The $44 Billion Company Building Self-Driving Money | Eric Glyman, Ramp

Stop using separate systems for expenses, bill payments, and accounting. Ramp's founder reveals how fusing these workflows into one intelligent platform cuts expenses by 5% and saves hours weekly. The key: your expense policy should drive card behavior in real-time, with AI automatically processing

58m
David Senra

Key Takeaway

Stop using separate systems for expenses, bill payments, and accounting. Ramp's founder reveals how fusing these workflows into one intelligent platform cuts expenses by 5% and saves hours weekly. The key: your expense policy should drive card behavior in real-time, with AI automatically processing transactions, writing memos, and updating accounting software—achieving true zero-touch expenses without manual work.

Episode Overview

Ramp CEO Eric Glyman shares how his company is revolutionizing business finance by building AI-powered infrastructure that helps companies save time and money. He discusses hiring for high-agency people, the power of long-term teams, applying Elon's algorithm to financial processes, and why AI is enabling determined generalists to accomplish far more than traditional specialists.

Key Insights

Invert Your Assumptions to Find Product-Market Fit

Ramp succeeded in a crowded 175-year-old industry by inverting a core assumption. While competitors incentivized spending more through points and rewards, Ramp focused on helping customers spend less. This single inversion led to fundamentally different product decisions—automated expense reduction, integrated systems, and tools that save both dollars and hours rather than encouraging wasteful spending.

AI Makes Determined Generalists Extraordinarily Powerful

Large language models have read more code than any engineer, more medical cases than any doctor, and more financial documents than any accountant. This means a stubborn, determined generalist can now extend far beyond their traditional boundaries. The implication for hiring: aptitude and drive matter more than ever, while narrow specialization matters less. Organizations can radically simplify by having fewer sub-specialties and empowering high-agency people to accomplish more.

The 10,000-Hour Advantage: Why Tenure Compounds

Working with the same high-performing team for years creates an ESP-like understanding where you can complete each other's sentences and anticipate needs without speaking. This isn't achievable in 100 hours—it requires thousands of hours together. The result is radically higher throughput per hour, faster decisions, and more pure pursuit of mission because everyone understands what excellence means and what each person excels at.

Find Talent Before the Market Prices Them In

The smartest people at MIT are identifiable within one semester, yet most companies don't recruit until junior year. By finding high-aptitude people early (even freshmen) and giving them more responsibility than expected, you create a virtuous cycle. They gain experience faster at your company than elsewhere, want to stay and build, and attract other top talent. This creates a competitive advantage before the market fully prices in their potential.

Low Standards Poison High-Performing Cultures

The most damaging thing for an organization is people with similar ownership and pay not pulling their weight. It creates a legitimate question for high performers: 'Why should I obsess over reaching higher potential when the organization doesn't demonstrate respect for the pursuit of higher standards?' Maintaining intolerance for anything less than people's best effort is essential for keeping iron sharpening iron.

Notable Quotes

"The typical business that adopts Ramp is able to cut their expenses by over 5% per year. And as you know, like a dollar saved is more than a dollar earned."

— Eric Glyman

"It's sort of nuts that everyone accepts as normal that some company somewhere is going to issue you or your employee a card. Or your expense policy is not going to drive that the thing actually works. You're going to pay for a client dinner, you're going to get a piece of paper, then you're going to go into another system maintained by an entirely different company, and you the employee are going to go manually do your expenses yourself. Kind of a waste of time."

— Eric Glyman

"Our mission is endless, right? It is to help every business owner get more out of every dollar and 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 have passed through your organization, how do we make sure that few will leave your organization at the end of the month?"

— Eric Glyman

"Large language models have read more lines of code than any engineer alive, right? They've read more medical case text 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?"

— Eric Glyman

"I'm less interested in what is the resume. I'm far more interested in like proof of work. It can be an award, it can be something you built, it can be like a great work that you read and say this is electric."

— Eric Glyman

Action Items

  • 1
    Identify Where You're Using Multiple Systems for One Process

    Map out your business workflows and find areas where information has to move between different systems for a single task (like expenses requiring both a card system and separate expense software). These friction points are costing you time and money. Look for tools that fuse these workflows or build internal solutions that eliminate handoffs.

  • 2
    Recruit High-Aptitude People Before the Market Prices Them In

    Instead of waiting to recruit people with established resumes, identify talented individuals early in their careers (college freshmen, people in niche communities, active GitHub contributors). Give them more responsibility than they'd get elsewhere. They'll gain experience faster with you, develop loyalty, and attract other top talent before their market value is fully established.

  • 3
    Ask 'What Would Success Look Like If We Inverted This Assumption?'

    For your core product or business model, identify the primary assumption everyone in your industry makes. Then deliberately invert it and explore what would be true if the opposite were the goal. This often reveals entirely new approaches and can help you find value in unexpected places where competitors aren't looking.

  • 4
    Use AI to Extend Beyond Your Specialty Boundaries

    When you hit the edge of your expertise, instead of immediately delegating to a specialist, use AI tools to push your boundaries further. Try solving problems in adjacent domains (design, sales, engineering) by leveraging AI's vast knowledge base. Being stubborn and persistent about extending your capabilities can help you accomplish far more than traditional role boundaries allowed.

Full Transcript

Transcript of The $44 Billion Company Building Self-Driving Money | Eric Glyman, Ramp from David Senra. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

I want to basically a download of your thoughts on how you're thinking about your business today and moving forward in the in the in the let's say the next few months. You use Ramp and you you know it, but um I'm going to give you a snapshot of where we are. Um you can think of Ramp as smarter financial infrastructure to run your business, right? From one single place, you can make payments of all kinds, whether that's cards, bill payments, procurement. You can better manage funds.

Uh you can automate expenses and even automate your accounting, right? And the way all of these tools are built is meant to be a single plane for you to better run uh your business and get more value out of every dollar and hour. The way that we measure ourselves um is how many fewer dollars do our customers spend after adopting Ramp and how many fewer hours uh are they using to go and run their business? Today, over 70,000 businesses uh use Ramp. Over 3% of all of the corporate card transactions in the United States uh are powered by Ramp and nearly 1% of all the corporate transactions uh are running through Ramp.

