Rippling’s 2024 Investor Memo

Rippling has always taken an unusual approach to fundraising. We’ve never produced a formal Pitch Deck. Instead, I have always written an “Investor Memo” and relied on this memo to lay out the pitch for the company to prospective investors. 

We published the first version of our memo in April 2019. Since then, other companies have adopted this way of pitching investors, and a “memo” has become an acceptable alternative to a standard pitch deck with many investors. 

I’ve updated and re-written this memo with each subsequent Rippling financing round, and five years later, we’re publishing a (lightly redacted) updated version as of March 2024, below, which we used to raise our series F financing and tender.

I thought it would be useful for other entrepreneurs to see this latest version alongside the original one, to see how the Rippling pitch and the company’s strategy have evolved in the last 5 years.

The memo is always accompanied by slides of SaaS metrics, projections, and financials which we are not publishing here – but this metrics deck has always been a “just the facts” dump of data – the narrative and story is in the memo, and we encourage investors to start there.

One unexpected side benefit of the memo has been recruiting. I always give candidates a copy of this memo before meeting with them, and our recruiting team uses it broadly, as well. It’s a great way for prospective employees to build an understanding of the company.