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

1. 0:00 – 4:01

   Smarter Financial Infrastructure To Run Your Business

   1. SPSpeaker0:00

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

   2. EGEric Glyman0:10

      You use Ramp, and you, you know it, but, um, let me just give you a snapshot of where we are. Um, you can think of Ramp as smarter financial infrastructure to run your business, right? From one single place, you can make payments of all kinds, whether that's cards, bill payments, procurements. You can better manage funds. Uh, you can automate expenses and even automate your accounting, right? And the way all of these tools are built is meant to be a single plane for you to better run, uh, your business and get more value out of every dollar and hour. The way that we measure ourselves, um, is how many fewer dollars do our customers spend after adopting Ramp, and how many fewer hours, uh, are they using to go and run their business? Today, over 70,000 businesses, uh, use Ramp. Uh, over three percent of all of the corporate card transactions in the United States, uh, are powered by Ramp, and nearly one percent of all the corporate transactions, uh, are running through Ramp. And I think the most, uh, useful piece of information is that, like, you know, the typical business that adopts Ramp is able to cut their expenses by over five percent per year. And as you know, like, a dollar saved is more than a dollar earned. The typical business that adopts Ramp, uh, is growing their revenue, uh, a median of sixteen percent per year. Um, the US average is three to four percent, and so we're just trying to make dollars and hours go further.

   3. SPSpeaker1:22

      You and I on our-- when we're talking off camera, uh, talk a lot about AI. The p-- 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 is, like, a great line that you have. Talk about, like, s-some of the ways that you guys are using AI and, like, what are the products you're building.

   4. EGEric Glyman1:44

      One of the most, I would say, like, present experiences is just, like, the act of, let's say, doing expense reports. We'll, we'll go there. We'll talk about paying bills. We'll talk about closing your books, right? Um, for many people, doing your expense 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 gonna issue you or your employee a card, or your expense policy is not gonna drive how the thing actually works. You're gonna pay for a client dinner. You're gonna get a piece of paper. Then you're gonna go into another system maintained by an entirely different company, and you, the employee, are gonna go manually do your expenses yourself. Kind of a waste of time. Uh, you could do it that day. You probably do it a month later, and it's an hour of your time wasted. Someone in another city or state reviews this thing. It's a whole rigmarole. At Ramp, we fuse all of it, right? And so we issue smart cards. Um, your expense policy drives how the thing actually behaves. You tap it. We check in real time is it in or out of policy. If it is, we pull the data from the merchant. We process the transaction. We write the memo. We push it into your accounting software, and it's done. Zero-touch expenses. Similar for paying bills. Uh, often if you're a small business and let's say you receive an invoice from a vendor, it's fifty 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? Um, you're entering the itemized, uh, level, uh, details, and it could be fifty clicks before the time you're done. With Ramp, you upload it. We check all those things, right? Do you have a contract? Was, uh, a service ultimately rendered? Uh, all the fields are entered for you, and if you go and change it, the next time you get a similar invoice, it's done correctly. And so y-the effect is actually, like, your bills are paid on time. If there's a lower cost way to do it, maybe you can earn cash back on it, or maybe you get better terms by paying early. We can do that automatically for you. And so the effect is, is something more like if, i-if there's car companies interested, like a, maybe a Tesla is, is designed to not just get you from A to B, but to drive you there, uh, without you needing to, like, you know, spend your focus on it. Uh, Ramp is trying to do this for your financial processes, and the effect is, uh, if you're a CFO, uh, it gives you one place where all the funds that are moving, uh, inside of your organization are being tracked, are being accounted for. Uh, and ultimately, we're recommending the next time where you can get more utility out of every, uh, dollar that's flowing through your org or hour. It's

2. 4:01 – 10:15

   The North Star Is Time And Money

   1. EGEric Glyman4:01

      like how you can think about it.

   2. SPSpeaker4:01

      How do you describe the mission inside the company, though? So, like, something that's very common, obviously, uh, one of my favorite examples of this is, like, uh, Steve Jobs, you know, would describe what he wanted to do. He said, 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."

   3. EGEric Glyman4:16

      Yep.

   4. SPSpeaker4:17

      He would just repeat, "If you want to make insanely great products, come with me. If you don't, then you shouldn't be working here."

   5. EGEric Glyman4:21

      Yep.

   6. SPSpeaker4:22

      I just talked to Toby Lutke from Shopify. The way I would think about the mission of his company and the way it's spread throughout, uh, internally, it's like we're building infrastructure for entrepreneurs.

   7. EGEric Glyman4:30

      Yep.

   8. SPSpeaker4:30

      So how do you describe it as a CEO, uh, to your team inside of Ramp?

