Ramp

“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.”

“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.”

“I will say that is not as big of a channel as one might expect because, you know, companies have their own, you know, decision-making frameworks for selecting a product like ramp and the investor opinion and recommendation matters, but it turns out it doesn't …”

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

“Everything is, is negotiable when it comes to contracts. People think contracts are standardized for software, and usually not. People are trying to sell you something they're trying to grow to. They have their quotas to meet. They have their goals to hit.”

“Growth experiments in my history are typically, like, 30 percent-ish success rate. So the vast majority of things that you try don't work.”

“Cause in many ways you ship your calendar. And so thinking about how are you spending your time and blocking your time?”

“What works really well with ramp is that we have the same shared goal. Which is the pipeline driven and the payback period of the channel. It's kind of unique to RAMP where the engineers feel ownership of the quota. They're not like owning product metrics or w…”

“You typically want to limit it to companies that are one to two stages of growth after you. So you want somebody that has seen, you know, your stage of growth and beyond at a company that has a reputation for craft in the field that you're looking for.”

“A lot of people actually struggle with that question and can't answer anything that they do that they're bad at which is a little bit of a yellow flag, which means that they're only used to doing things that they're successful at, and they haven't cultivated i…”

“The reason we don't allow personal emails is because it's just typically very low intent users that are coming to the website that are putting in personal emails.”

“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”

“In the recent past, it was for the growth team, the North star was dollars of SQL pipeline. So anything, anybody did, we would try to estimate the impact into what would be the dollars of you know, sales qualified lead pipeline generated for RAM.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“We actually have a growth engineering team that's dedicated to supporting that that efficiency, but including, you know, adjusting third party data and using AI to automate much of their workflow, et cetera. We've been doing this Well before AI has become, you…”

“And at ramp for our activation, we've got like, I mean, it's like very specific to ramp, but we've got like four events that the customer needs to do in the first 30 days. And if they do that, they have a high likelihood of being activated and successful. So o…”

“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…”

“I think the challenge with LTV to CAC, especially for a lot of, even ramp, right? It's only four years old is it's really hard to predict LTV. It's like a DCF. It's extremely assumption laden and it, and it's hard to know. You know, what the defiant value will…”

“I've never had a status meeting. I've never scheduled a status meeting. Statuses are done async.”

“And if that number is a slightly elevated, we're basically saying you can't ship any new features. You need to fix these things. And so, yeah, there's just these types of controls, but basically trying to standardize across the teams. This is your percentage o…”

“It's the difference between a beta and the GA that that's where we really get plugged in when we make the decision to go live. To the rest of the customer base and asking sales to start selling. That's where I'll really come in and stress test the hypotheses a…”

“In three months, we built a competitor to Amex. Six months after that, we built a competitor to expensify, you know, both publicly traded companies.”

“We have about 13 PMs at RAMP, probably over a hundred engineers.”

“You're able to move super, super fast. If you have those two things in mind, the market and the revenue goal, because we're very revenue driven as a company and the designs that, that can really keep you anchored on, on what this could look like.”

“Behind ramps velocity is a lot less like the culture that, that I try to amplify a lot more, the quality of the engineering and design talent candidly.”

“We never write a ticket. We don't spend much time in, in, you know, linear, which is our ticket management system. We basically, our contract is the vision and the priority and a very high level spec and everything else is kind of Pushed on the engineering tea…”

“I mean, we were one of the fastest growing fintech and maybe SAS companies of all time. I think we've hit a hundred million in annual for first two years.”

“So, you know, we have a rotational program on production engineering, for example, where our engineers are protecting the core team from escalations, from bugs, from issues. We have product operators that are protecting the PM from the chaos that is, you know,…”

“Small teams have a single threaded focus give them the resources they need to execute, big lofty goals, very tight timelines, and then like shield them from the chaos that is the rest of the organization. Basically don't bother them and don't even tell the res…”

“We have an extremely low contact rate. We have, you know, over 400,000 users on our platform and a team of agents that's under, under 30.”

“And so I actually think velocity is a way to potentially avoid burnout. I'm not asking people to work, you know, unless hours a week, I'm asking people to get out of their own way and to focus on, on what truly matters, which is building great products for our…”

“Your job is to make sure that they're aligned with the long-term vision and that they can deliver what they've committed to. But on top of that, they can do whatever the hell they want. And if they're taking on something that puts the things that they committe…”

“In terms of just raw transaction volume, you know, we have crossed ten billion in analyze spending on the platform and just getting started.”

