Rippling Operating Lessons, #1: Learn the Business

A lot of advice for people working at startups isn’t very helpful. Tactical advice gets outdated fast; and rosy post-exit narratives are hard to apply to the day-to-day grind. The type of advice I’ve always found more helpful, is more general: operating principles that you can use in any situation. I just wrapped up 3 years in growth & GTM at Rippling, during a period of 5x revenue growth. My teams worked on marketing to fuel that growth, from scaling cold outbound, to rebuilding our cross-sell motion, to taking new products to market. It was the most intense learning experience of my career. There’s certainly no avoiding the late nights and trial & error of working at a startup. But, there were some things I wish I’d known, especially early in my career. Over a set of posts, I’ll try to share them. These learnings will probably feel most relevant for analytical generalists at fast-growing startups. A lot is growth-specific, but still generalizes. Most people at work just wait for assi

A lot of advice for people working at startups isn’t very helpful. Tactical advice gets outdated fast; and rosy post-exit narratives are hard to apply to the day-to-day grind. The type of advice I’ve always found more helpful, is more general: operating principles that you can use in any situation. I just wrapped up 3 years in growth & GTM at Rippling, during a period of 5x revenue growth. My teams worked on marketing to fuel that growth, from scaling cold outbound, to rebuilding our cross-sell motion, to taking new products to market. It was the most intense learning experience of my career.