Parker Conrad

Parker Conrad (born 1980, New York City) is an American entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and CEO of Rippling. He grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the son of Ellen Rouse Conrad (founder of the environmental nonprofit Bedford 2020 Coalition) and Winthrop B. Conrad Jr., a retired senior partner at law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. As a high-school student at Collegiate School he studied the neurobiology of sea snails, work that earned him third place nationally and $20,000 in the Westinghouse Talent Search. He entered Harvard in 1998 and became managing editor of The Harvard Crimson; the demands of the paper contributed to his failing out and taking a leave of absence (during which he worked at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) before returning to graduate in 2003 with an AB in Chemistry.

After Harvard, Conrad worked as a product manager at biotech firm Amgen in California, where he co-founded a retail-investor portfolio-management startup, Wikinvest — later relaunched as SigFig — with Mike Sha, launching in San Francisco in 2007. In 2013 he founded the HR/benefits startup Zenefits, which grew explosively to a peak valuation of roughly $4.5 billion before compliance investigations over its insurance-sales practices forced Conrad to resign as CEO in early 2016 and prompted a valuation cut of more than half. He has described the episode as formative and humbling — the "chip on the shoulder" that fueled his next venture.

Roughly six weeks after leaving Zenefits, Conrad started work on a new company. In April 2016 he and Prasanna Sankar (CTO) co-founded Rippling, an "all-in-one" workforce platform spanning HR, IT, payroll, benefits, and spend, built around a unified employee system of record. Rippling operated largely in stealth from Conrad's San Francisco home for about two years. By 2023 it had raised roughly $1.2 billion from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, and a May 2025 round valued the company at about $16.8 billion. Forbes estimated Conrad's personal net worth at roughly $2 billion in early 2025.

Alongside running Rippling, Conrad invests personally as an angel, typically writing small early checks into enterprise-software and fintech founders, often co-investing with peers such as Jack Altman, Sam Altman, Dylan Field, and Ryan Petersen.

• Stage: Mostly Seed, with some Series A and occasional Series B follow-on; a genuine early-stage angel, not a fund.
• Check size: Small personal checks, roughly $5K–$50K, clustering around $25K.
• Sectors: Enterprise/B2B SaaS, HR and people-operations tech, data infrastructure/integration, fintech, and insurance technology — closely mirroring the systems-of-record and back-office problems he has built companies around.
• What earns a "yes": Conrad is a vocal proponent of the "compound startup" thesis — building broad, deeply integrated product suites on a shared data model rather than a single narrow point tool — and his bets skew toward operational software and infrastructure that unifies fragmented business workflows.
• Co-investor signal: He frequently invests alongside well-known operator-angels and top-tier funds, so being in a syndicate with credible enterprise investors fits his pattern.