5 reasons startup leaders should go big from the start: lessons from Rippling CEO Parker Conrad

People get a lot of things wrong about startups—even the people who lead them. There’s a lot of advice out there about how to run a startup and much of it is good. But a lot of the conventional ideas about what a startup should do and how it should operate are approaching their expiration date. While there’s no universal formula for building a sustainable, scalable business that can grow and adapt as the market shifts, there are ways to approach your startup from the very beginning that can dramatically change your reach and impact. 

Rippling CEO Parker Conrad understands the value of breaking from tradition, and he’s witnessed the benefits firsthand. By applying different principles to Rippling from Day One, Parker earned a perspective that he now shares with other startup leaders. He shared these ideas at the Startup Grind Global Conference 2021 and we’re expanding his advice here to give you even more insight into building a successful startup.

Key Idea #1: A narrow focus leads to missed opportunities and steeper competition

For years, startup leaders have been told to create a super narrow focus for their products and services, and even warned that broadening the scope would be dangerous. Parker wholeheartedly disagrees with this advice. Speaking primarily of SaaS startups, Parker says having a super narrow focus “has held back the industry and has held back a lot of really important companies that could have been created but have not been.”

By definition, restricting your startup to a narrow focus limits the types of problems that you work on. “When you think about the problems your clients have, they often span a lot of different business systems or point solutions,” says Parker. “In fact, I think some of the biggest problems and therefore the problems that potentially could give rise to the most valuable companies tend to be things that span a lot of different point solution products within a business. And therefore, only building one point solution product can't really address them.”

Once upon a time, a small company could dominate a super niche space, Parker acknowledges, but now “there are actually a lot of different companies operating in all of these different narrow point solution verticals. So there is actually now a lot more opportunity if you can go bigger and combine a bunch of these different point solutions into one product.” 

There’s also a bit of a myth around the notion that you should start small and expand later on. Historically, that doesn’t happen often. “Companies that focus early on tend to continue to focus,” Parker says.