The media narrative about founders of tech companies is there's only two things. You're either like a hero or a villain and there's sort of very little room for anything in between. And so the narrative about founders has always been, oh my god, like you're crushing it. Even when things are going well, I think most most people who are founders of companies, even when things have been successful,. It's very, very hard and often sort of deeply unpleasant and emotionally and psychologically very scarring.
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Parker Conrad, founder and chief executive of Rippling, to talk about getting caught in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (3:30), receiving a call at 5:30 am (8:30), how wide the SVB blast radius was (11:00), moving $130m to JP Morgan in three hours (13:45), raising $500m in a day (17:00), why some people still didn’t get paid (23:40), the growing vulnerabilities of regional banks (30:20), the importance of SVB to tech (32:30), Conrad's experience at Zenefits (37:15), why automating things with software is harder than it seems (42:30), and operating in a slowing economy and tighter funding environment (44:40).
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