I built a billion dollar company in 18 months

Want to research million-dollar opportunities like Eric did with Ramp? Get Sam's Company Research Playbook: https://clickhubspot.com/kbf Episode 737: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) sits down with Eric Glyman ( https://x.com/eglyman ) about how he built a unicorn in less than 2 years. — Show Notes: (0:00) $100M in 18 months (4:13) The Ramp business model (8:58) Moving fast (15:29) IDEA: Manufactured homes (18:24) IDEA: Creator credit card (21:51) The crazy history of credit in America (28:15) Building a 100-year company (31:20) Favorite business biographies (40:03) Auditing your weaknesses — Links: • Ramp - https://ramp.com — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  Can you build a billion dollar company in only 18 months? Today's guest, his name is Eric Lyman. He's a buddy of mine who started a company called Ramp. And him and his co-founder, they asked themselves this question before they started the company. They wanted to get to a billion dollar valuation in only 18 months and they reverse engineered it. And I'd heard him tell this story before, but he didn't really like give a lot of details on it. And I thought it was amazing, the fact that they were this bold and then they actually pulled it off. So the company is worth something like $20 billion now and they're only, I think, six years old. And so give this episode a listen. Let me know what you think. Again, Eric Lyman of Ramp is on today's episode of My First Million.

• 0:47Sam Parr?

  You said something that was like pretty crazy. It was, I want to get, I want to build a billion dollar company in 18 months.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  In 18 months, yeah.

• 0:54Sam Parr?

  And that was kind of shocking because that's like, I mean, that's crazy fast. Is that really what happened? You guys had that conversation?

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a real conversation.

• 1:02Sam Parr?

  That you guys didn't have, you and Kareem, were you on the same page?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  We, we wanted to go fast for sure. You know, I think like the world is moving faster than ever. We had already sold our first company and we were definitely like, neither of us came for a whole lot. We were comfortable and, you know, I think even at the time had already proven a couple of things out. And, you know, in some sense had left, like I was, I was a 26 year old, you know, senior director at Capital One. I think it was like the youngest person at that, that age, like we left a very good setups. And so we knew that if we wanted to leave, we wanted to go and make this company big and either make it huge quickly or fail really quickly. And so, yeah, Kareem really did have that conversation. I think he had it with Calvin, who, you know, later he cracked me up.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  I think when we finally did become a billion dollar company and it did occur in, in 2021. And so it was less than two years from incorporation of the company.

• 1:56Sam Parr?

  No shit, wait, two years after incorporation?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59Sam Parr?

  That's insane.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was crazy. You know, a lot, a lot of magical things happened in 2021, but it really did happen. And Calvin said, you know, look, it's best not to know the odds. You know, if I had looked it up and known, I would have seen that there was no company in New York's history ever. That was worth a billion dollars within 18 months or two years or three, but yeah.

• 2:19Sam Parr?

  What was your revenue when you, when you did that?

• 2:20Speaker 01

  I mean, in 2021, geez, that was, you gotta remember, this was like peak excitement in the market. I think we started that year. Maybe around 10 million in revenue, probably less.

• 2:34Sam Parr?

  Which is six months into the company, you're at a 10 million run rate?

• 2:37Speaker 01

  So let me back it up.

• 2:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  We incorporated the company in March of 2019. We launched it publicly in February of 2020. The pandemic hit, things slowed down, then ramp just started real accelerating. I think that year revenue grew something like 70 times year over year to the point where a small denominator, but we had hit, it was approaching 10 million a year before the company was out for even a year. And by the end of 2021, again, I think the multiples really hadn't changed too much, but the company ended with an $8.1 billion valuation and we were coming up to, but hadn't yet crossed 100 million a year in revenue. It was a crazy year.

• 3:20Sam Parr?

  So how many years until, how many months until 100 million run rate?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  We were one of the fastest ever. I mean, so if you go back to it, we, I think, announced it, I want to say in March of 2022, I think is when Paki McCormick discovered the company deeply, become a very good friend. I think wrote the article talking about it as well as the $8.1 billion valuation. I believe that was in March of 22. We launched in Feb of 2020. I think we hit our first, you know, million run rate sometime in the spring, maybe by early summer. And so if you look at the traditional charts, there's, it's now become a bit of a meme of like time from a million to 100 million in revenue. Our chart's actually wrong. That's from like time from incorporation.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  I want to say like 15 to 17 months from a million to 100 million. It was explosive.

• 4:16Sam Parr?

  That's insane. And like, I don't even know, I don't know anything about the finance industry or, I don't even know anything about your business model other than I use it.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:24Sam Parr?

  Like I know everything about personal finance apps. I'm a huge nerd in that, but I don't even know how, like you, you take a percentage of, of spend, I imagine, but I don't even understand, explain to me how that works.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  You know, I didn't know anything about it either until I sold my last company to Capital One and learned the business model. And so in financial services, there is particularly in the card space, there's two basic business models.

• 4:48Sam Parr?

  Credit cards.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Credit cards. There's two basic ways that they tend to make money. Number one is a transaction-based model where there's this thing called interchange. Every time a card is swiped, there's a series of payments. The merchant, rightfully so, gets the lion's share. And then folks involved in moving the money take a little bit. A little bit goes to, let's say, the merchant processor, the people who accept the cards, route it, and deal with all the back.

• 5:11Sam Parr?

  Who's an example of that company?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  That would be like a Stripe or Square, maybe Shopify.

• 5:15Sam Parr?

  And they take a huge percentage, right?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  So they collect it, but they don't keep a huge percentage.

