Ramp

“Ramp is a company that we've been fortunate enough to invest in since the seed round.”

“A year ago, we had zero customers”

“We didn't ship anything to customers, I think, in the first 120 days in the life of the company, and we were building the core ledger, and we were building the core financial infrastructure, and a lot of the core accounting integrations, all that”

“So right now, our burn rate is not far from what it was, like even, like a year ago. And so there's an element of, we now just have a lot more time before the expiration, call it like a decade, you know, versus like, we can run out of stuff in two years.”

“We actually go Back to the company. All a hundred people at ramp can see what was in the board meeting and his chance to actually distill down the strategy itself.”

“And so by fixing early in the life of a company, really what's the bigger story? What are you about? It allows you to move much faster on the other questions. So we can get into that, but I think actually fixing the core of the company early is really key.”

“I think that a lot of really the North star of where we're headed as a business is, can you actually go understand what things cost and build, let's say like a ways for all sorts of business expenses, a Shopify suite for the CFO.”

“By raising at a lower price, you actually make your stock more a Affordable for your employees, and they can enjoy more upside”

“Within 45 days, we were able to be live with our partner bank, within 55 with Visa, within 65 internally, we were able to go and start Doing internal transactions.”

“And look, I think that there are many hundred billion dollar plus companies in this space. I know Amex It's had since 1850 to work on it, and there are a number of others, but I think that if you can truly do that, and if you can create differentiated value in…”

“It's not on the single round price. It's on total enterprise value.”

“What made you good two months ago probably would be holding you back, and if you really are growing at a compounding rate, and suddenly three months later, your company is twice the size, and three months after that, or you're four X the size, and then eight X…”

“I think we spent Like 50,000 dollars on marketing last month, but are doing like a billion dollars in transactions a year.”

“If you leave value on the table, you start to have really happy investors who go to bat, tell their people about this. They tell other companies about it because they're excited and feel like it can go up even more from there.”

“Ramp was always, like, something super interesting for us because it was the first competitor that was, like, an insurgent. Someone who was coming and growing that wasn't like the big guy, JPMorgan and American Express.”

“And then that's when we said, actually, no, what they're doing doesn't make any sense for a lot of our customers, maybe for their customers, the direction that makes sense in the product and expense. It's helping companies move faster. That's what matters for …”

“People are great fun at parties, but they make for shit sellers. You need someone who is a lot more skeptical, who questions everything.”

“We just announced for the last year, we hit 400% revenue growth.”

“This quarter the enterprise team at ramp is trending to hit more than 300% of their quota, which is pretty insane.”

“The two first salespeople at RAMP. The first one now leads half the sales and SDR teams. The second one is chief of staff to our CEO.”

“We at ramp still, for example, run the growth team, whether it's product or non-product teams as well on a two week sprint cadence.”

“You have to let some fires burn. If you think you have to fight every fire on your team, you're going to burn yourself out. So you just have to realize that, like, some things are just not going to be worked on for a bit, and they're going to be broken, and be…”

“I, I'm pretty ruthless about that. I think that there's absolutely no conflict. I think it's extremely anti-competitive from a labor market perspective for you to think that I won't hire the best people from your company. And so you, it's your job to retain yo…”

“Obviously anything that could be competitive, perceived as competitive, or looks like it's down the line competitive, I don't even take the meeting and I strongly advise against anybody at the company taking meetings as well, if they're considering them.”

“And at Ramp, the other thing that we've done culturally as a company as well, is to just really drill that in, into the teams by talking about days actually. So we talk about what day it is since the founding of Ramp at every all hands, at every board meeting,…”

“As I mentioned before, I think as long as you're not, you know, distracted during work hours and getting your day job done, I think what you do outside of work is, is your prerogative.”

“A fire that we have let burn for some time is you know, we just, at, Ramp, we have not historically invested a lot in, in field and event marketing because, you know, we've got a very large TAM, and it requires us to be thoughtful about our field and event str…”

“The big short-term pain that we're taking is We're moving towards a larger company segment-oriented strategy, where we have cross-functional teams that are going after a customer segment and, you know, budgeting, goaling, everything based on this segment, whic…”

“My theory is if you can't even succeed in getting a warm intro, how are you going to hustle and building a company? I only take conversations that are very high reputation, warm intros, where the person is, like, typically, like, already spoken to the person, …”

“I tend to find that the context switching and learning about different spaces actually builds more intuition and creativity for ideas. So I think in, in moderation, I actually think it's a good idea to do that.”

