Parker Conrad Takes the Pain

A spectacular implosion at his last startup forced him into exile. But the Rippling CEO’s bold response to the Silicon Valley Bank collapse has brought him all the way back.

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Parker Conrad was touring me around a personal sliver of heaven when I asked him to relive his personal hell. As we traipsed through his sister Louisa’s hilly 100-acre farm at the eastern base of Vermont’s Green Mountains—Louisa’s chickens strutting in the spring sun, her goats poking their heads amiably from their pens—Conrad’s mind cast back to a much darker place.

“I thought maybe the world was ending,” he recalled. Conrad—the billionaire CEO of Rippling, a San Francisco–based payroll and human resources provider—was referring, of course, to last month’s Silicon Valley Bank collapse. As the bank imploded, Rippling needed to ensure delivery of more than a half-billion dollars of its customers’ money: $130 million due by Monday, March 13, then another $415 million two days later. But much of that customer cash—and some of Rippling’s—remained frozen in SVB. “The main thing that you have to do as a business when you’re a payroll company is get people paid,” Conrad said. “And if that doesn’t happen, that’s a big problem.”