The Exchanges

Q I'm too interested there. Why does Ramp have the secrets of ingredients to be successful as the future of finance?

A So I, I think the first thing that's misunderstood about Ramp is that, uh, it's a money movement and a fintech company. I think one of the deceiving kind of Trojan horse ways in about Ramp is that, you know, we're a corporate card and, and we are the fastest growing corporate card in America, but we're actually a productivity company, uh, and a workflow company. People use Ramp, uh, not to buy things, but to automate expenses. Um, you know, not to have the tools to close your books, but to have it be automated. And so really what's going on inside of the strategy is trying to understand all the ways that companies are spending money and time and surface up data to show companies where they can spend less. Maybe they're buying 200 seats on a sauna, but only a hundred people are logging in and we can detect that based on kind of Okta data and show people ways to cut. Maybe, uh, companies are Um, you know, have 20,000 transactions with ramp. We're able to suggest accounting categories, um, certainly more quickly, but also more accurately than the vast majority of customers. Uh, and when you think about really where, where AI is excellent and has unique capabilities, it's really around, uh, a few things, um, you know, doing work that previously was knowledge work. It required context, required vast amount of data, and then order to form an output. Um, and because we connect to so m…

AI assessment note: “we're actually a productivity company, uh, and a workflow company.”

Q I'm too interested there. Why does Ramp have the secrets of ingredients to be successful as the future of finance?

A So I, I think the first thing that's misunderstood about Ramp is that, uh, it's a money movement and a fintech company. I think one of the deceiving kind of Trojan horse ways in about Ramp is that, you know, we're a corporate card and, and we are the fastest growing corporate card in America, but we're actually a productivity company, uh, and a workflow company. People use Ramp, uh, not to buy things, but to automate expenses. Um, you know, not to have the tools to close your books, but to have it be automated. And so really what's going on inside of the strategy is trying to understand all the ways that companies are spending money and time and surface up data to show companies where they can spend less. Maybe they're buying 200 seats on a sauna, but only a hundred people are logging in and we can detect that based on kind of Okta data and show people ways to cut. Maybe, uh, companies are Um, you know, have 20,000 transactions with ramp. We're able to suggest accounting categories, um, certainly more quickly, but also more accurately than the vast majority of customers. Uh, and when you think about really where, where AI is excellent and has unique capabilities, it's really around, uh, a few things, um, you know, doing work that previously was knowledge work. It required context, required vast amount of data, and then order to form an output. Um, and because we connect to so m…

AI assessment note: “we're actually a productivity company, uh, and a workflow company”

Q build out is kind of quite intense. I guess my question to you on that one was like, how did you determine between what to build versus what to borrow? I mean, especially in the space that you're in with a lot of the providers, some of it is off the shelf, but you decided to build your own. I guess, what was that decision-making process between build versus borrow?

A We do this all the time. And actually, I think in terms of a team, I think this is one of the greatest times ever to be building on top of and with the expertise of others. Five, six years ago, there was this early talk of this API revolution. You could tap into different APIs and building services, and it was talked about a lot then. I don't think it was really true, but now it is. You know, one of our first partners was a company called Marquetta. They allowed us within, you know, effectively through the expertise they had with banks, with the credit card networks, with approaches, they gave kind of the rubric of, if you want to ship, here's what you need to get done. 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 that would never have been possible if we said, let's go build integration with Visa. Let's go build integration with our bank. Let's go do all this stuff. But that's an API that really benefits. And all the way through, there's lots of things like that. There's APIs that will access in order to connect to different accounting services to go and in just, let's say parts of receipts. And I think that you can do this by one, at least getting a baseline of one. How do you get things up fast? If you're optimizing towards momentum, how can you build th…

AI assessment note: “if you really want to make the decision of what you're going to build yourself”

Q Now, can you kick us off by giving us a little background on yourself and an insight into your career before Paribus and what your aha moment was for the idea?