And I think the most uh useful piece of information is that like, you know, the typical business that adopts Ramp is able to cut their expenses by over 5% per year. And as you know, like a dollar saved is more than a dollar earned. The typical business that adopts Ramp uh is growing their revenue uh a median of 16% per year. Um the US average is 3 to 4%. And so, we're just trying to make dollars and hours go further. further. further. You and I and our when we're talking off camera uh talk a lot about AI.

The you know, Ramp started as corporate credit cards. Now you look at how people speak about you guys on X. It's like they're just using AI to make your finance team more efficient and happier is like a great line that you have. Talk about like about like about like some of the ways that you guys are using AI and like what are the products you're building? building? building? One of the most I'd say like present experiences just like the act of let's say doing an expense report.

So, we'll we'll go there. We'll talk about paying bills. We'll talk about closing your books, right? Um for many people, doing your expenses like just the worst hour of your month, right? And if you think about it, it's sort of nuts that everyone accepts as normal that some company somewhere is going to issue you or your employee a card. Or your expense policy is not going to drive that the thing actually works. You're going to pay for a client dinner, you're going to get a piece of paper, then you're going to go into another system maintained by an entirely different company, and you the employee are going to go manually do your expenses yourself.

Kind of a waste of time. You could do it that day, you probably do it a month later, and it's an hour of your time wasted. Someone in another city or state reviews this thing, it's a whole rigmarole. At Ramp, we fuse all of it, right? And so we issue smart cards. Your expense policy drives how the thing actually behaves. You tap it, we check in real time is it in or out of policy. If it is, we pull the data from the merchant, we process the transaction, we write the memo, we push it into your accounting software, and it's done.

Zero-touch expenses. Similar for paying bills. Often if you're a small business, and let's say you receive an invoice from a vendor, it's 50 clicks and a lot of your time wasted for you or an AP clerk. You're checking who is this vendor, why do we owe them money, did they deliver the service that they promised they would? You're entering the itemized level details, and it could be 50 clicks before the time you're done. With Ramp, you upload it, we check all those things, right? Do you have a contract?

Was a service ultimately rendered? All the fields are entered for you, and if you go and change it, the next time you get a similar invoice, it's done correctly. And so the effect is actually like your bills are paid on time. If there's a lower cost way to do it, maybe you can earn cash back on it, or maybe you get better terms by paying early. We can do that automatically for you. And so the effect is is something more like if there's car companies interested, like a maybe a Tesla is is designed to not just get you from A to B, but to drive you there without you needing to like, you know, spend your focus on it.

Ramp is trying to do this for your financial processes, and the effect is if you're a CFO, it gives you one place where all of the funds that are moving inside of your organization are being tracked, or being accounted for, and ultimately [snorts] we're recommending the next time where you can get more utility to every dollar that's flowing through your org or hour is like how you can think about you describe the mission inside the company though? So like something that's very common obviously one of my favorite examples of this is like Steve Jobs, you know, would describe what he wanted to do.

He said he used the same phrase when he was in his 20s, he used the same phrase when he was in his 50s, he says insanely great products. He would 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 Tobi Lutke from Shopify. The way I would think about the mission of his company and the way it's spread throughout 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?

I think our mission is endless, right? It is to help every business owner get more out of every dollar and 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 have passed through your organization, your organization, your organization, how do we make sure that few will 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, industry, industry, which is where we started, even just 7 years ago, years ago, years ago, everyone had agreed that the best way to earn business was through these points and rewards programs.

Go spend more money, you can earn points and multipliers will have your back. And it was I think exactly the opposite of what most business owners and CFOs that I knew wanted. They actually wanted more in their bank account, and they wanted their employees spending less time on this stuff. And so simply by inverting that primary assumption and saying, what if instead of going and trying to get you to be a little bit worse off by spending more than you intended, what if I worked really hard to help you spend less?

It leads you to answer different kinds of questions. It's part of why we're the first in the industry to go look at expenses and say like, why are why are there two systems involved in buying every single thing you do? you do? you do? It's part of why we said like, why do you need another different tool for bill payments? Why do you need another one for procurement? Why do you need another one for for for treasury? And ultimately where where it's led us is to build better infrastructure and kind of the substrate where your your dollars are moving through it.

But again, I I care less about what are the dollars we're moving, but actually how do we get more value from every movement that's occurring. occurring. occurring. So can I think of the North Star that you're working backwards from? Right, when you guys are talking about I'm going to build we're going to build new products new features. The question you ask yourself first is like, is this saving our customers either time or money? That's right. That's right. That's right. Correct. Okay, so That's the North Star you're working backwards from.

backwards from. backwards from. Yeah. That is exactly right. And and I I I think a lot of it too like I've [snorts] [snorts] [snorts] been a been a been a I mean a huge fan of founders and what you've been building for years. Like I I think of Elon's algorithm as one that has been incredibly motivating and orienting and clarifying for us. Right, with [snorts] every process of money movement or allocation of resources of resources of resources or measurement of of of money movement that occurs inside of companies, we are trying to apply a similar philosophy of asking, you know, whose requirement is this in the first place?

What is that we're trying to achieve? Do we need every single step? Is there a way to simplify the process? Can we cut out unnecessary parts? Can we accelerate the this the amount of time it takes to develop a feature? And then once we've simplified it, can we go and automate more parts of the process at the end? And what we were trying to do is take that methodology and that style of thinking thinking thinking and ask about every dollar or hour that organizations choose to spend and how can we build technologies that make it such that like you can just run your business more profitably with less effort.

That's really what we're trying to do and the products we make are frankly just scaffolding in a form factor for us to go deliver that service to our customers. I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that.

The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5% and one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the Ramp data, too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier.

Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp and you should, too. Go to ramp.com to learn how it can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places unexpected places unexpected places and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform.

AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water, and you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions.

