The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 61 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Shipper: Near-term enterprise AI will center around company super agents
“I really think that the model for now is going to be a super agent, like one agent for the entire company.”
Rabois: Thriving startups promote internally rather than hiring senior outside executives
“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…”
Fast-moving teams should stress-test product decisions at GA, not pre-beta
“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…”
Ramp built competitors to American Express and Expensify in months
“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.”
Ramp's velocity is driven primarily by elite engineering and design talent
“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.”
Ramp product managers never write tickets or manage Linear tasks
“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…”
Shield new product teams from organizational chaos until product-market fit
“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…”
Ramp replaced quarterly OKRs with a biannual one-pager of company priorities
“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.”
Ramp avoids OKRs for product teams to prioritize direct roadmap velocity
“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…”
Empowering engineers and designers to think like product managers creates leverage
“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…”
Ramp considers support tickets product failures and has support report to product
“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…”
Ramp's CTO focused solely on hiring elite talent in year one
“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…”
Berkowitz: Deel overtook Ramp as fastest-growing SaaS company in history
“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”
Ramp freezes new features if teams breach quality and confusion metrics
“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…”
Ramp reached $100M annual revenue in its first two years
“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.”
High product velocity and core focus helps teams avoid workplace burnout
“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…”
Engineers should have full autonomy beyond meeting their core product commitments
“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…”
Radically empowered, opinionated engineers outperform passive teams that accept instructions
“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…”
Ramp maintains zero bug backlog and fixes bugs as they surface
“We don't have a bug backlog. We fix every bug once they're surfaced almost.”
Ramp built a Bill.com competitor in three months with five people
“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.”
Batchu: Investor intros matter less for B2B sales than peer customer reviews
“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 …”
Batchu: Ramp reached $100M ARR faster than any fintech company
“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.”
Sri Batchu: Traditional PR Will Remain Critical for Reaching Non-Tech Audiences
“I think traditional PR will remain another really important piece because they just target a different audience.”
Batchu: Ramp leveraged its cap table as an early growth engine
“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…”
Batchu: Relying on LTV-to-CAC ratios risks destroying value via faulty churn assumptions
“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…”
Rabois preempted Ramp's Series A because they prepared cards in three months
“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 …”
Geoff Charles has never scheduled or run a status meeting at Ramp
“I've never had a status meeting. I've never scheduled a status meeting. Statuses are done async.”
Anchoring on revenue targets and design prototypes drives extreme product velocity
“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.”
Ramp uses engineering rotations and product operators to shield core builders
“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,…”
Ramp supports over 400,000 users with fewer than 30 customer support agents
“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.”
Interactive visionary prototypes shared via video walkthroughs dramatically increase product velocity
“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…”
Ramp engineers and designers decide if trial product managers keep their jobs
“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…”
Incumbent market comparables de-risk business decisions for startup product teams
“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.”
Product leaders should debate data and hypotheses rather than potential solutions
“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…”
Writing rather than reading is the best way to improve clear thinking
“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…”
Charles requires public weekly goals and uses 1-on-1s only to unblock reports
“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…”
Batchu: Ramp has under 500 employees with industry-leading revenue per employee
“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.”
Sri Batchu: Fundraising Announcements Drive Meaningful Top-of-Funnel for Ramp
“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.”
Batchu: Ramp grew 4x year-over-year following $100M ARR milestone
“We publicly disclosed that last year we grew Forex on top of that, you know, very sizable based from the year prior”
Batchu: All software contracts are negotiable due to quota pressures
“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.”
Batchu: Growth experiments typically have roughly a 30% success rate
“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.”
Batchu: Teams ultimately ship their calendars based on how they block time
“Cause in many ways you ship your calendar. And so thinking about how are you spending your time and blocking your time?”
Batchu: Ramp growth engineers share quota and pipeline accountability with sales
“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…”
Batchu: Target specialized hires from companies one to two growth stages ahead
“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.”
Batchu: Candidates who cannot name an activity they struggle at quit easily
“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…”
Batchu: Ramp restricts personal emails due to low user intent
“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.”
Batchu: Mid-market enterprises drive the vast majority of Ramp's revenue
“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”
Batchu: Ramp growth team's North Star was dollars of SQL pipeline
“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.”