A Yeah, absolutely. Um, it's a bit about me. I was born and raised in, uh, Las Vegas, Nevada. Grew up there for 18 years, and I guess there's three stages to what actually drove the AHA amendment. Um, the first, uh, my first job was 18 years old. I worked at a store called Express, and I was selling jeans and shirts and all that kind of stuff, and what stuck with me over the years was every, every weekend, there'd be these super sales for 20% off. Families would come in, spend thousands of dollars, and what was weird was every Monday, Uh, things would be 40% off, and it was rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. You would, you would push people through at these deals. They thought they were getting a good deal, but it turned out they weren't. Um, and it was strange the way that, um, on a lack of knowledge, um, a lot of retail was driven. Um, later on, um, so I went, uh, graduated from Harvard, spent a lot of time abroad, lived in China for a year, all this kind of stuff, and worked in an industry called restructuring. Um, in a nutshell, um, You were dealing with these companies that were about to go bankrupt, um, or were in it, um, companies like you, uh, AIG, now US Airways, and American Airline Merger, now the firm I work for is advising Greece, um, all that kind of stuff. Um, and my job was to go through the finances and the legal contracts that dictated what happened when things…

AI assessment note: “I guess there's three stages to what actually drove the AHA amendment.”

Q Okay. I'll, I'll take that. Keith, well, well done. Very, very politically answered. Eric, if I was actually accurate though. If I were to apply the same to you, Eric, and you know, Keith so well now for so many years, what do you think makes Keith the world-class partner that he is?

A I mean, it's a, it's a few things. I mean, first, one of the things that people talk about rampant being great at is Just the efficiency and focus of our operations. Uh, it's very fast moving. People know it's fast growing. Um, and I, I think it started a lot with some of the lessons we internalized from from Keith. He talks about this concept of, can you really articulate cleanly your business equations? Um, 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 our business really worked created focus for a company next, something I recommend to every founder. It certainly, Change my ability to operate and, and, 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, it's on YouTube. It's free. Um, it is worth a lot more than that. Um, and, and I recommend everyone watch it. And, and I, I think that, that his focus on, um, you know, clarity of thought, excellence in operations, central casting, finding extraordinary talent, uh, at the end of the day, it's all the company is, is it's a collection of people. Um, and if you, if you hire great people, you give clear focus and you just execute vigorously, um, You know, it's not much more complicated than that.

AI assessment note: “his focus on, um, you know, clarity of thought, excellence in operations”

Q Okay. I'll, I'll take that. Keith, well, well done. Very, very politically answered. Eric, if I was actually accurate though. If I were to apply the same to you, Eric, and you know, Keith so well now for so many years, what do you think makes Keith the world-class partner that he is?

A I mean, it's a, it's a few things. I mean, first, one of the things that people talk about rampant being great at is Just the efficiency and focus of our operations. Uh, it's very fast moving. People know it's fast growing. Um, and I, I think it started a lot with some of the lessons we internalized from from Keith. He talks about this concept of, can you really articulate cleanly your business equations? Um, 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 our business really worked created focus for a company next, something I recommend to every founder. It certainly, Change my ability to operate and, and, 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, it's on YouTube. It's free. Um, it is worth a lot more than that. Um, and, and I recommend everyone watch it. And, and I, I think that, that his focus on, um, you know, clarity of thought, excellence in operations, central casting, finding extraordinary talent, uh, at the end of the day, it's all the company is, is it's a collection of people. Um, and if you, if you hire great people, you give clear focus and you just execute vigorously, um, You know, it's not much more complicated than that.

AI assessment note: “his focus on, um, you know, clarity of thought, excellence in operations”

Q because we're all founder friendly as VCs, Eric. Just remember that. On the fundraising side, I do want to touch on it, because it's been such an incredible journey with rounds fundraising, to say the least. So, uh, tell me, you've before said that funding rounds can be thought of as a science experiment. What did you mean by this, and how does that shape how you think about fundraising?