So, you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin, and you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. So, AI is accelerating. You guys are adopting every single new technology possible you can. You guys are obsessed with this. A lot of late-night dinners we have is about this. My question though is like, I've met so many people at Ramp, like you guys hire for spikes, and you see this because so many people we either former founders that now work in Ramp or used 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, 2 years ago? There's [snorts] a few things that I think are evolving with with AI. One, uh just the the power laws are getting more extreme in the same way.

Um uh companies are getting larger. The speed to which companies are 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 100 times as effective. It could be a thousand times as effective in a particular area. So, I think finding people people 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 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 it used to be able to do, right? To to explain a bit more of what what I mean, [snorts] [snorts] [snorts] large language models have read more lines of code than any engineer alive, right? They've read more medical case text than any doctor alive. They've read more more more company filings company filings 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 going and do this. And in a way, like I think a lot of work over the past 100 years was you would have some craft or subject matter expertise that you were very very good at. at. at. But once you hit kind of the boundary, right? You were a great engineer, but you enter into design, you say, you can have your intuition, but ask the designer, right?

Or you can have your ideas, but go ask someone who's skilled at sales. At sales. And now, if you were stubborn enough and pushing and willing to start to go build systems, you can extend your boundaries. So the the positive interpretation is you're not geeked up and you can do a lot more. But I think the more interesting interpretation for people building businesses businesses businesses is is is first, if you find really determined people with a high level of determination and an aptitude just like a drive, these people can do far more than they ever used to be able to do.

So it's not restricted just to specific spikes. And then I think it leads you to question you design organizations with lots of sub specialties, which can lead to walls and barriers and things that get lost between organizations. And I think you can radically simplify. Wait, what what does that mean? The barriers between organizations? I'll put it this way. When Ramp was, call it 10 people, and you ask people, you know, where do you work? Or or 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 and you know, I work at Ramp and I'm in the sales team. And you start seeing these different divisions as grow. But once you start getting to like 200 or 500 people, you start hearing this inversion and identity. People say, you know, I'm a sales person at Ramp. I'm a designer at Ramp. They start to identify by their craft and what they do and what they were asked to do. They interact with mostly people who are in their craft.

Uh sales people talk with other sales people 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 cuz 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 customers, um that helps them track outreach, that helps them write with a better pitch on the first go.

Uh and these are real tools that you can build for people today. I think you start seeing fewer types of specialties within organizations and it's leading uh I think a lot of organizations right now to question, to question, to question, uh do I have the right or shape of an organization for the world that we're starting to enter into? It's I I just find this whole field really interesting right now. right now. right now. I want to go to the shape of organization if you think you need to change it or not.

You So, what I'm understanding from what you're saying is like essentially, you're looking right now in this age, you should just find the highest agency person possible for what you're trying to do inside your company. I have a question for you. How do you find high agency people right now when you guys are hiring? I just saw a clip from this podcast which actually we like. It was Toby talking about this. And he's like, listen, I'm a high school dropout. The idea that I'm going to like ask for your credentials would be like completely ironic.

And the way Shopify does it is when they're interviewing, he's like, I want you to tell me your life story. And in your life story, you're going if you're a high agency person, you're going to have examples of this thing I ran into this blockade and this is what I did to get over it. And so they have high agency people reveal themselves through the telling of their life story. How do you do it? There are two things that I'm generally looking for, right? One, I completely agree with Toby.

I think you're trying to look for some evidence of a spike or some level of exceptional drive. I think that there are many people in certain fields that can be top 1% or 0.1% in some field, but most of most are not. And I think that if folks are, there's usually some evidence to some degree somewhere in the past that you can find. When I think about a a couple of these things, uh you know, I think about there's an engineer engineer engineer uh and actually a whole litany now, a whole community of people at Ramp who uh we found them because you know, when they were 15 years old, they were paying playing like 80 hours, 100 hours a week just on Minecraft.

And a few of them were known for building these private Minecraft uh servers that were so entertaining other kids would love you know, one of them paid his way through college, hundreds of thousands of dollars by making something that was entertaining like he became like a small business person uh when he was quite literally very small. Uh you know, and it turns out he knew all the other um you know, Minecraft developers. And you find these people he would have missed. Like I think that a lot of traditional ways of looking for employees would go and say, "Oh, they don't have a college degree.

They aren't well-rounded in all these ways." But he has this incredible focus and drive. And if you talk to the other folks who are in the community at the time, people say like he was incredibly obsessive. He was super detailed and he was able to to bend the API to do things that we didn't know it could do because he was so discerning. And I I think you can often find um people with incredible spikes. Um sometimes it's through video games, sometimes it's through sports, who has the drive to go and be that good.

It can be through grades. Um it can be by uh people who didn't have any of these credentials somehow are out there making and putting out incredible work. Like I think even you know, just about you, I think you just sat down one day a decade ago and you said like I want to make incredible podcast. And for [snorts] years and years and years you were working on this and I I just remember meeting a lot of folks who just kept talking about like there's this guy making Founders podcast and it's really good.

You look to the it's all to say I'm less interested in what is the resume. I'm far more interested in like proof of work. It can be an award, it can be something you built, it can be like a great work that you read and say this is electric. And so often I think I'm really looking for signs of that and you can find that I think by by searching of like where is work, where are people producing interesting, you know, achievements, awards, bodies of work and actually starting and looking for that.

And so part of our hiring process is actually going and just trying to trying to trying to look for people who are very active on on GitHub. We're trying to meet people who like were leaders in like different bizarre fringe communities. And it turns out too like even if you have a really intensive interview process and you you you have like 10 rounds of interviews, right? And you interview someone for 15 hours, it turns out in two business days of working with someone, you're going to have more information about working with that person.

So we rely a lot on referrals. We try to find people where who have maybe some asymmetric information about who someone actually is versus who they present to be. I think the next thing which I specifically spend a lot of time looking for is you know, look, there's a lot of incredible things to work on in the world, right? I shouldn't be so arrogant to assume that people need to want to work for for Ramp or whatever it is that we're working on. Or you can be working on making humanity multi-planetary.