• 5:19Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  So you might see headline on some of these sites, you know, 2.9% plus 40 cents or something like that. At the very end of the day, they might keep, you know, it varies anywhere from like 0.1 to 0.5% is ultimately their net take. But the gross is much higher because they're collecting. They also pay the networks. Well, so they have a few folks involved. They have the merchant bank. So you, as a customer, have banks that's, you know, it's deposited to some bank, which maybe you keep it there or you move it to your business's bank account. They'll keep a little bit, maybe 10 cents. Visa or a Master Card, they'll keep a little bit too, call it like 0.1 to 0.4%. And then the remainder tends to go to the issuer and the issuer processor. That's generally the people that

• 6:04Speaker 01

  you think of as like, people's name is on your card. It could be like a Chase, or it could be like a Ramp, or something like that, or a Capital One, if you have a Capital One card, or Wells Fargo, if you have that kind of a card. And so the issuer in interchange is traditionally keeping most of that interchange. And the reasons actually makes sense when you think about it, you know, especially in credit, they're taking on the risk. They're saying that merchant, we will pay you, you know, even if our customer doesn't pay us back, when you accept this payment, you are getting paid for it. And if the customer later defaults, that's on us. And so they're generally taking the credit risk. They have the operational costs of standing up the card programs. And actually, classically, if you look historically,

• 6:46Speaker 01

  these rates used to be very high. A lot of these came from like the old department stores in the early 1900s where you'd have like a bank setup shop, actually in the department stores, and interchange could be as high as 5 or 6%.

• 6:57Sam Parr?

  18 months in, at 100 million in revenue, how many employees did you have?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred, maybe two hundred.

• 7:03Sam Parr?

  Dude, so I don't, that's just like boggles my mind because

• 7:08Sam Parr?

  my company is, I think, two years old and we're small or it's a bootstrap company. We own the whole thing. And so I think we have fifteen or eighteen people. But when you're doing everything yourself as a bootstrap company, just like getting one or two hires a month is hard. I'm sure at Parabas you were feeling the same thing where just like the logistics of getting that many people.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:28Sam Parr?

  Just the day to day, like, does everyone have a computer? That's incredibly challenging. So that's ten people a month that you need to do that.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:36Sam Parr?

  It's kind of challenging to understand how, how fast that is.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  I mean, now we're over eleven hundred people. There can be single, you know, two week periods when we have forty to fifty people that start. You know, I totally agree with you. You definitely need great software and, you know, even to the point you'd said earlier, like you use Ramp, but don't, don't totally understand exactly how, how all this stuff works. I think there is in any business so much complexity in going and starting a company and operating and scaling it. Uh, and I think there's an entire class of tools that tend to be great business models and some of the fastest growing companies of the last few years uh, have actually been that, you know, you can look at like a ramp in the card space is what it's allowing you to scale up and down with full control, full visibility, all your expenses managed, your accounting managed.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Done, you don't need to think about it. In HR and payroll, Rippling is a great example where, you know, I think that they're eight years old. I think their last round.

• 8:31Sam Parr?

  Rippling?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Rippling, you know, in HR.

• 8:33Sam Parr?

  They're only eight years old?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  They're eight years old. They started in.

• 8:35Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. I was one of the first customers.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Maybe twenty sixteen, maybe nine, but you know, they're, they're not that old. And I think their last round, I want to say was at seventeen billion.

• 8:44Sam Parr?

  That's insane, right?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of these tools, HubSpot, you know, you, you mentioned them, like they're an incredible company that takes what used to be, there's lots of little paper cuts that generally need to deal with as a business owner and abstract those away. And so I think kind of these boring business models can actually be, uh, very good.

• 9:01Sam Parr?

  I think I've been able to grow into some of like my success a bit because this happens a little bit slower.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:06Sam Parr?

  When you're thirty two years old or whatever, and you have two hundred people or you have this valuation or whatever like that, it's a little bit overnight feeling. Did you have like weird feelings of like self-actualization of like, oh, my God, all I, what I wanted is actually here this fast. And I don't know if I'm actually ready to. Step into that position of or have this responsibility.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  There's always like imposter syndrome and you know, and I would say so there are a couple of things. I mean, we from early on designed the company explicitly around velocity. If you kind of step back and sort of look at the particular industry that we're playing in, not a joke, most of the founders of the companies that we compete with actually wore top hats. You know, they lived in the, you know,

• 9:51Sam Parr?

  Who? What do you mean?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  You know, like James Pierpont Morgan,

• 9:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Henry Wells, like, you know, you look at the people who started Amex, Citi, Chase, you know, nothing wrong with these businesses. In fact, there's a lot to love about them. They're enormous businesses, but you know, a lot of their fundamental edges were in long time enduring brands, unbelievable distribution, risk and underwriting, the benefits of scale and of time. But all of them moved very slowly. I think an analogy I like to use sometimes is like, you know, imagine that you wake up one day and you have to use like the computer or like the cell phone technology or like the tools that your parents used when they were your age. It'd be very like you couldn't do this podcast. It'd be very hard to run your business in that way. But if you woke up and you had to use their bank account or their credit card or debit card,

• 10:39Speaker 01

  you probably could, you know, not too bad. And I think it's sort of proof of like, not too much innovation has happened and the products haven't fundamentally evolved over the past 30, 40 years is, you know, from, you know, no phones to flip phones to computers that can think. And so a lot of our view was early on, we needed to count the days, move at incredible velocity and simply be designed to ship things faster. And so today we're 2,310 days old, we're six years.

• 11:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's insane, by the way, you just said that. You know, the day, I mean, that's just like a radical thing.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  It's, you know, and I remember in the early days, when you go back to that 18 month stat you were talking about at the beginning, you know, we were like, Hell bent on, okay, within 45 days, we want to be approved by the network. Within 60, we want to be approved by our bank. Within 70, we want to be funding our first transactions. We want to get this product in front of customers as fast as possible. And so a lot of what we were trying to do is just move very quickly. We had set goals that we wanted to grow the company 10% a week. You know, once you've got the scale, 20% a month.

• 11:45Sam Parr?

  Does that burn people out?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  It's very intense.

• 11:48Sam Parr?

  You don't have this typical personality type. Like usually people who succeed as fast as you have are very, very high on the disagreeable scale.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:58Sam Parr?

  You seem pretty easy to get along and you're very calm. I don't understand like how that personality type has like been able to grow this.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  My view is like, I don't, I'm not trying to find folks who are, you know, low cost, you know, push them to an extreme, burn them out. I would rather find people who like just find extreme joy in their craft and just set them up where they can be doing just that as much as possible all the time. But I think that you have to, if you want to move quickly, you can't do everything. There's only one or two things you can pick and you try to have like extreme focus as a company on that and just having an everyday, trying to just ask like, what are the things we can do to optimize just this one function?

• 12:39Sam Parr?