A Yeah, I actually think it was someone at Slow Ventures who I think had this notion that I lifted this from So I'll give them the credit, but it's this really interesting and daunting thing, right? You're starting a company and you're like, we want to build Ford motors or like Tesla or Google, and we're going to raise two million dollars and go do that. And like, it's both crazy to kind of start a company and think you're going to take on the world, but yet only have a small amount of dollars. And I think that this notion of a science experiment is this really interesting thing. And often in experiments, you're running, let's say like five, six different ways to go and approach a question and figure out Could you actually prove something to be true? And I think often early in the life of a business, it's kind of like that. You're trying to answer the question of, like, do customers want this? Can I build a team effectively that can ship software? Do I have an efficient way to maybe I have a good product, I have a good team, but I can't figure out how to get customers? And I think that you're trying to answer a series of questions. And so when our first round at Ramp was an unusual one, we raised an eight million dollar seed round in part to fund the company, in part to fund the credit card purchase Could we have this credit card add value above just giving customers cash back? T…

AI assessment note: “in experiments, you're running... different ways to go and approach a question”

Q Absolutely. And then, why did you choose YC? It's obviously, you know, one of the world's most prestigious accelerators, and probably the most successful. Why did you choose them, and why do you think they chose you?

A Yeah, the biggest thing for why we chose them is you could just feel the energy. It was real, it was raw, and ultimately it was incredibly focused, and I, I think that's the specialty of YC as I know it, is they know that only one, really, it's just a couple of important things. If you can get it right in the early days, it will give you the maximum leverage, and that interview, in my mind, was the biggest convincing point. Um, I could just feel it. They knew the right questions to ask. They forced you to be serious and thoughtful about how you were going to grow, to test it, to iterate on it. Um, and from what I had heard from others who had gone through it, it was clear that those three months were going to be a bender, um, but very much focused on the right kind of things. So, um, for that, we should, we chose YC. I think for us, the big reason why, um, I believe they liked it is, one, we kept at it. Um, it was the second time coming through, um, stuck to the vision, iterated on it, and didn't stop. Um, we continued to work and make progress whether or not they were involved, and I think that anywhere as a business, um, you need to have that grit and determination. The second piece, um, is that we had something that was working. It was clear it could scale, um, and we could tell the, not only could tell the story of why, but Could just create a really magical experience out …

AI assessment note: “the biggest thing for why we chose them is you could just feel the energy.”

Q Eric, if I, if I were to say to you, 10 years, like where's Ramp then? It's 2034, which is almost the time that we first met. We met nine years ago. Christ. Take that time again. Where's Ramp then if everything goes well?

A We want to rewire every company that we serve to be more profitable, um, to be more efficient. And it's one of the things that we say is we save the average company five percent today. Um, uh, it's profound, right? It's, it's not just a number. It means people can make additional hires, um, to, um, have more time to be creative. And I think that the compounding effect of what happens when you make every business in America, not just five percent more efficient, but seven to 10, and you're not serving Uh, less than one percent of them, but you're serving five, 10, 20, 50. I, I think one of the broader issues historically over the past 30 years is America's been in a productivity slump. There's been great advantages in technologies, but you haven't seen, uh, companies be able to create dramatically more, um, you know, for the country or world. And I, I think, you know, what we're doing, some people think it's boring, but I, I think if we can quite literally, uh, make companies more profitable, I think the effects of that, uh, are profound. Um, uh, and so we have a long way to go. I think when we launched, we saved the average company about two percent, uh, on their, on, on their card expenses and time. We think that if it's 10 years, we can do a lot better, uh, than, uh, than five, uh, where we are currently. Um, and I think to Keith's point, um, you know, uh, serving not just, y…

AI assessment note: “serving not just card expenses, but all of the ways that companies move money”

Q aren't they? Uh, I mean, the thing that always strikes me with your business is bluntly the speed of execution. And you have the day count, which is so different, I find. When you think about advising founders today on having the same speed of execution that you have, what are one to two of the biggest piece of advice that you have to them on driving that execution speed?

A I love that you started with the day count. It was actually, so today is day 1866. Um, we do know it by the day, but it's not what you think. It's not like a, it's day 1866, YOLO, carpe diem, like go, Let, let, let, let's, let's get it. It, it's much more focused on thinking about the passage of time. So the first time after, um, I don't know if I, if I ever told you this, when, when we met for the first board meeting, it was day 133, and part of the context we wanted to drive is, you know, it's, it's, it's just four months old, here's what we've done. But in that October meeting, the second meeting Keith was talking about, we kind of mindlessly went to go update it, um, from 133 to 199, and it forces, we're like, wait a minute, 66 days have passed. Do we get the same amount done with the same set of people? Do we get more done? Or did we get less? Um, and as far as I know, no one has more than 24 hours in a day. Um, but there are certain hours that certainly counted for a lot more, and it, it, it set off this, this thought exercise, um, for us, or, or more formally maybe called the calendar audit, which we learned from, from Keith, which is, um, if you measure time in this way, it creates the space for you to say no to the things that are less impactful, and to say yes to the areas of your business that create a lot more leverage. And for small start, young startups just getti…

