Matthew Lu, Reserv’s Head of Strategic Business Operations, was one of Reserv’s original three employees. The company tasked him with running its fledgling IT department even though he didn’t have a formal IT background. 

Matthew reached out to his friend, an alum of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator, for advice on how those three people could do the job of 30. 

"We have to be good stewards of capital. How can we run really lean?" Matthew asked

Staying lean got trickier in July 2023 when the startup won its biggest account yet and needed to hire dozens of new employees in a month. As Reserv blossomed, it needed all the automations, integrations, and support it could muster to onboard its growing workforce.

"When you suddenly need to triple your headcount, that's crunch time, that’s rubber meets road. You have to recruit these people. You have to hire them. You have to onboard them. You have to train them. Doing that in the time given was an impossible task," Matthew said.

Matthew’s friend floated Rippling. As Matthew looked into the solution's full suite of products, he saw the potential to save hours of time a day. He also realized Rippling was the only full-suite platform that had everything he needed—from an HRIS to IT to PEO—all in one system.

"We knew we needed somewhere we could run a lot of automation. We wanted it to integrate with everything. And we wanted the best in class," he said. 

After implementing Rippling, Matthew became Reserv's sole leader for IT, HR, and payroll. But that's all just a portion of his responsibilities. Matthew also works with the cofounders on Reserv's sales, go-to-market strategies, finance, compliance, and legal. His days are busy, and he's come to rely on Rippling automations to tackle his long to-do lists. 

"Rippling is the heart of a lot of what we do," he said.

Rippling is the heart of a lot of what we do.

Matthew Lu,

Head of Strategic Business Operations at Reserv

By July 3, 2023, the company had 25 employees—mostly engineers to build out its software products. The month after Reserv secured its big new account, the team brought on 35 more employees. In two months, the headcount reached 75—spread remotely throughout the US and the UK—with Matthew remaining the single person running IT, HR, finance, compliance, and legal.“There is no other way to scale up at that pace without Rippling. Not something like Rippling. It’s literally just Rippling.”

There is no other way to scale up at that pace without Rippling. Not something like Rippling. It’s literally just Rippling.

Matthew Lu,

Head of Strategic Business Operations at Reserv

According to Martha Dreiling, Reserv’s COO, growing threefold to fulfill the needs of one large client gave the company confidence it can replicate the process, without hiring a more extensive HR or IT staff. 

“Rippling got us battle-tested. Now that we have the infrastructure to scale as needed, I can make the promise to deliver similar results for other big accounts down the road, no matter how tight the timeline,” Martha said.

Matthew was able to hire so quickly without commissioning other IT and HR managers because he set up Rippling to handle an impressively long list of administrative tasks for him. 

For IT, Matthew teed up automations for both IT device requests and app access. Working with a third-party vendor for devices used to involve manually typing out an employee’s name, address, and device choice, which led to cumbersome follow-up work to check for mistakes and ensure the right devices arrived on time. Now, Rippling custom fields capture device requests from the onboarding process and automatically ship the right equipment to the right employees. 

Matthew also has Rippling draw from data in employee offer letters to automatically configure custom software that gets installed on new hires’ devices, which varies depending on the type of employee and their department. Altogether, these automations give every new hire the right laptop, apps, and permissions to hit the ground running on day one. 

What’s more, he was able to automate an industry-specific requirement: insurance licenses. Every new hire at Reserv needs to get set up with an insurance license through a licensing vendor. Before Rippling, Matthew would lose hours to manual back-and-forth email chains with new employees, and then again with the licensing vendor. 

Now, he has custom fields set up to automatically collect the right licensing information from new hires during their onboarding flow. Rippling then auto-emails this info straight to the insurance adjusters themselves. That means new hires get the licenses they need from Day 1—without any manual work from Matthew. 

This has been a huge time saver given Reserv hired nearly 50 people in two months, many of whom required special, state-specific insurance licenses. “Our licensing vendor told us we’re the most automated client they’ve ever seen,” Matthew said. 

Matthew also uses Rippling automations for:

• Account provisioning across every system in Reserv’s tech stack
• Setting up SOC 1 and SOC 2 controls and monitoring compliance  
• Payroll and benefits administration
• Adding new employees to the right groups and ensuring they have the right permissions
• Complying with tax and labor laws across the US and UK

Matthew estimates that Rippling’s automations saved Reserv from making three or four new HR and IT hires, which lets the company prioritize hiring for other roles that help scale the business. 

“Especially in this macro environment, it’s important to show a commitment to running lean,” Martha said. “Rippling has really helped us rely on Matthew to be the one-man show on this.” 