   9. EGEric Glyman4:34

      I think our mission is endless, right? It is to help every business owner get more out of every dollar and hour. That's what we're trying to do. The credit cards that we offer, the expense management, the bill payments, the accounting automation, these are just products. At the end of the day, what we are trying to do is really measure for all the dollars that have passed through your organization, how do we make sure that few leave your, your organization at the end of the month? That you get more for every dollar and every hour is what we are trying to do. And I think what made Ramp start to scale very early on in a very crowded industry that people thought we weren't-- we were, like, hundred seventy-five years late to was this was, I-I think, really inverting, uh, a lot of the way that many of our competitors had acted, right? If you kind of look at the credit card, uh, industry, um, which is where we started, uh, even just seven years ago, everyone had agreed that the best way to earn business was, uh, through these points and rewards programs. Go spend more money. You can earn points and multipliers. We'll have your back. Um, and it was I, I think, exactly the opposite of what most business owners and CFOs that I knew wanted. They actually wanted more, uh, in their bank account, and they wanted their employees spending less time on this stuff. And so simply by inverting, uh, that primary assumption and saying, "What if instead of going and trying to, uh, get you to be a little bit worse off by spending more than you intended, what if I worked really hard to help you spend less?" It leads you to answer different kinds of questions. It's part of why we're the first in the industry to go look at expenses and say, like, "Why are, why are there two systems involved in buying every single thing you do?" Uh, it's part of why we said, like, "Why do you need another different tool for bill payments? Why do you need another one for procurement? Why do you need another one for, for, for treasury?" And ultimately, where, where it's led us is to build, uh, better infrastructure and kind of this substrate where your, your dollars are moving through it. But a-again, I, I care less about what are the dollars we're moving, but actually how do we get more value from e-every movement that's occurring.

   10. SPSpeaker6:32

       So can I think of the North Star that you're working backwards from, right? When you guys are talking about, "I'm gonna build, we're gonna build new products, new features," The question you ask yourself first is like, is this saving our customers either time or money?

   11. EGEric Glyman6:44

       That's right.

   12. SPSpeaker6:44

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

   13. EGEric Glyman6:46

       Yeah. That is exactly right. And, and I, I think a lot of it too, like I, I've been, been a, I mean, a huge fan of, of, of Founders and what you've been building for years. Like, I, I think of, of Elon's algorithm as one that has been incredibly, uh, motivating and orienting and clarifying for us, right? With every process of money movement or allocation of resources, uh, or measurement, uh, of, of, of money movement that occurs inside of companies, uh, we are trying to apply a similar philosophy of asking, you know, whose requirement is this, uh, 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, this, the amount of time it takes to develop a feature? Uh, and then once we've simplified it, can we go and automate, uh, more parts of the process at the end? And what we are trying to do is take that methodology, uh, and that style of thinking, uh, uh, 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, uh, 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.

   14. SPSpeaker7:59

       I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the Ramp data too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, and you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, 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 thirty-five seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin, and you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.

3. 10:15 – 11:58

   A Determined Generalist Can Now Do More Than Ever

   1. SPSpeaker10:15

      So AI is accelerating. You guys are adopting every single new technology you possibly can. You guys are obsessed with this. A lot of the late-night dinners we have-

   2. EGEric Glyman10:22

      Yeah.

   3. SPSpeaker10:22

      -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 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 th-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?

   4. EGEric Glyman10:55

      There's a few things that- I think are evolving with, with AI. One, uh, just the, the power laws are getting more extreme in the same way, um, uh, companies are getting larger. The speed to which companies are, are getting built is, is accelerating. I think the returns to talent is higher than ever. The most effective person in the world is no longer, uh, ten times as effective or a hundred times as effective, it could be a thousand times as effective in a particular area. So I think finding people, uh, who are very spiky in areas I think is absolutely right. The thing which is, I think has bent my mind most over the past year is if you're really internalizing what LLMs are, are doing, I think we used to be in a world where skills were very scarce and very hard to find. And I think we're starting to get to a place where, uh, a very determined generalist can start to do much more than they used to be able to do, right? To, to explain a bit more of what, what I mean, um, 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. Uh, they've, uh, read more, um, uh,

4. 11:58 – 13:20

   I'm The Best Doctor I've Ever Been

   1. EGEric Glyman11:58

      company filings, uh, and, uh, 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? [laughs] If I'm just stubborn, I can keep going and do this. And i-i-in a way, like, I think a lot of work over the past, uh, hundred years was you would, um, have some craft or subject matter expertise that you were very, very good at. Uh, but once you hit kinda the boundary, right, you were a great engineer, but you enter into design, you say, "You can have your intuition, but ask the designer," right? Or, "You can have your ideas, but go, uh, ask someone who's skilled at scales, uh, 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, the positive interpretation is you're not gate kept, and you can do a lot more. Um, but I think the more interesting interpretation for people building businesses, uh, is, is, is first, uh, if you find really determined people with a high, uh, level of determination and an aptitude for just, like, a drive, these people can do far more than they ever used to be able to do. So it's not restricted just to specific spikes. And then I think it leads you to question, you design organizations with lots of subspecialties, which can lead to, uh, walls and barriers and things that get lost between organizations. Uh, and I think you can radically simplify-

   2. SPSpeaker13:17

      Wait, what, what does that mean?