You can be working on artificial general intelligence. Why should I assume people should be interested in what we're doing? And I think a lot of that starts with asking what is their actual motivation. I think in some sense like you and I like we only live our lives, right? Everyone in some sense is the hero of their own journey, of their own story, and try to spend a lot of time, you know, forget even some of the capabilities, but like what does someone want independence of what Ramp will do in 5, 10, 15 years?

Where do they hope to be in 5, 10, 15 years? What drives them? What motivates them? Does that coincide and can I see and understand how it could coincide or present how, you know, me saying, "Actually, please spend years of your life working on this mission and I'll try to convince you why it's worthwhile." If there isn't a clear sign of evidence of why they might want the same thing and how it can connect, like don't worry about it. Don't waste your time. And so, those are the two things that I spend a lot of time looking for when I'm interviewing people.

people. people. That brings something I thought to my mind. I just had a conversation with Gustav, who's the co-CEO of Spotify, and one thing that's remarkable about him is like he start he had a startup, sold a startup, then goes to work for Spotify, then works there for 18 years, then becomes the co-CEO. And if you look at the top leadership in Spotify, it's usually I think he said something like a decade is the average that they've been working together. And on the other end, you have 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 in like your your the top people in your company or do you like encourage turnover? Do you want to keep the the core current product kernel team together? Like how do you think about that? about that? about that? 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 staff 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 them. And generally, people are not recruiting people for their internship program until their junior year or their junior summer, but you 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 people and by the way other freshman 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 on the market by their junior summer or after they've been working for 5 years it's priced in you're competing straight up with with with quant firms AI labs whoever you name it people are paying top dollar for folks but that early in career is when people don't have a resume you can start to go and break down actually you can find signs of incredible aptitude drive and potential for performance early on and start to build an affinity.

So we try to find those folks and give them a lot more responsibility than maybe they're used to and when they work for quite a number of hours and do great things despite their age and then when they've built experience earlier in your company than they would have otherwise they want to stay they want to build it and that leads me to my actual goal is I want to work very early with people and I want to work with them for a long long long time cuz I think when you've built the trust and you understand you know how to complete each other's sentences without you know the other needing to go do it you're able to rely on each other you're able to move faster and you're able to communicate far more in a shorter period of time which leads you to act with higher higher velocity.

It's almost like an ESP that develops. So So So we were just talking before recorded that few days ago I recorded Mr. Beast episode that can be out for several months for reasons that we can't disclose and what's fascinating about him and I've got I spent a bunch of time with him is he has this thing where it's just like just like just like he has almost like a like he there's certain the people who have worked with him so long to the point where they used to live with him and then spend every waking hour with him and he's like now you're talking about 100 hours and some cases, this is like well over even 10,000 hours that they've spent working together.

And he says like at his operations guy, I think his name's Tyler, if I remember correctly, he can like walk on a set that just like the one you're on right now that Tyler does, and before Mr. Beast like looks at something or opens his mouth, Tyler's like, "I already know what you're going to say. I did this reason for it, that light's over here for this. This camera's actually here. You think it should be over there, but the reason it's not over there is because I have I positioned it here, it lets me shoot into here." And then he doesn't have to say anything.

He's like, "That's exactly what I would have done if I knew that." And he's he's says like it's excessively important. He's like, and then he had a great line. He's like, "You don't get there in 100 hours. Yeah. There is something special about this like I I talked to Charlie Munger. I went to Charlie Munger's house right before he died. And the the fascinating thing we one of the questions that one of these other entrepreneurs who would ask him is like, "Well, how often do you talk to Buffett these days?" And he's like, "We got We talked so much, we got to the point where he We didn't have to call each other anymore." Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And his whole point was just like, "I already know Buffett knows he used like he used to organize his thoughts with me. Now he knows what I'm going to say." So, he could be like, "Oh, I should pick up the phone and call Charlie." And then have the conversation in his head without actually having the conversation. conversation. conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It allows, I think, a much more pure pursuits of the mission cuz you understand why like what each other are pursuing, what that mission actually means, what the impact is if you're successful, and you also know what you are excellent at, and you can take uh and push forward, and what you can rely on another person to do with you.

And I I think it leads to these effects where you see some companies when you have a really strong culture, you have a really strong uh trust. It's not necessarily that the talent level is different, it's that in every single hour, the amount of throughput that organization gets is radically higher. Uh and so, I I think some form of both is what we're trying to pursue. And then last, look, I I think one of the most damaging things you can do to an organization uh is if there are folks who are getting paid similarly, have similar ownership, and are just not pulling their weight.

Because I think it leads to this like very tough quite question, and and fair one for folks of like if I'm busting my ass and working super hard and like, you know, giving up on all the things that that that I am and like you're not you know, there's all these folks free riding riding riding and you're not enforcing high standards. Why should Why should we obsess so much over over over reaching our higher potential? This organization doesn't doesn't seem to demonstrate a real respect for respect for respect for the pursuit of higher and higher standards and an intolerance for anything less than giving your best.

Like ultimately, I want to win, but what motivates and drives me and most people at Ramp is this belief that every day we can wake up and actually get a little bit better, drive a little bit more impact, get better at the things that we do. I think when you have an organization filled with people who share those set of beliefs, iron sharpens iron, you build better products faster and and so, you know, my whole job, like I don't believe I'm the smartest person at Ramp.

Not even close, sadly, sadly, sadly, at this point. My job is to try to create the conditions for people to do their lives work and that involves finding great people, making Ramp the kind of place that people want to come and do that great work and then once they're here, ensuring that they're able to do incredible work, make decisions quickly, see if they're right or or wrong fast and get products into people's hands and move. That's my job, is to unblock these other people. other people.

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Learn how they can help your business today by going to deel.com/sendora. deel.com/sendora. deel.com/sendora. That is deel.com/sendora. Ramps was 6 years old 7 How many years right now? I know you do the day thing, but how many years? It's just over 7 years or 2,620 days in case you were curious. There you go. So, 7 years ago and you guys had this from day one where like, you know, you're doing expense management, corporate cards, B2B, but you guys had a like a love and insistence on like elegance of design, almost like a consumer level that you didn't see in B2B software, which is still talked about to this day and has been copied by many other companies.