  All right, so I've built a few companies that have made a few million dollars a year and I've built two companies that have made tens of millions of dollars a year. And so I have a little bit of experience launching, building, creating new things. And I actually don't come up with a lot of original ideas. Instead, what I'm really, really good at, what my skill set is, is researching different ideas, different gaps in the market and reverse engineering companies. And I did invent this, by the way. We had this guy, Brad Jacobs, we talked to him on the podcast. He started like four or five different publicly traded companies where tens of billions of dollars each. He actually is the one who I learned how to do this from. And so with the team at HubSpot, we put together all of my research tactics, frameworks, techniques

• 13:20Sam Parr?

  on spotting different opportunities in the market, reverse engineering companies and figuring out exactly where opportunities are versus just coming up with a random silly idea and throwing it against the wall and hoping that it sticks. And so if you want to see my framework, you can check it out. The link is below in the YouTube description.

• 13:39Sam Parr?

  What businesses were you going to start instead of Ramp? So you had just sold Paribus, is it Paribus?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:44Sam Parr?

  Have you ever said, how much money did you make off that?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  We even, I mean, talked about it publicly, but it was mid eight figures.

• 13:49Sam Parr?

  You each walked away with that?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  No, that was the total deal.

• 13:51Sam Parr?

  The total.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  But we hadn't raised very much. I mean, we had.

• 13:54Sam Parr?

  There's three of y'all?

• 13:56Speaker 01

  It was really Kareem and I, you know, then, and, but we had raised something like $2 million at the time. And so there were some investors, but most of it went to founders and employees.

• 14:05Sam Parr?

  So it was enough that you're like, I'm good, potentially good for forever, depending on how I live, but I have enough. So you're sitting around and you're like at Capital One, doing your thing. What was your list of ideas that you guys were like scheming on where you're like, it could be this, it could be this. What if it was this and this angle? Like, what was that list?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  So.

• 14:23Sam Parr?

  I think everyone has a list.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. You go through all these different phases. So the first year, we were just dead set on, these people just changed our lives. We want to make sure that they feel incredibly good, actually, about this deal. So the first year, we actually didn't spend too much time at all. You know, we wanted to go and make sure there wasn't a failure to launch, like we didn't get crushed kind of by the weight of joining this 50,000 person company and that that.

• 14:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So you're just being a good seller.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which I think is good, but, but sort of like underrated, kind of the value of like integrity relationships, you know, you know.

• 14:55Sam Parr?

  That was important to me when I sold too.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 14:57Sam Parr?

  I was like, I remember thinking, I think they got the better of the deal, this or that. But I was like, you know, I'm happy, but I'm also, I kind of want to have a reputation as someone who.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:08Sam Parr?

  It was, we all won, we all win.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. Right. And I am more flagged of like for folks who are like young and, you know, the value of like a great reference of people saying.

• 15:17Sam Parr?

  The world's small, man.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  It's so small. And so that was, that was the first year. I think the second we started saying, okay, this is interesting, but, you know, I miss the speed. You know, I feel like I'm at a cruise ship versus a small speed boat of, of kind of going and starting a company. And so I think I did what a lot of entrepreneurs do, which is I started trying to come up with, you know, ideas in the abstract and. You know, I think we went on a journey of like bad ideas until eventually it was, came back to good ones. And so I think at the time, you know, I was looking at, I think similar to our talk before this, we were, you know, looking at places in New York and they're all kind of bad and we're wondering why are they bad and we should, you know, cars are manufactured, planes are manufactured, all these products that are low cost, affordable, but wondrous that anyone can afford are manufactured.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Why aren't homes manufactured?

• 16:04Sam Parr?

  So you're gonna, you're interested in manufactured, like, like when I was a kid, like a bunch of my poor friends, like, and my grandparents, they lived in, we just call it a, like, mobile homes.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:15Sam Parr?

  Like, it's just, I guess that's what they're called. I mean, the nice way is manufactured houses.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  They're manufactured houses. I mean, there is also, you know, like, one of the places that, like, is extremely populous, it's the, like, biggest city in the world, and yet housing isn't so crazy unaffordable, is, like, Tokyo. Or you go to Japan, and it's because they actually, most of the home builders are home manufacturers. And things are very standard. The cost of a new home build is, like, not that expensive. And, you know, I think there's all sorts of issues in the States related to this, and we thought, wow, we should look in into, like, manufacturing homes. And I still buy, and I think that there's-

• 16:52Sam Parr?

  I've invested in a few of them.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're very hard.

• 16:55Sam Parr?

  It was very popular right around when you were starting Ramp.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:59Sam Parr?

  And I invested in two or three.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:01Sam Parr?

  That space interested me. None of them have, like, completely taken off.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  In, ultimately, we decided not to do this for a couple of reasons.

• 17:09Sam Parr?

  So hard.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  One, I actually had no business in doing it, and I rented an apartment in New York, I never owned a home. I manufactured anything. And, you know, there was no connecting story to it, but then the more you read about it, the constraint in the bottleneck was not around manufacturing at all. It was all the zoning. And it was that you could manufacture a house that was zoned to go nowhere, unless you could go and see it to, there was a lot of complex problems. And by the way, I hope someone solves a lot of this. I think that there's-

• 17:38Sam Parr?

  You think that's still interesting?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  I think it's still interesting. My view is, it's like, the manufacturing is part of it, but the zoning question is very real. It's how do you actually get, and it can show up in all these funny ways. Ways of like which weight is the house face, you know, how far back does it have to be set? What are the proportions?

• 17:55Sam Parr?

  Joe Gabby is doing something in this space.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  I think if people crack this, I think it is an enormous opportunity, but it is like a big slog. And like, this is one of those businesses where you're not going to 10x for a while. You're going to be 10%, 20% compound, but there's a great business I do think to be built there.

• 18:11Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  It's just too expensive.

• 18:12Sam Parr?

  So that was on the list, some like tractor trailer, or I don't know what you call it. Uh, dude, like my friends, like their home or like my grandparents, they'd lived in a place where like their home was delivered on like a truck.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:23Sam Parr?

  Uh, yeah. And so, okay. So that's the interesting space.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:26Sam Parr?

