasted.

Rippling is terrible. I had major major issues with their software and an even worse customer service experience. The best thing I can say about it is the UI is better than ADP but ADP at least works.

Parker Conrad says founders have been building software wrong for the last 20 years