Eric Glyman, Co-founder of Ramp

Eric Glyman is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ramp, the financial-infrastructure platform valued at $44 billion used by over 70,000 businesses to run payments, expenses and accounting from a single place. Glyman grew up in Las Vegas and studied at Harvard, where he met his eventual co-founder, Karim Atiyeh. In 2014 the two started Paribus, a price-tracking app born from Glyman's frustration after missing an airfare price drop — the software automatically caught retroactive discounts and filed refunds on customers' behalf. Capital One acquired Paribus in 2016, and Glyman and Atiyeh stayed on for roughly three years running the business inside the bank. That experience showed Glyman something he found strange: card companies made money by convincing customers that points and rewards were valuable, then quietly devaluing them. In 2019 he, Atiyeh, and longtime friend Gene Lee left to build Ramp on the opposite premise — instead of pushing businesses to spend more for rewards, help them spend less and waste less time doing it. Every product decision gets run through what Glyman calls a version of "Elon's algorithm": question the requirement, simplify, then automate. Ramp tracks its own success obsessively — a running "scoreboard" of dollars and hours saved for customers, displayed on office walls and posted in Slack. Glyman now sees the company's real competitors not as other fintechs but as AI labs, since Ramp is ultimately selling automated knowledge work, not money movement. He frames the company’s mission as: build something that saves people time and money, and let the business follow — freeing entrepreneurs and finance teams from rote work so they can focus on what actually matters to their companies. Chapters (00:00:00) Smarter Financial Infrastructure To Run Your Business (00:04:01) The North Star Is Time And Money (00:10:15) A Determined Generalist Can Now Do More Than Ever (00:11:58) I'm The Best Doctor I've Ever Been (00:13:20) The Tower Of Babel Inside Big Companies (00:16:00) The Kid Who Paid For College On Minecraft (00:19:10) Everyone Is The Hero Of Their Own Story (00:22:31) You Don't Get There In A Hundred Hours (00:23:52) Buffett And Munger Stopped Needing To Call Each Other (00:25:03) The Damage Of Letting People Free-Ride (00:27:40) Consumer-Grade Design In B2B Software (00:28:34) The Breville Toaster And The Bit-More Button (00:31:47) We Win When Our Customers Win (00:35:18) Put The Scoreboard On The Wall (00:37:07) A Company Is Just A Fiction With A Common Purpose (00:38:19) Focus On The Things That Don't Change (00:40:02) Is This Time Actually Different (00:40:50) Air Conditioning Made Las Vegas, Not Fortunes (00:43:52) 1% Of US GDP Will Be Token Spend (00:45:28) A Six-Month Lag To A Model A Hundred Times Cheaper (00:46:46) Agents Negotiating With Agents To Buy Things (00:49:22) Making Sure The Highest-Return Dollar Gets The Dollar (00:51:17) The Dream Of Being At The Table That Matters (00:54:14) Why The Labs Are Ramp's Real Competitor (00:55:44) Banks Sell Money, Ramp Sells Time (00:56:27) When Intelligence Becomes Functionally Free Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:02David Senra?

  I want basically a download of your thoughts on how you're thinking about your business today and moving forward in, let's say, the next few months.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  You use Ramp and you know it, but I mean, just to give you a snapshot of where we are. 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. 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 your business and get more value at every dollar an hour. The way that we measure ourselves is how many fewer dollars do our customers spend after adopting Ramp and how many fewer hours are they using to go and run their business? Today, over 70,000 businesses use Ramp.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Over 3% of all of the corporate card transactions in the United States are powered by Ramp and nearly 1% of all the corporate transactions are running through Ramp. And I think the most 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 is growing their revenue a median of 16% per year. The US average is 3% to 4%. And so we're just trying to make dollars and hours go further.

• 1:22David Senra?

  You and I, when we're talking off camera, talk a lot about AI. The, you know, Ramp started as corporate credit cards. Now, if 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. It's like a great line that you have. Talk about like some of the ways that you guys are using AI and like what are the products you're building?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  One of the most, I would say like present experiences, just like the act of, let's say, doing expense reports. So we'll go there, we'll talk about paying bills, we'll talk about closing your books, right? For many people, doing your expenses is 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, right? Your expense policy is not going to drive, but 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, your state reviews this thing. It's a whole rigmarole. Ramp, we fuse all of it. Right? And so we issue smart cards.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Your expense policy derives how the thing actually behaves. You tap it. We check in real time. Does it enter 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.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  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 something more like if there's a car company is interested, like maybe a Tesla 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.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  And ultimately, we're recommending the next time where you can get more utility out of every dollar that's flowing through your org or hour. It's like how you can think of it.