“Yeah, so we do monthly post-mortems. They're somewhat structured. We actually have a, you know, air table system where we track all of our experiments. We score them, et cetera, in terms of impact.”

“And at RAMP they're all under one roof which is great and have the same kind of north stars and goals.”

“And if you look at a team like Reamp, these days, with like, 10, 15 people on the growth team, they ship about 200 experiments per quarter.”

“When people onboard a financial, you know, platform, global platform like Ramp, they tend to stay for very, very long, multiple years, and so you can afford It's a something much higher in terms of payback time because the LTV is huge. People stick for three, …”

“And I have never seen a companies I've worked with, neither at Segment or at Drift, Gorgias, or Ram, and not in one of the companies I engage with, where we were able to get to fifty million on one channel. Not one.”

“The response rate here is 12 to 15%.”

“Even the people I love and care about, you think of, like, something like a ramp, I love them to death. Amazing company. Do you think there's PRG? Do you think CFOs randomly invite other CFOs to use Ramp? Hell no. It doesn't happen like that. It doesn't work l…”

“The question really is around metric setting is like, can I As a team, in a two-week sprint, move this metric. And if I can, it's a great metric. If I can't, It shouldn't be part of really our goals.”

“The reason why I don't like The framework is that it doesn't actually talk about strategy. It just gives a goal and then it just tells the team like, go hit this goal, but there's no thinking on the exec level about like how we can actually achieve that goal a…”

“So I think that for the majority of the company, You need to be like single product oriented for a very long time until you get to the really good market share. But as a tech team, you actually need to have an R and D department that is constantly shipping new…”

“Monday morning, the first thing everyone on my team tells me, what did they get done last week? What are they going to get done this week? What are the key decisions that they're going to make? And what do they need my help on? And it's public, and so everyone…”

“We were extremely aggressive in terms of making it super easy for them to switch. And what I meant by that is like, we literally had teams say, give me your old credit cards. I will log in to all of your other software and I will switch your cards for you. I w…”

“If you see yourself repeating the same goal for like many quarters at a time it's not motivating. And so something that's more like a vision or mission statement should not be a goal.”

“The biggest mistakes were probably on, on on, on go to market earlier on, you know, we hired people who had seen success in growth.”

“People who were ex-founders that might not have succeeded or early engineers that, that have been coding for a long time that, that, that just want to build great things. And I think you find that DNA that, that really helps.”

“We have a culture at RAMP where even if you're not in the team, you can Advise and leave comments and suggestions to other teams. And we build in the open. And so what I mean by that is like, if you're a salesperson, you can go into my product spec and leave a…”

“We basically have engineers that sign up and then we post publicly here are our goals and here's who's doing what. And so the scoreboard is super, super clear. And then before the start of the next sprint, we basically go and say, this is what we wanted to ach…”

“At RAMP, we've shipped a lot of things and I don't think we've been like particularly good at like taking things down.”

“There are no other meetings that are recurring. In the entire product development process. Those are the only two one hour meetings that happen.”

“For ICPMs on my team, I basically place them in teams that are high performing. And I, and we immediately see whether they are, they're at the bar. So, so you take basically something that is fixed, you add a variable and you, and if anything changes, right, i…”

“We invest in new players. We acquire you know, aqua hire great talent. And we actually use that as a testing bed to figure out, like, what's working, and we include that in our product strategy.”

“Every quarter we take a step back and we look at, okay, like, what did we achieve in the last three months? We basically have off-sites per, per pod that are, like, customer-centric oriented, and we ask ourselves, like, okay, like, what does incredible look li…”

“Whether it's like Facebook trying to enter the B to B space, whether it's Stripe trying to actually go from like developers and SME to finance teams in, in, in the enterprise. It's hard. And we actually haven't seen that much success.”

“I mean, I, we have, I'll tell you, we have Slack channels with every single negative feedback we get from customers. Every time we lose a deal, there's a Slack, like, why did we lose a deal? Who did we lose it to?”