Matthew said Reserv is prepared to finally hire a dedicated HR leader to run HR and IT. “But come on–first HR hire as we’re eyeing growing over 100 people? Not bad, right?”

Matthew now works three times more efficiently with Rippling, which is crucial time saved that allows him and the rest of the team to focus on the bigger picture: “This network of infrastructure gets done without any of us having to think about it. And that frees us to focus on, how do we hit targets? How do we make sure we win this account?” he said.

This network of infrastructure gets done without any of us having to think about it. And that frees us to focus on, how do we hit targets? How do we make sure we win this account?

Matthew Lu,

Head of Strategic Business Operations at Reserv

When evaluating Rippling, Matthew didn’t just pick it for the time it would save him. The easy-to-use interface and countless integrations also free up brain space for non-administrative employees using it for onboarding, time-off requests, pay stubs, and more. “I was like, how do I pick something that will make my life as an employee easier too?” he said. “That was Rippling. Everything is done through this one system.”

Reserv’s software development team also benefits from outsourcing IT busywork to Rippling. Nick Stanish, Reserv’s founding engineer, knew the company needed SOC 2 certification to secure enterprise clients. But the approval process can take years, especially when you have to prove compliance across multiple platforms. 

“Rippling made it incredibly easy for us to get our SOC 2 report for the first time. We were quickly able to set up and enforce all the security measures required for SOC 2, and our auditor had one consolidated place to review instead of six separate systems.”

According to Nick, SOC 2 requirements like single sign-on (SSO) can be a cumbersome timesuck for engineers to develop. But Rippling’s extensive, pre-built integrations with third-party apps allow Reserv’s engineering team to enable SSO painlessly—so they can instead direct resources towards making their core insurance products. 

“Rippling’s pre-built integrations made it painless to integrate third-party apps and set up SSO for our SOC 2,” Nick said. “Instead of getting bogged down in busywork, our engineers are able to focus on projects for the core business.” 

Moreover, a large part of SOC 2 is implementing controls to make sure access is provisioned accurately and appropriately. “The marriage of IT with HR meant that we could automate access controls and guarantee it to be error-free,” Nick said. “It made it way easier to grant newly hired engineers access to our core systems while provisioning different access levels to other employees. It was easier to manage and easier to prove to auditors that we did it correctly.”

Matthew is a self-described generalist who, before Reserv, was first a securities lawyer and then a management consultant. Since he’s never been a full-time IT or HR professional, he had questions as he refined Rippling workflows amid Reserv’s hiring flurry. Whenever he hit a roadblock, he said Rippling’s robust support team was there to instantly help him out. 

“I feel like I have the backing of a very large HR or IT organization,” he said of Rippling support, which is quick to give clear, step-by-step instructions for anything from I-9 verification to device management software installations. “An IT expert or HR advisor will reach out, and I can go with that,” he said. “That gives me a tremendous amount of operational leverage.”

As the point person for both people and devices, Matthew knows how helpful it is when the different departments draw from the same data source. “So much of what needs to happen on the IT security front is very tied to HR,” he said. “Unless you have those datasets wedded together, you'd have to work manually. And that's a full-time job like it was at other shops I've been at.” 

With Rippling, all the employee data is in one place instead of siloed across systems. So Matthew can ensure any of the customizations he makes in one arena informs the other, instead of him needing to retrace his steps. With other solutions, integrations that are supposed to map data together break down, which means you have to manually ensure the right data makes it into the right fields in each separate system. Rippling eliminates the need for all that pesky double-checking and reconciliation.

In addition to saving time and eliminating mistakes, Rippling helps ensure data stays secure. According to Martha, Reserv’s COO, this is a key differentiator in winning enterprise clients, who need assurance their information is protected when employees churn. 

“With Rippling, I can guarantee to new clients their data is safe. We’ve removed all room for human error, and I have the peace of mind that nothing will slip through the cracks. Ex-employees won’t retain app access and all the information cascading through our HR and IT systems will always remain ironclad,” she said.  

Martha marveled at how Rippling allowed Reserv to work faster, better, and safer amid unheard-of growth—all with a single generalist incubating multiple functions. "I talk about Rippling being the reins of the internal tech stack. We can run a 75-person company extremely leanly because of the scalable systems Rippling enables via automation. Finance, IT, people, compliance, legal—thanks to Rippling, we can operate with just one generalist owning all of them.” Despite that massive administrative burden, Martha later explains there are almost never any hiccups. “It just works.”

• Productivity gains:  Rippling automations help Reserv’s head of IT work three times faster. 
• Growing fast: With Rippling, Reserv added 50 employees in two months.
• Staying lean: Reserv managed to support a 75-person workforce with a single IT admin.