• 4:01David Senra?

  How do 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 twenties, used the same phrase when he was in his fifties. He says insanely great products. He would just repeat, you want to make insanely good products? Come with me. If you don't, then you shouldn't be working here. I just talked to Toby Luque 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?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  I think our mission is endless. Right? It is to help. Every business owner get more out of every dollar an 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 are trying to do is really measure for all the dollars that are passed through your organization, how do we make sure that few leave 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 were like 175 years late to was this was, I think, really inverting

• 5:17Speaker 01

  a lot of the way that many of our competitors had acted. If you kind of look at the credit card industry, which is where we started even just seven 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?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  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 there two systems involved in buying every single thing 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 treasury? And ultimately, where it's led us is to build better infrastructure in kind of this substrate where your dollars are moving through it. But again, 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?

• 6:32David Senra?

  So can I think of the North Star that you're working backwards from? 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?

• 6:43Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 6:44David Senra?

  Correct? Okay, so that's the North Star you're working backwards from.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  That is exactly right. And I think a lot of it too, like I've been a... I mean, a huge fan of founders in which you've been building for years. Like, I think of Elon's algorithm as one that has been incredibly motivating and orienting and clarifying for us, right? With every process of money movement or allocation of resources or measurement 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 it 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 amount of time it takes to develop a feature?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  And then, once we've simplified it, can we go and automate more parts of the process at the end? And what we are trying to do is take that methodology and that style of 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 and a form factor for us to go deliver that service to our customers.

• 7:58David Senra?

  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 costs. 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

• 8:42David Senra?

  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 they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com.

• 9:04David Senra?

  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, 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.

• 9:46David Senra?

  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 possibly can. You guys are obsessed with this. A lot of the 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 were either former

• 10:30David Senra?

  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, two years ago? There's a few things that...

• 10:57Speaker 01

  I think are revolving with AI. One, just the power laws are getting more extremes in the same way. Companies are getting larger. The speed to which companies are getting built is accelerating. I think the returns to talent is higher than ever. The most effective person in the world is no longer 10 times as effective or 100 times effective. It could be 1,000 times as effective in a particular area. So I think finding people 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 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

• 11:42Speaker 01

  to do much more than he used to be able to do. Right to explain a bit more of what I mean. Large language models have read more lines of code than any engineer alive. Right. They've read more medical case texts 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. 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. But once you hit kind of the boundary, right?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  You're a great engineer, but you enter into the 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 scales, at sales. And now, if you are stubborn enough and pushing and willing to start to go build systems, you can extend your boundaries. So the positive interpretation is you're not gate captain, you can do a lot more. But I think the more interesting interpretation for people building businesses is first, if you find really determined people with a high level of determination and 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 or Organizations with lots of subspecialties,

• 13:10Speaker 01

  which can lead to walls and barriers and things that get lost between organizations. And I think you can radically simplify.

• 13:17David Senra?

  Wait, what does that mean? The barriers between organizations?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  I'll put it this way. When Ramp was, call it 10 people and you ask people, you know, where do you work? Or what do you do here? They'd say, I work at Ramp and I'm an engineer. 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 grow. Once you start getting to like 200 or 500 people, you start hearing this inversion in identity. People say, you know, I'm a salesperson at Ramp. I'm a designer at Ramp. They start to identify by their craft and what they do and what they are asked to do. They interact with mostly people who are in their craft. Salespeople talk with their salespeople. And you see these mega corporations. It's kind of like the Tower of Babel where, you know, no one in sales knows an actual engineer. The engineers don't know any actual designers.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Everything's hard because information has to go up top and down on through. And these organizations become very Byzantine. 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, that helps them track outreach, that helps them write with a better pitch on the first go. 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, I think, a lot of organizations right now to question, do I have the right shape of an organization for the world that we're starting to enter into? And so I just find this whole field really interesting right now.

