Karim Atiyeh
Co-founder & CTO, Ramp · Co-Founder, Ramp. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Karim Atiyeh is a co-founder of Ramp, a fast-growing fintech company. He focuses on engineering internal software systems and utilizing AI to maintain competitive operational efficiency.
2shows
2appearances
40statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Karim Atiyeh said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Atiyeh: Future Software Code Is LLMs, Instructions, and Infinite Loops
“The next phase that we're entering and the one that I'm seeing in our company is one where you start thinking about these LLMs really as part of your product and your pro Programming them. So you're no longer writing the same code that you used to write with t…”
Atiyeh: Ramp abandoned fine-tuning AI to wait for next-generation foundation models
“We did spend some time fine-tuning in many places, and then we very quickly found out that our time was worth way more and that we should just, like, wait, wait for, like, other generations of model.”
Atiyeh: Fixing bugs hyper-fast builds more customer trust than unbroken software
“I often find it a much better way to build credibility with them and trust if things break and you fix them very quickly as opposed to if they just don't care and don't notice anything about the products and whenever it's like one of my favorite things to do i…”
Atiyeh: Most consumer cards are identical products marketed differently
“Frankly, to this day, a lot of the consumer card products still fail like different versions of the same product, just marketed differently.”
Atiyeh: Amex has a great brand but offers little beyond statements
“Like they still have a really good brand. But at the time like that, that, that, that's all they had. I mean, that's still all they have is like, they have a good brand and yeah, I guess you could log in and check your statement, but that that's about it.”
Atiyeh: Adding a paid SaaS model accelerated Ramp's overall growth
“There was a lot of fear when we did, I'd say internally, because you have this like beautiful business model that's working really well. And everyone's a little freaked out that it's like, well, are people going to be willing to pay for it? Is it going to hurt…”
Atiyeh: Pricing AI agents on execution time disincentivizes engineering efficiency
“I worry a little bit about that model sometimes incentivizing the engineering team to not be as efficient as possible with their use of AI, right? Like if you're a company charging for how much time the agent is spending on the task, like, are you not incentiv…”
Atiyeh: Vetting candidates on more criteria increases the likelihood of hiring average performers
“I'm a lot more interested in, in essentially assembling the Avengers at the company where everyone has like a clear superpower than a lot of people who just check the box on 10 things. It's like, if you're looking, the more things you are looking to Vet someon…”
Atiyeh: Precise task estimation incentivizes inflated timelines and slows engineering
“You can,
Get a lot of precision on how long things take, or you could do them a lot, you could do them very fast. It's hard to get both, because if you start to put a lot of importance on like measuring in advance, how long you think things will take and estim…”
Atiyeh: Best practice processes only raise performance to average
“I think process, like best practice process are a good way to like move you to average on a, in a discipline if you feel like you're below average, but often some of the people who are like most extreme on how fast I move or on any dimension that you're trying…”
Atiyeh: Hiring purely for loyalty to avoid poaching is a mistake
“It's very easy to want to try to avoid that by hiring people who are purely incredibly loyal. And I don't think that's a good idea. It's like, I see it as a sign that we're hiring the right people.”
Atiyeh: Ramp uses GPT-4o Mini for 90% of its production AI tasks
“Oh yeah, it's already in production, and for like, 90% of tasks that we're running, it's good enough, so that was a quick switch. And within a day, we can know very quickly, like, that, yes, this is, like, good enough, and we have the right evals.”
Atiyeh: AI will not replace human taste in marketing
“The one thing that I think will remain for a very long time is, is having good taste. And at like at the end of the day, like if you are, even if you are working with the eyes and machines at, Someone needs to decide, like, is, is this good or not? And there's…”
Atiyeh: Test creative performance first before optimizing for brand compliance
“I think it's a lot more restrictive to start with, let's make something on brand, and then let's make it work, and a lot more costly. So trying to, like, invert a little bit how how we produce, like, good creatives and good content.”
Atiyeh: Most Companies Are Stuck Using AI Only for Marginal Speedups
“It's obvious to me that the impact The effects of adopting the technology are transformative, but a lot of companies are still stuck in the very early phases, and I would describe the first very early phase as you are using those, ah, LLMs to do the same work …”
Atiyeh: Ramp infers customer behavior to train next-gen financial agents
“And a lot of work that we're doing right now is because we have so many interesting customers and they're using the product to run their finances. We can infer a lot of these policies through their behavior. And a lot of that, those policies that we're inferri…”
Atiyeh: Legacy B2B software catered to buyers while frustrating employees
“You think about a lot of the business products that were built in a previous generation, they were essentially built for decision makers. So you think about building a, I don't know, like an HR tool or anything. It's like, well, who's the decision makers? Like…”
Atiyeh: Ramp focuses on minimizing time users spend in the app
“Design obsession has helped us a lot and just polishing every single interaction, making sure that we only ask questions that are absolutely necessary, that we can pre-fill any form that can be pre-filled so that you have As little work to do as a user of the …”
Atiyeh: Celebrating lagging business metrics risks complacency on current problems
“One is a lot of the results that you are seeing today at RAMP are due to the efforts that we put in and solving the problems six months to a year ago.
So current quarter was baked in a couple months ago.
So I always find it a little bit weird to celebrate lagg…”
Paribus scraped billions of emails and tens of millions of receipts daily
“I'm pretty sure that we were running, like, one of the largest scraping operations in the U.S. At the time, going through at some point, like, billions of emails per day. Tens of millions of receipts per day.”
Atiyeh: Businesses waste far more time than money
“Businesses, as we both know, tend to waste a lot more time than they do money. Those are generally interchangeable.”
Ramp's corporate card was a Trojan horse to track business software usage
“Really the card early on was a way to know what businesses were spending time and money on, right? Like, if you know what tools they use and how how much money they're spending on them? You get a sense of like how the business functions, what kind of business …”
Atiyeh: Ramp Defines Its TAM as Total Time Wasted by Finance Teams
“And we kept like essentially like mapping out the total amount of time wasted in all parts of finance team that, that, that we touched. And we look at that as like the total addressable market.”
Atiyeh: Enterprise card spend plateaus as companies shift to procurement systems
“Small businesses tend to run everything through card. So it works well for small businesses, but as you mature the larger businesses tend to move a lot more of their purchasing and spending through essentially bill payments and procurement systems and not as m…”
The other half of the tape: Karim Atiyeh's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Karim's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INVEST LIKE THE BESTLEDGER | Co-founder & CTO, Ramp | 1 | 32 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Invest Like the Best → |
 NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-Founder, Ramp | 1 | 8 | — | full record on No Priors → |