AI assessment note: “if you measure time in this way, it creates the space for you to say no”

Q I, I, I totally get you and agree. Eric, you've mentioned before about the unique moment in history that we're in now for people to build in. I'm just intrigued here when you think about that then, given the unique moment in time, for young people today, for founders listening, what do you, what do you think they should build? What should they not build?

A I'll start with your question of what should people build or not build, and then I'll, we'll, we'll talk about the unique, um, point in, in history that we're at, uh, and in many ways they're at odds. What I would say is that, uh, great businesses, 99 out of a hundred times, uh, start with being really curious about people's problems, uh, and how can you solve them, uh, in a better and deeper and more true way? Uh, not with what are the new breakthrough capabilities of technology and how do I apply that? Um, uh, when I think about, um, what is timeless about ramps business? Um, we started with the question of, you know, most business people, finance teams, people building companies that I know, um, weren't interested in more points or more lounge access or anything. They were interested in how do you be more profitable? How do you spend less? How do you go home earlier, achieve more with this, with a, with a smaller team? And what we found that was so timeless about, um, really the starting mission of, of, of, of ramp was this enduring thing. I couldn't imagine in the future people saying, you know, Um, you know, to maybe, uh, paraphrase Jeff Bezos. I couldn't imagine people saying, you know, I just wish I was less efficient with my spending. I wish it took longer to close my books. Um, you know, it, it's ludicrous. That would never happen. What they would always tell you, you …

AI assessment note: “start with being really curious about people's problems... not with what are the new breakthrough capabilities”

Q People say that it's a matter of one to two big decisions a year is what defines a great CEO. And then others say it's about number of at bats. It's about just getting a lot of decisions constantly right. Again, two different schools of thought, and I'm like, I don't know. What do we think?

A I definitely lean the ladder for most people. Um, uh, I really do think that activity, um, in hours, uh, of yourself and of others being spent in the right place, uh, is leverage. And so certainly at some extreme, uh, I think it's about one to two, but for the vast majority of people, I, I think it's the number of at bats and having the system to understand your own view of, of reality and spend your time in the right places. Um, and, and, I, I just think that what I wouldn't underestimate for, for most people is most of the world is fairly linear, like an hour in, in any way is an hour out. But unfortunately in, in company building, there are some things that just matter a hell of a lot more than others. Um, and, um, creating the space to, you know, where you take enough baths so you can find those veins and just double down on it is a lot of the way we think about things.

AI assessment note: “I definitely lean the ladder for most people.”

Q Who's your operator mentor? It could be a founder. It could be an operator that you're, like, super close to and look to learn from in terms of your personal scaling. Who's that mentor for you?

A I think one of my favorite books, and I think someone that I find to go back to when I'm very deeply stressed about stuff, would be, like, John Wooden. He was a basketball coach of UCLA. They had the most dominant record in the NCAA, and he just was this, like, deeply calm, nice dude, and he was a coach, right? The job was, like, not just, like, how do you go and have amazing strategy? It's, like, how do you Do your best. How do you try? How do you pull the best out of other people? And, like, I think a lot of that approach of it's like, alright, forget the, like, different hacks and tips and tricks on, like, different skill sets. I think that that kind of thinking on, like, how do you just have, like, clear, calm thinking and get good performance to the people I think has been very helpful in general. I think there's other great people who've been helpful along the way. Like, I look up a lot to Z at Rowe. I think he's an incredible pace, all this energy person. Kareem, my co-founder, I think that he just keeps things moving at this very rapid pace, and there's some great strategy minds too that I'll talk to, but I think that in terms of thinking and as a person, like John Wood and I, he passed away a while ago, I never met him, but like, he's amazing.