Sure. But you got I think that just speaks to you like well well, if we're if we want to have excellent standards, I'm going to quote Toby for the third time in this podcast, but he even goes, "I hate these goddamn Norman doors." And I had to He has thick accent. I was like, "What What is that?" I didn't know what it was. And it's a door where you can't tell if you can push or pull. Exactly. So, he's like, "I can't have shitty design things." So, he had them removed from the Shopify offices cuz he's like, "That design falls below the engineering standards that I'm trying to get to like I want spread and like we have to adhere to." And I love this idea of like the one the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

It's totally right and it's funny like a group of designers were were were hanging out the other day and and I found myself in a very funny conversations. Have you ever used a Breville toaster? Breville toaster? Breville toaster? No. No. No. You care about design. You're meeting all these people. You should buy a Breville toaster. Uh so, uh one of the big problems, right, in enterprise software and a lot of B2B software is it starts out clean and elegant. There is a bunch of businesses who love the product.

Uh they start serving more customers and they have more requirements and they have more ideas. And before you know it, you end up [snorts] with these like disaster of B2B softwares which require like, you know, a PhD to learn how to use uh these tools. Um people who will maintain your database. Uh they're horrible to use and as a result you never want to go login and you can kind of name uh what are the software is and uh for sales people, for HR people, for finance people, you name it, they're horrible.

That's uh I I think uh a lot of how people would describe B2B software. Let's Let's go back to toasting, right? If you were to go ask people what do you want in a toaster or maybe in a microwave, they might say, "Well, um I like toast but I sometimes I I I want to reheat pizza. Um I should have like a reheat frozen pizza mode. Uh or maybe um you know, you're you're cooking stuff in you want it to be more like an oven uh or you want to make popcorn and it's in you know, a toaster/microwave and all these kind of things." And before you know it, you end up with these toasters filled with buttons and buttons and buttons and knobs and dials and it's super it's super crazy, right?

And I think that that is quite literally asking customers what do they want and building exactly that. The Breville toaster I find is very very interesting. [snorts] [snorts] [snorts] I think there was an incredible designer there uh who thought about things maybe like Toby did with with the Norman doors. doors. doors. What he started doing is try to observe people toasting things. And if you watch people toast things, what they actually are doing it basically falls into two categories. You hit start and either uh you've undercooked uh the toast and you need to put it back in for another cycle or you've overdone it and it's like you need to start over and it's like horrible.

And so, if you look at that, there really is only a few buttons and one of the four buttons I think on there is a button called a bit more. The reason it goes back to that that is actually one of the most dominant things and no one would ask you, right, for a bit more. They just want the perfect level of toast and it's hard to kind of know that and so they built that in. And I think that great design is following an understanding.

It is like no one is coming to Ramp saying like I want to buy a credit card or can you build me a better expense app? Like I don't think people should do expense reports. It's crazy. All the the data is digital in the first place. You were you're an adult, you know, who's, you know, allowed to buy things on behalf of your company. Expenses should do themselves, right? If we have a world the computers can think, your books should close themselves, right? And so a lot of what we're trying to do was not be stuck in the form factor of what is the product we're trying to solve but like what are we trying to deliver for customers?

We are trying [snorts] to to deliver a business that is easier to run, that is more profitable, that is not I don't know, distracting you with like at work. And so I'm happy it's manifested in terms of people saying like Ramp is easy to use intuitive, but like I think if you actually respect people's time and care about what they're doing, like [snorts] [snorts] [snorts] you have to be asking these kind of questions. You have to be interested in these kind of products. This leads me to another question.

How do you align incentives with your customers? One of my favorite lines in the history of entrepreneurship comes from from from Henry Ford. He says money comes naturally as a result of service. So in his organization he's like we're going to focus on serving the customers and the money will take care of itself as long as you do that. Me and you were at an event, we were talking at an event together, I don't know, like 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? 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, um sorry if any administrators are listening to it.

There was like 20 of them and like I couldn't remember any of them, right? And what [snorts] we tried to do at the very start of the company was ask like what are the things the very few things that all of us really agree with. And if we don't all strongly feel this and agree 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?

customers spending? customers spending? And how many did we block? How many dollars did we prevent from going out going out 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 as part of why we move funds and then we explicitly create measurements on how many like how many dollars did we block?

block? block? How many expense reports did we automate? All that. And then all we do each and every month is look at the scoreboard and we ask did we save in aggregate customers more money? money? money? Did we save them more time? And for individual customers, did the experience get better or worse? And our job is to make sure the products that we build ultimately ladder back to that goal. For example, automating merchant matching or being able to go and take like often if you look at your credit card statement today for most people it's like a string of text and it's inscrutable.

It'll say like UBR star 478 and you have finance people whose time is wasted running pivot tables to tell you oh that's Uber and we spent you know $50,000 this month at Uber. With Ramp part of why we built that was we discovered our end customers their finance teams were just going and trying to do all these transformations and they say oh we spent money at Uber. Here's what they send. So, part of what we did was after measuring, right, where were people going to spend their time, we built software to go and automate that for people.

Okay, we've saved an hour here for them. We've saved this hour for 20,000 other uh, companies. How do we start adding more features and compounding? And so, you flash forward to 7 years today, any customer you talk to who uses Ramp will tell you like, this thing saved me way more hours than I expected it to. It saved me time in areas I didn't expect. I was able to block transactions so when I canceled my subscription to some SaaS software and I deactivated that merchant just on the card, it didn't go through.

We are tracking those religiously uh, across the company to try to go and get better at it each and every month. And as good as Ramp is, I don't think as as good as Ramp is, I don't think it's good enough. I think we can do a lot more just to cut out waste and wasted motion. wasted motion. wasted motion. A question on the scoreboard, they use the term scoreboard. How is this presented to your team? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is it an actual scoreboard inside of Ramp?