“I listened to that and I love that. I don't agree. And again, this is the Shopify, you know, obviously, you know, Toby's like very involved in the product surface area at ramp. I think we have Slightly different approach. I think that the, our founder Eric is …”

“We do cases that basically are, like, lateral things about RAMP, so they're about something that we would never do, so that we never really, like, steal people's work, but something that is, like, somewhat relevant to RAMP”

“Each team should probably have one, maybe two goals. And then as a tech organization or as a pride team, we try to synthesize those and aggregate those into like three, maybe four.”

“What we typically do is we start at the bottom of the market with product led growth on those products. And so there is actually no like sales and very little marketing. We use that to prove the business case to the sales team. And we continue iterating on the…”

“Only recently do we have enough data to actually, you know, run maybe test only recently do we have enough data to say, To hold teams accountable to more of a lagging metric than the leading one, but it takes a very long time.”

“Ramp is absolutely going to be the winner. Probably will be two, three, four, five, 10 times more valuable.”

“It probably, it might have been 40 posts, but it was more than 30.”

“And it turned out that there was only one variable that moved everything. And it was just purchase volume.”

“I think actually there's advantages to not changing directions too often. And so though we may have missed some opportunities, I think the regular repeat Repeated motion and focus on the same mission, same goals, creates a lot of advantages”

“And when you went from like 10 employees to 20 employees. Businesses didn't spend twice as much. They would spend like five, 10, 50 times as much in some cases.”

“It was a seven point six. 7.6 billion dollar post.”

“And if you read the notes today, it is literally just like the board meeting we just finished with the exception of AI. We didn't really talk about it at AI, but everything else in the board meeting today is like, Right on target from this first note in maybe …”

“He talks about this concept of, can you really articulate cleanly your business equations? What are the outputs you're trying to drive? What are the inputs in your business? Can you list that very clearly and map that? And that exercise of mapping, how does ou…”

“Great businesses, 99 out of a hundred times start with being really curious about people's problems and how can you solve them in a better and deeper and more true way? Not with what are the new breakthrough capabilities of technology and how do I apply that?”

“So there's a lot of complexity in setting up issuing cards, just the very basic fundamentals usually take an infinite amount of time. Usually six to 12 months is pretty good as someone who's been involved in companies like this for like 20 years. I think Eric …”

“Most of the team you'll see today running ramp is the same team as it was two years ago, three, a lot of the same people and the depth of that and people's knowing each other's patterns, the strength, the weaknesses are good.”

“As it goes from singular value propositions to you can run all of your finances through RAMP as thousands of businesses do you could, the risk is to lose focus and to not make your singular products that are best in class and to lose that edge.”

“And so what we said was we actually care a lot less about being someone's first card. We're much more interested in how do you be there last?”

“In the wave of bank failures a year ago we could have been very well positioned to capture a lot of things. So there's things that we certainly would have benefited from.”

“I think we just finished a board meeting where it's pretty clear that this is the best run private company on the planet.”

“We're call it one percent of how you know businesses spend money on cards in America, but there's 99% to go.”

“The majority of how we're moving funds is, is you know, it's gone beyond card.”

“Every board deck is what is going well, what is going less well than we hoped and why.”

“We save the average company five percent today.”

“They understood immediately why RAMP had a lot of the secret sauce to be successful in using AI in finance and that nobody else on the planet does. And so they were really excited to meet with actually Eric and Kareem, almost independent of investing. It was m…”

“Change my ability to operate and helped, you know, ramp reach the scale that we're doing quickly is, is this talk he gave a decade ago called how to operate. It's on YouTube. It's free. It is worth a lot more than that. And I recommend everyone watch it.”

“Even five years later at, You know, well into the nine figures in revenue we are less than one percent of the market in which we are largest”

“I just don't think any great company was built on savings.”

“There's also a set of founders that have self-selected into proactively wanting to, you know, sort of work with me, you know, Eric and Ramp, sorry, Eric and Kareem of Ramp, you know, maybe being a perfect example of this, of, you know, really wanting to, you k…”

“We were at the top of what people put, the gen AI products that people put on their ramp credit cards, which means that like lots of, and so we were surprised people are using this for Cold outreach for sales, for marketing, for all kinds of stuff.”

