Name: From Solo Founder to Global Team: How Propel Code AI Scaled to 20+ Employees Without Ops Chaos
Uploaded: 2026-03-24T18:16:37.060Z
Duration: 1 h 12 s
Description: From Solo Founder to Global Team: How Propel Code AI Scaled to 20+ Employees Without Ops Chaos

Transcript for "From Solo Founder to Global Team: How Propel Code AI Scaled to 20+ Employees Without Ops Chaos": All right, welcome. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for joining our How I Rippling session today. We'll get started here in one minute or so. Before we do, go ahead and drop in the chat where you're tuning in from. We'd love to get to know everybody. Okay, awesome. Let's get started. Well, hi, everyone. Hi, again. Thanks for joining us. My name is Brett. I lead product marketing for our startups team here at Rippling. And I have the pleasure of being your moderator today. Before we dive in, I want to go over a few housekeeping rules. So first, you'll be muted for the duration of this webinar. So with that said, definitely just feel free to hop into the chat with any questions, thoughts, comments. We'd love to see that humming as we chat. If you have any questions, again, you can please be sure to just use the Q and A section in Zoom and we'll try to address those, live. And then last, like we are recording this and we're happy to provide that under upon request. Okay. So enough of that. We're really excited to welcome Tony Dong today. Tony is the founder and CEO of Propel and former VP of Engineering at Rippling. So welcome Tony. It's great to have you here. Thanks for having me, Brad. Excited to be here. Yeah. Us too. Us too. Okay. So let's kind of start a little bit with your journey here. We'd love to kind of give the audience a little glimpse into some of your recent stops, in your career trajectory and kind of where you've been. We obviously have a lot of founders and startup operators, who are in the audience today. And so I definitely expect your kind of boomerang story, founder founder, Rippling Founder to resonate with some folks. So it sounds like, you were at a company called Pershop, where you were cofounder there and went through YC. And it sounds like like most early stage startups, you really had to figure out kind of all of this, like, call it admin junk here, payroll compliance, onboarding, all of those operational systems, really kind of figure it out on your own and just, just, grit through those. So could you start by just kind of telling us all a little bit about what that experience was like and maybe some of the things that you ran into as far as issues or blockers? Yeah, for sure. Happy to. So, prior to joining Ripley, was starting this company Pershop. When we started the company, Ripley wasn't quite in the state where it is today. I think it was definitely very much in its infancy. We ended up picking a piece of software to run our HR and payroll and everything. And it was honestly just not the best choice. Think we were a small company and we ended up spending a lot more time than I would have liked, just to run the basics, just to run payroll every two weeks, just to administer some very basic benefits. As founders, we just needed some basic health insurance, something basic to be able to actually get us going. And it's unfortunate that the platform we chose just didn't have any of that. And that as we're looking at how we may expand the team, came a lot of challenges. Just trying to figure out, okay, if we need to hire at that point, if we need to hire more people, it was a little bit more operational overhead. We were looking at potentially some part time folks, some contractors, and everything alongside with myself and my co founder who worked full time. Just became a whole situation. And then as we're winding that company down, it was reflecting back, were some of the problems I ran into just running that company, even though it wasn't at the forefront, just managing the day to day HR payroll side of the things, it became very apparent, hey, this is a thing that people need to be solved. And as I was exploring what was the next journey, I came across Ripley and I saw the vision, Parker and what the team was working at that point in time. Was like, well, I need to go train Ripley and to go solve these problems I personally ran into. Yeah, for sure. So you did decide to do just that and you joined the team and eventually became our VP of engineering here. So curious, I mean, you touched on this a little bit, but you're having like all of these sort of operational overhead issues, particularly around like different employment types and maybe as you started to scale. And so how did you kind of tackle some of those problems from a technical capacity when you did end up joining us at Rippling? Yeah, so I think it was helpful to have had that personal experience of having to manage the payroll system and manage the HR system when joining Rippling, because there were a lot of things that just made more sense as I started to go into the system, into the software. There are things that unless you've written HR software before, you wouldn't have known. So one example is treating contractors and employees the same. And that was one of the interesting architectural decisions that we made at Ripley from day one. And that was something that was non obvious, because you're like, oh, a contractor and a full time employee, they're very different things semantically, but in reality, they