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  "documentTitle": "This serial founder thinks pitch decks are passé. Here's what his startup used instead to raise $45 million in new funding.",
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  "authorName": "Rippling",
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  "notes": "The slide combines a performance metric (NPS) with a narrative justification for high operational burn.",
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      "text": "Our average NPS is 66.",
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      "text": "NPS monthly trend from Jul-18 to Jan-19",
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      "text": "NPS: 66",
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      "kind": "paragraph",
      "text": "Equally important is that this growth has not come at the cost of client satisfaction. Our Net Promoter Score in January was 70, and has averaged 66 over the last several months:",
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      "kind": "paragraph",
      "text": "Building something like Rippling isn't cheap. As you'll see if you take a demo, the product surface area is large. To hit our MVP, we've had to (re)build a payroll, benefits, and HRIS system that took companies like Zenefits, Gusto, and Namely years and tens of millions of dollars to build. And, we've had to build versions of Okta, OnePassword, and JAMF alongside it.",
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      "text": "However, we believe that our growth rates demonstrate that our bet was essentially correct — we've built the right product, one that customers want, and we're now winning deals against much larger and more mature companies that have spent a lot more to get to where we are.",
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      "text": "To do this, we've invested in a great deal of up-front R&D. For most of the last two years, Rippling was a company of almost entirely engineers (there are just over 40 today, or roughly 2/3 of our headcount). It's only recently that we've been growing the sales team.",
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      "kind": "paragraph",
      "text": "Our gross margins show that the product is software end to end, and our sales and marketing ratios (magic number, etc) show that this growth is based on sound fundamentals.",
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      "text": "The downside of this is that building something like Rippling wasn't cheap, and the company's total OpEx burn to date — roughly $XXmm — is more substantial than most startups as a result.",
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      "text": "R&D INVESTMENT",
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