   3. EGEric Glyman13:18

      Yeah.

   4. SPSpeaker13:18

      The barriers between organizations.

5. 13:20 – 16:00

   The Tower Of Babel Inside Big Companies

   1. EGEric Glyman13:20

      I'll put it this way. When Ramp was, call it, uh, ten people and you ask people, um, you know, "Where do you work?" uh, or, "What do you do here?" They'd say, "I work at Ramp, and I'm an engineer." Uh, you get to fifty, you might hear something simpler, you know, "I work at Ramp, and I'm in the sales team." You start seeing these different divisions grow. But once you start getting to, like, two hundred or five hundred people, you start hearing this in- 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. Uh, salespeople talk with other salespeople, and you, you see these mega corporations. It's kinda like the Tower Of Babel where, you know, this, uh, no one in sales knows an actual engineer. The engineers don't know any actual designers. Everything's hard because information has to go up top and down on through, uh, and these organizations become very Byzantine. Uh, and I think now in a world where, you know, someone who develops the product can use technologies that helps them sell more effectively, that helps them track customers, um, that helps them track outreach, that helps them write with a better pitch on the first go, uh, and these are real tools that you can build for people today, I think you start seeing fewer types of specialties within organizations, and it's leading, uh, I think a lot of organizations right now to question, uh, "Do I have the right or shape of an organization for the world that we're starting to enter into?" And so I, I just find this whole field really interesting right now.

   2. SPSpeaker14:44

      I wanna go to the shape of organization if you think you need to change it or not. You j- How... So what I'm understanding from what you're saying is, like, essentially you're looking f- 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 like. It was Toby talking about this, and he's like, "Listen, I'm a high school dropout. The idea that I'm gonna, 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 go-- if you're a high agency person, you're going to have examples of this thing, I ran into this blockade and this is what I did to get over it." And so they have high agency people reveal themselves through the telling of their life story. How do you do it?

   3. EGEric Glyman15:33

      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 one percent or point one percent in some field, but most or most are not, and I think that if folks are, there's usually some evidence to some degree somewhere in the past that you can find. When I think about a, a, a couple of these things, uh,

6. 16:00 – 19:10

   The Kid Who Paid For College On Minecraft

   1. EGEric Glyman16:00

      you know, I think about there's an engineer, uh, and actually a whole litany now, a whole community of people at Ramp who, uh, we found them because You know, when they were fifteen years old, they were paying, playing like eighty hours, a hundred hours a week just on Minecraft. And a few of them were known for building these private Minecraft, uh, servers that were so entertaining, other kids would love 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, uh, when he was quite literally very small, um, [laughs] you know, and it turns out he knew all the other, um, you know, Minecraft developers, and you find these people he would have missed. Like, I think that a lot of traditional ways of looking for employees would go and say, "Oh, they don't have a college degree. They aren't well-rounded in all these ways." But he has this incredible focus and drive, and if you talk to the other folks who were in the community at the time, people would say, like, "He was incredibly obsessive. He was super detailed, and he was able to, to bend the API to do things that we didn't know it could do because he was so discerning." And I, I think you can often find, um, people with incredible spikes. Um, sometimes it's through video games, sometimes it's through sports. Who has the drive to go and be that good? It can be through grades. Um, it can be by, uh, people who didn't have any of these credentials somehow are out there making and putting out incredible work. Like, I think even, you know, just about you, I think you just sat down one day, uh, 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, I just remember meeting, uh, a lot of folks who just kept talking about, like, "There's this guy, [laughs] uh, making Founders podcast and it's really good." You look to the-- it's all to say, I'm less interested in what is the resume. I'm far more interested in, like, proof of work. Um, 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, I think I'm really looking for signs of that. Uh, and you can find that, um, I think by, by searching of like where is work? Where are people producing interesting, you know, achievements, awards, bodies of work and actually starting and looking for that. And so part of our hiring process is actually going and just trying to, um, look for people who are very active on, on GitHub. Uh, we're trying to meet people who like were leaders in like different bizarre fringe communities. Uh, and it turns out too, like even if you have a really intensive interview process and you, you, you have like ten rounds of interviews, right? And, uh, you interview someone for fifteen 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 where, who have maybe some asymmetric information about who someone actually is versus who they present to be. I think the next thing which I specifically spend a lot of time looking for is, you know, look, there's a lot of incredible things to work on in the world, right? I shouldn't be so arrogant to assume that people need to want to work for, for Ramp or whatever it is that we're working on. Or you can be working on making humanity multi-planetary. You can be working on, uh, 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? Uh, I think in some sense, like you and I, like we only live our lives, right?

7. 19:10 – 22:31

   Everyone Is The Hero Of Their Own Story

   1. EGEric Glyman19:10

      Uh, everyone in some sense is the hero of their own journey, uh, 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? Um, independence of what Ramp will do in five, ten, fifteen years. Where do they hope to be in five, ten, fifteen 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, uh, 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. Um, don't waste your time. And so those are the two things that I, I spend a lot of time looking for when I'm interviewing people.

