Ramp

“The really talented marketers of today going forward are going to be looking more like engineers where historically the really sophisticated marketing organizations like ramp as an example, they have like a lot of engineering involvement in the marketing activ…”

“So, they blew through about a billion dollars in a few months almost unprecedented. I think, like, half a million of that went to payroll. But the big issue, they were on RAMP, but they were also using a variety of other, sort of, payment.”

“So one interesting thing about ramps organization is it's so engineering led that ramp CTO Kareem actually runs marketing and they oftentimes are focused on recruiting engineers to their marketing team because they want to take an engineering led approach.”

“Large fire breaks out on Soho rooftop, and the, and they got press around this because they kept working, and it says FDNY, Hottest startup in NYC, Traba, stays locked in despite fire. I love that they called NBC New York and got this done. It's amazing. And t…”

“Every single new company coming out of YC that's doing some AI meets finance for corporations, you are competing directly with a very fast moving gorilla, which is ramp.”

“Early on, I remember they were they were one of the huge beneficiaries of GPT-IV for the receipt scanning because they could just do exactly what we did with the red book where they would OCR it with Google, take all the text in the picture, and then throw tha…”

“Ramp has locked down one of its absolute stars, Andre Kovalev, with a big contract extension after he hit his four-year cliff.”

“I was close with the ramp founders and wanted to onboard and it still took a persistent sales rep to actually be at the top of my email regularly for me to do the internal tasks just to make it happen.”

“Did you know that Devin is now the number one committer of code at RAMP?”

“So I give this advice all the time to people that are like, I want to be a founder. And it's like, well, you don't need to have started a company before, obviously to be a founder, anybody can just become a founder, but a lot of people would be better off goin…”

“The ramp down round was directly tied to the market, not business performance, which is why they're back above that last, you know, financing, just given that you know, they were taking that down round while still putting up ridiculous numbers.”

“When I was working at founders fund at the time, There's a very non-standard Founders Fund investment in many, many ways. The most acute one being, if you have all these vendors that are doing well, what's the monopoly story?”

“Even the most cutting edge organizations typically have a very archaic, call it analog CFO function.”

“I think most organizations could not have put out a Superbowl ad from, you know 11 days start to airing.”

“Mathematically a company like you know, an Apple or Microsoft or Nvidia, you know, talking to a ramp is almost like a ramp talking to a seed or Siri J startup. It's actually those multiples in between valuations are about the same.”

“We grew four times year over year. No other publicly traded company was doing that.”

“In December, 20, 21, we valued ramp at 8.1 billion. Today we actually think it's going to be a way bigger company and the value is 5.8 billion. And we said, great, let's do it.”

“I don't think it was a sin necessarily to raise at high prices. I think probably the sin was just spending it all really quickly.”

“When I look at where we are, it's, it is incredible to be serving empowering. I, what we believe is one to two percent of all corporate and small business card spend in the U S which is maybe the market that we're largest in.”

“What Kareem is interested in is not like your total package. He's interested in your very best idea. So like, if you were the very best at X and he just wants you to do that for ramp. And if you only last for six months, that's fine. It's like, he just, he opt…”

“That round that we ended up investing in at whatever, eight billion or eight and a half or whatever it was what's a couple hundred million among friends. But I that was like, December, 21 when we were talking about it, and then the round ultimately closed in J…”

“The thing that I will say though, is at least the biggest check that I've ever, you know, sort of led is like a net new, you know, portfolio company investment. So not just like follow ons, obviously we like we've deployed mega checks in a ramp, but that was a…”

“Stripe had built RAM. Stripe had a corporate card. And it didn't work. Like, they ended up investing in RAM and deprecating that card.”

“So we've had hundreds of applicants already. You know, these have been engineers and designers and companies like OpenAI and Databricks, SpaceX, Ramp, you know, like you name it. We have a Gen Z creator who has millions of followers more research focused peopl…”

“There are some job functions at ramp where it is actually not possible to pass it like an interview or a coding interview without using an LLM. And that's intentional.”

“These companies were able to get 15 times more work done. Transactions categorized. But the more interesting part is these agents were way more accurate. These agents all day, like they know the expense policy better than any manager at the company. And so it …”

“Like right now July is pacing we're pacing to do 20% more purchase volume in July than June.”

“We raised five hundred million dollars at a 22 and a half billion dollar valuation.”

“Ramps AI index shows AI adoption held flat at 45% of businesses in November, driven by slight declines in Finance and technology sectors.”

“Ramp did really, really well with their Super Bowl activation. They had a whole bunch of different touch points, so they didn't just, like, lob an ad in and then call it a day.”

“They have a new fund that has Databricks, Mercore, Revolut, Airwallex, Boom, Supersonic, Ramp, Aura, and Stripe, which is signed and pending, closed.”

“They bought Databricks at a 150 dollars per share. Now trading at 204 ramp at 90, now trading at 98. Airwallex 21 dollars. It's now trading at 18.8.”

“The companies that used to spend the most on freelancers shifted to AI the fastest, 97% savings for the businesses that spent the most on freelance.”

“More than half of the businesses using freelancers in twenty-twenty-two have stopped entirely.”

“I know it's in alpha with a number of customers, and I believe that the product's actually available to non-ramp customers as well, so you can use their product.”

“OpenAI Ananthropic, 80% of their enterprise revenue comes from just one percent of the companies.”