actually navigate your system. They actually work on a day to day way very similarly with your system. So just having those understanding of how actually running a company actually works and using that knowledge in some of the decisions there when building Rippling was really helpful. Yeah, for sure. And it sounds like some of those decisions you made that were really foundational sort of led us into one of the things that really makes Rippling different today, which is our employee graph. We can talk through that a little bit on some of these subsequent slides, but just would love to hear a little bit of your take on sort of why the employee graph is differentiated. And then maybe I can kind of flip over to that while you're chatting through it. Yeah, for sure. This is definitely near and dear to my heart because having led the platform, the HR products, the core things that power the employee graph or intro, we also call object graph, basically every single element within your company, whether it is a person, pay run, an IT device, anything within the system are all interconnected. Even though from the outside we say employee graph, it's really object graph, it's really everything in your system is interconnected. So having a system that is able to traverse and find all time off requests for employee and being able to connect those to pay runs, or connect those to commissions, or connect those to any other object in your system is really powerful. It's the underlying primitive that allows us to scale naturally across many different objects or many different products in the same ecosystem. Yeah, great. I appreciate that overview. And I think that's like, again, kind of from a technical differentiation point, like really something that we love to talk about here at Rippling. And it really helps us simplify your life as founders, as admins, as anyone who's kind of running all of this stuff. Again, like we are built on that, what we call single source of truth for all your employee data. And so it really is built with the employee at the center. So as Tony kind of touched on across PTO, all of these different use cases, we understand and unify that data and the context around it. So what does that look like in practice? Say you have one of your superstar EEs who is promoted and maybe they kind of move from California to New York to kind of launch your new HQ and NYC. In a normal or sort of other HCM system, you're going to have to make all of these changes individually. With Rippling, you simply update that employee profile and it's going to cascade across all of these other modules. So not only are we hosting all of this stuff for you across your HCM, IT spend, we are really making it super, super simple and giving you a ton of time back as a founder so that you're not like dealing with all of this admin work. Tony, would you say when you were at Pershop, like this was something that was a headache for you as you started to think about employment status and different changes to the employee graph? Definitely just having to deal with kind of like getting anyone started into the company, getting payroll set up for even different states or different types, and having to figure out how do you pay a part time contractor different than how you're paying your full time employees. All that was just things that I didn't really have experience with and the system that we're using didn't make it easy to do that. And this is actually harking back to my initial first experience with Flink, just getting that initial offer letter and going through the sign up flow and going through the onboarding process, it just made very much intuitive sense that, hey, I can just get my laptop connected to my system. Oh, I also just automatically got access to Slack, got access to Gmail, got access to AWS, got access to everything that I needed as an engineer, as an engineering leader, and everything just worked without me having to go request a bunch of people within the team internally to get access. Those are the things that just was kind of like a light switch when I first signed up for Ripley initially. So I'm curious kind of today what your biggest day to day ops challenge is as you've scaled as a startup. So we'll pause here for the audience to just drop in a letter into the chat. We got again, pains that I'm sure you all have come across, manual admin, compliance, hiring and onboarding, disconnected systems, or if you have something else, please drop it in the chat. So we'll pause here for a minute or so for you all to dig in. Okay, great. Yeah. Seeing a lot of As and Bs rolling in. Okay. Nice. Awesome. Yeah. So again, like appreciate you all kind of weighing in earlier and Tony for chatting through a few of those examples. I think one of the things that really makes us, special here at Rippling is not only do we offer these kind of simplified experience kind of at the employee level, but our employee graph is also built at the center of all of these different modules. So we talk a lot about consolidation here. And this is really today, it might feel a little large and far off for some of these smaller startups. But one thing we hear from founders most is that all of these disconnected pieces of data, every software evaluation, like they all costs time, but then they obviously all cost money, but they also really cost you time. So, as startup founders, like we know that time is like your most precious resource. So