• 14:44David Senra?

  I want to go to the shape of organization. If you think you need to change it or not. 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 I actually really liked. 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 what 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.

• 15:27David Senra?

  And so they have high agency people reveal themselves through the telling of their life story. How do you do it?

• 15:32Speaker 01

  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 are 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 couple of these things, you know, I think about there's an engineer and actually a whole litany now, a whole community of people at Ramp who, 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

• 16:16Speaker 01

  for building these private Minecraft servers that were so entertaining, other kids would love to play it. 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 when he was quite literally very small, you know, and it turns out he knew all the other, 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 were in the community at the time, people would say like, he was incredibly obsessive. He was super detailed and he was able to bend the API to do things that we didn't

• 16:57Speaker 01

  know it could do because he was so discerning. And I think you can often find people with incredible spikes. 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. It can be by 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 podcasts. And for years and years and years, you were working on this. And I just remember meeting a lot of folks who just kept talking about, like, there's this guy making founders podcasts, and it's really good. You look to the, it's all to say, I'm less interested in what is

• 17:38Speaker 01

  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 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 look for people who are very active 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 have like 10 rounds of interviews, right?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  And you interview someone for 15 hours. It turns out in two business days of working with someone, you're gonna have more information about working with that person. So we rely a lot on referrals. We try to find people 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 spent 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 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?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  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 five, 10, 15 years. Where do they hope to be in five, 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 connects, 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.

• 19:51David Senra?

  That brings something, a 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 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 on like your, the top people in your company? Or do you like encourage turnover? Do you want to keep the core product kernel team together? Like, how do you think about that?

• 20:31Speaker 01

  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 snob 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 can go and say, "Actually, I'm going to try to find like the smartest freshmen and offer them a winter internship or a summer internship and go bring them in and find the smartest and like incredible aptitude people."

• 21:14Speaker 01

  And by the way, other freshmen, when they see the smartest person win, 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 Elon's philosophy of trying to find really smart people, in part because it allows you to find maybe something like a mispricing in the market. By their junior summer or after they've been working for five years, it's priced in, you're competing straight up 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

• 21:59Speaker 01

  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. Because 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 velocity.

• 22:31David Senra?

  It's almost like an ESP that develops. So we were just talking before we recorded that a few days ago, I recorded Mr. Beast, the episode's not going to be out for several months for reasons that we can't disclose. And what's fascinating about him, and I've got, I've spent a bunch of time with him, is he has this thing where it's just like, he has almost like a, like he, there's certain, the people who've worked with him so long to the point where they used to live with him

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:57David Senra?

  and then spend every waking hour with him. And he's like, now, you're not talking about 100 hours. In some cases, this is like well over even 10,000 hours that they've spent working together. And he says like, his operations guy, I think his name's Tyler, if I remember correctly, he 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, I was like, I already know what you're gonna 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 positioned it here, it lets me shoot into here. And then he doesn't have to say anything. That's exactly what I would have done if I knew that. And he says like, it's excessively important. And he's like, and then he had a great line. He's like, you don't get there in 100 hours.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:37David Senra?

  There is something special about this. Like, I talked to Charlie Munger, I went to Charlie Munger's house right before he died. And the fascinating thing, one of the questions that one of these other entrepreneurs we're with asked him is like, well, how often 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.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:53David Senra?

  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 gonna 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.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  It allows, I think, a much more pure pursuits of the mission because you understand. What 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 and push forward. And what you can rely on another person to do with you. And I think it leads to these effects where you see some companies when you have a really strong culture. You have really strong 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. And so I think some form of both is what we're trying to pursue. And then last, look, I think one of the most damaging things you can do to an organization.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  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 like question 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 I am and like you're not, you know, there's all these folks free riding and you're not enforcing high standards. Why should we obsess so much over reaching our higher potential? This organization doesn't doesn't seem to demonstrate a real respect for the pursuit of higher and higher standards and an intolerance for anything less than giving your best.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  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. And I think when you have an organization filled with people who share those set of beliefs, iron sharpen iron. You build better products faster. And so, you know, my whole job, like I don't believe I'm the smartest person at Ramp, not even close 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.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  And then once they're here, ensuring that they're able to do incredible work, make decisions quickly, see if they're right or wrong fast and get products into people's hands and move. That's my job is to unblock these other people.