“Having designers spend more time creating more visionary prototypes and then sharing those out in videos. It just has just huge impact on, on how exciting work is and how excited the team are. And so just providing that clarity is massive. And I think just aga…”

“I try to create or free up headspace for processing, not memory, and so I just basically spend very little time memorizing anything, and I write everything down.”

“And look like there, there's drawbacks to that culture, right? Where you get to like a radically empowered engineering team that thinks that they know the product better than the designer or the PM and they push back on the designs or they disagree with the PM…”

“And what we typically do is we give those PMs a shot or those folks a shot. So we'd give them like six months to go into a new area and try it out. And then we basically have the engineers they work with and designers they work with actually make the call as t…”

“We moved from like quarterly, very expensive quarterly planning, which took one month every three months. So basically, 33% of the time was planning to a biannual one pager on these are the company priorities. And it's much more smooth and much faster.”

“I stay away from them from a product perspective, because again, I want to focus on velocity, which is just output, which is your roadmap. But they could, they're pretty strong at more of the cross-functional side of things as well as the financial side of thi…”

“When you look at, you know, bill.com, right, they're a publicly traded company, Expensify Public and Traded or Concur or Coupa. These are all like large players that are actually very motivating and largely de-risk some of the business decisions you're making.”

“Making everyone feel like a PM is a great way to get leverage as a PM. And that means basically empowering the designer to think about the actual specs and priorities and scopes more than you or empower the engineer to take something that's. Fairly lightweight…”

“Oftentimes, you know, more junior leaders, and I was certainly in that camp earlier on, kept focusing on, on the solutions and debating the right solution when in fact you should really be debating upstream of that. You should be debating the interpretation of…”

“We don't have a bug backlog. We fix every bug once they're surfaced almost.”

“Our support reports into me, and the first principle there was saying, well, every support ticket is a failure of our product. We literally have that as, you know, a quote just posted on, on, on all those channels. It's a failure. And our, if the product works…”

“You could read things and that's helpful, but I don't think that reading makes you necessarily think better. It makes you more wise. But the best way to increase your capacity to think is to actually do the thinking. And so that's where I see writing. If you'r…”

“We basically gave a team, you know, goal of building a competitor to build.com. It was three engineers, one designer, one PM, three months, and they hit it out of the park and that product is, is, is moving in billions of dollars a year.”

“I mean, early, early on for the first year at ramp, Kareem our CTO was only focused on that. It was hiring the best talent. He was a lot less interested or focused on our product strategy or product market fit, or even our revenue. It was all about bringing in…”

“I basically have teams, all my directs post their goals every week. First thing Monday, the goal there is to also have them review each other's goals. I have a one-on-one template that I basically use to keep on track of how progress is being made. But I certa…”

“At ramp, we're big enough and we're a B to B company, but we have a B to C top of funnel where we try to acquire users and get them to fill out our application to get a credit card. We have like a distinct revenue operations team that's broken into business te…”

“And actually one of the coolest and most fun projects that we worked on early when I joined ramp is we were optimizing. We're trying to get top of funnel data all the way down to the bottom of the funnel and tie it with opportunity data. So we could send that …”

“So Ramp was the first one to be crowned the fastest growing, and then we kind of took that crown from them. So I think we're both right. In that at a certain point in time, we've been the fastest growing”

“Today some of the top growth companies, like, Block, Vercel, Ramp, Retool, Mercury, and Substack are building with Linear. We also additionally have lots of other companies, like thousands of other companies using, using Linear.”

“I asked, what's the hardest thing you've ever done? And I asked that because working at ramp is hard. I want to understand like what hard means for them. I want to understand why it was hard. I want to understand how they overcame that difficulty, how they wor…”

“One of our customers, Ramp, had a 43 X increase in traffic when their ad went live. The engineer that worked on that only needed to learn Next.js. Then they pushed their code over sell and now they can reach an audience of a hundred million people without a bl…”

“I led the seed in like May-ish of 2019 and gave a term sheet to preempt the A in September, so pretty quick. One of the two signals was how fast Ramp was able to be on the precipice of shipping the cards. I'd been working in financial services for a long time …”

“Most of the companies I work with that are thriving have basically skipped hiring senior people, senior experienced people, mostly internally grown talent. And I think that model has worked really well. It's definitely true of ramp, definitely true of trade Re…”

“I really think that the model for now is going to be a super agent, like one agent for the entire company.”