   2. SPSpeaker19:51

      That brings something, a thought to my mind. Uh, I just had a conversation with Gustav, who's the co-CEO of Spotify, and one thing that's remarkable about him is like he start-- he had a startup, sold a startup, then goes to work for Spotify, then works there for eighteen years-

   3. EGEric Glyman20:03

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SPSpeaker20:03

      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." W-what's your opinion on this? Like, do you want consistency in like your, your, your, the top people in your company? Or do you like encourage turnover? Do you want to keep the cur- the core cur, uh, product kernel team together? Like, how do you think about that?

   5. EGEric Glyman20:31

      I think that people's level of in, 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 fifty smartest people at MIT, uh, if you ask around and spend some time on that. And generally, people are not recruiting people for their internship program until their junior year or their junior summer. But y-you can go and say, "Actually, I'm gonna try to find like the smartest freshmen, uh, and offer them a winter internship or a summer internship and go bring them in and find the smartest and like incredible aptitude of people." And by the way, other freshmen, when they see the smartest person went, they wanna go to your company too. Uh, and you can start to create these virtuous cycles of finding great people. So I agree with, with Elon's philosophy of trying to find really smart people, in part because it allows you to find maybe something like a mispricing 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, uh, quant firms, AI labs, whoever you name it. Um, people are paying top dollar for folks. But, um, that early in careers 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, uh, and give them a lot more responsibility than maybe they're used to. And when they work for Quite a number of hours and do great things despite their age. And then when they've built experience, uh, earlier in your company than they would've otherwise, they wanna stay, uh, they wanna build it. And that leads me to m- my actual goal is I wanna work very early with people, and I wanna work with them for a long, long, long time. Uh, 'cause I think when you've built the trust and you understand, you know, how to complete each other's sentences, uh, without, you know, uh, the other needing to go do it, you're able to rely on each other, you're able to move faster, uh, and you're able to communicate far more, uh, in a shorter period of time, which leads you to act with higher, higher velocity.

8. 22:31 – 23:52

   You Don't Get There In A Hundred Hours

   1. SPSpeaker22:31

      It's almost like an ESP that develops. So, um, uh, we were just talking right before we recorded that a few days ago I recorded MrBeast, the episode's not gonna 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-

   2. EGEric Glyman22:56

      Yep

   3. SPSpeaker22:57

      ... 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.

   4. EGEric Glyman23:06

      Yeah.

   5. SPSpeaker23:06

      And he says, like, uh, his operations guy, I think his name's Tyler, if I remember correctly, he can, like, walk on a set that, just like the one you're on right now, that Tyler does. And b- before MrBeast, like, looks at something or opens his mouth, Tyler's 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-

   6. EGEric Glyman23:25

      Yeah

   7. SPSpeaker23:25

      ... if I position it here, it lets me shoot into here." And then he doesn't have to say anything. He goes, "That's exactly what I would've done if I knew that." And he, 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."

   8. EGEric Glyman23:37

      Yeah.

   9. SPSpeaker23:37

      There is something special about this. Like, I, I talked to Charlie Munger, I went to Charlie Munger's house right before he died, and the, the fascinating thing we, one of the questions that one of these other entrepreneurs we're with asked him is like, "Well, how often do you talk to Buffett these days?" And he's like, "We got, we talked so much, we got to the point where he, we didn't have to

9. 23:52 – 25:03

   Buffett And Munger Stopped Needing To Call Each Other

   1. SPSpeaker23:52

      call each other anymore."

   2. EGEric Glyman23:52

      Yeah.

   3. SPSpeaker23:53

      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." [laughs]

   4. EGEric Glyman24:06

      It allows, I think, a much more pure pursuits of the mission, 'cause 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, uh, and push forward, and what you can rely on another person to do with you. And I, I think it leads to these effects where you see some companies, when you have a really strong culture, you have really strong, uh, trust. It, it's not necessarily that the talent level is different, it's that in every single hour, the amount of throughput that organization gets is radically higher. Uh, and so I, I think some form of both is what we're trying to pursue. And then last, look, I, I think one of the most damaging things you can do to an organization, uh, is if there are folks who are getting paid similarly, have similar ownership, and are just not pulling their weight. Because I think it leads to this, like, very tough que- like, question and, and fair one for folks of, like, if I'm busting my ass and working super hard and, like,