curious, Tony, whether this resonates. And have you kind of had to go through these lengthy processes to onboard multiple tools in the past? And maybe how is that different today with Rippling and kind of centralizing everything here? Yeah, for sure. I've definitely had to go through lengthy onboarding process for every additional system that you add to your company. And one of the things that I really think is powerful about Rippling is being able to get to the core of what you need in a lot of different product areas without having to onboard new systems and everything's or less seamlessly integrated. So a good example is just the HRIT integration. Just having someone be able to get onboarded and be able to actually connect all their accounts and have the appropriate permissions created right away, that's a big game changer because we onboard a lot of folks, they're also somewhat distributed globally, meaning that there's less of the time for myself or others to go and handhold those account creations and handhold making sure they have the right access to things. And then as part of our company as well, we are SOC two compliant. So access control, everything is really, really important to maintain SOC two compliance. So just having one system that manages all of that is really helpful for us. Yeah, that's great. I love hearing that experience and I think it's something we talk a lot about here at Rippling. I'd be curious now to just sort of talk through Propel a little bit. Obviously we hit Pershop, your company when you were not using Rippling. How is that different today? Could you maybe kind of tell us the Propel story? It sounds like you started out as a solo founder and you've kind of scaled the team from there, both domestically and globally. So what were some of those pain points? What are some of the things that are working well in Rippling today? And again, maybe how is that different than kind of your past go around at this? Yeah, for sure. Propel really started from my experience at Rippling, where I really saw a lot of development bottlenecks as AI started to get integrated into engineering orgs. There were a lot of challenges in how to actually productionize AI development and how to productionize the code that was getting generated by Claude, by OpenAI, by Copilot, etcetera. So, as part of that experience, we brought in a lot of engineers that I worked with, and they were globally distributed. Meaning that, hey, as a solo founder, having to manage all these folks across different time zones and across different geolocations was a huge challenge. And really, choosing Rippling as the all one was somewhat a no brainer, just given the integration, one on the HR and IT side to be able to actually give everyone access and permissions. Second is the seamless integration of The US payroll and global payroll and global EOR versus global contractor. Everyone on the team has a specific bespoke condition and bespoke setup. So we really had to figure out finding a system that actually fits for all the different team member needs. So taking Rippling as, in my opinion, obviously the most flexible system, the thing that can be that all in one to help you run the team, is really massive. And especially as a solo founder, I'm the only admin with the team, I'm the only one touching the payroll software. This is just something that I want to spend, obviously, very little time thinking about and really healthy just spend basically no time thinking about after the initial sign up. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, do you think you're saving a few hours per week, less, more? I would love a quick comparison on maybe your past life as a founder with a different tool. Yeah, honestly, there's probably weeks where I'm not even signing into Ripple. The payroll approval's automated, everything's as long as nothing's really changing, everything just is a go. And yeah, definitely saves at least hours. Thinking back to my previous experience, just running payroll, it would literally take probably twenty minutes to approve pay runs for my co founder. It was twenty minutes, so just log in, wait for the loading and calculation and everything, and then click finish. This is just something that I didn't want to spend time doing. It's also the extra context switching of going to different systems or going from building your product to then having to take those twenty minutes to actually go do some HR busy work. That twenty minutes isn't actually twenty minutes because it's all the context switching back. Yeah, for sure. We hear that all the time from founders that it just like the compounding effect of this admin junk, like really, really can start to bog you down. And so really appreciate you sharing the story here. And I think like a lot of our audience today is also kind of navigating similar distributed and global workforce situations. So we're actually going to turn it back over to them here. And we'll be curious for the folks here in the audience today, whether you have employees in different states and or a global workforce. And again, like would love to just see those answers here in the chat. Okay. Great. Okay. Now that we've heard from all of you a couple of times, we're gonna dive into a short product demo. So we're originally gonna have Tony, you know, dust off the old rippling gloves and get back in the platform. Platform. But just to keep things super clean and easy, we're going to have a