  What else was on the list?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  So that was on the list. Um, we, uh, there was various like random crypto things. We were, you know, we, Krim and I had been interested in this stuff, probably going back to like 2012 and routine. So we spent a little bit of time around that space. Um, uh, you know, we spent some time, um, you know, helping out different friends, starting businesses. Uh, we were close with Z at Row, who started the, the direct to consumer kind of, um, healthcare business, folks at Candid. And so we spent some time on that kind of world. And then I, I think where it got interesting again is we came back to the things that we actually knew and a bit of our, our roots. And so there was almost two variants of what eventually became Ramp. Uh, variant number one is what turned into Ramp and we can come back to that at some point.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  The other was this view of, you know, in the, in the card space, um, which is, it feels almost voodoo from the outside. It's unclear how you start these things, how the business model work, but we, we knew this because we had spent a bunch of years inside of Capital One, studied the, the models really deeply, um, knew the history well and, and had some credibility in the space. We're also very interested in the partnership business, um, and the co-brand business. So let's say that you were, um, you go to Best Buy and at the very end someone says, would you like to open a, a Best Buy credit card? Um, someone is doing that. Um, there's people powering those business models.

• 19:42Sam Parr?

  Who, who are they? Who's the big one?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Um, you know, uh, Synchroony, um, uh, is a, is a really, um, big name and at Capital One, you know, had a large co-brand business, Amex. I mean, all the large banks.

• 19:53Sam Parr?

  And those are huge, tens of billions of dollars company?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Barclays, uh.

• 19:57Sam Parr?

  How big is Synchroony? I've never heard of it.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  MBNA. Tens of billions of dollars. I haven't looked up their And revenue? You know, that as well, certainly in market cap. Sure. Huge businesses. And the basic premise of that is like, look, is we had a side of our business at Paribus, where we worked very closely with retailers.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  You know, all of these, these stores have strong customer loyalty. And the, and credit cards are great products, but they're very hard to sell. And so the basic business model was if you could as added, you know, if you're a store, you had customer loyalty, if you could convert even a tiny percentage of these customers to just take on a new credit card. And that was it. You would make a little bit of interchange. You would kind of lower your costs when they were shopping with you. But also you could make a little bit back at all the other places that customers went and shopped. And so the whole question was, could you build a product that was standard enough? Simple, modifiable enough that you could convince lots of different stores. And as this was going on, the online boom was happening.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Shopify was, you know, opening up new retailers and stores everywhere. Creators were getting big, you know, and we thought there was a chance to have a modern card for businesses and creators. You know, MBNA was a big company. I mean, they, they figured out, when you look at university credit cards, that's like a huge business. Dara Murphy is here in New York. His business is doing really, really well. Imprint. I've heard of them. Imprint. They're doing very well. These take a long time, even in the cases where like they're the fastest ever, you're going to be building these businesses for many, many years. And you have to ask yourself, it's like, do I want to be working on this for decades?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  I thought that it was crazy that the largest credit card companies on the planet were working really hard to get customers spend a little bit more than they thought. And then once they do, they would work really hard to convince people that the points they got were worth a lot. And then devalue them in the background.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Hey, let's take a quick break. You know, HubSpot helped Tumblr solve a big problem. Tumblr needed to move fast. They were trying to produce trending content, but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign. But now they use HubSpot's customer platform to email realtime trending content to millions of users in just seconds. And the result was huge, three times more engagement and double the content creation. If you want to move faster like Tumblr, visit hubspot.com. All right, back to the show.

• 22:22Sam Parr?

  It was pretty funny. You said, "I read so many books on the banking industry."

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:27Sam Parr?

  And you're like, "I spent weeks doing it." I'm like, "Oh, I would have thought you would have spent like five years." You're like, "You must have read a shitload of books in a very short amount of time." Did you learn about any of the weird or shady stuff that the banking industry does for consumers, or like the history of credit cards and things like that? Like, I remember reading about, I think it was Bank of America. Was that the first credit card?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:51Sam Parr?

  And how, I believe what they did, well, first of all, like, one of them started as like a dining club card.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:56Sam Parr?

  But then another one, what they did was, I think they just handed out credit cards to farmers in central California, something crazy like that, right?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  So, the history, it started by a guy named A.P. Giannini. I think it was Bank, Bank di America di Italia. It was basically Bank of Italy, started by a very poor Italian immigrant, is functionally how it got started. And his first big opportunity really was in like the, I think it was like the earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco, where effectively, he was working and kind of supporting and lending to like grocers, immigrants, farmers, folks who would come into SF and trade. After the earthquake, there were fires everywhere, a huge portion of San Francisco burned down. And he was one of the only people that supposedly,

• 23:44Speaker 01

  the story goes, he set up a table out in the middle on Market Street, and he started making loans then and there on the spot. And he went from this like tiny bank to effectively like started going everywhere. And his history is pretty interesting. He, so it was kind of this bank to merchants, and then eventually to consumers. I think in the- Early 1900s, Woodrow Wilson was trying to supposedly encourage lots of different banks to go and lend to small businesses and the emerging middle class, right? This is the things you hear about if like the Americans are buying their first car, their first washing machine, all that kind of stuff. And they were very big on it. And so he was, he, I think was famous for setting up franchise banking, where there was like little branches and branch bankings in all sorts of little cities.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  And they sort of took over what used to be like,

• 24:33Speaker 01

  and this is relevant when you get into the history of credit cards. One of the most common places that people would take loans would be in a department store. So if you wanted to buy, you know, you may know that Sears was the parent company to discover.

• 24:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Or Bank of America would actually go into their branches in like the top, you know, somewhere in like a Macy's. So instead of Macy's giving you a loan, so if you wanted to buy a washing machine for, you know, a dollar, you know, you would walk out of it after making a 10 cent down payment and you pay them back. They said, we'll take over that Macy's, you don't need to underwrite each customer. We as the bank can do that for you. And that was the start of it.

• 25:11Sam Parr?

  What would they do if you didn't pay?

• 25:13Speaker 01

  You know, it was a loan and so it was whatever banks normally do. You know, maybe they could go and take the good, but it just was.

• 25:20Sam Parr?

  Did credit bureaus exist then?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  This is before credit bureaus.

• 25:24Sam Parr?

