YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeremy Henrickson

lines on the record: 80
first: 2023-06-04
most recent: 2023-06-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would say it's the speed of execution, I think, in speed of decision making, it's the thing that is probably the hardest to explain to people before they're here. Like it's hard to understand until you experience it. Like, let's not schedule a meeting for next week or tomorrow or later today. We're in the middle of a meeting. We need to make a decision. Let's either make the decision or if we can't, let's like slack call in the person that we need in order to make that decision. And we'll be done with the decision today. And like, sure, there are irreversible decisions. You can't make that way. But for the most part, we really value the tempo of decision making and the speed of response. And no company I've been at on any scale, five people, you know, 5,000 people has ever operated at the tempo of this windows. And I think that our ability to continue to operate at that tempo, which is partly due to the fact that we are a compound startup and have these small independently operating teams and all the rest.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have another email address or another name, maybe an employee ID of who that person reports to and upload that to another system, which, by the way, is immediately out of date because organizational structures change all the time. Whereas with Rippling, it's always correct, right? We are the system of record. So all of our products, they're like, hey, who's that person's manager? And the system immediately knows. And that's a very, very simple example of something that you can only do if you start with solving, to come back to an earlier point, like solve the most complex use case first. Solve the fact that this data all needs to be in the same place. And so our ability to kind of differentiate boils down to kind of that one fundamental decision, which just allows us to do things that are literally impossible for any other company to do.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's right. So, I mean, the fundamental contention is having a single system of record is better for many, many, many reasons. The most simple of which is there's a single source of truth and like all of these other products can rely on it. But also, unless you start with that assumption of everything being in a single system of record, there's a bunch of other things you can't do, right? You can't build out a, I don't know, a permissioning system that looks at the various attributes across all of these products. You now suddenly have to do an integration in each of these products talks different languages. You can't do simple things like build a product and say, who is this person's manager? Products you can't do that, most products you find some system of truth, export everybody's name and email address in a spreadsheet.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Top of that, you know, things like workflow and reporting and analytics and permissioning and all these kind of underlying capabilities. So the idea of a compound startup is like all of these different businesses benefit from being built on top of one platform. The activation energy for that is extremely high, right? So before my time at the company, Parker, Persana, the technical founder, and others built all of the first versions of all of these products. And it was a minor miracle that they were able to do that. But having done it, right, we then had that platform and we could continue to build like new verticals and new startups on top of that foundation.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea of a compound startup for us is that we're basically a lot of businesses that all work together. If you think about the products we offer, we have payroll. Well, there's entire company has built just on payroll. Insurance and benefits, entire companies, that's their entire life. In fact, like a fragment of benefits is the entire life cycle of a whole company. Our IT products device management identity management, time and attendance, each of these things are industries into themselves with like multi-billion dollar companies serving each of them. The Insight Parker had before he founded the company was like, actually the result you get that when you have that is that there's all this data that gets replicated and copied and is impossible to keep in sync everywhere. The right answer is to have a single system of record one place, one database where all of that information is resident so that each of these downstream systems can always have the right data at the right time and then you can build on time.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% many times. So it's one of these things that until you're here, it's a really difficult thing to kind of grok because A, it's so counterculture to what the background that most people have come from. It's like, no, no, no, don't think about all those things. Just like zoom in on this one case, use it as a wedge, and then grow from there. This is one of the reasons that we have people, especially new people in these kind of founding roles, come in and spend a few months just like absorbing the culture to like really. With kind of new products in their infancy to make sure that we just don't fall into that trap, right? Especially because simultaneously with doing this, we're like, hey, but we need to ship this as fast as possible. And so you want to get the balance of those two things, right?”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Local specific, but instead can be configured by somebody that's in compliance, by somebody that's in legal, that needs to get the right documents into the system. And all of that stuff can be handled by the system, which allows us to move much faster sort of going forward.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did is we said, look, we need to launch with six countries. And these are six super different countries that we want to look at. And they're going to have different requirements from an HRIS standpoint, from an employer of record standpoint, from how you pay global contractors, from how payroll works. And we're going to make a system that works for those countries. And there's like lots of downstream implications for that. But what it means is that now our global payroll system adding a country is not easy, but it's a lot easier than it would have been if you had to like continue to stamp out and replicate. And then, of course, maintain all of these things that have very little underlying connectivity. And instead of what we have is like, you know, 80% of the system is baked into our global payroll platform. And then the 20% is like country specific. And most of that specificity can be handled not by engineers who are very, very expensive to change things that are like”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think a great example of this at Rippling is our global payroll product. We could have said, hey, look, we just need to support this one country. We need to support whatever, the UK, let's say. So we're going to copy all of our US stuff, just replicate it, and change all the things to be UK-like. That would have been the fastest thing to do dramatically oversimplify. But that's not what we did.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You still build the product in a way that's not going to prevent you from getting there in the future. And does that take a little more time? Sure. Yeah. But does it save you time in the long run? Absolutely. And so that's our approach.