10. 25:03 – 27:40

    The Damage Of Letting People Free-Ride

    1. EGEric Glyman25:03

       you know, uh, giving up on all the things that, that I am, and, like, you're not, uh, you know, there's all these folks free riding, uh, and you're not, uh, enforcing high standards, why sh- why should we obsess so much, uh, over, uh, reaching, uh, our higher potential? This organization doesn't, doesn't seem to demonstrate a real, um, respect for the pursuit of higher and higher standards and an intolerance for anything less than giving your best. Like, ultimately I wanna 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, I, I, iron sharpens ir- iron. Um, you build better products faster. And, and so, you know, my whole job, uh, like, I don't believe I'm the smartest person at Ramp, um, not even close, uh, sadly, uh, at, at this point. My job is to try to create the conditions for people to do their life's work, and that involves finding great people, making Ramp the kind of place that people wanna come and do that great work. And then once they're here, ensuring that they're able to do incredible work, make decisions quickly, see if they're right or, or wrong fast, and get products into people's hands and move. That's my job, is to unblock these other people. Deel 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, Eleven Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product, and what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel 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. The founder of Eleven Labs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, "We built Eleven Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel 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." Deel is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deel.com/senra. That is deel.com/senra. Ramp's six years old, seven, how many years right now? I know you do the day thing, but how many years? It's, uh, w- just over seven years.

    2. SPSpeaker27:38

       Okay.

    3. EGEric Glyman27:38

       Or 2,620 days in case you were

11. 27:40 – 28:34

    Consumer-Grade Design In B2B Software

    1. EGEric Glyman27:40

       curious.

    2. SPSpeaker27:40

       There you go. [laughs]

    3. EGEric Glyman27:41

       [laughs]

    4. SPSpeaker27:41

       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, like, a love and insistence on, like- Elegance of design, almost l- 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.

    5. EGEric Glyman28:01

       Sure.

    6. SPSpeaker28:02

       But I think that just speaks to you as like we're, well, 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 a thick accent. I was like-

    7. EGEric Glyman28:14

       Yes

    8. SPSpeaker28:14

       ... "What? What is that?"

    9. EGEric Glyman28:14

       Yeah.

    10. SPSpeaker28:14

        I didn't know what that was. And it's a door where you can't tell if you should push or pull it.

    11. EGEric Glyman28:17

        Exactly.

    12. SPSpeaker28:18

        And so he's like, "I can't have shitty design things," so he had them removed from the Shopify offices 'cause he's like, "That design falls below the engineering standards that I'm trying to get to. Like, I want spread and, like, we have to adhere to." And I love this idea of, like, the o- the way you do one thing is the way you do

12. 28:34 – 31:47

    The Breville Toaster And The Bit-More Button

    1. SPSpeaker28:34

       everything.

    2. EGEric Glyman28:34

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

    3. SPSpeaker28:44

       No.

    4. EGEric Glyman28:44

       If you care about design, you're meeting all these people, you should buy a Breville toaster. Uh, so, uh, one of the big problems, right, in enterprise software, in a lot of B2B software is it starts out clean and elegant. There's a bunch of businesses who love the product, uh, and 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, like, disaster of B2B softwares which require, like, you know, a PhD to learn how to use, uh, these tools, um, people who will maintain your database. Uh, they're horrible to use, and as a result, like, you never wanna go log in. And you can kind of name, uh, what other software is. And, uh, for salespeople, for HR people, for finance people, you name it, they're horrible. That's, uh, I, I think, uh, a lot of how people would describe B2B software. Let's, let's go back to toasting, right? If you were to go ask people, "What do you want in a toaster or maybe in a microwave?" They might say, "Well, um, I like toast, but I, sometimes I, I, I want to reheat pizza. Um, I should have like a reheat frozen pizza mode." Uh, or maybe, um, you know, y- you're, you're cooking stuff and you want it to be more like an oven, uh, or you wanna make popcorn and it's an, a, you know, a toaster/microwave and all these kind of things. And before you know it, you end up with these toasters filled with buttons and buttons and buttons-

    5. SPSpeaker29:54

       Yeah

    6. EGEric Glyman29:54

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

    7. SPSpeaker30:29

       [laughs]

    8. EGEric Glyman30:29

       ... you need to start over and it's, like, horrible. And so if you look at that, there really is only a few buttons, and one of the four buttons, I think, on there is a button called a bit more. The reason [laughs] he 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, it is, like, no one is coming to Ramp saying like, "I wanna buy a credit card," or, "Can you build me a better expense app?" Like, I don't think people should do expense reports. It's crazy. All the dig- the data is digital in the first place. Um, you are, 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 in 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, I, I don't know, distracting you with, like, bullshit, uh, at work. And so I'm happy it's manifested in terms of people saying, like, Ramp is easy to use, intuitive. But, like, I think if you actually respect people's time and care about what they're doing, like, y- you have to be, uh, asking these kind of questions. You have to be interested in these kind of products.

13. 31:47 – 35:18

    We Win When Our Customers Win

    1. SPSpeaker31:47

       This leads me to another question. Um, how do you align incentives with your customers? One of my favorite, uh, 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 gonna 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 event together, uh, I don't know, like a month or two ago. You're sitting to my right. I look at, you're wearing, like, Ramp, m- uh, merch, and I, like, grab your, your, your sleeve because I wanted to read what was on it. It says, "We win when our customers win."

    2. EGEric Glyman32:17

       Yeah.

    3. SPSpeaker32:18

       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?