  And so what do you do if someone doesn't pay?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  I think that was why they had the local bankers, you know, they would go and work. I think they would try to collect for a lot of years, but that was like, this is like early 1900s banking. The, the part where you're getting to was by the time, I think Bank of America was the biggest, certainly the biggest bank in the US, it might've been the biggest bank in the world. It was just enormous, enormous scale. And I think the town, I want to say it was Fremont.

• 25:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  And so this was in the 50s and I think that it was something like 60% or 70% of everybody who lived in this town were customers of Bank of America. And, you know, if you were going to the department store, they had this, this branch that you could go. And go to, but you know, if you were going to like, um, you know, any random, you know, hard goods store, uh, you couldn't get a loan for it. And so they took this bet and they said, let's just get the rest of the town. Let's get everybody and we're going to send you cards. And I think they mailed everybody in the town. It was like a four or five digit card and uh, you could go use this and you could say, put it on my card. Um, and you would go and pay the bank back later. Um, and it just exploded. Um, suddenly, you know, they, almost everyone

• 26:36Speaker 01

  in the town became customers and people were using it all the time. People, once they got access to credit, started being able to afford more things and it was good for merchants too. You know, merchants who couldn't access and couldn't get a branch to come in could start to compete with the, the, you know, large department stores that could. And it, it gave rise to, you know, the Bank of America card. And so the initial credit card was Bank of America card, once they showed us successful, went to their competitor banks or regional banks and saying, I will run this program for you. We can issue Bank of America cards for the Commerce Bank of Seattle. You know, you can issue it to your, your customers and uh, we will deal with the operations, paying, you know, collecting from the stores, paying, you know, doing the underwriting, all that kind of stuff. So it was a franchise model. It wasn't the model that it was today.

• 27:21Sam Parr?

  Was that, is credit like a uniquely American thing?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  It, you know, I think there's a good argument to say yes. Um, you know, in, in, some of it comes back to that early 1900s kind of lineage where as this was going on, you saw the birth of the American consumer where you have department stores, cars, automobiles, and um, you saw financing for the emerging middle class. I would say in Europe, um, even to this day, um, you see this very different behavior where-

• 27:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like for example, they don't, they put way more down when they buy a home.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  And this is exactly it.

• 27:55Sam Parr?

  Americans are very accepting of borrowing and debt.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  You know, and I think that's the, uh, that's the perverse way to say it. I think the non-polite way to say it is like, you know, in Europe, if you're rich, you can borrow and if you're not- Paying cash, that's all you can do. And I think it's actually much harder for people who aren't in the middle class, who are poor, you know, to borrow in the US. People, you know, it's this view of you can kind of pick yourself up by your own boot strings. You know, you can go and, you know, borrow for that car or for that farm equipment or that laundry machine. So you can go and build your business and go into it. And so I think there's a lot of good that comes with it. Obviously, sometimes there's, there's some bad, people can get into credit issues. But I think on net, you know, most businesses, it takes, it's the startup costs are real.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  But once you get going, you can build an extraordinary business.

• 28:46Sam Parr?

  I listen to founders all the time. And like, I was listening to the LaZatica episode, and I'm really fascinated with building a company that can last for 50, 100, 200 years, like something where, God willing, I hope this is true, but my children want to get involved in some capacity, and it could last beyond me. Typically, those, I think those businesses that do that are not the fastest growing companies.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  I actually agree, it's like the basic physics of what I think David and the Founders podcast studies and what you're getting at too of like, I think if you, to get down to the core of what makes great businesses, it's not like who grew 100% or 200 or whatever this year. It's that which businesses can grow 30% for 30 years. And if you do that, you will be a giant business.

• 29:37Sam Parr?

  That's not what you did.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Our view is that we can. And like, the crazy part is like, we have grown extraordinarily quickly. We're still just about doubling each year at enormous scale. I think we are 1 and 1/2% ish of the corporate and small business card market in the US. And so if you just look at the physics of it, even if we were to massively decelerate and start growing 30% for decades, it's physically possible. The market is so big.

• 30:08Sam Parr?

  You're sort of like hanging out with like the Illuminati a little bit, where it's like these old money families, because that's what a lot of the banking industry is made up of.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:16Sam Parr?

  Because they've been around for 200 years, they've been dealing with money forever. Have you noticed or found anything that you are shocked by, where you're like, if the consumer knew that this is how this setup is, they would be infuriated?

• 30:31Speaker 01

  It's a... There's a lot there in what you're asking. So one, these families, like, I think that they're focused on doing simple things well and doing it for a very, very, very long time and consistently. And a lot of these families just like, don't sell.

• 30:46Sam Parr?

  That's the biggest takeaway from the Founders Podcast is don't sell.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Don't fight or interrupt the power of compounding. You want to find a business where you can just compound for a long time. And so I would say, when you're just starting out, or if you're building, like, you're terrified of, like, losing money, or things going sideways, you have real costs, families, friends, things to take care of. And so you don't interrupt the debt. You want to, when things get risky, you sell. But I think a lot of these families just stayed in for a long time. When there was huge, I mean, classically, you'd see a significant recession in the US every seven to 11 years consistently. A lot of people

• 31:30Speaker 01

  will sell out at the bottom, because they can't take any more pain, or they can't take the risk of it going even further. And I think the difference of a lot of these families is they would figure out, how could you avoid it? How could you go and stay in? You know, I obviously have never, none of my family had anything like this. And so I also too, I think as a kid, was very skeptical of people who grew up with a lot of money.

• 31:53Sam Parr?

  Running my company Hampton, it gives me the chance to meet with hundreds of different businesses. And I'm always surprised by how many of them still use spreadsheets, emails, and clunky tools that do not talk to each other. It's like watching someone build a house with duct tape. So here's my take. Custom software that actually fits your needs isn't just convenient, it's a competitive advantage to transform the way you do business. And that's why you need to know about a no-code platform called Bubble. With Bubble, you can build powerful web and mobile apps by literally dragging and dropping different elements on a screen, no coding required. By the way, I use Bubble on a ton of different apps, including Hampton. And if you want help building something complex on Bubble, you have to

• 32:34Sam Parr?

  bring in zero code. They're the top Bubble agency out there, and literally the biggest plugin creator for the platform. They can build anything. Custom portals, SaaS products, and they do it about 10 times faster and cheaper than traditional development. Zero Code is also all about AI business automation, transforming manual and slow processes into efficient automated ones. So stop cobbling together different tools and solutions and head to zerocode.com. That's zero code, as in the word zero, and then code, Q O D E. Again, code is with a Q and tell them that Sam sent you.

