Ben Peterson and the business worth walking away from

Ben Peterson and Ryan Sanders had a rule for their business: if it threatened their friendship, they would sell it or shut it down. Before there was much company to lose, they had decided what was worth keeping. It is an unusual opening clause for an enterprise. Most founders spend rather more time discussing what happens if things go well.

They already knew how to work together. They had done it at two companies, including one Peterson owned and sold. Peterson kept proposing another venture. Eventually, the pair landed in a 100-square-foot Provo office, unemployed, with a whiteboard and no settled business plan. Sales and marketing were Peterson’s territory; product was Sanders’s.

Their agreement did not remove ambition. Both wanted to be CEO. A cartoon on Peterson’s cubicle depicted two battered figures with the same thought: “I’m the CEO, you know.” Peterson got the job. The friends had found their first practical test: have an awkward conversation, decide, and keep working.

The space between a spreadsheet and a giant

Peterson had already spent time around the Utah technology business. A 1998 Brigham Young University graduate in entrepreneurship, he was an early employee at MyComputer.com, which became Omniture. He later built and sold personals websites, then tried investing. He returned to starting companies.

With Sanders, he settled on the administrative problems facing smaller employers. Sanders’s consulting work had brought him close to those problems. There was room for software that offered more than a spreadsheet without asking a growing business to adopt an enterprise-sized system. The pair initially funded the business themselves.

“We built something just right,” Peterson said of that choice. It was a restrained description of a useful ambition. For someone responsible for keeping employee information in order, a tool of the right size could be a substantial improvement over another afternoon wrestling with files. BambooHR began in 2008, selling into a world entering a financial crisis.

An expensive education in people

His enthusiasm for working with people came with some receipts. By 2014, Peterson was willing to discuss business relationships and investments that had cost him money. More experienced people had told him that mistakes were the price of his education. His response was economical: “That’s a really expensive education.”

The lesson he described was to move more slowly and listen more closely before deciding whom to trust. Partnerships, hiring and investments all demanded that attention. There is something useful about this episode beside the friendship story. Peterson had confidence in a particular partner because they had worked together; he had also learned that liking the idea of people was insufficient preparation for choosing them.

When the boss gives himself homework

Inside BambooHR, Peterson’s interest in employee development could produce awkward discoveries of its own. In 2014, he asked team leaders to define an exceptional employee. They returned with qualities such as dependability, honesty, initiative and knowledge of the product. Those sounded admirable. They were also qualities the company expected as a matter of course.

The leaders received another week to think. This time, questions multiplied. Some struggled to establish even the ordinary standard. Others wondered how to explain the difference between completing an assignment and doing it particularly well. The exercise had exposed a communication problem among the people setting expectations.

Peterson acknowledged that leadership had left employees without enough clear direction. Teams would help refine the definitions, which would inform training, recruiting and performance discussions. His account is revealing because the boss’s request for better performance came back as homework for the boss. An employee cannot reliably meet an expectation that exists chiefly in a manager’s head.

Six-year-olds have useful feedback

Peterson also found management lessons while coaching his daughter’s soccer team. He had expected to teach basic teamwork. Instead, the six-year-olds supplied a refresher course in explaining things to an audience that owes a coach very little professional courtesy.

His instruction about avoiding prima donnas produced puzzled looks. He changed his language. The episode became part of his thinking about how leaders communicate: a message needs to mean something to the people receiving it. Repeating an instruction, demonstrating a skill and explaining why it mattered were part of the work.

He argued for giving specific, candid feedback with care, and letting the player suited to a position play it, even when that person was better than the leader. The team did not win the championship. They improved from their first practice to the end of the season. Peterson counted the improvement as success. The medals, he noted, were available to everyone who showed up.

The email he was happy to receive

One of Peterson’s favorite moments as CEO involved an employee announcing a mistake. BambooHR had an internal “oops” email: explain what went wrong, why it happened and what had been done to fix it. Other employees could learn from the account.