solutions consultant on our team, to walk you all through it. So without further ado, I'm going to pass things off to Austin for like a ten or so minute demonstration AhmyRippling is the preferred choice for over 15,000 startups, including Cursor, Clay, Replit, Propel, and many more. So let's, dive in now. To begin with, I would like to start with our hiring approach and onboarding. Whereas we start, we'll always click on hire in order to begin selecting the details that are going to ultimately apply to the onboarding candidate that we're bringing into the system. Be that an individual or multiple people from an ATS or African tracking system or as an individual new employee, such as what I've started here with Karun, who we will be employing into India. So as we put in that first name, last name, and personal email so that they retain access to the Rippling system even after they've departed your organization, we can then start going through the process, hiring them into a position or hiring, with manual details being entered. At this point, going ahead and selecting that this person is being hired into a specific country or work location, detailing how we plan to employ them, where, of course, Rippling does support hiring through your own entities, hiring through the, Rippling employer of record, or even international contractors should you need to do so, where we can support payments in all three scenarios. Proceeding next to the employment details step, we'll begin to enter in the details around the entity they're tied to, the employment time that's connected. And as you'll see, we do bring in local compliance as we move through the process, where in India, an example, there is no such thing as true hourly employees. Everyone is salaried in some form or fashion, and so therefore, those are the options that are presented and based on the selection then determines the eligibility for overtime as well. So embedding that and information along your path throughout the onboarding flow to ensure that even though you may not be a quote unquote expert in all things India in this case, you still have a system that is working for you and with you. As we go in and start updating start dates and addressing things like department, job, family, title, and more, just like our across our platform, we'll use these data points to actually drive what an employee is able to interact with, what they are able to see, as we call these super groups, where we use the employee data to drive that access to time off, time and attendance, document management learning, and more throughout the entire platform. Continuing forward and moving next into our compensation details, you'll see that out of the box, we are accounting for that localized currency with INR in this case or Indian rupee based on the location that the employee is based in. We provide nice tools to help aid in entering this information, such as if you're a US business who does all budgeting in USD, maybe you're looking for the equivalent salary to enter in that local currency. So we can input that copy and paste and drop it in where this is based on a daily rate that is provided, and we give you that date, time, and value, associated with it to ensure there's visibility. Now in India, where we have functionalities like cost to company, we'll be able to set and control those on a self-service basis. And we will reflect that as you go through the onboarding flow, what that breakdown associated would look like based on the employee details that are driving connection. We also, as a natively processing global payroll platform for locations like India and numerous others, will allow you to do things like selecting to add sign on bonuses, equity, things along these lines. And in scenarios like a sign on bonus, we can define whether it's part of that first pay run, or is it actually gonna take place after ninety days, a hundred and eighty days? What does this process look like? To ensure that we can create as much automation for you as possible across Rippling, not just from a US perspective, but also globally. Next, moving into the additional employment details where we'll address some things like the type of employment contract, probationary periods, and such in order to ultimately look to generate the employment agreements and agreements that we'll have. Now we are able to embed custom fields throughout this process so that we could account for administrative fields like the USD salary equivalent that we're wanting to tie this to or an exchange rate that we used externally to get the evaluation that we provided. Maybe we're collecting some company specific details here that have been created custom. While we can collect collect these on the admin front, we can do much of the same for the employee. Before we finally get to those agreements that are able to populate in, where we will have an agreement automatically generate based on the details that we've input to this point. So we have that India employment agreement full time for salaried employees. We are also able to have any additional documents that we may wanna provide, either be that as a signing document, as a static document, or simply a notice able to be facilitated through the platform. RipLink is a globally recognized signature platform equivalent in many ways for these agreements to a DocuSign or a HelloSign. So able to ensure that we can consolidate systems that the employees and your administrators