• 33:09Sam Parr?

  One of my favorite biographies is Titan by John Rockefeller. And David Chernow, who's the author, he wrote one on JP Morgan, which I'm going to get to. And it's fun, it's fun reading about these old banking families because they're full stories and they're typically nutty. You are going to be an old banking family. And that's kind of like crazy to think about.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  It's, you know.

• 33:33Sam Parr?

  Does that mess with you?

• 33:35Speaker 01

  I think that a lot of the families of the past has done a great job of being like involved civically. I think that a lot of them have been more upstanding. I wouldn't say all of them have been, but I do think that, you know, like I'm in my mid 30s. I don't know that I've thought so far ahead in on like a legacy perspective, but yes, Ramp as a company is getting very valuable. But like, all my stock is in Ramp. It's just a certificate and it's only become valuable because we've built something that makes a lot of people a lot better off. My whole obsession is like, how do we keep doing that for a very long time? And, you know, maybe the money comes with it, but like, that's not why I do it.

• 34:15Sam Parr?

  What was the reason why you did it?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  So the first company we started was definitely around like, you know, I remember when our, we were down to like one month of, or like a few weeks of savings and like, that's it.

• 34:26Sam Parr?

  Fucking the worst, dude.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  It's the worst. Like a lot of it is.

• 34:29Sam Parr?

  You usually, but you probably felt that way the whole time.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:32Sam Parr?

  Like that burden. I remember I felt that burden for four years.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  And you're just working your ass off.

• 34:36Sam Parr?

  The worst.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Every weekend and like, it's hard to relate to really people because you're terrified.

• 34:40Sam Parr?

  It's like, I remember in college, I had this girlfriend who cheated on me. And I remember like here, like.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Sorry, dude.

• 34:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I remember like, and then she's like go to that. I kind of knew she, it was horrible. And like, she would go out and I'm like, I had this like anxiety all the time, like. Like bothers me. And then when I like started to business, I would remember like checking the bank account all the time. And I'm like, that same anxiety of like, I don't want to look, I don't want to know. I just want to bury my head. I don't want to know. I don't want to be part of this. I felt that way for four years.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  I'm curious if it changed for you too, but like after the sale, like suddenly you have security, right? Like your, your bank account looks a little more, more flush. You move it out of the student checking account to something more secure. You know, you're good. And then at some point, you know, it's a, I don't know, hedonic adaptation, you get used to it. It's just like a number in account and then you have like your same anxieties, your same.

• 35:34Sam Parr?

  You have the same shit.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  The same stuff, all that kind of stuff.

• 35:37Sam Parr?

  It's better though.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  It's better. It's better.

• 35:39Sam Parr?

  It's better, but you have a similar anxieties, but it's not existential.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  You are.

• 35:45Sam Parr?

  It is sort of existential, but it's not like.

• 35:49Sam Parr?

  The baseline happiness of knowing that you're not going to be on the street is makes like the baseline goes up.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  I agree with all this.

• 35:57Sam Parr?

  Half the time I listen to founders and I'm like, well, every time I listen to founders, I think I'm going to, I'm going to own this for 50 or a hundred years.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:04Sam Parr?

  And then during the day when I'm having a pain in the ass, like issue come up, I'm like. We're going to set this up so we could flip this thing. Like it always changes, right? Like your mood.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:16Sam Parr?

  Your emotions are powerful and do you think you'll run this or have equity in it 50 years from now? Or would you sell in five or 10 years if it was like a no brainer deal?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  I hope this is the last company that I ever work on, you know?

• 36:34Sam Parr?

  Really?

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, really. You know, I.

• 36:37Sam Parr?

  Your partnership feel that way?

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. You know, and it's, it's one of these things too, where like, you know, I, I remember even in the early days of, of going through, like there was deep pain, right? If you're, if you're growing this quickly, you know, it certainly got you here and won't get you there. And I, I think that's some of what Kareem is saying is like, look, if I'm going to go through all this pain, like he has.

• 36:56Sam Parr?

  It doesn't seem like he went through that much pain. If I'm like, looking at you guys from the outside, of course, it's always more challenge, way more harder than it looks. But like when I'm like. I don't know, 100 million in revenue in 18 months like that, like,

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:09Sam Parr?

  Like even though it's hard, you're still winning and that momentum like that it's really all about dopamine. That makes you feel good.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  I agree with you. So some of it was like not planning for downside and not solving problems until they hit us in our first business. So in our first business, we had a day when we lost 75% of our revenue overnight vaporized. There were risks that we knew about that we didn't properly manage. And one of the things that ramped that we resolved to do is like Kareem and I and others are just going to beat the shit out of each other all the time worrying about problems that are three to six months to a year out in the future. And so it's true, if you look at kind of ramps trajectory, it has been kind of nonstop growth. Fairly consistently up into the right in terms of like the revenue, the cash flow, profitability, all this kind of metrics has been consistently good.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  But it's because inside of it, there is so much like agony that we spend over like this metric that's going to affect how we perform in three months from now is not going the wrong way, is not going the right way. What are we doing about it? And so it's a lot of internally beating each other up like I often, you know, when you look at like, like I think the analogy is like an athlete.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  You know, you look at like, it was just Wimbledon over the weekend. And center and Alcaraz, like each of them look like they're playing effortlessly, can pull off these shots you don't imagine. It's because there's been years and years and years of when you're not looking. They're just obsessing, practicing, trying these shots. So when it counts, they're able to do it. And so I think there's a lot of similarities there. And what I would say is like, is, you know, for Kareem, it was amplified. He had, you know, he's three kids now. He got started earlier than I did. And he's like, look, these are some of the most valuable, you know, hours I'll ever have. And if we're going to go through this, like it's going to be because we're going to, the ambition is going to be real. And if we have a problem, we're going to confront it right away.

• 39:02Sam Parr?