At first, leaders had to prompt people to send those messages. Eventually, someone sent one without being asked. Peterson remembered that as one of his happiest days at the company. The unremarkable act of pressing send meant the practice was beginning to work.

His advice to managers was demanding in its simplicity. Ask for feedback. Admit fault. Explain the thinking behind difficult decisions. Give people a reason to trust the invitation to speak. An inbox supplied a small, observable test of those intentions. An employee had made a mistake and considered telling colleagues a useful next step. A culture survey might have produced a tidier chart; this produced an email people could use.

“If you create a great place to work, great work takes place.”

Ben Peterson

Please leave the office. Here is $2,000.

In 2015, BambooHR introduced paid paid vacation. The doubled word was doing real work: employees could receive money toward a vacation as well as taking paid time off. By 2016, Peterson was describing an annual $2,000 benefit. One company warned that spending money this way would put BambooHR out of business. Peterson found the reaction amusing.

The benefit fitted a concern he had already put into writing. A vacation policy could become difficult to use if employees feared disapproval, carried an impossible workload or were expected to remain reachable throughout the trip. He urged employers to train colleagues to cover one another and make workloads manageable.

He also described employees sharing vacation pictures internally. A photograph of someone enjoying time away could make the permission more believable. There was an administrative side to the idea: arrange coverage, distribute responsibilities and let someone leave. The cheerful holiday photograph rested on decisions made before the suitcase came out.

Peterson’s writing about life and work went further. In late 2016, he objected to the expression work-life balance itself. People did not become separate beings on arriving at the office. The person with commitments, interests and relationships outside the job was the same person doing the job. The argument gave his workplace policies a personal logic: the company employed people whose lives continued after closing time.

A bigger company, a different chair

The business did grow. BambooHR’s own history marks 100 employees in 2014. By October 2015, its customers spanned more than 80 countries. A Utah software company serving smaller employers was working well beyond Utah.

The company’s history records another milestone in 2021: 1,000 employees, 25,000 customers and two million users. In 2023, those figures reached 1,200 employees, 30,000 customers and three million users. These are dated milestones, each belonging to its particular year. They show how far the organization travelled from the founders’ small office.

Before those later milestones, Peterson had already changed jobs. On October 15, 2019, BambooHR announced Brad Rencher as CEO. Peterson and Sanders became co-chairmen of the board, responsible for strategic oversight and direction. Rencher arrived after leading Adobe’s Digital Experience business.

Peterson described the appointment as a way to advance BambooHR’s mission. Sanders likewise presented it as bringing in experience that could carry their vision into the next decade. The two founders had once had to decide which friend would run the company. Eleven years after founding it, they were ready for someone else to do so.

The change makes an instructive companion to Peterson’s soccer advice about letting the person suited to a position play it. A founder can believe that principle on a field and still find it difficult to apply to his own office. Here, the division of responsibilities changed in public: a new executive led the business, while both founders took board roles.

What the founders left in the room

Peterson continued discussing how the business was built. In December 2022, he joined Elevation Capital’s Ravi Adusumalli for a conversation about BambooHR’s early years, sales, retention and the choice of quality over speed. These were questions about the work of running a company, alongside the familiar questions about culture.

His public descriptions of the team could be more informal. Celebrating the company reaching 1,000 employees, he wrote about a new hat and the people it represented. He calls employees Bambooligans. A BYU biography records that he and his wife, Natalie, have six children. Family and colleagues appear repeatedly in the way he describes a worthwhile working life.

By 2025, Rencher was celebrating employees through BambooHR’s Founders Award, explicitly connecting it to Peterson and Sanders’s emphasis on culture. The award recognized people who put the company’s values into practice. The original pair’s influence had become something other employees could receive recognition for carrying forward.

The friendship clause remains the telling detail. Peterson and Sanders began with a relationship they were unwilling to spend, even to keep a company alive. What followed required software, sales, difficult conversations and a change of CEO. It also required deciding when work should stop for the day. For a business devoted to managing employees, that was a useful question to keep asking.