AI assessment note: “someone that I find to go back to... would be, like, John Wooden.”

Q Now, can you kick us off by giving us a little background on yourself and an insight into your career before Paribus and what your aha moment was for the idea?

A Yeah, absolutely. Um, it's a bit about me. I was born and raised in, uh, Las Vegas, Nevada. Grew up there for 18 years, and I guess there's three stages to what actually drove the AHA amendment. Um, the first, uh, my first job was 18 years old. I worked at a store called Express, and I was selling jeans and shirts and all that kind of stuff, and what stuck with me over the years was every, every weekend, there'd be these super sales for 20% off. Families would come in, spend thousands of dollars, and what was weird was every Monday, Uh, things would be 40% off, and it was rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. You would, you would push people through at these deals. They thought they were getting a good deal, but it turned out they weren't. Um, and it was strange the way that, um, on a lack of knowledge, um, a lot of retail was driven. Um, later on, um, so I went, uh, graduated from Harvard, spent a lot of time abroad, lived in China for a year, all this kind of stuff, and worked in an industry called restructuring. Um, in a nutshell, um, You were dealing with these companies that were about to go bankrupt, um, or were in it, um, companies like you, uh, AIG, now US Airways, and American Airline Merger, now the firm I work for is advising Greece, um, all that kind of stuff. Um, and my job was to go through the finances and the legal contracts that dictated what happened when things…

AI assessment note: “there's three stages to what actually drove the AHA amendment”

Q Well, that is very kind of you, but I do want to start with some context. I love a bit of background. So how did you make your way into the world of startups, and how did you come to found the unicorn that is Ramp?

A I got into this in a very funny way. My first job was actually in restructuring and bankruptcy, and so seeing companies at the end of their life, which is a bit atypical, but the skill set there was One, could you first just have a healthy respect for what has to be true for businesses to, like, stay in business? And next, a lot of the skill set was, is there value that other people have missed and are totally overlooked? And that skill set really translated well into what became my last startup. It was a company called Paribus. We figured out that consumers were leaving billions of dollars on the table, literally, whenever prices would drop, like, a day, two days, a week after they bought items online. And so we built an email app that automatically got customers' money back. We launched that in May of 2015. You covered us, actually. It was one of the first shows you did. I think it was probably five months later, and within a year, we had almost a million customers that were using that, and, uh, yeah, it just kind of went from there. We got bought by a bank in the U.S., saw a lot of new things, you know, changed reviews, and just kept going at it, and I love it. I found it addictive, found it's interesting just to be able to go pull people together and try to build towards something.

AI assessment note: “My first job was actually in restructuring and bankruptcy”

Q How did you identify this as a good market, bluntly, when you talk about, like, solving a problem? You know, as you mentioned, Concur, Bill, many incumbents, which we agree as shit, but also then, a lot of other startups at the time, and other kind of scale-ups, Doing the same. How did you identify good markets, and how do you and I guess Keith think about that?

A In many ways, this has been like a decade-long project. It is year five of RAMP, but there are aspects of RAMP which were a continuation of Paribus, which, Harry, you first interviewed me about this in 2015, um, almost a decade ago when both of us were getting started. I mean, this obsession, you know, how do you help people spend less in, in, in, in, in, you know, in, in, you know, in, it was in, if you, Call it that. In 2015, it was an AI agent. It lived in your inbox, and it would file for refunds when you bought things, and it dropped in price. We were bought by Capital One, and we were obsessed with this notion of what if there was, you know, um, over years we developed this idea of credit cards are really profitable, but they're misaligned. Every card company is trying to get people to spend more money, earn more points, that kind of thing, and got obsessed with the idea of what if they help you spend less. It's evolved a lot since then. We still are very much focused on delivering a great card that those people spend less. We do that. We believe that we are the best at that. Still. But one of the things that we started noticing because of this system of getting input and, and, and tuning was in the second board deck, you'll see the first, it was the first time we ever talked about saving time. We missed it in the first time around. So we knew cards were profitable and mi…

AI assessment note: “we developed this idea of credit cards are really profitable, but they're misaligned”

Q Eric, how do you think about your inputs and outputs today? What are they if you were to output them?