are interacting with to facilitate those global signatures. Now above and beyond this in the onboarding flow, much of this moves into our peripheral items or or tools, if you will, modules and applications throughout the platform, such as global benefits, our device management capabilities, other IT functionalities like our single sign on or third party app integrations. But aside from that, should you choose or not choose to have those applications, our final steps will be adding in a work email and reviewing the details before submitting an email to ultimately be received by the employee to invite them for employee self-service, where they then will be able to log in via their credentials and upload things like their right to work documentation, their bank account, fill out tax forms where applicable, etcetera. So ultimately, whether you're onboarding in The US, in India, The UK, or many other countries that you may be employing in, the process will remain consistent. The difference will be the localization that will automatically take place and the information that thus is associated. When thinking about employing, hiring, and paying internationally, compliance is often a cornerstone of the concerns or the desires that we have for that employment. With that in mind, Rippling has built a solution that enables compliant time off and leave policies, as well as payroll, which are both interconnected to ensure that that data can freely flow, but also creates a number of compliance tracking and barrier capabilities to ensure that compliance is being met. As we dive in and we think about time off as an example, first and foremost, once entering an entity in the Rippling system, a number of localized policies where available will be added in to the system by default. Those defaults are going to be referenced as a Rippling default, which will enable you to easily see the policies that Rippling has created, as well as the policies for which Rippling will be maintaining should any compliance or legal changes in market take place. Within these policies, you'll be able to see that Rippling is continuing to use the concept of a super group or the employee data to drive which policy employees belong to, such as in this case, part time employees in The UK that aren't contractors are connected to this rippling default policy versus as we move them over to full time and they're still in The UK and as a con not a contractor, they will move to the full time policy. Rippling is maintaining these, ensuring that using the maternity leave example here, they are requesting and requiring the proper forms such as MATB1 form or certificate, which would be required in The UK, and are associating proper pay rules such as what we would see in The UK with reduction in pay from the employer over a period of time supplemented by the government agency, as this will stay consistent across the board and where needed during implementation, a build out of respective policies will be associated with that implementation process. And the value of having these in one system is, of course, starting with the compliance, which also should you make anything customized, will be tracked by our compliance three sixty tool, ensuring that you are made aware of time and attendance, scheduling, or time off violations that may take place where it will flag it with an urgency level, describe the issue to you, and provide the recommended solution steps where you, of course, can then update the policy or at any point in time reach out to RIPLIN's support to gain more understanding of the change that may be needed. But all of this is also connecting back to our payroll system. Whereas we go into payroll, all of our payrolls will be able to be run from one centralized location where I may be able to process India, Ireland, Australia, whatever is top of mind, all in one clean space. Using India as an example, where, of course, there's complexity across things like cost to company and the breakdown of that gross salary to different, categories for tax purposes, that's what we'll see directly out of the gate, where these employees have had their gross salary brought in and then broken out across categories like basic salary, house rent allowance, or HRA as it's commonly known, different few food coupon requirements based on tax selections that have been made by the employees and the cost of company structure they belong to and such. Within this payroll, the only real manual, quote, unquote, steps we may need to take here is updating value should they be one off changes such as through an import or a manual adjustment, be that variable pay components that we're bringing in or additional deductions that maybe we're collecting for some reason that's been determined external from the system. In any of these scenarios, we'll be able to leave an audit note alongside the change that's been done, have that reflected by the blue override flag, and ultimately review the details that are connected for our audit purposes. This is especially value if we have multilevel approvals connected in order to validate from one person to the next in that approval flow exactly what's been done manually and what may need attention. We're also going to accounting for those deductions, be them statutory or in many countries, the opportunity to also build in supplemental benefits through our benefits administration tool. That calculations flow in here as you're seeing before