Ramp? Ramp? Yes. Yeah, every I mean, you can get it any any minute or or second of the day if you go on to our internal dashboards or um, you can query uh, you know, ask one of our internal agents for Ramp research any question you want. Uh, how many how many uh, dollars uh, and hours did we save a specific customer? Show me all the ways in a tally. But it effectively it's a data table. But it's inside a dashboard on their computer? computer? computer?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Have you ever thought about putting it on the like a making a giant version on the wall? the wall? the wall? It's it's it's it's it's on the wall. Um, it's reported out uh, in the the the largest channels in Slack. It's things that we talk about frankly every month. Um, and it's part of why even too, uh, even on the first slide, uh, if we're meeting with a new potential prospect, we talk not just about how many dollars, how many customers are using us, how many dollars we move, but how many fewer dollars and hours have we helped organizations spend.

organizations spend. organizations spend. Yeah, I think putting that data in front constantly reminding and putting in front of your employees is super uh, important. There was this uh, I did this episode on Ken Griffin from Citadel. And he's I think he was giving this lecture at Yale or maybe at Stanford and he thought it was interesting. He went to he actually got the idea from Saudi Aramco. Aramco. Aramco. Yeah. And he's like, you know, there's a there's not like you said, if you have 20 variables, it's too many.

Six, five, whatever it is. So, Saudi would put up like the handful of things that were so most important, like maybe how much oil they drilled that day or how many they shipped or whatever the case was. And it was a giant screen in their headquarters. And at the time, I think Ken was having an issue with risk, and he identified a handful of things that we need to monitor, and he he said he drastically drastically drastically uh reduced their risk by just putting it I think at the time Citadel was in Chicago between these giant dashboard like scoreboard in the office where everybody could see it.

It's just constant reminders so you can't run from it. it. it. That's it. And and it comes back to like at the end of the day, like people love complexity in new things and new products and and the world is changing. There's there's nothing wrong with that. Like in some sense, a company is just a fiction. You make some filings somewhere and you say, "We're a corporation today, you know, even though we're just two people sitting around a couch, and we have a few dollars in a bank account." Right?

And if these fictions are intended to grow to hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands of people, people, people, it should be because there is some common purpose. There is something that in aggregate, the sum of the parts of all the people working together should be able to move something further faster than anyone alone could do. And so, I think part of the role of a leader, frankly, is to go and assert like, "How will we measure ourselves? If we are seeking to be our best and get better every day, uh how should we think about that?

And how can we understand our forward progress? What is the right scoreboard?" And so, yeah, we we spend an incredible amount of time uh on that. And at the end of the day, like look, I don't know what Ramp will look like exactly in 100 years, but I I think it just as it was true 100 years ago, people always wanted more uh out of every dollar and hour, I think people will absolutely want it uh in 100 years in whatever form that may take. Uh and so, I think Yeah, you're speaking to this Bezos idea where it's like Yeah.

the one of the smartest things a a company can do is like identify the things that don't change. And if you could he identified three at the beginning of Amazon and if you could invest heavily in them decade after decade because you know the customer is going to want lower prices, more selection, and faster delivery. That's it. That's it. And look, there there there's so much that's changing about the world and you know, we can talk about where what we're focused on and obsessed in and and some of the themes of themes of themes of of this decade, but I totally subscribe to that notion of you should be focusing on the timeless if you're trying to build an enduring brand.

Like I want this to be the last company ever work on and I want to work on this for the rest of my life. Like I I love building this thing. You know I was just at a question. Like I talked to founders and they want to tell talk me tell we talk about their company and like one of the first things I always ask is like is this the last is this your last company? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like that's the thing I'm super interested cuz then all the good things in life come compounding and like I get I was just at this dinner two nights ago and ran into the son of this guy I wound up being able to spend an hour with and just sold his company for like $50 I think he's like 77 or something like that and he started the company when he was 22.

So that means he's a 55 years of experience in the same company. same company. same company. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like those conversations are so full like insight per minute like you're not going to beat that at all. That's it. That's it. That's it. [snorts] [snorts] [snorts] You know, and you'll you'll see thing at a at a deeper level of depth and you know, it's fun. You know, you learn you know, all all that the scar tissue you have, the mistakes you made I think allow you to move with a lot more efficiency and and movement.

I am very skeptical of the statement that humans repeat throughout history that this time is different. Hm. Hm. Hm. Usually it's not different. I just was spending more time with Michael Dell the other day and I figured okay, you started the company when you were 19 you're in your 60s. He's had to manage and thrive through all these different technological revolutions and everything else. I go, Michael, is Is time different? He goes, yes. I time is different." We had a wonderful conversation about it. So, I want to go back to AI AI AI has to I would imagine in your opinion, and I've spent enough time with you, I think I know the answer to this, but like I think it's going to change the shape of your organization.

Is it not? I think this is a super deep topic. And And maybe we'll just start at the highest level of like I I think you'd ask of like, "Does AI throw out all the fundamentals and lessons we learned about business?" And I I say this because like I'll encounter engineers every month, right? On one side, you have people who are like, you know, terrified, right? This is doom, and and and it's going to be kind of the end of business as we know it. At the other, you see almost this obsession, right?

With the labs and deep love of them, and look, I think there's something incredibly revolutionary going on. I think that some of the labs are going to be uh some of the best businesses created of all time, but the potential of AI is so great, it can blind people and ask is is it worth working on anything else? Should we even build a company if AGI is almost here, around the corner? And I think history offers some pretty interesting lessons around this. And maybe to use an example, let's talk about air conditioning.

It's 95° outside. We're not sitting here talking about like the great robber baron, you know, families of the air conditioning industry, right? And these great family fortunes of people who created it. And at the same time, like air conditioning, like I was born in Las Vegas, that city wouldn't exist if not for the air conditioner. You live in Miami, right? There's entire ecosystems. And think about the value that was created out of the ecosystems far exceeded the value that was captured by the people who invented this technology.

And I think with artificial intelligence, don't be wrong, I think that this is going to be one of the most revolutionary transformations in our life. I think on the scale beyond the industrial revolution, making goods plentiful, and it will make services plentiful. I think it is interesting to go work on creating a general intelligence that is artificial for the world, but I think one of the more interesting questions uh to be asking is in a world in which uh intelligence is very plentiful, in which intelligence is accessible, in which intelligence is cheap, what should you build?