A We can certainly send from the very first board deck. We, we, we tried to write this business equation out. Um, and it clarified that there were two cuts that led to the early ramp strategy. The first, um, if you were to still, okay, we had no revenue. We really want to make revenue. Um, we asked how, where does it come from? And there was at the time, three basic variables. Purchase volume. How much are people spending on the cart? Interchange rate of what people spend, how much we're able to keep. Uh, and then last, uh, funding costs, um, uh, for it is pre-rewards. Um, and if you looked at every one of those variables, well, the purchase volume went up, revenue went up. That was straightforward to grow purchase volume. Interchange rate. Um, you could see it very clearly. The more, um, purchase volume you had, the more interchange we would keep. So it was okay. If you wanna grow, um, interchange, grow purchase volume. Funding costs, similar thing. If you go to a bank and say, I'd like to borrow a hundred million dollars, please. Um, they will certainly give you a lower interest rate than if you, um, say I'd like to borrow one, uh, and you will be better predicting fraud, all that. And so every single one of these variables we mapped out pretty clearly, what were the drivers of them? And it turned out that there was only one variable that moved everything. Um, and it was just p…

AI assessment note: “there was at the time, three basic variables. Purchase volume. Interchange rate.”

Q And then the final one, Eric, what do the next five years hold for you and for Ramp, and like, just how big could this be?

A I mean, very biased person, but I think this could be just truly enormous and Generational impact. I think it's deeply weird that the status quo in the industry is a little schemey, that people are trying to figure out to get companies to spend more, but get them to be a little bit more wasteful and against what companies are optimizing for. A lot of our goal is just like Shopify has built software that is so useful to e-commerce sellers that it literally makes businesses better by being on Shopify. Could we build something similar for the CFO suite? 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 this very sleepy space, we think we can build something incredible.

AI assessment note: “I think this could be just truly enormous and Generational impact.”

Q Eric, how do you think about your inputs and outputs today? What are they if you were to output them?

A We can certainly send from the very first board deck. We, we, we tried to write this business equation out. Um, and it clarified that there were two cuts that led to the early ramp strategy. The first, um, if you were to still, okay, we had no revenue. We really want to make revenue. Um, we asked how, where does it come from? And there was at the time, three basic variables. Purchase volume. How much are people spending on the cart? Interchange rate of what people spend, how much we're able to keep. Uh, and then last, uh, funding costs, um, uh, for it is pre-rewards. Um, and if you looked at every one of those variables, well, the purchase volume went up, revenue went up. That was straightforward to grow purchase volume. Interchange rate. Um, you could see it very clearly. The more, um, purchase volume you had, the more interchange we would keep. So it was okay. If you wanna grow, um, interchange, grow purchase volume. Funding costs, similar thing. If you go to a bank and say, I'd like to borrow a hundred million dollars, please. Um, they will certainly give you a lower interest rate than if you, um, say I'd like to borrow one, uh, and you will be better predicting fraud, all that. And so every single one of these variables we mapped out pretty clearly, what were the drivers of them? And it turned out that there was only one variable that moved everything. Um, and it was just p…

AI assessment note: “we tried to write this business equation out. Um, and it clarified that there were”

Q aren't they? Uh, I mean, the thing that always strikes me with your business is bluntly the speed of execution. And you have the day count, which is so different, I find. When you think about advising founders today on having the same speed of execution that you have, what are one to two of the biggest piece of advice that you have to them on driving that execution speed?

A I love that you started with the day count. It was actually, so today is day 1866. Um, we do know it by the day, but it's not what you think. It's not like a, it's day 1866, YOLO, carpe diem, like go, Let, let, let, let's, let's get it. It, it's much more focused on thinking about the passage of time. So the first time after, um, I don't know if I, if I ever told you this, when, when we met for the first board meeting, it was day 133, and part of the context we wanted to drive is, you know, it's, it's, it's just four months old, here's what we've done. But in that October meeting, the second meeting Keith was talking about, we kind of mindlessly went to go update it, um, from 133 to 199, and it forces, we're like, wait a minute, 66 days have passed. Do we get the same amount done with the same set of people? Do we get more done? Or did we get less? Um, and as far as I know, no one has more than 24 hours in a day. Um, but there are certain hours that certainly counted for a lot more, and it, it, it set off this, this thought exercise, um, for us, or, or more formally maybe called the calendar audit, which we learned from, from Keith, which is, um, if you measure time in this way, it creates the space for you to say no to the things that are less impactful, and to say yes to the areas of your business that create a lot more leverage. And for small start, young startups just getti…