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's extremely difficult to unwind those decisions once you've built them into the product. And therefore, we believe very deeply. It's like, sure, understand those simple cases, right? Understand if you're a two-person company, you don't need all of these other things. And what is a product going to look like for you to approach it, but also understand what it would mean to have 10,000 people globally around the world with this ridiculously hard use case. What's the model that would support that? And let's make sure that as we're doing the technical and product design for this thing, that it accommodates that view, even if we're not going to support it in the first version, right? Even if we make the product decision to say, like, look, we actually don't need to handle that case right now.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you design a minimum viable product, you're optimizing for speed. And in that set of optimizations, you are minimizing the deeper product thinking about what can fully differentiate our product based on not only existing kind of capabilities within our products and platform, but based on what it ought to do in the future. And so it sort of limits product creativity. But worse, it leads to building the wrong thing technically. Right. So if you're only thinking through the simple cases and you're an engineer and no one's pushing you on saying, wait, what about that healthcare hospital administration case where like, you know, it's mission critical life, then you're going to make a different set of architectural assumptions. And then you're going to build on those and you're going to build on those for six months, nine months, a year, and you'll have dozens or hundreds of assumptions built on top of those.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I don't want to knock on MVPs. I think MVPs have their place, they're extremely useful, particularly if you're literally at a zero-to-one company that's never done anything before and you don't have clear market validation. I think in our case specifically for Rippling, a minimum viable product would do a disservice like to both our customers and to the very team that was building it. And the reason I believe that is that when”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, that's right. And every, you know, it's pretty ad hoc, but every couple of weeks or something like that, they're meeting with me or with Parker, whichever one of us is like the DRI on it and giving feedback on the designs, kind of having a critical eye for like, oh man, if I were using this as a admin, you know, a small company or an admin at a large company, how would I feel about this? Would this interface work for me? And so we're pressure testing it throughout that cycle and trying to get the balance of like, you know, speed and comprehensiveness, right?”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, no, no, no, no. Like literally somebody who knows Rippling's products, knows our component library, knows all of that stuff and is skilled in doing UX and interaction and visual design.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get an opinion about your product and then start building it. And during this, they're also recruiting a team of usually two, three, four other engineers who kind of have that same zero to one mentality and they start building. And usually over the course of like six to nine months, we can get a product from a blank sheet of paper to something that is launched or at least that we're using sort of internally when we dog food our stuff really heavily. And then it grows from there. And then sometimes when you launch one of these products, you get close to launch, you realize, hey, actually a team of five or six people can handle this product. And now seems sometimes you have to bump it up. It's like, okay, this thing's about to go to production. There's all these other things to do. The team now needs to go from four to 15 or something like that. It really depends on the product. But that's the general life cycle. And then you keep growing and scaling.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the model's quite simple. In the vast majority of cases, we realize we need to build something. And we have the one-page view of what that is. And usually we're lucky enough that the things we're building sort of exist in some form in the industry today, not in the differentiated way that we can build it, but like time in attendance as an example, like that's a well-known thing in the industry. There's whole companies that do only that. So we start there. We find a single engineer who is extremely entrepreneurial, understands what it means to operate at tempo, understands what it means to like make decisions with low information, understands how to work very, very quickly with a design partner. So we have a design partner. And we say, look, come into Rippling, spend a few months getting to know the platform, first of all. So go work on.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was mostly small focus, like obviously Parker can do things and unblock them in the way that only a CEO can, and that helps. But the thing is that rippling, like we've now replicated that a dozen times, right? That's our model for starting new things. And so it can't just be him unblocking things, oh he does unblock things. It's more that this pattern of having these small groups be able to do things. And then being able to go to those people, whether you're Parker or somebody else in the company and be able to say, hey, how are things going? Or are we working on the right things? Or let's see the latest designs for that thing and comment on it. Like all of those things can happen just at a much greater tempo than if you're trying to go three layers down into the org and do things. I think that's the other maybe the key point here, that like everyone is exposed to senior leadership. Like, yes, we have a management structure because you have to, but that management structure does not interfere with the ability of kind of anyone, anywhere in the organization.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Monomaniacally focused on this one thing. And then identifying the places where, yes, there's connectivity to the rest of the suite. And that allowed them to move extremely quickly.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One example is maybe three years ago when I was just starting at the company, we decided that we needed to build a time in attendance product. Lots of market demand for us. And that we hadn't built it yet, something that many customers need. And so there were a bunch of ways we could have chosen to do that. But the way we did it was to say, look, let's find one engineer, really talented systems engineer who's actually capable of doing product thinking and have Parker, CEO, also spend time on it. And you start there, right? And Sacheth brought a few people on with him. And those four people over the course of maybe nine months or so built a time in attendance product. It was the only thing they were doing. They didn't have to worry about what was going on with our payroll product except to the extent they had to integrate with them a little bit, right? They didn't have to worry about what was going on with the kind of the benefits team or kind of our IT products.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On what needs to be done, then you can usually actually even accelerate over time because you bake more into this platform. It allows your engineers to do more with less, and that's always pretty amazing.