The Exchanges

Q just repeat, you want to make insanely great products? Come with me. If you don't, then you shouldn't be working here. I just talked to Toby Luque from Shopify. The way I would think about the mission of his company and the way it's spread throughout, uh, internally, it's like we're building infrastructure for entrepreneurs. So how do you describe it as a CEO to your team inside of Ramp?

A I think our mission is endless, right? It is to help Every business owner get more out of every dollar an hour. That's what we're trying to do. The credit cards that we offer, the expense management, the bill payments, the accounting automation, these are just products. At the end of the day, what we were trying to do is really measure for all the dollars that are going to pass through your organization. How do we make sure that if you leave your, your organization at the end of the month, that you get more for every dollar and every hour is what we are trying to do. And I think what made Ramp start to scale very early on in a very crowded industry that people thought we weren't, we were like 175 years late to was this was, I think, really inverting a lot of the way that many of our competitors had acted, right? If you kind of look at the credit card industry, um, which is where we started, uh, even just seven years ago, everyone had agreed that the best way to earn business was, uh, through these points and rewards Go spend more money. You can earn points and multipliers will have your back. Um, and it was, I think exactly the opposite of what most business owners and CFOs that I knew wanted. They actually wanted more, uh, in their bank account and they wanted their employees spending less time on this stuff. And so simply by inverting, uh, that primary assumption and saying, …

AI assessment note: “It is to help Every business owner get more out of every dollar an hour.”

Q to work at RAMP and then start companies, right? So you have that like very like entrepreneurial, like lifeblood that's running throughout the company. Curious, do you think about talent differently now Because so much of your work can be, or is supplemented in some cases replaced by like AI agents. Like how are you thinking about hiring now, given the capabilities of AI compared to say two years ago?

A There's a few things that I think are evolving with, with AI. One, uh, just the power laws are getting more extremes in the same way. Um, uh, companies are getting larger, the speed To which companies are getting built is, is accelerating. I think the returns to talent is higher than ever. The most effective person in the world is no longer, uh, 10 times as effective or a hundred times effective. It could be a thousand times as effective in a particular area. So I think finding people, uh, who are very spiky in areas, I think is absolutely right. The thing which is, I think has bent my mind most over the past year is if you're really internalizing what LLMs are doing, I think we used to be in a world where skills were very scarce and very hard to find, and I think we're starting to get to a place where a very determined generalist can start to do much more than they used to be able to do, right? To explain a bit more of what, what I mean, um, large language models have read more lines of code than any engineer alive, right? They've read more medical case texts than any doctor alive. They've read more company filings and chart of accounts than any accountant who's ever lived or Probably ever will live. And in some sense, if I can just ask a good question, I'm the best doctor I've ever been in my life, and I'm not like a doctor at all, right? If I'm just stubborn, I can keep goin…

AI assessment note: “a very determined generalist can start to do much more than they used to”

Q Wait, what, what does that mean? The barriers between organizations?

A I'll put it this way. When Rampos call it, ah, 10 people, and you ask people, um, you know, where do you work? Uh, or what do you do here? They'd say, I work at RAMP and I'm an engineer. Uh, you get to 50, you might hear something simpler. You know, I work at RAMP and I'm in the sales team. You start seeing these different divisions grow. Once you start getting to like 200 or 500 people, you start hearing this inversion in identity. People say, you know, I'm a salesperson at RAMP. I'm a designer at RAMP. They start to identify by their craft and what they do and what they are asked to do. They interact with mostly people who are in their craft. Uh, salespeople talk with other salespeople, and you, you see these mega corporations. It's kind of like the Tower of Babel where, you know, this, no one in sales knows an actual engineer. The engineers don't know any actual designers. Everything's hard because information has to go up top and down on through, uh, and these organizations become very Byzantine. Uh, and I think now in a world where, you know, someone who develops the product can use technologies that helps them sell more effectively, that helps them track That helps them track outreach, that helps them write with a better pitch on the first go, and these are real tools that you can build for people today, I think you start seeing fewer types of specialties within organizat…

AI assessment note: “They start to identify by their craft and what they do”

Q a month or two ago. You're sitting to my right. I look at, you're wearing, like, ramp, uh, merch, and I, like, grab your, your, your sleeve because I wanted to read what was on it. It says, we win when our customers win. So I believe that to be true. So how do you align the incentives of your company with your customers to make sure that stays true?