  What do you like to read?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  I like to read, it's part of why I like the Founders Podcast so much, like biographies of other founders. I like reading about like, you know, design.

• 39:12Sam Parr?

  Are you a designer?

• 39:13Speaker 01

  I really like it. So the first company, Paribus, I had design and product reported to me. And so I had to spend a lot of years kind of like thinking about like, you know, the principles of it, what makes products great. And so I love it. I would probably get booted off of our design team. I don't think I have quite the level of talent in crafting, but I definitely spend a lot of time thinking about it.

• 39:35Sam Parr?

  What biographies?

• 39:36Speaker 01

  In terms of favorites or what am I reading now?

• 39:38Sam Parr?

  Favorites.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, it's, I think I probably read, you know, 15 biographies of Steve Jobs. You know, it's, I think as great as people think he is, I think he's still underrated for what he was able to do and how consistently he was able to do it. And I also think that he changed a lot over the years. I think he gets kind of typecasted this like brilliant asshole, which like, I think he was at the start of his career, but I think he got much more interesting, cared about people in a much deeper way than I think comes across. And some of that is like, I think people like conflict and people like controversy, but kind of forget to look at his career as he softened over the years. And I think

• 40:20Speaker 01

  ultimately, I think that's when he built Apple into the powerhouse that it is today.

• 40:25Sam Parr?

  I've been struggling to find biographies where I admire their whole life.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you read, I mean, just on Steve Jobs, have you read Becoming Steve Jobs?

• 40:34Sam Parr?

  I don't remember. I've read about two or three of them. I forget the titles. I did the Walter Isaacson one.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  That one is good, but I think that one is more kind of like pop culture Steve Jobs.

• 40:44Sam Parr?

  It was not. When I remember reading that, I'm like, I don't want to be this person. I don't like him. He was very unlikeable.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:51Sam Parr?

  In that book. But what was Becoming Steve Jobs?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  So the central question of it was examining like who he was over the course of his life. And so effectively, these were journalists, people who covered him for like 40 years and knew him from when he was like the 20 year old kind of wunderkind to, you know, kind of like end of his life. It came out. Around the time, I think a few months after the Isaacson, and I think that they felt similarly that so much of who was portrayed out was was like this brilliant trick and instead we're trying to focus of like, how did he change over the course of his life? And I think it's an amazing, amazing read because I think it focuses much more on like him or the lessons or the things that shaped and changed his style. And I would say like,

• 41:35Speaker 01

  I super, I really highly recommend that book. There's other great, um, great ones too on other aspects like I love insanely simple. Um, I love, uh, insanely great Steve Levy. That's like a lesser read, but wonderful book, just about just like.

• 41:51Sam Parr?

  115 of them.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:52Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:53Sam Parr?

  So chat GPT has become my life coach.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:57Sam Parr?

  And there's like a prompt where it's like, I forget exactly what it was, but it was like, everything you know about me, boil it down to one word.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:05Sam Parr?

  And I think I phrased it where I'm like, tell me like my issue or my flaw. So it was like, it's going to be negative. And it, I think I said two words and the first one was jealousy and the second one was fear.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:16Sam Parr?

  Which are very similar, um, emotions, actually, I think. But it was like rooted in like comparing yourself to other people.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:22Sam Parr?

  In New York City, it's like so easy to do that.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:25Sam Parr?

  And it's like dialed up to a 10. You're strange to me because you seem like such a, you are so successful at a such young age and also you seem emotionally stable. Those things typically are the same. You know what I mean?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  A little, little out there. Yeah.

• 42:39Sam Parr?

  You know what I mean?

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:40Sam Parr?

  And, and, and I find that unique and interesting about you.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Look, I, I'll like, compete very aggressively in, in things that I believe in, believe in. Don't, don't be wrong, but like, you look back and you're having like a shit day and you're like, all right, I had a bad morning. What does this affect my afternoon at all? Um, you know, I've got a half a day left. Do I want to make a count or not? And I just think the ability to just like stop, catch yourself and reset, um, is really important and is increasingly hard as you kind of get older, but it's super important. And I think some of it was like early experiences, like, you know, my older brother growing up would have like these really strong mood swings and all kinds of things would go on and he had different kind of like, you know, learning difficulties and stuff. And, and he would take medicine and it would like radically change his mood.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  And I was like, I remember as a kid, like that was so jarring and weird. Someone could be like, you know, feel a certain way and then suddenly, you know, feel differently was strange to see. And then, you know, I, I think as a kid, I don't like I'd fully process the thought, but I remember, you know, I'd get really mad too. Um, or be going to sleep and I was angry about something. I was like, oh my, why am I mad? Maybe I could not be mad. Um, uh, does being mad help me uh, or not?

• 43:54Sam Parr?

  That's a, that's an interesting, very, very introspective philosophical question to ask like, well, why do I feel this way and do I have to?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You know, and I, you know, I, I think, um, you know, my brother and I would get in all sorts of fights. You know, I remember one, he like, threw like a fork and it went into my leg and stuff like that. And, you know, we have three boys in, in a house like they're, they're probably not as fun as, as, as little girls they, they do. Uh, more interesting things. And I think my, our parents would, uh, my mom was really good. It's like, all right, like, uh, I'm going to sit both of you down and you're going to have to go and explain like, um, you're going to listen to your brother as he says why he was mad and you get like, pissed and you'd want to go whatever. And you'd be like, you know, you have to go say, and you say it back to him. And then, you're going to say your side and then he's going to say it back to you.

• 44:41Sam Parr?

  It's a super intentional thing to do.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  It was really.

• 44:43Sam Parr?

  My parents never would, they would have been like, you guys just shut up.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. It drove me off the goddamn wall. But after long enough.

• 44:51Sam Parr?

  Is your mom like a, was she like a hippie? Like that's strange. Like that, that stuff was like, that stuff's popular now with, with, that's probably how, that's how I'm going to parent my kid.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:59Sam Parr?

  But that's like some gentle parenting, like hippie dippy shit, which I buy into.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  I mean, it was.

• 45:04Sam Parr?

  Was she a, what was her job? Teacher, therapist or something?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  No, she sold like telecommunications.

• 45:09Sam Parr?

  That's interesting.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Telecom stuff.

• 45:11Sam Parr?