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things like whichever one seems hardest or most complicated. And so I try to do that as often as I can. And I found that I always learn a lot by going through that detailed exercise. And I think the last thing is just making sure that teams have the right distribution of experience and seniority. Like sometimes you get a team started and the team is like perhaps doing something that's zero to one and they're amazing at all this zero to one stuff. And then like two or three years later, like those same people are trying to like scale the product to like, you know, millions of people. And it turns out that A, they don't like that part of the job as much. And B, maybe they're not as good at it. So I think you just constantly like look at the team and make sure that A, people are doing things that they love. And if they're not, like, hey, try this other thing instead, right? And B, like recalibrate the team and make sure the right kind of skill sets are there. And I found if you kind of do all of those things and then have product leadership where we're saying this is what we need to do in a very, very clear and”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Main part of the problem. And so a clear platform with a clear interface, easy to use, and all the ways that both engineers and product people want it to be easy to use, simplifies the space in which people have to think about these problems. And that's not always easy, right? Platforms are not, you know, you can't just write a platform and hope it's going to work for the products. It's very much an iterative thing. But the more one can invest in that and have the right kinds of people who are capable of doing that sort of both systems thinking and product thinking simultaneously, I think is really important. The third thing just from a leadership point of view is like diving deep, right? Like it's very, very tempting to kind of float up here as a leader and say, hey, you take that hill over there. You guys do this over here, when in fact, like where you really learn where the challenges are or the problems or the successes is by just being there with the people in the trenches on one of the”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a lot of different answers here, and I think a lot of them are very specific to the nature of the business that someone's in, right? Different businesses can maintain velocity in different ways. I think there's kind of a universal truth that you want small teams with clear missions. If there's 300 people trying to work on one thing, like just sheer communication challenges done Bars number, all of those things come into play. And it's really, really hard to act quickly. And so having smaller groups of people breaking down what is always a very, very large problem into like sufficiently small bits that small groups can attack wholeheartedly and minimize horizontal communication, I think is the first thing. I think the second thing is that to the extent it's like a technology problem, the more you can bake into a clear platform, it reduces the decision-making complexity for everyone who's working on the domain.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's hard, right? It wasn't always easy. I had a new daughter who had been born just a few months earlier, right? Really tough to kind of balance those things. I've always loved the rate of learning. And so it is those experiences, I feel, that have most sort of accelerated my own personal growth and personal learnings because it's in the crucible of things being hard. And so I think when people are going through those times, it's nice to take a step back and talk with friends or whatever about what's really going on and setting it in the context of, hey, three, four, five years from now when we look back on this, we realize, wow. A, we did something amazing with that time. And B, we learned a lot and we were able to take that with us kind of into whatever we were doing next after that.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the biggest challenge was that in crypto, there's just so much uncertainty in general, like simple questions like, is Ethereum going to be a thing? Are the subject of debate. And no one actually at the time had an answer to that question. Lots of really strong opinions. And so you have to be able to have those debates because lots is going on. But then you have to be able to come out of those conversations with a clear kind of company point of view that you're all shooting toward. And like while there may still be differing points of views and debates that happen on the margins, like you go full speed toward this answer until you decide to go full speed toward a different answer. And I thought we were pretty successful at that at Coinbase and it wasn't always easy.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first thing is you don't talk about people getting rich. It's a very technical. You talk about its customers, it's their money, right? And number one, it had to be secure. So there's a guy named Philip Martin, a friend of mine now, and he's just this amazing security leader at Coinbase. And he was able to always put these decisions that we were making extremely quickly in context and say, look, these are the kinds of decisions we can make and still have it be secure, no matter how fast we need to move. And so security was always like the number one thing. And then the second thing is like focusing on both the kind of immediate nature of the issue. Hey, site is down or whatever and like resolving that, but also trying to set those in a context of like where we need to go over the next six months. Like what are we actually shooting for? What do we believe the volumes are going to be? What's it going to take to have everything from a user experience to kind of the deep.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, it was both a dream and a nightmare. You know, and I was incredibly lucky to be working on it with a team of people that I could really trust and could stand shoulder to shoulder with in the trenches. And it was a lot of learning about how you can rapidly scale systems over time. And people like to trade crypto on Saturday mornings. So a lot of Saturday mornings, there's like some new thing would break on the edges of the system. And we need to kind of get in there and work on it. And so it was just a lot of really incredible lessons about who you choose to work with and focus and making sure you have the right people in the room at the right time.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The strongest memories for me are during like 2017 where crypto, which has kind of been at its nadir in early 2016 and kind of slowly started climbing out, I'm just kind of took off and became a real thing in the public consciousness. And Coinbase, which at the time had an exchange just like on-ramp and off-ramp from fiat to crypto and back, experienced over the course of 2017 40x growth in usage.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very, very tempting to kind of float up here as a leader and say, hey, you take that hill over there, you guys do this over here. When in fact, where you really learn where the challenges are or the problems or the successes is by just like being there with the people in the trenches on one of the things, like whichever one seems hardest or most complicated. And so I try to do that as often as I can. And I found that I always learn a lot by going through that detailed exercise.”
2023-06-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source