Unlocking Opportunity Amid Competition: Rippling's Strategic Move in the Tech World

Ask any company in the tech industry if it is trying to out-innovate its rivals – or out-sue them – and the answer is likely to be yes. So it was significant that for Rippling, an early leader in HR software, to recently engage in savvy financial jiu-jitsu said something itself about the pushme-pullyou relationship between growth and competition. Rippling recently chose to bar some of its former employees from purchasing shares in its latest stock sale, and this essay explores the firm’s decision.

Navigating the Waters of Workplace Innovation and Competition

The Rise of Rippling: A Tech Success Story

Rippling has quickly become one of the largest companies in the HR software industry with a current valuation of $13.5 billion by aggregating payroll, benefits and a wide range of other services in one place. The company has gone through a series of massive funding rounds and acquisitions, part of a larger story of how tech companies are pushing technological boundaries to figure out ways to grow and succeed.

Rippling's Tender Offer: OPEN DOORS with Notable Exceptions

But his truly audacious financial move took place last year when Rippling announced a tender offer – a kind of stock sale in which employees are given a chance to cash out and share in the profits – open to both current and former staff. There was a catch. Anyone who had left later to work at Rippling’s competitors – including Deel and Workday – was explicitly excluded. The decision provoked a debate about loyalties, rivalry and the virtually invisible lines drawn in the sand.

The Exclusion Clause: Strategy or Spite?

Underpinning Rippling’s exclusionary decision is a combination of strategy and apparent need. The company was worried that sensitive information could be shared with rival firms, an understandable worry in the dog-eat-dog world of tech. What Rippling illustrates is a dilemma confronting growing tech companies more broadly: how to be open while avoiding sharing proprietary data and strategic advantage.

Rippling vs. Deel: An Unfolding Rivalry

The growing exclusion of alumni – including former Deel employees – reflects the heated competition between these businesses. Rippling and Deel are locked in a battle as both look to dominate the HR tech market, impacting how they hire and, in turn, how they treat former team members. As they square up for the fight to lead the future of work innovation, via savage marketing and technological one-upmanship, it’s clear that alumni experience is no less competitive.

Addressing the Human Element: More Than Just Business

Far from the boardroom strategy and positioning seminars are the people themselves whose lives this stuff touches. Former employees, having been pushed out the fire escape and into the cold, are ‘betrayed’, as they write on deal websites, ‘devastated,’ ‘stunned,’ ‘blindsided,’ ‘disillusioned’, and other forms of disapproval over the very private human cost. The ban on selling their stock relates not only to cash, but a deeper trust, and asks us to view the life cycle of a company, or a career, as having obligations beyond just the gain. What ethical thing does a company owe to its past contributors?

Rippling's Long-Term Vision: OPEN for Growth, CLOSED for Competition

What Rippling’s reaction to internal challenges and, now, competitive skirmishes reveal is the company’s longer-term ambitions. Openness must always be balanced against strategic exclusivity if it is to weather the inevitable fluctuations in growth and the never-ending cycle of rivalries that comes with industry expansion. We can expect these tensions between openness and exclusion, openness and ‘strategic open’ to persist well into Rippling’s future.

Exploring 'Open': The Concept Defined

After all, the word evokes struggle, liberation, egalitarianism, democracy and free expression. In business, the idea of openness reflects a particular philosophy of sharing, collaboration and inclusivity that has empowered the success of open-source technology and collaborative invention. ‘It’s not an “open or closed” thing,’ Khurana says. ‘You have to make the right tradeoffs’ Rippling embraces openness only up to a point. As a business, it needs to compete with other companies, and it wants to preserve the advantages that the company has fought to create.

The conditional openness of Rippling’s latest strategic move highlights how complex the logic of modern business practices can be. Rippling’s offer and its selectivity of former employees is the latest chapter in an ongoing debate about the scope of openness in competitive tech markets that will no doubt continue to evolve.

At the end of the day, Rippling’s handling of its stock sale is a testament to the complexity of openness in today’s commercial landscape, where the realities on the ground – not just the ideas in our heads – must be reconciled with the realities of business growth, competition and the human beings behind every corporate decision. What lies ahead for the tech world remains to be seen. But the debates around openness, and the call for more openness, will continue to be at the heart of it all.