The Ledger, every show

“It's really important to know that it's a consistently underperforming asset class. Like you will make less money doing angel investing than putting your money in an index fund or almost any other kind of equity investment by and large.”

“And I think you'll see more people like me because I think increasingly growth is a discipline of making a portfolio of bets, thinking about ROI, and thinking about data and experimentation in a rigorous way, which I think my background speaks to.”

“Our overall goal was to be, and we were consistently profitable on every cohort of homes that we were buying, so our goal was, even if they were, you know, outstripping us in volume, we would be able to survive for a long period of time because our, we were un…”

“These homes, you know, we did this program for a few months, and we learned that they were tremendously unprofitable for Opendoor because of the adverse selection element and we had to shut down the program.”

“When he released this, you know, a year ago, we were the fastest growing company to a hundred million dollars of, you know, annualized revenue at the time. I don't know if there's been others since, but certainly not in the fintech category as far as I know.”

“One of the things that they did is what I call kind of cap table as a growth strategy where they did a great job of getting a large number of, you know, early stage founders and other influential operators and advisors onto the cap table at the company. And ma…”

“I think traditional PR will remain another really important piece because they just target a different audience.”

“A lot of great firms have made the mistake of doubling down, especially during our zero interest rate environment in later rounds, and honestly diluted their excellent series A and, you know, series B returns by investing large pools of capital into later stag…”

“If you actually look at the data from the last 20 years of IPO exits, There's been more value created from consumer companies than B to B companies.”

“We never did a price match and we never negotiated on price with sellers of homes.”

“In my experience, and I've seen this to be pretty consistent actually across the various companies that I've worked on these types of projects growth has just a typically high failure rate. And my historical success rate that I've seen at various companies is …”

“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.”

“Pouring, you know, money indiscriminately into paid marketing, I think is gone for two reasons. One is, of course, like the efficiency environment, and I don't think we're going to be in a completely zerp environment again. And the other reason being, I think …”

“We publicly disclosed that last year we grew Forex on top of that, you know, very sizable based from the year prior”

“We're, you know, under 500 people roughly today at that scale. And so definitely have a much higher kind of, you know revenue for employee than some of the competitors and others in the space.”

“And ramp today is actually not majority startups or tech companies anymore. The vast majority of our customers are, you know mid-market enterprises for our revenue comes from”

“Having said all of that, what's interesting is that the vast majority of our growth back then, and even to this day is via new customer acquisition.”

“We track engagement during all hands on the zoom to see what percentage people like participate. And it's like usually close to a hundred percent. Like people are talking, like the entire company is talking on the zoom job because they're excited about the win…”

“What we have seen is anytime that we've been fundraising and we've been using that as an effective way of creating a market moment it's driven actually a non-trivial amount of top of funnel for us.”

“The Open Door community, we recently counted, we have at least 50 founders that came out of Opendoor and counting, right and growing.”

“Both Google and Facebook have boomerang policies. I don't know if you know about this, but basically if you come back within four to six months, To Facebook or Google, they will just restart the clock on your equity package. So you won't lose your vested equit…”

“Instacart was in some ways an even more complicated business than Opendoor because it's a four sided marketplace. We have shoppers, we have buyers, we have advertisers, and we have the retailers that are on the platform as well with various different incentive…”

“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,…”

“Instacart, the growth and consumer team was over 300 people, right?”

“One thing that Eric, our CEO does, which I don't know if you've heard externally, is we have, like, days.ramp.com, where we can see how many days it's been since the founding of Ramp internally, and it's day 1529 at Ramp. He has that number of days at every bo…”

“And so at Instacart, for example, our North star metric for growth was monthly active orders.”

“There's a holdout for ads, for example. So there are some lucky Instacart users out there that are not getting ads and they've never gotten ads because they've always been part of Instacart's advertising.”

“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.”