“No one should be that attached to the experiment that they're running. Like, I think that is a cultural problem.”

“You should assume if you're doing things right, you should assume the majority of your bets are going to fail, which is why I always believe that velocity is probably more Important than getting things perfect.”

“I honestly, that's one of the reasons why I love ramp is the growth team reports to one of the co-founders.”

“And I think most marketers tend to jump to let's go do something. Let's go launch something. But the experimental design, like understanding what you're actually able to measure, what you will measure, how long it'll take to get that result. If it's statistica…”

“I think the way that you find alpha is either by doing things that no one else knows about. I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work.”

“The biggest bottleneck is probably the velocity of experimentation. Like, there are so many opportunities. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough resources.”

“Once you reach a certain size or scale, like if you're not investing in brand as part of like your long-term horizon or long-term bucket of bets, then you're going to screw yourself over in the future.”

“I think like the number one reason is it was on the manager. It was a mishire. They didn't scope the role effectively or the role changed. The needs of the business changed and they hired the wrong person the wrong profile. I think generally managers try to co…”

“I don't think most people think of it as a growth channel, but Influencers absolutely is, at least on the B to B side.”

“I think that they should acknowledge that the vast majority of what they work on is going to fail. And that if they're not failing, like, honestly, they're probably not doing their job well.”

“And the other one would be Ramp, like Eric and those folks, they were our kind of second private, private beta customer. Now we have, like, one of the most used products.”

“They told them they don't do B to B investing, then that viewed ramp as a fintech.”

“I think that's really smart for product development, but I think what Ramp has done with their counter positioning against Brex is just genius marketing.”

“I still feel like for startups, we're giving Revenue valuations that don't have an adjustment for different ways their comps trade in the private markets. And if ramp is in a space that's two to four X revenue at when it's public or whatever that you could loo…”

“Here's the thing, it's two hundred million at sixteen billion.”

“Like, I've heard they're doing roughly seven, eight hundred million dollars.”

“Once the growth rate slows, they will be valued. Just like if they're growing the same as Amex, they will be valued the same as Amex. The growth is what's saving them.”

“They have the margin profile and core dynamics of a financial services company, but they have the growth rate of a software company.”

“Ramp is at a billion in revenue. Brax is at 700. They're both around the breakeven to moving profitable phase.”

“Going from twenty three billion to thirty billion, I don't even consider it an up round. It's not enough. It's not enough.”

“Dude, you sourced the seed of ramp.”

“Ramp was thirteen billion at the start of this year. Now it's 32 with the latest round announced yesterday.”

“I think that's really smart for product development, but I think what Ramp has done with their counter positioning against Brex is just genius marketing.”

“From an operational perspective, this is further validation that quote unquote, I've won. I started later and I'm doing a billion. They started earlier, they're doing seven hundred million.”

“You ain't going to get the M&A outcome anymore. You've just got to be the big company and trade in the public markets at a significantly higher multiple than the other financial services companies.”

“Just to start with the facts, they actually said 73% of new spending. Right. And what it is, and the same graph shows OpenAI is still actually ahead of Anthropic in terms of total spend. But the marginal buyer in the last six weeks, eight, 10 weeks has massive…”

“But even on, just on the personal side, was Angel invested in Ramp, so that's like a, at a 50 mil entry value, so that's like a, whatever, 300 X on a personal side.”

“Whichever of those doesn't have an API forward product. We'll lose market share, which everyone does. We'll gain market share.”

“If you work at Clay, and you want to try out a new AI tool, you can just go into a channel and say, can I have a ramp card to try this tool out? And they'll give you a ramp card. Like, no questions asked.”

“One of the companies I really admire and try to model after his ramp, like you said, and we talk a lot about them internally in terms of how they've built the execution layer from a go to market perspective.”

“Certainly we're going to rebuild our financial stack after Sastra annual and we will move from Brex to ramp if it is the most agent friendly and automating procurement is a huge bonus.”

“Fortyx runway revenues when the comp traded at six in terms of breaks, even albeit on a lower growth rate is a pretty healthy valuation.”

“Ramp raises seven 50 at 44. We've discussed Ramp a lot. Tripled in a year. Cross a billion in ARR. Positive free cash flow.”