• 26:19David Senra?

  Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers.

• 27:01David Senra?

  The founder of 11 Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, "We built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world." Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com/cenra. That is deal.com/cenra. Ramp's six years old, seven, how many years right now? I know you do the day thing, but how many years?

• 27:36Speaker 01

  It's just over seven years, or 2,620 days in case you were curious.

• 27:40David Senra?

  There you go. So, seven 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 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. But I think that just speaks to you, like, if we're, if we want to have excellent standards, I'm gonna quote Toby for the third fucking 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 is that? I didn't know what that was." And it's a door where you can't tell if you're push or pull.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 28:18David Senra?

  So he's like, "I can't have shitty design things." So you had to remove from the Shopify offices. Cause 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.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  It's totally right, and it's funny, like, a group of designers were hanging out the other day, and I found myself in a very funny conversations. Have you ever used a Breville toaster?

• 28:43David Senra?

  No.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  If you care about design, you're meeting all these people, you should buy a Breville toaster. So, one of the big problems, right, in enterprise software, in a lot of B2B software, is it starts out clean and elegant. There's a bunch of businesses who love the product. They start serving more customers, and they have more requirements, and they have more ideas. And before you know it, you end up with these disaster of B2B softwares, which require a PhD to learn how to use these tools. People who will maintain your database, they're horrible to use. And as a result, you never want to go login. And you can name what the software is. And for salespeople, for HR people, for finance people, you name it, they're horrible. That's, I think, a lot of how people would describe B2B software. Let's go back to toasting, right?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  If you were to go ask people, "What do you want in a toaster or maybe in a microwave?" They might say, "Well, I like toast, but sometimes I want to reheat pizza. I should have a reheat-frozen pizza mode." Or maybe you're cooking stuff and you want it to be more like an oven. Or you want to make popcorn, and it's a toaster/microwave and all these kind of things. And before you know it, you know what these toasters filled with buttons and buttons and buttons and knobs and dials, and it's super crazy. And I think that is quite literally asking customers what do they want and building exactly that. The Breville toaster I find is very, very interesting. I think there was an incredible designer there who thought about things, maybe like Toby did, with the Normandors.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  What he started doing is tried 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 you've undercooked the toast, and you need to put it back in for another cycle. Or you've overdone it, and you need to start over, and it's 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 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 and understanding. It is like, no one is coming to ramp saying like, I want to buy a credit card.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Or can you build me a better expense app? Like, I don't think people should do expense reports. It's crazy. All the data is digital in the first place. 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 that 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 to deliver a business that is easier to run, that is more profitable, that is not, I don't know, distracting you with like bullshit 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,

• 31:41Speaker 01

  like, you have to be asking these kind of questions. You have to be interested in these kind of products.

• 31:47David Senra?

  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 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 are 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 merch, and I like grab 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?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  It's one of our six values. And a lot of companies have this idea. If they want to have values, everyone has. My elementary school had values, right? And what I didn't like about values at my elementary school, now I'm 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 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?

• 33:08Speaker 01

  And how many did we block? How many dollars did we prevent from going out of their company? How many hours did 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. It's part of why we move funds. And then we explicitly create measurements on how many, like how many dollars did we 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? Did we save them more time?

• 33:53Speaker 01

  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 mashing 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 texts and it's inscrutable. It'll say like UVR star four, seven, eight. 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, simply say, oh, we spent money at Uber. Here's what they spent. And so part of what we did was after measuring, right? Where were people going to spend their time?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  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 companies. How do we start adding more features and compounding? And so you flash forward to seven 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 it 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 across the company to try to go and get better at it each and every month. And as good 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. Wasted motion.

• 35:18David Senra?

  A question on the scoreboard, they use the term scoreboard. How is this presented to your team?

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:22David Senra?

  Is it an actual scoreboard inside of Ramp?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, ever, I mean, you can get it any, any minute or second of the day. If you go on to our internal dashboards or you can query, you know, ask one of our internal agents for Ramp Research, any question you want. How many, how many dollars and hours did we save as specific customers? Show me all the ways in Italian, but effectively it's a data table.

• 35:44David Senra?

  But it's inside a dashboard on their computer?

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:46David Senra?