    4. EGEric Glyman32:24

       It's one of our six values, and a lot of companies have this idea they wanna have values. Everyone has... My elementary school had values, right? Um, and, um, what I didn't like about values at my elementary school, um, sorry if any administrators listening to it-

    5. SPSpeaker32:38

       [laughs]

    6. EGEric Glyman32:38

       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 thing, 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, 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... I- it's part of why we connect, right, to a company's accounting software to have kind of a source of truth, uh, as part of the way we move funds, and then we explicitly create measurements on how many f- uh, like how many dollars have we blocked, 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? And for individual customers, did the experience get better or worse? And our job is to make sure the products that we build ultimately ladder back to that goal. For example, automating merchant matching or being able to go and take like, often if you look at your credit card statement today, for most people it's like a string of text, and it's inscrutable. It'll say like UBR star four seven eight, and you have, uh, finance people whose time is wasted running pivot tables to tell you, "Oh, that's Uber, uh, and we spent, you know, $50,000 this month at Uber." With Ramp, um, part of how we built that was we discovered our, our own customers, their finance teams were just going and trying to do all these transformations to simply say, "Oh, we spent money at Uber. Uh, here's where we spent." And so part of what we did was after measuring, right, where were people going to spend their time, we built software to go and automate that for people. Okay, we've saved an hour here for them. We've saved this hour for 20,000 other, uh, companies. How do we start adding more features and compounding? And so you flash forward to 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 I didn't expect. I was able to block transactions, so when I canceled my subscription to some SaaS software and I deactivated that merchant just on the card, it didn't go through." We are tracking those religiously, uh, across the company to try to go and get better at it each and every month. And as good as, as good as Ramp is, I don't think it's good enough. I think we can do a lot more just to cut out waste and wasted motion.

14. 35:18 – 37:07

    Put The Scoreboard On The Wall

    1. SPSpeaker35:18

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

    2. EGEric Glyman35:22

       Yeah.

    3. SPSpeaker35:22

       Is it an actual scoreboard inside of Ramp?

    4. EGEric Glyman35:24

       Yes. Yes. Yeah, every, I mean, y- you can get it any, any minute or, or second of the day if you go onto our internal dashboards, or, um, you can query, uh, you know, ask one of our internal agents Ramp research any question you want. Uh, how many, how many, uh, dollars, uh, and hours did we save a specific customer? Show me all the ways in Italian, but it, effectively it's a data table. Um-

    5. SPSpeaker35:44

       But it's inside a dashboard on their computer?

    6. EGEric Glyman35:46

       Yes.

    7. SPSpeaker35:46

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

    8. EGEric Glyman35:49

       Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's on the wall.

    9. SPSpeaker35:51

       Okay.

    10. EGEric Glyman35:51

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

    11. SPSpeaker36:14

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

    12. EGEric Glyman36:21

        Yeah.

    13. SPSpeaker36:21

        And he's, I think he was giving this lecture at Yale or maybe it was Stanford, and he thought it was interesting. He went to, he actually got the idea from Saudi Aramco.

    14. EGEric Glyman36:29

        Yeah.

    15. SPSpeaker36:29

        And he's like, you know, there's a-

    16. EGEric Glyman36:30

        Huh

    17. SPSpeaker36:30

        ... there's not, like you said, if you have 20 variables, it's too many.

    18. EGEric Glyman36:34

        Yeah.

    19. SPSpeaker36:34

        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.

    20. EGEric Glyman36:46

        Yep.

    21. SPSpeaker36:46

        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, uh, reduced their risk by just putting it, I think at the time Citadel was in Chicago, just putting this giant dashboard, like, scoreboard-

    22. EGEric Glyman37:00

        Mm-hmm

    23. SPSpeaker37:00

        ... in the office where everybody could see it.

    24. EGEric Glyman37:01

        Yeah.

    25. SPSpeaker37:01

        Just this constant reminder, it's like you can't run from it.

    26. EGEric Glyman37:03

        That's it. Uh, and, and it comes back to like at the end of the day,

15. 37:07 – 38:19

    A Company Is Just A Fiction With A Common Purpose

    1. EGEric Glyman37:07

       like people love complexity in new things and new products and, and the world is changing. There's, there's nothing wrong with that. Like in some sense, a company is just a fiction. You make some filing somewhere and you say, "We're a corporation today," you know, even though we're just two people sitting around a couch [laughs] and we have a few dollars in a bank account, right? And if these fictions are intended to grow to hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of people, it should be because there is some common purpose. There is something that in aggregate, the sum of the parts of all the people working together should be able to move something further faster than anyone alone could do. And so I think part of the role of a leader, frankly, is to go and assert, like, how will we measure ourselves? If we are seeking to be your best and get better every day, uh, how should we think about that, and how can we understand our forward progress? What is the right scoreboard? And so yeah, we, we spend an incredible [laughs] amount of time, uh, on that. And at the end of the day, like, look, I don't know what Ramp will look like exactly in 100 years, but I, I think just as it was true 100 years ago, people always wanted more, uh, out of every dollar an hour. I think people will absolutely want it, uh, in 100 years, in whatever form that may take.