What kind of businesses are now possible? Uh just as there were cities and things created that were not possible before, maybe the air conditioner and something as dull as that. I think that there entire things that we can go do uh when you have intelligence that this is this is accessible. accessible. accessible. Come back to us. In some sense, like you and I are a form of general intelligence, right? We have kind of our evolved monkey brains um and and and we've kind of seen over the course of thousands of years how does a general intelligence like to do things?

And it turns out that general intelligences like to pay for things. They will hire other types of intelligences to go do this. And you can think about payments almost as a form of the like a distributed ledger to manage resources, work, you know, there's records around this, and there's a reallocation of of these types of resources. And I think part of why we are so interested in payments in in this kind of world is I think when you have an explosion of intelligence, and it's more accessible than ever, I think you will have an explosion of payments, whether it's people or agents on behalf of people, or even agents in general making purchases.

And I think you'll need a better substrate and a form factor to go track and control and get more value out of every dollar an hour. And so, a lot of what we're focused on right now is how do you build the scaffolding and these systems for organizations to manage not just the dollars they're spending on people and things, but the dollars they're ultimately spending towards resources, towards tokens. Talk about what you guys are doing with Token Spend. This is very interesting. Uh like I want to be clear, like this is not just some esoteric science fiction topic, right?

Like just to observe it, like I don't know, let's take Anthropic. 3 years ago, they made their first dollar. dollar. dollar. Uh while we're recording this, um the rumor is uh the run rate revenue is over 50 billion dollars a year. And if you play out what they and OpenAI, just the two labs, are on track to do in revenue in call it a year's time, I think it'd be reasonably conservative at this point to say they're going to pass more than $300 billion a year revenue, which is like 1% of the entire gross domestic product of the United States is spent on token spend.

And this type of spend, unlike other types of software, does not have no marginal costs. Every job you're doing has a marginal cost. And I think in a world where before it was fine for a CFO to go and say, "I'm just going to you know, manage my payroll, and I have a philosophy about how I'm going to decide how much to spend on that. I'm going to manage my vendors." I think there's going to be a third mega category created around how do we manage knowledge work that will be done on behalf of organizations and done through these tokens.

Part of why we're so focused on this is our customers are incredible early adopters of this. There are many reasons why Ramp is doubling its revenue each year. This is one of them, the growth of these categories. But these businesses are trying to better manage the spend. Like one of our customers is Uber, who, you know, is prior to going and adopting, but they they had mentioned that their CTO had had said publicly that in a few months of the year they had spent the entire budget they had allocated for AI spend in a quarter.

No one has budget like I can tell you 5 years ago no company budgeted for this type of spend. And by the way, like a lot of this is really high returning, but not all spend is treated equal. And so part of what we're doing on behalf of our customers is helping them understand where did they spend on? Was this opex spend? Was this R&D spend? Who spent it? What was the return on that? And I think the really interesting thing that's happening right now is look, most of the spend is concentrated in frontier models, right?

These are sort of code word for the most advanced model that is commercially accessible and maybe use this for your most difficult types of ask. And the really interesting thing going on and and as this is going to you you have this this the labs don't like the the notion that these that these labs can be distilled. As you've noticed it's not one super model, you know, there's a great model and a few weeks later this company comes out with a model that's almost as good or this company has a model that's as good as for this task or that and it's constantly kind of moving.

And what we've observed is about six months after the latest and greatest model comes out, you'll have an open suite model that is just as good and maybe costs right 1/100 to go and use it. And so it begs the question of, you know, you can use this advanced alien intelligence to edit your email, but perhaps right you know, you you could route these tasks to these lower cost models. And so part of what we and others are are focused on is delivering services like token spend management, right?

So go and observe what was requested, what was the output and were there better ways to go route this type of work as it's moving outside of just engineering to general finances. And so that's a major area. There's a gentic spend. One way of thinking about this is like you and I in in some sense are limited agents of our companies, right? If I'm on business, I have the limited agency to book a hotel and take an Uber and go to dinner, but I can't just buy like a $2 million Ferrari because I feel like it.

I would probably need the CFO and maybe the board to sign off. Or if I worked with you, we're we're lucky enough to have this partnership with the Mon so they let us film here when we're in New York in the beautiful Mon. I don't think you would appreciate if I worked at Ramp if I was booking the Mon hotel. Probably not. Probably not. Probably not. You know, unless you close some great deals in which case we can talk what I'm getting at is like we we built a structure for organizations to delegate authority to spend on certain types of things is like a core to how the product works.

And already today there are organizations that are saying, "You know what? Like we auto renew $10 million of software every single year. And my process today is ask somebody in like this department or that department to go review and say like do we still need it?" And they need to go ask it's like hey we're paying for a thousand licenses who's logging in or not. And I will submit to you that in a few years and frankly already we're seeing organizations do this are tracking this programmatically, right?

They'll go and pull the data and see all right we paid for a thousand seats how many people actually logged in? This rate that we're getting maybe we're getting charged $100 per seat. Ramp can show them actually your price per seat is lower or higher than what the rest of the market is doing and I think that very quickly you'll have agents negotiating with agents to buy things on behalf of companies cuz in some sense it's just your policies that people are applying to govern what you're going to spend on and I think that's going to become software and so part of what we're working to do is on one side manage the spend where you are actually just paying for types of compute for all types of work.

On the other side allowing intelligence to allocate resources for you, you know, not just digitally log and help you close the books but over time can you start to build an operating system that allows organizations to frankly make sure the most worthwhile cause and the highest return on the dollar gets the dollar. The best businesses I've studied all figured out the same thing early. Your team is only as good as the information they're working from and today that team includes people and agents but most generic agents only have limited information and don't know the most important aspects of your business like your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter and what didn't.

This is what HubSpot fixes. It connects AI to your real customer data. So when you ask AI to write an email it knows this customer asked about pricing three weeks ago. It knows what campaign brought them in and it knows that customer already contacted support twice this month. And that changes everything for a startup. When you're hiring, new team members can see how you actually sell. When you're fundraising, your data is clean and ready. And when you're scaling, you're building on something designed to grow with you, not rebuilding from scratch.

