What are the essential companies in the modern HR, finance, and legal compliance stack?

For payroll, Gusto is a primary with Rippling as a backup.

For cap table management, there’s Pulley and Carta—it depends on your company, and a bit on your lawyer.

Historically, Carta has been the entrenched 800-pound gorilla here, in a manner of speaking. Pulley has built some really compelling stuff more recently, and they’re a little bit more API-first and a little bit more data portability friendly. I don't think we have a clear first and second, as they're both really compelling offerings.

For banking, Mercury is a ridiculously delightful product. Brex is an easy close runner-up. There are also a number of challenger banks.

Banking is one of those things where it's not a singleton. We typically recommend that people have two to three bank accounts with different providers, not for the sake of de-risking—if your bank goes out of business, there's something very wrong going on with the world—but because banks can have slightly different purposes.

For bookkeeping and account ledger management, it’s QuickBooks. It's not even close. At some point, you'll have to graduate to NetSuite, but that's true of other tools too. For example, you'll probably have to graduate to ADP for payroll at some point in time.

There have been some interesting developments in the space recently. Puzzle is a company that we know well, and they’re building some really cool stuff. There seem to be interesting things going on with Pry and Digits and some of the others as well, so we'll see how that space ends up evolving. 1Password is the gold standard for password management. Do not second guess it.

I would say the most non-negotiable things we have as part of taking on a customer are probably Google Workspace and 1Password. If you're not on those, it's just way harder to make your company run.

For international payroll, we're currently huge fans of Deel. We work very closely with them.

This is definitely one of those spaces where there's a lot of competition—I mean, there are a dozen of those players right now. Going with established players from a compliance perspective is pretty important. There's no perfect solution, but Deel is currently our go-to for the most complete effective solution.

For credit card, Ramp is the most robust, but again, I don't think you'll go too wrong with Brex. If you want to marry both your bank and credit card in one, Brex is a good approach. But Ramp will scale a lot better, as their permissions and controls and feature set are really robust.

On the flip side, one of the risks with Ramp is the fact that it's currently overwhelming for a non-power user. There's a lot going on. I think the Ramp team knows that as well, according to their public statements. I expect them to take a breather to reorganize things in the product and make it easier to navigate.

For business insurance, Vouch should be your go-to.

I think those are most of the important elements of a modern HR, finance, and legal compliance stack.

For contract management, you should use us if you’re an early stage startup. At some point, Ironclad or other more powerful CLMs might become valuable. Our experience is that using contracts in AbstractOps is a 10X better experience than using DocuSign plus your Dropbox or HelloSign plus your Google Drive.