Parker Conrad

At Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, Conrad was managing editor of The Harvard Crimson. “I spent so much time at the Crimson that I failed out of school,” he recalled. He took a year off to work at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, then returned and graduated in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.⁠[1]

After graduating, Conrad worked as a product manager at AmgenAmgenAmgen Inc. is an American company that discovers, develops, manufactures and delivers innovative medicines. Incorporated in California in 1980, it has its principal executive offices in Thousand Oaks, and its common stock trades on The Nasdaq Global Select Market.Open the full entry. In 2006 he co-founded the portfolio management startup SigFig, originally called Wikinvest, with a college friend, and was pushed out about six years later after a falling-out with his co-founder.⁠[1]

In 2013 Conrad co-founded the HR software company Zenefits with Laks Srini, a former software developer at SigFig. In spring 2015 Zenefits, backed by Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry and other venture capital firms, reached a valuation of $4.5 billion.⁠[1]

On April 23, 2015, Andreessen Horowitz published the a16z Podcast episode “a16z Podcast: How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Business,” featuring Conrad as chief executive and co-founder of Zenefits. The episode described how the two-year-old Zenefits was banned in Utah for offering its HR management software for free and how the company got the state to reverse the ban. Conrad said he felt “upset, anxious, and scared,” partly because Zenefits, as a B2B company, lacked the millions of users who could push back on behalf of companies such as UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry or Lyft; he also said, “we make HR software. That's totally unsexy.”⁠[2]

The episode was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on January 1, 2019, under the title “a16z Podcast | How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Business.”⁠[3]

On February 8, 2016, Conrad resigned under pressure as chief executive of Zenefits. The reasons included broker licensing failures and a “macro” program that allowed brokers to complete fewer hours of training than California required; the company’s growth had also stalled, leaving it short of its $100 million revenue target.⁠[1]

Zenefits and Conrad later settled charges by the US Securities and Exchange Commission that they had misled investors about state insurance licensing and failed to disclose the macro; without admitting or denying the findings, Zenefits paid a $450,000 penalty and Conrad personally paid just over $533,000.⁠[1]

In April 2016 Conrad launched Rippling with Prasanna Sankar, Zenefits’ former director of engineering, as co-founder and chief technology officer; the two worked in stealth from Conrad’s San Francisco home for about two years.⁠[1]

By May 2020 Rippling had raised $100 million from investors including Initialized CapitalInitialized CapitalInitialized Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm headquartered in San Francisco, United States, founded in 2011 by Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian, and Harj Taggar, and an early investor in companies such as Coinbase, Instacart, Cruise, and Flexport. In December 2021 it announced it had raised $700 million in new funds; after Tan became President and CEO of Y Combinator in early 2023, Brett Gibson became managing partner.Open the full entry and Kleiner Perkins, including a $45 million round in April 2019 at a $295 million valuation.⁠[1]

As Silicon Valley BankSilicon Valley BankSilicon Valley Bank was a state-chartered commercial bank founded in California in 1983 and headquartered in Santa Clara. It was the principal subsidiary of the holding company SVB Financial Group, and its clients were concentrated among technology and life sciences companies and venture capital firms. In March 2023, after it announced a securities sale and a capital-raising plan, it suffered a massive run, was closed by California regulators, and was placed into receivership with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. U.S. regulators invoked a systemic risk exception to protect all of its deposits, its deposits and loans were then assumed by First Citizens, its parent entered bankruptcy reorganization, and the regulatory reviews and litigation that followed the failure continued into 2026.Open the full entry collapsed in March 2023, Rippling secured a $500 million term sheet from Neil Mehta of Greenoaks in under 12 hours, at an $11.25 billion valuation unchanged from its Series D the previous May, bringing its total funding to about $1.2 billion. Conrad said his condition to the investor was, “we need to close over the weekend.”⁠[4]

Rippling: Official website: https://www.rippling.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parkerconrad/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]