  Very forward way to parent.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Good parenting, I guess, but it teaches you to consider the other side a little bit. Um, and to, to calm down. You see the complexity of things. And then, you know, later on, when you see something chemically change other people, it's hard to do it. But, you know, it forces you to start wondering like, is it me or is it the, you know, something going on in my head that's making me feel this way? And, and look like I, I think sometimes, stress is good. Other times it's not. And I, I think, you know, Ramp is a big company. There's a lot of pressures and, and stuff that are natural. And, you know, like if you step back and you're like, all right, um,

• 45:48Speaker 01

  How I act and how I, how you feel can really impact how you think about things. You know, I, I think I, I now it's, it's much more trained, but you spend a lot of time just being like,

• 45:59Sam Parr?

  You meditate?

• 46:00Speaker 01

  What is the headspace? I, I don't regularly.

• 46:03Sam Parr?

  How are you this well balanced?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  You read different books too. I mean, it's now a little more, more trite, but like, it's funny. I like Ryan Holiday's stuff when he wrote, Kind of trust me, I'm lying. But then you got very into Sto, Sto kind of philosophy to read like meditations and stuff like that. And so I think you pick some of that up. I try to have a day where I just like hang out, just, I don't know, go on a run, do different things.

• 46:24Sam Parr?

  You do?

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Clear my head. Yeah.

• 46:25Sam Parr?

  What day?

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Uh, usually Saturday. Yeah. Usually then, and then Sunday I'll pick stuff back up. But I also think too, during your week, like I think, Especially with other founders is life goes on. You were probably really good at something. And you did it a lot. And that's what allowed you to build this company. Then suddenly you're running the company and you don't have time to do the thing that you really liked anymore.

• 46:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Uh, and I think that a lot of people lose control over their own week and they don't actually audit like, Am I spending the time on things that I'm good at? Um, or not?

• 46:55Sam Parr?

  Want to be.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Or, or want to be spending the time on. And so, and I pretty regularly try to go and like blow up my calendar and be like, all right, I actually love doing this thing. Am I spending any time on it? No. And I promise if you spend your, too many weeks in a row doing something you hate, um, you're going to be miserable. You're going to be stressed out. And so I just redesign my weeks or months pretty regularly.

• 47:18Sam Parr?

  I am.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  It helps.

• 47:19Sam Parr?

  A question I've been asking myself a lot is like, where's my weakness now?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:23Sam Parr?

  And like, what do I need to like really work on?

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:26Sam Parr?

  It's actually, uh, whenever I do reference checks with people, one of my little tricks is I'll be like, what's this person one out of 10? And they're always going to say like eight or nine.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:34Sam Parr?

  Everyone says that. And I'm like, cool. What makes them nine or whatever? Okay. Now to get that extra point, what do they need to work on?

• 47:41Speaker 01

  I like this question.

• 47:42Sam Parr?

  That's where you hear like weaknesses. That's the only polite way I've been able to get someone to like talk shit on someone.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:49Sam Parr?

  It's important. I need like,

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:50Sam Parr?

  And then like a lot of those weaknesses that they have, I'm like, I could put up with that.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:54Sam Parr?

  Whatever. Um, like if someone's like, well, they're really not patient. I'm like, okay, that sounds good to me. Whatever. Uh, what? Flaws or weaknesses do you have now that you think you have to overcome to get to where you want to be in a decade or two?

• 48:08Speaker 01

  So I'll slightly critique the question, which is like, if you're like a one-person company, this is exactly the right question of like, how can I change in order to get better? But if you're like a 10-person or a 1,000-person company, or whatever you are in it, you're on a team, you can change, or you can change how the team is constructed, is, I think, the more interesting way to think about it. And what I'll tell you, like, one of my big flaws, which is probably very surprising for, you know, Ramp Scale, is like, I don't know, if there's like 100 things to do that

• 48:49Speaker 01

  are very important to get done, the way my mind works is like, I'll start with a blank sheet of paper, and I'll be like, what are the top five or 10 things? And I'll like, write them down, and then I'll like, forget about the rest and don't do them. And like, that's fine, early on, when things, there's like, one or two things that matter, but like, will blow up the company, if you're just consistently not dealing with 90% of issues. And one of the things that I do, in order to cope with that and compensate for that, is I surround myself with people who are operationally unbelievable, who are incredibly good at triaging, cascading, getting things done, and making things move. And what I would say is, like, it's actually totally fine to have huge flaws, and you

• 49:31Speaker 01

  could decide to fix them, or you can say, I'm actually going to design, you know, my life, or the company, or whatever, to be performant in that context. And so I think that's okay. And I guess what I would say is, like, a lot of the way that we built Ramp, and, you know, I think about building companies, is a lot of folks kind of look for, you know, what are the things they're good at, what are the things they're bad at, and how do I, you know, identify all the problems? And it's good to know about them, I agree with that.

• 50:00Sam Parr?

  Well, what I'm referring to is like, like, for example...

• 50:05Sam Parr?

  I'm a very emotional person. Yep. And like I like a trick that I've been learning is like it don't make it. It's like, don't go to the grocery store when you're hungry. Yeah. Don't make a big decision when I'm feeling pissed off about something or, you know, or really happy about something like, don't make decisions there. So I got, I have to wait. Or when someone tells me something I don't like, don't react. Yeah. Just say, okay, let me think about it. And so my big thing is just like, it's all about emotional regulation and impulse control. That's like, that's what I have to, that's my big flaw. And I think I, you, I have to improve that to be a better person. Yeah. And I'm not even referring to just, um, business. Yeah. But that will impact it positively as well. Yeah, I totally agree with you. Thanks, dude. That's the pod. Thanks a lot.

• 51:00Sam Parr?

  My friends, if you like MFM, then you're going to like the following podcast. It's called Billion Dollar Moves. And of course, it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the number one audio destination for business professionals. Billion Dollar Moves, it's hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling. Sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist. And with Billion Dollar Moves, she wants to look at unicorn founders and funders, and she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader. Many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic. She does it with unfiltered conversations about success, failure, fear, courage, and all that great stuff. So again, if you like My First Million, check out Billion Dollar Moves. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Again, Billion Dollar Moves. All right, back to the episode.