16. 38:19 – 40:02

    Focus On The Things That Don't Change

    1. EGEric Glyman38:19

       Uh, and so I think for-

    2. SPSpeaker38:19

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

    3. EGEric Glyman38:22

       Yeah

    4. SPSpeaker38:22

       ... the, the one of the smartest things a, a company can do is like identify the things that don't change. And if you could, he identified three at the beginning of Amazon, and if you could invest heavily in them decade after decade-

    5. EGEric Glyman38:33

       That's it

    6. SPSpeaker38:33

       ... because you know the customer's gonna want lower prices, more selection, and faster delivery.

    7. EGEric Glyman38:38

       That's it. That's it. And, and look, there, there, there's so much that's changing about the world and, you know, we can talk about where, what we're focused on and obsessed in and, and some of the themes of, uh, 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 wanna work on this for the rest of my life. Like, I, I love building [laughs] this thing. It's like-

    8. SPSpeaker39:02

       You know, I always answer that question. I, like, I talk to founders and they wanna tell, talk me about, tell, you know, talk about their company.

    9. EGEric Glyman39:07

       Yeah.

    10. SPSpeaker39:07

        And like one of the first things I always ask is like, "Is this the last co- is this your last company?"

    11. EGEric Glyman39:11

        Yeah.

    12. SPSpeaker39:11

        It's just like that's the thing I'm super interested in, 'cause then all the good things in life come in compounding. And like I get, um, I, I was just at this dinner two nights ago and, uh, ran into the son of this, uh, 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.

    13. EGEric Glyman39:30

        Mm-hmm.

    14. SPSpeaker39:30

        And he started that company when he was 22. So that means he's a 55 years of experience in the same company.

    15. EGEric Glyman39:37

        Yeah.

    16. SPSpeaker39:37

        And it's like those conversations are so full, like insight per minute, like you're not gonna beat that at all.

    17. EGEric Glyman39:42

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

    18. SPSpeaker39:56

        I am very skeptical of the statement that humans repeat throughout history that this time is different.

17. 40:02 – 40:50

    Is This Time Actually Different

    1. EGEric Glyman40:02

       Hmm.

    2. SPSpeaker40:02

       Usually it's not different. I just g- was spending more time with Michael Dell the other day, and I figured, okay, you started a company when you were 19, you're in your 60s. He's had to manage and thrive through all these different technological revolutions and everything else. I go, "Michael, is this time different?" He goes, "Yes." [laughs]

    3. EGEric Glyman40:17

       [laughs]

    4. SPSpeaker40:17

       "It's actually different." We had a wonderful conversation about it. So I wanna go back to- AI has to, I would imagine in your op-opinion, and I've spent enough time with you, I think I know the answer to this, but, like, I think it's gonna change the shape of your organization, is it not?

    5. EGEric Glyman40:32

       I think this is a super deep topic. And, and maybe we'll just start at, like, the highest level of, like, I, I think you'd asked of, like, does AI throw out all the fundamentals and lessons we've learned about business? And I, I say this because, like, I, I'll encounter engineers every month, right? On one side, you have people who are, like, you know, uh,

18. 40:50 – 43:52

    Air Conditioning Made Las Vegas, Not Fortunes

    1. EGEric Glyman40:50

       terrified, right? This is doom, and, uh, it's gonna 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, I think there's something incredibly revolutionary going on. I think that some of the labs are gonna be, uh, some of the best businesses created of all time. But the potential of AI is so great it can blind people and ask is, is it worth working on anything else? Should we even build a company if AGI is almost here around the corner? And I think history offers some pretty interesting lessons a-around this. And maybe to use an example, let's talk about air conditioning. It's ninety-five degrees, uh, outside. Uh, we're not sitting here talking about, like, the great robber baron, you know, families of the air conditioning industry, [laughs] right? And these great family fortunes of people who created it. And at the same time, like, air conditioning, like, I was born in Las Vegas. That city wouldn't exist if not for the air conditioner. You live in Miami, right? There's entire ecosystems. And you think about the value that was created out of the ecosystems far exceeded, uh, the value that was captured by the people who invented this technology. And I think with artificial intelligence, don't be wrong, I think that this is gonna be one of the most r- one of the most revolutionary transformations in our life. I think on, 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, uh, a general intelligence that is artificial for the world. But I think one of the more interesting questions, uh, to be asking is, in a world i-in which, uh, intelligence is very plentiful, in which intelligence is accessible, in which intelligence is cheap, what should you build? What kind of businesses are now possible? Uh, just as there were cities, uh, and things created that were not possible before maybe the air conditioner and something as dull as that, I think that there are entire things that we can go do, uh, when you have intelligence that this, this, this is accessible. Come back to us. In some sense, like, you and I are a form of general intelligence, right? We have kind of our evolved monkey brains, um, and, and, and we've kind of seen over the course of thousands of years how does a general intelligence like to do things. And it turns out that general intelligences like to pay for things. They will hire other types of intelligences to go do this. And you can think about payments almost as a form of the, like a distributed ledger to manage resources, work. You know, there's records a-around this, and there's a reallocation of, of these types of resources. And I think part of why we are so interested in payments in, in this kind of world is I think when you have an explosion of intelligence and it's more accessible than ever, I think you will have an explosion of payments, whether it's people or agents on behalf of people or even agents in general making purchases. And I think you'll need a better substrate, uh, 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.

