AI isn't valuable because it can chat. It's valuable when it understands your business. What happens when AI has access to all of your business data? On the latest TechCrunch's @StrictlyVC Download, hear from our CEO Parker Conrad on why connected data matters, and why we spent three years building Data Cloud: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

Many parts of venture don’t make any sense to founders, and hanging out with the great but always surprising @stanine, being forced to explain how VC works, reminded me of that

Founders step on every rake in the garden trying to figure out the Valley. I know, because my forehead is full of rake marks. I decided to interview some of the best investors about where the rakes are hidden in a new series called First Principles, starting with @saranormous.

We launched Rippling Data Cloud today - an all-in-one rebuild of the modern data stack, with AI deeply integrated throughout. Why would you want an org-and-employee-centric data stack? Well, here’s how I used Rippling Data Cloud to help with token burn and cut AI slop. 1/ x.com/parkerconrad/status/20…

Most founders know they need SOC 2. Very few can tell you what it actually is. The short version: It's how enterprise buyers verify you won't lose their data. And without it, you're going to lose deals. The longer version: Getting there takes hundreds of hours and a stack of disconnected tools that flag problems but don't fix them. Watch the full breakdown from @chandr3w—what SOC 2 actually is, what auditors look for, and why most compliance tools just hand you a longer to-do list.

Nearly 200 companies are pitching at YC Demo Day today. A handful might become the next @Airbnb, @stripe, or @Reddit. If you're a founder pitching today, come find us. @Rippling has coffee, swag bags, and a pretty sweet offer for YC startups. 😉

Thank goodness someone is talking about SOC2. Nothing much interesting or dramatic has been happening in this space over the past few weeks. Glad someone is shaking things up a bit.

The entire compliance automation category exists because nobody owned the underlying employee data. That just changed. Standalone compliance tools sell integration breadth as the moat. "We connect to your entire tech stack" is the pitch. Hundreds of integrations, dozens of frameworks, a federated pull across every system you run. That moat only exists when the data is fragmented. Employee records in one HRIS. Devices in an MDM. Identity in an IdP. App access spread across dozens of SaaS tools. Training in a learning system. Each one a separate API, a separate auth token, a separate schema. Stitching that together is genuinely hard work, and the standalone tools priced that hard work into a category. Rippling already owns the source. HRIS, IT, identity, app provisioning, device management, training, payroll. One schema, written once. Compliance becomes a single query against a unified data layer. The federated pull goes away. Unit economics flip completely. A standalone tool has to acquire a customer cold, run a multi-month implementation, maintain integrations against APIs that keep deprecating endpoints. Rippling already has the customer paying for the underlying systems, already has the data, marginal cost to attach compliance approaches zero. This is the same play that works whenever a system of record absorbs an adjacent category. Find the place where the "value add" is stitching data the system of record already has. Bundle it at near-zero marginal cost. The architectural premise underneath the standalone category quietly collapses. AI compliance agents don't change this either. The agent inherits the underlying data graph. Querying hundreds of inconsistent APIs gives you an agent with inherited inconsistency. Querying one schema gives you an agent that actually works. Standalone tools still have distribution and customers who don't run on a unified platform. They'll be fine for years. But the structural ceiling on the category just got marked down for anyone who takes the compound thesis seriously.

Hot take: compliance feels complex because of how it gets handled. SOC 2 turns painful when teams try to recreate reality inside a compliance tool using integrations, exports, and manual checks. That’s what turns it into a second job. @Rippling takes a different approach. Start from what already exists. When employee data, devices, and access controls live in one place, evidence collection happens automatically. Fixing gaps becomes immediate instead of coordinated across multiple tools. This feels less like better compliance software And more like removing unnecessary work altogether

@Rippling does Automated Compliance now and the product is SO GOOD that I sat in front of a camera for 2 hours to talk about it. If you’re running your startup on Rippling, you already use them to manage the stuff that matters for SOC 2: employees, devices, access, policies, onboarding, offboarding. It's kind of a no-brainer. rippling.com/customers/steal…