  Have you ever thought about putting it on the, like, making a giant version on the wall?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's, it's on the wall. It's reported out in the, the largest channels in Slack. It's things that we talk about frankly every month. And it's part of why even too, even on the first slide, if we're meeting with a new potential prospect, we talk not just about how many dollars, how many customers are using it, how many dollars are removed, but how many fewer dollars and hours have we helped organizations spend?

• 36:13David Senra?

  Yeah, I think putting that data in front, constantly reminding and putting in front of employees is super important. There was this, I did this episode on Ken Griffin from Citadel.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:21David Senra?

  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 Ramco. And he's like, you know, there's a, there's not, like you said, if you have 20 variables, it's too many.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:34David Senra?

  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 fucking screen in their headquarters.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:46David Senra?

  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 reduced their risk by just putting it, I think at the time Citadel was in Chicago, between this giant dashboard, like scoreboard in the office where everybody could see it. Just this constant reminders, like you can't run from it.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  That's it. And it comes back to like, at the end of the day, like people love complexity in new things and new products. 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? If these fictions are intended to grow to hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands of 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.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  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 your best and get better every day, how should we think about that? And how can we understand our forward progress? What is the right scoreboard? And so, yeah, we spent an incredible amount of time 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 think just as it was true 100 years ago, people always wanted more out of every dollar an hour. I think people will absolutely want it in 100 years, in whatever form that may take.

• 38:19David Senra?

  You're speaking to this Bezos idea where it's like,

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:22David Senra?

  one of the smartest things 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.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  That's it. That's it. And look, 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 in some of the themes 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 I ever work on, and I want to work on this for the rest of my life. Like, I love building this thing.

• 39:02David Senra?

  You know, I was obsessed with that question. Like, I talked to founders and they want to tell, talk me, we've talked about their company. And like, one of the first things I always ask is like, is this the last, is this your last company?

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:11David Senra?

  It's just like, that's the thing I'm super interested in, because 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 billion. I think he's like 77 or something like that. And he started that company when he was 22. So that means he's a 55 years of experience in the same company.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:37David Senra?

  It's like, those conversations are so full, like insight per minute. Like, you're not going to beat that at all.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  That's it. And you'll see things at a deeper level of depth and it's fun. You know, you learn all the scar tissue you have, the mistakes you made. I think allow you to move with a lot more efficiency in movement.

• 39:56David Senra?

  I am very skeptical of the statement that humans repeat throughout history that this time is different. Usually it's not different. I just was spending more time with Michael Dell the other day. And I figured, okay, you started coming when you're 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 this time different? He goes, yes. We had a wonderful conversation about it. So I want to go back to 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?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  I think this is a super deep topic and maybe we'll just start at like the highest level of like. I think you'd asked of like, does AI throw out all the fundamentals and lessons we've learned about business? And 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 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 some of the best businesses created of all time. But the potential of AI is so great, it can blind people and ask, is it worth working on anything else?

• 41:15Speaker 01

  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 degrees 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 is 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. 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.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  I think on the scale beyond the industrial revolution, making goods plentiful. I think it'll 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 to be asking is, in a world in which 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? Just as there were cities and things created that were not possible for maybe the air conditioner and something as dull as that. I think that there are entire things that we can go do when you have intelligence that this is accessible. Come back to us. In some sense, like you and I are a form of general intelligence, right?

• 42:43Speaker 01

  We have kind of our evolved monkey brains. 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 like a distributed ledger to manage resources, work. You know, there's records around this and there's a reallocation of these types of resources. And I think part of why we are so interested in payments 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.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  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 the 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.

• 43:49David Senra?

  Talk about what you guys are doing with token spend. This is very interesting.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  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. Three years ago, they made their first dollar while we're recording this. The rumor is the run rate revenue is over $50 billion a year. And if you play out what they and OpenAI, just the two labs are on track to do in revenue and 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 in 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.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  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 incredibly 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, was prior to going and adopting,

• 45:17Speaker 01

  but they had mentioned that their CTO 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 budgeted, like I can tell you, five 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 created 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 and 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?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  These are sort of a keyword for the most advanced model that is commercially accessible and maybe you use this for your most difficult types of ask. And the really interesting thing going on, and this is going to, you have this, the labs don't like the The notion that these labs can be distilled. As you've noticed, it's not one supermodel. 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 weight model that is just as good and maybe costs, right, one one hundredth to go and use it. And so it begs the question of, you know,

• 46:41Speaker 01

  you can use this advanced alien intelligence to edit your email, but perhaps, right, you know, you could route these tasks to these lower cost models. And so part of what we and others are focused on is delivering services like token spend management, right? To 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 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.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  I would probably need the CFO and maybe the board sign off.

