Rypple

» see rypple.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

this one i only read about, at a distance, still. Rypple was a small Toronto company with one big enemy, the annual performance review. It wanted to replace the yearly rating meeting with feedback that arrived all year in small pieces. Salesforce bought it before it could finish the job, ran it under its own name for a few months, and then in September 2012 took the name off entirely and called the result Work.com. The product was four years old.

The founders were not first-timers. Daniel Debow and David Stein had already built Workbrain, a workforce-management company that sold to Infor for two hundred and twenty-seven million dollars in 2007, so when they started Rypple in 2008 the money came easily. About thirteen million dollars went in over two rounds, and the names behind it included Peter Thiel and Seymour Schulich. anyway, this was a serious swing at a real problem, not a weekend idea.

The first version of the product was almost a toy. You posted a short question, something like what should i do more of, and people answered anonymously. Out of that grew the real thing, goals you set in the open and recognition you handed out where the team could see it. The argument was that once a year, across a desk with a number attached to your raise, is the worst possible time and shape for an honest word about your work.

The thing it was fighting never had the same grip where i was. The annual review as a ceremony, a meeting on the calendar with a score at the end, was an American corporate ritual before it was anything i personally sat through. In the engineering places i have worked the feedback that counted came from whoever read the code, in the moment and on the thing itself. A product built to replace a formal event has nothing to do in a room that never held the event.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the review it wanted to kill ~

The annual review is one of those office objects everyone agrees is broken and nobody removes. Rypple's whole case was that the yearly cycle is too slow to change how anyone behaves and too loaded to be honest. By the time you hear in March that you did something wrong last autumn it is ancient history, and because the verdict is tied to your pay, nobody says the true thing to your face anyway. Small and frequent was the fix. A nudge that costs nothing and carries no rating attached to it.

~ what salesforce actually bought ~

Salesforce announced the deal on 15 December 2011 and did not put a price on it in public. What it was really buying was not the feedback app. It was a way into human resources software, a category Salesforce did not have and wanted badly, plus a team that already thought in the social-feed shape Salesforce was betting its whole company on with Chatter. Rypple got wired against Chatter almost at once.

~ the rename ~

For a while it was Salesforce Rypple. Then on 19 September 2012 the name came off for good and the product relaunched as Work.com. That is the date this grave carries, because a product that keeps running under a new name has not died, but a name has. Rypple the thing became a feature set inside a Salesforce suite, goals you set in public and a thanks button wired into the same feed as everything else. Debow and Stein did their time inside Salesforce and left.

~ what it left in the tools ~

The idea outlived the name easily. Continuous feedback and regular check-ins instead of one yearly verdict, the whole shape Rypple argued for became the default pitch of a dozen HR startups that came after, Lattice and 15Five and the rest. Rypple was early and correct and got absorbed before it could own the thing it started. Work.com itself got quietly repurposed years later as the label for Salesforce's back-to-the-office pandemic tools, a second life the founders had nothing to do with and which had nothing to do with performance reviews at all.

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