A It's one of our six values, and a lot of companies have this idea they want to have values, everyone has, my elementary school had values, right? Um, and, um, what I didn't like about values at my elementary school, you know, I'm sorry if any administrators listening to it, there was like, 20 of them, and like, I couldn't remember any of them, right? And what we tried to do at the very start of the company was ask, like, what are the thing, the very few things that all of us really agree with, and if we don't all strongly feel this and agree with this, like, it's a nice idea, You can go pursue it, but it's like not an actual value, right? And so one of the top level things we wanted to do at the start of the company was set a goal that explicitly measured for the products that we put out there. Could we measure how many dollars are our customers spending? And how many did we block? How many dollars did we prevent from going out Of their company. How many hours do they spend doing expenses or closing their books or paying bills or moving funds to earn higher yield? And so we both, it's part of why we connect, right, to a company's accounting software to have kind of a source of truth, ah, it's part of why we move funds, and then we explicitly create measurements on how many, like how many dollars did we block, how many expense reports did we automate, all that. And then all we d…

AI assessment note: “we explicitly create measurements on how many, like how many dollars did we block”

Q know, this one little thing. My question to you is like, as ramp evolves and these new technologies, uh, you take advantage of all the, the new latest technology, uh, developments, In your mind, then, like, what is, it's not there now, but like, what is the ideal product? Is it literally self-driving money? It's like, you're not buying seats, software, it's, you're buying work? What is it to you?

A I think that's really well said, right? I'll just start with, like, who we serve today, right? A lot of our customers are, uh, business owners and finance organizations, and I think, Like, I, I remember meeting a lot of friends, right, who were studying accounting and finance, and, you know, back in college, like, I, I remember that the things you'd hear from them, like, the dreams they had is like, you know, I want to go be at the table where it matters, right? I want to be allocating resources to causes that are important. I want to help people understand businesses better so they can make better decisions. I want to create great products. Uh, I want to do things that are really meaningful, and you go study this kind of craft and trade of, of, of accounting, finance, whatever it may be. And then you are really awakened to the reality that's like, oh, no, no, you're not doing that. Your job is you're going to do the expenses. You're going to go and like take the bills and you're going to go process them. You're going to go rerun this analysis that we ran last month for, you know, a liquidity roll forward or financial projection again for this quarter. And you're going to spend like 80, 90% of your time just on road to recurring tasks because the machinery is so hard to operate. There's so much data split across all these tools today that is very difficult to operate. And part …

AI assessment note: “part of what we're doing is, one, just collapsing the number of tools”

Q people like Elon who just wants to like, he says, I want fresh blood. I want to like turn through people. What's your opinion on this? Like, do you want consistency on like your, your, your, the top people in your company, or do you like Do you want to encourage turnover? Do you want to keep the core product kernel team together? Like, how do you think about that?

A I think that people's level of experience can change, and you can learn unique things, but I think general aptitude is reasonably consistent, and what I mean by that is, let's say you want to take the snob route and just go look at MIT and find the smartest people there. You can reasonably figure that out within one semester of, like, who are the top 50 smartest people at MIT if you ask around and spend some time on that. And generally, people are not recruiting people for their internship program until their junior year or their junior summer, but you can go and say, actually, I'm going to try to find, like, the smartest freshman and offer them a winter internship or a summer internship and go bring them in and find the smartest and, like, incredible aptitude of people, and by the way, Other freshmen, when they see the smartest person went, they want to go to your company too, and you can start to create these virtuous cycles of finding great people. So I agree with, with Elon's philosophy of trying to find really smart people, in part because it allows you to find maybe something like a mispricing in the market by their junior summer, or after they've been working for five years, it's priced in. You're competing straight up with, ah, quant firms, AI labs, whoever you name it. Um, people are paying top dollar for folks, but, um, that early in career is when people don't have a…

AI assessment note: “So I agree with, with Elon's philosophy of trying to find really smart people”