AI assessment note: “creates the space for you to say no to the things that are less impactful”

Q build out is kind of quite intense. I guess my question to you on that one was like, how did you determine between what to build versus what to borrow? I mean, especially in the space that you're in with a lot of the providers, some of it is off the shelf, but you decided to build your own. I guess, what was that decision-making process between build versus borrow?

A We do this all the time. And actually, I think in terms of a team, I think this is one of the greatest times ever to be building on top of and with the expertise of others. Five, six years ago, there was this early talk of this API revolution. You could tap into different APIs and building services, and it was talked about a lot then. I don't think it was really true, but now it is. You know, one of our first partners was a company called Marquetta. They allowed us within, you know, effectively through the expertise they had with banks, with the credit card networks, with approaches, they gave kind of the rubric of, if you want to ship, here's what you need to get done. 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 that would never have been possible if we said, let's go build integration with Visa. Let's go build integration with our bank. Let's go do all this stuff. But that's an API that really benefits. And all the way through, there's lots of things like that. There's APIs that will access in order to connect to different accounting services to go and in just, let's say parts of receipts. And I think that you can do this by one, at least getting a baseline of one. How do you get things up fast? If you're optimizing towards momentum, how can you build th…

AI assessment note: “if you're optimizing towards momentum, how can you build things with incredible speed?”

Q Eric, can you talk to me about when you've had the highest level of conviction and you've been wrong?

A What I would definitely say for like any, anyone listening is like, uh, I would listen to what Keith said twice. I think it's really, really good. And I think that, um, People don't always internalize the importance of, uh, as a founder, as a CEO at the end of the day, like, um, everything that's going well for a good thing, like credit to your team, everything that's going bad, like is your fault and you need a fix. And like, that is the right mentality. Like for me, the question is not, will people be wrong? It's a question of how does your company deal with it culturally? And I, I think that, uh, two things, when good companies talk about wins, great companies talk about misses the way that we start. Uh, every board deck is what is going well, what is going less well than we hoped, uh, and why. And so we, you know, it's, it's not letting there be a culture of sweeping things under the rug, uh, and not crucifying people when things do, do go wrong. You know, and next, um, you know, Kareem is, you know, overseas, um, you know, half of the org, a lot of the most important investments. He has every right to, to tell me like on marketing, you know, this is off or you're missing this and here's what we're seeing. Cause a lot of what we're doing, it's a, It's a pursuit of the truth. It's not about, um, you know, was someone right and, and kind of acing your own scorecard as an exec…

AI assessment note: “Like for me, the question is not, will people be wrong?”

Q Eric, can you talk to me about when you've had the highest level of conviction and you've been wrong?

A What I would definitely say for like any, anyone listening is like, uh, I would listen to what Keith said twice. I think it's really, really good. And I think that, um, People don't always internalize the importance of, uh, as a founder, as a CEO at the end of the day, like, um, everything that's going well for a good thing, like credit to your team, everything that's going bad, like is your fault and you need a fix. And like, that is the right mentality. Like for me, the question is not, will people be wrong? It's a question of how does your company deal with it culturally? And I, I think that, uh, two things, when good companies talk about wins, great companies talk about misses the way that we start. Uh, every board deck is what is going well, what is going less well than we hoped, uh, and why. And so we, you know, it's, it's not letting there be a culture of sweeping things under the rug, uh, and not crucifying people when things do, do go wrong. You know, and next, um, you know, Kareem is, you know, overseas, um, you know, half of the org, a lot of the most important investments. He has every right to, to tell me like on marketing, you know, this is off or you're missing this and here's what we're seeing. Cause a lot of what we're doing, it's a, It's a pursuit of the truth. It's not about, um, you know, was someone right and, and kind of acing your own scorecard as an exec…

AI assessment note: “for me, the question is not, will people be wrong? It's a question of”