we ultimately move to our payroll review summary, where we are ultimately able to review all of the details with real time calculation where we have built our native payroll. Today, we have native payroll in about 11 countries and are expanding our overall global payroll footprint by an additional 40 countries in the coming year to ultimately allow us to have visibility into what's taking place, when we need to submit by, where we will often have a shorter turnaround time from a deadline to a check date process because of that native relationship, an opportunity to review the payroll journal report prior to processing or a cash requirement where we can see if conversion rates apply, what the different taxes, earnings, deductions, etcetera, may look like, which of course are downloadable in PDF and CSV as well. We will be able to review as well on the employee level any differences or on the company level and understand more clearly where those differences are coming from. Understanding the variable pay components that are applicable. As we scroll through this individual employee, we'll be able to see exactly where that takes place, such as a greater bonus and fuel allowance, a reduction in food coupons, and ultimately, should we want to learn more, clicking on the history to understand why those changes may have taken place. Lastly, we'll also provide visibility into the pay stubs before you submit so that you can review exactly what the employee is going to receive from this payroll cycle. As this pulls up, we'll ultimately be able to see that localized payslip example broken out with localized fields such as that UAN and PFN, earnings, taxes, deductions broken out by the respective categories that are expected in market. And this of course will be downloadable from a desktop or mobile device for the employees for use. Now, once we do go to approve and submit where we have a standard of four to five day block prior to check date, to be acknowledged, though the system automatically accounts for holidays and weekends to adjust that date on your behalf, Rippling is then going to be able to manage as well the filings and submissions associated with that on your behalf. Meaning that ultimately once we approve, we would often as a rule of thumb or as a standard look to debit your account and facilitate net payments to the employees, upload the tax filings and make those tax payments on your behalf. Okay. Thanks so much for that Austin. That was great to kind of see the platform in action, especially just around, again, simplifying like those pay runs and all of the time, energy and compliance headaches that come with these distributed global workforces. So definitely want to spend a few time, a few minutes with everybody just chatting through some resources and next steps. So first, if you're joining us for the first time, I'd officially like to welcome you to the First Principles community. This is our kind of early stage founder destination and community, where we really pair with founders, startup operators, anyone in the ecosystem building kind of world changing companies. And so we'd love to have you join us, where we again are going to deliver everything from interviews, data reports, artifacts, all of these things in our weekly newsletter. And we also are constantly having conversations with folks like Tony and, really making sure that you kind of are on top of everything that's happening in startups. And I think the most important question of the day is if you're interested in learning more about Rippling, we'd love to show you a quick demo. So again, you heard from Tony about his experience. You saw Austin using the platform and really saw everything in action. But if you want to go deeper with our team, we do have a six month free offer for venture backed companies That's going to handle all of the essentials, right? Some of the stuff Tony mentioned, that's going to give you so much time back in your day, global payroll, compliance, benefits, finance, IT, and all of the rest of it. Like we can really simplify all of that stuff and get it off your plate. So we'd love, again, use the chat here, just drop a quick A or B. If you're interested in a demo, we will be certain to follow-up with you. And the first five people to book and attend a demo will receive a free Theragun. So, just a little carrot there if you all are interested. Okay. Before we wrap up, Tony, I'd love to kind of hand it over to you one more time to chat through how folks, in the audience can get more involved with Repel. For sure. I mean, I would also love Theragun too, maybe. Yeah, so definitely would be excited for folks to try out Propel as well. Just like how you'd want to spend time thinking about the HR overhead and approving payroll, you probably don't want to spend time thinking about approving all the PRs that your engineers are writing every day using all the different AI tools out there. So I would definitely suggest trying out Propel where you are the highest signal to noise product out there, where we can help you leverage our frontier AI and be able to actually get all the different changes that your engineers are making into production as fast and with highest quality possible. Okay, awesome. Well, thank you everybody, Tony. It's great to chat with you and looking forward to staying in touch. And again, feel free to drop those As or Bs in the chat and we will be sure to follow-up from there. Thanks everybody.