It's the same platform that more than 300 startups who have grown to over a billion dollars in valuation grew their businesses on. And now, HubSpot for Startups offers the service at up to 90% discount exclusively for eligible startups. Visit hubspot.com/startups to learn more. That is hubspot.com/startups. I just had this fascinating conversation with Jared Kushner and he talks about when he's doing these like he he you know, he's negotiating trying to negotiate these peace agreements. He doesn't start with like, "Okay, let's like do like the smallest thing the smallest thing we could do.

Let's start with the most ideal situation and work backwards from that." And he finds he actually has more success swinging for like the fences than if like, "Hey, I just want you to stop doing you know, this one little thing." My question to you is like as Ramp evolves and these new technologies uh you're taking advantage of all the the new latest technology uh developments, in your mind then, like what is it's not there now, but it like what is the ideal product? Is it literally self-driving money?

It's like you're not buying seats, seats, seats, software, it's you're buying work? What is it to you? I think that's really well said, right? I'll just start with like who we serve today, right? A lot of our customers or uh business owners and finance organizations. And I think like I I remember meeting a lot of friends, right? Who are studying accounting and finance and you know, back in college like I remember that the things you 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. be. 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 wrote 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 of what we're doing is one, just collapsing the number of tools that organizations need so it's easier to monitor, but two, ultimately when you have better tools that are generating, moving the payments, but also like have the audit trail, know your policy is connected to your your full financial data so it can know this dollar did it did it make you money or was it neutral or did you waste money by spending on this?

this? this? Then suddenly, all right, the job starts to change from most of your time is looking backwards and very little is actually in the interesting stuff to like finally, if you're a business owner or if you're leading the finances of an organization, you can actually spend most of your time on like, "Who is our customer? What are the great products that we're developing for them? Where should the next dollar actually be going and how do we actually allocate the resources going forward?" And so I think for me, where this turns into and where it gets interesting is your point is like, "Yes, like it is it is selling like this wrote low value work is done for you." for you." for you." Yes, you can go and turn on Ramp and all of these things maybe maybe you're a small business owner and you have an obsession maybe you you know how to make a great podcast, but you don't care at all, right, as to like, "I don't know how to keep books or pay, you know, vendors at the lowest cost or optimize my working capital.

And you can hire Ramp to do that for you and with you. And that's what we're working towards. Like I I I I I share a lot of common beliefs with folks like Toby who are trying to make entrepreneurship more accessible to people. I think people should be should be should be put in a position where technology and tools empower them to pursue their actual like missions and dreams and purposes purposes purposes versus getting clogged with all the tedious work that tends to drag most people down and I think defines most of corporate life today.

So, I think a lot of what we've talked about so far ties to this fact which is surprising and I don't know if you you you or Karim have talked about this publicly, but publicly, but publicly, but who you actually look at as the competitors to Ramp is not the typical people, you know, other people on the outside kind of group you together sometimes or compare and contrast you with. Your answer to that is that the labs. labs. labs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can you explain why?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, if you get down to it, there's this question of like what does Ramp sell? And I think early on we were bunched in with a lot of financial service providers. And and I understand that comparison kind of on the face of it. We move funds. We're we're we're we're quite good at it. And people are often coming from legacy tools and I I think that these [snorts] banks at the core, a lot of what financial institutions or folks engaged in the movement of money are selling to their end customers is money.

Right? They're selling you money. They are selling you rewards, right? A larger rebate on a purchase. They are selling you more working capital. They are selling you a loan, right? Um they're selling you a higher interest on your accounts and they compete often based off of price or brand or service or some form of who can convince you they're giving you the most money or for back and keep a reasonable margin. Ramp was very unusual in that from the get-go, really what we were trying to sell you was time.

was time. was time. We would move your funds, but the pain that people had was like it was a waste of everyone's time to do expense reports. It was a waste of time to go and have to tick and tie for every payment to close your books. Really what we're trying to go do is is automate and do the work around the money movement. It is all of the knowledge work and the business process that we are working to automate and help you get more value out of.

In some sense, it is a form of knowledge work and intelligence that we are serving and servicing for you. And I think that labs are in some sense the most comparable provider of this type of service. I think in some sense it could be labor, but it also could be knowledge work done in different ways. And so, one, I think it's incredibly exciting. I actually get very energized having like great competitors and having great organizations to compete with. I think iron sharpens iron, and it gets forces people to ask deeper questions, to get off their ass and not be lazy, and to go build something great every single day and week.

And so, I think I'm having some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. Like we've had five quarters in a row of accelerating revenue growth while you know, doubling the business and doing it on a multi-billion dollar scale. And so, that part of it has been incredibly energizing. At the other side of it, you need to think really carefully of you know, these organizations and I think community is on the exponential. Just a few years ago, we were all shocked when AI could generate a paragraph that sort of made sense.

It might have had some typos or things that were weird, but it seemed sort of human. You know, just a few years later, people quibble, you get a 100 page dossier, and some footnote is offered hallucinated. And I I I don't think there's any sign the stuff is slowing down. If you really internalize of what are the capabilities of some of these organizations, I think it calls into question of if you assume intelligence will be functionally free in some sense, what is unique and how do we make sure we're adding durable and differentiated value compared to these organizations.

And so look at it's it's it's super exciting. I think it leads us to go really deep and ensure that we are providing a different sort of value. I think a lot of how we do that for organizations is by being the layer where money movement is actually occurring. You know, I think in some orgs maybe you can determine months ago we wasted funds and with Ramp we're building kind of the the circulation and connective tissue so you can stop dollars from leaving before they ever go out.

And so I think that it tends to feel much more like an operating system in connecting to the movement of funds, but I think it they are some of the most exciting competitors for all types of businesses. businesses. businesses. I think we've ever seen. Thank you put forth a very optimistic case for entrepreneurs. This is awesome. Thanks for taking the time to do it. Thanks a lot, David. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast founders.

For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.