• 47:27David Senra?

  Or if I worked with you, we're lucky enough to have this partnership with the Mon. So there's film here when we're in New York in the beautiful Mon. I don't think you would appreciate it if I worked at Ramp, if I was booking the Mon Hotel.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Probably not, you know, unless you close some great deals, in which case we can talk.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  What I'm getting at is like, we built a structure for organizations to delegate authority to spend on certain types of things. It 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 I 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 1,000 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?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  This rate that we're getting, maybe we're getting charged $100 per seat. Ram 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. Because 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.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  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?

• 49:22David Senra?

  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.

• 50:05David Senra?

  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 this service at up to a 90% discount exclusively for eligible startups. Visit hubspot.com/startups to learn more. That is hubspot.com/startups.

• 50:31David Senra?

  I just had this fascinating conversation with Jared Kushner and he talks about when he's doing these, like, 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 that 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, you're taking advantage of all the new latest technology developments. In your mind, then, like, what is, it's not there now, but like, what is the ideal product? Is it literally self-driving money? It's like, you're not buying seats, software, it's, you're buying work? What

• 51:16David Senra?

  is it to you?

• 51:17Speaker 01

  I think that's really well said, right? I'll just start with like who we serve today, right? A lot of our customers are business owners and finance organizations. And I think, like, I remember meeting a lot of friends, right, who were studying accounting and finance and, you know, back in college, like, I remember that the things you'd 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. I want to do things that are really meaningful." And you go study this kind of craft and trade of accounting, finance, whatever it may be. And then you are really awakened to the reality that's like, "Oh, no, no, you're not doing that. Your job is

• 52:00Speaker 01

  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 a financial projection again for this quarter and you're going to spend like 80, 90% of your time just on rote 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

• 52:41Speaker 01

  data so it can know, "This dollar, did it jet, did it make you money or was it neutral or did you waste money by spending on this?"

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Then, suddenly, the job starts to change from "most of your time is looking backwards" and very little is actually 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 your 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 selling. Like, this rote, low-value work is done for you. Yes, you can go and turn on Ramp. And all of these things, maybe you're a small business owner and you have an obsession. Maybe you know how to make a great podcast,

• 53:35Speaker 01

  but you don't care at all, right? As to like, "I don't know how to keep books or pay vendors at the lowest cost or optimize my working capital." And you could hire Ramp to do that for you and with you. And that's what we're working towards. Like, 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 put in a position where technology and tools empower them to pursue their actual missions and dreams and 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.

• 54:14David Senra?

  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 or Kareem have talked about this 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 the laps.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:40David Senra?

  Can you explain why?

• 54:41Speaker 01

  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 I understand that comparison, kind of on the face of it. We move funds, we're quite good at it, and people are often coming from legacy tools. And I think that these 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. They're selling you money. They are selling you rewards, a larger rebate on a purchase. They are selling you more working capital. They are selling you a loan. They're selling you a higher interest on your accounts.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  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 value 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. 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 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.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  And growth while 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 these organizations. And I think humanity 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 weird, but it seemed sort of human. And just a few years later, people quibble. You get 100 page dossier in some footnote is offer hallucinated. And I don't think there's any sign the stuff is slowing down. And if you really internalize of what are the capabilities of some of these organizations? I think it calls in a question of if you assume intelligence will be functionally free in some sense.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  What is unique? And how do we make sure we're adding durable and differentiated value compared to these organizations? And so, look, 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 two months ago, we wasted funds. And with Ramp, we're building kind of 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 and connecting to the movement of funds. But I think they are some of the most exciting competitors for all types of businesses I think we've ever seen.

• 58:19David Senra?

  Thank you. Put forth a very optimistic case for entrepreneurs. This is awesome. Thanks for taking the time to do it.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Thanks a lot, David.

• 58:26David Senra?

  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.