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Prasana, the co-founder of Rippling, shares his journey of identifying and leveraging Six Sigma events to achieve massive value creation. He defines Six Sigma as rare events with odds of 0.001 percent or lower, and attributes much of his success to being at the right place at the right time. Prasana recounts his experience of being ranked number one in India in top order, which propelled his career and led to job offers from top tech companies. He also discusses the importance of identifying opportunities and taking calculated risks.
After his previous startup, Zenefits, faced controversies and upheaval, Prasana recognized the huge potential in starting a new company. He explains how he saw the opportunity in creating a HR platform after Zenefits' implosion and how he convinced Parker Conrad, the former Zenefits CEO, to co-found Rippling. Prasana highlights the importance of recognizing and seizing opportunities when others are not taking action, and how he and Parker went on to build Rippling, a successful company in the HR tech space.
Prasana shares his experiences and challenges in building a high-performing tech team at Rippling. He emphasizes the value of hiring talented individuals, especially ex-founders, who had a clear understanding of the potential and opportunity at hand. Prasana discusses how they maintained a consistent UI despite different business units and made opinionated architectural choices to drive efficiency and consistency. He also reflects on the importance of cultural elements, such as maintaining high velocity, instilling a strong sense of ownership, and fighting against mean reversion to preserve the startup mindset even as the team and company grew.
As Rippling scaled, Prasana recognized the need to debug his decision-making processes and transfer those insights to others in the organization. He distills the importance of tracing internal thought processes, understanding why certain decisions were made, and then communicating those insights in a succinct and memorable manner. Prasana discusses the value of instilling culture through transferable frameworks and statements that enable individuals to make decisions aligned with the company's goals. He emphasizes the need for leaders to debug their own thought processes and effectively install that software in the minds of others to maintain a cohesive and successful culture.
The speaker emphasizes the importance of building products based on deep insights and opinions instead of relying solely on A/B testing and market guidance. Deep insights provide a strong foundation for decision-making, allowing companies to move forward without extensive testing. He argues that while A/B testing can be a useful tool, it is not always the most effective or smartest approach.
The podcast explores the transformative potential of blockchain and cryptocurrency. It highlights the financialization of the internet as an extension of blockchain technology, enabling decentralized systems and native digital currencies. The speaker discusses how blockchain can disrupt traditional centralized systems, eliminating intermediaries and empowering individuals. He identifies the crypto space as a hub of innovation and believes it will lead to massive changes in sectors such as finance, commerce, and social organization. The conversation emphasizes the need to decentralize power and create new opportunities for value creation through blockchain technology.
In this episode, we have Prasanna Sankar the CTO and Co-founder of Rippling.com, which is currently valued at $10B. Prasanna had also co-founded companies like LikeaLittle, a campus social network that grew from 0 to 20M page views in 6 weeks.
He is a two-time world finalist at Google Code Jam and ACM ICPC and held the rank one position at TopCoder while in college. After moving to the US he worked with companies like Microsoft and Zenefits but was always curious about real-world problem-solving and building startups.
Listen to this Podcast where he shares his encounters with 6 sigma events, startup experiences, raising funding from major VC firms like Ycombinator and a16z, stories with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and his belief in blockchain technology for a better-decentralized future.
Timeline:
00:00 Introduction
00:43 Understanding 6 sigma events
02:21 How he started with TopCoder
06:50 Microsoft, Interactions with Paul Graham(Y Combinator) and his first Startup
19:30 About Like a Little and hyper-growth
23:47 On turning down offers from Google and Facebook, investment with a16z
29:04 Failures and Downfalls while building startups
34:46 Zenefits story
42:35 How rippling started and engineering culture
47:42 Managing large tech teams and his learnings
59:40 His first principles
1:03:25 6 sigma events in current times and Blockchain Technology(Crypto)
1:12:35 On Decentralization, cryptocurrencies, and Uniswap
1:17:53 His Optimism, beliefs, and life experiences
1:22:19 OpenAI and the Elon Musk story
1:27:47 Outro
#PrasannaSankar #ScalerPod #Podcast #Scaler #Blockchain #Ycobinator #Startups #Rippling #Crypto
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