    2. SPSpeaker43:49

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

19. 43:52 – 45:28

    1% Of US GDP Will Be Token Spend

    1. EGEric Glyman43:52

       Uh, like, I wanna 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. Uh, while we're recording this, um, the rumor is, uh, the run rate revenue is over fifty billion dollars a year. And if you play out what they and OpenAI, just the two labs, are on track to do in revenue in call it a year's time, uh, I think it'd be reasonably conservative to, at this point to say they're gonna pass more than three hundred billion dollars a year in revenue, which is, like, one percent of the entire gross domestic product of the United States is spent on token spend. And this type of spend, unlike other types of software, does not have no marginal costs. Every job you're doing has a marginal cost. And I think in a world where b-before it was fine for a CFO, uh, to go and say, "I'm just gonna, you know, manage my payroll, and I have a philosophy about how I'm gonna decide how much to spend on that. I'm gonna manage my vendors," I think there's gonna be a third mega category created around how do we manage knowledge work that will be done on behalf of organizations and done through these tokens. Part of why we're so focused on this is our customers are incredible early adopters of this. There are many reasons why Ramp is doubling its revenue each year. This is one of them, the growth of these categories. But these businesses are trying to better manage the spend. Like, one of our customers is Uber, who, you know, is prior to going and adopting, but they, they had mentioned that their CTO had, had said publicly that in a few months of the year, they had spent the entire budget they had allocated for AI spend, uh, in a quarter.

20. 45:28 – 46:46

    A Six-Month Lag To A Model A Hundred Times Cheaper

    1. EGEric Glyman45:28

       No one has budget-- Like, I can tell you, five years ago, no company budgeted for this type of spend. Uh, 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&D spend? Who spent it? What was the return on that? And I think the really interesting thing that's happening right now is, uh, look, most of the spend is concentrated in frontier models, right? These are, uh, sort of a code word for the most advanced model that is commercially, uh, accessible, and maybe you use this for your most difficult types of asks. And the really interesting thing going on, a-and as this is going on too, you have this, this, uh, the labs don't like the, the notion that these, that these labs can be distilled. Uh, as you've noticed, it's not one super model. You know, there's a great model, and then 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, um, and maybe costs, right, one one-hundredth to go and use it. And so it begs the question of, you know, you can use this advanced alien intelligence to edit your email, but perhaps, right, [chuckles]

21. 46:46 – 49:22

    Agents Negotiating With Agents To Buy Things

    1. EGEric Glyman46:46

       um, you know, y-y-you could route these tasks, uh, to these lower-cost models. And so part of, of what we and others are, are focused on, um, 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 agentic spend. One way of thinking about this is, like, you and I in, in some sense are limited agents of our companies, right? If I'm on business, uh, 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 two-million-dollar Ferrari because I feel like it. I would probably need the CFO and maybe the board sign-off.

    2. SPSpeaker47:27

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

    3. EGEric Glyman47:37

       Probably not. Um, you know, unless you close some great deals, in which case we can talk. But, uh, uh, what I'm getting at is, like, uh, we, we built a structure for organizations to, uh, delegate authority to spend on certain types of things is, like, a core to how the product works. And already today, there are organizations that are saying, "You know what? Like, we auto-renew ten million dollars 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 a thousand licenses. Who's logging in or not?" And I will submit to you that in a few years, and frankly already we're seeing organizations do this, are tracking this programmatically, right? They'll go and pull the data and see, all right, we paid for a thousand seats. How many people actually logged in? This rate that we're getting, maybe we're getting charged a hundred dollar per seat. Uh, Ramp can show them, actually, your price per seat, uh, 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. 'Cause in some sense, it's just your policies that people are applying to govern, uh, what you're gonna spend on, and I think that's gonna become software. And so part of what we're, we're working to do, uh, 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, uh, intelligence to allocate resources for you, you know, not just digitally log and help you close the books, but over time, can you start to build an operating system that allows organizations to frankly make sure, uh, the most worthwhile cause and the highest return on the dollar gets the dollar.

22. 49:22 – 51:17

    Making Sure The Highest-Return Dollar Gets The Dollar

    1. SPSpeaker49:22

       The best businesses I've studied all figured out the same thing early. Your team is only as good as the information they're working from. And today, that team includes people and agents. But most generic agents only have limited information and don't know the most important aspects of your business, like your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter and what didn't. This is what HubSpot fixes. It connects AI to your real customer data. So when you ask AI to write an email, it knows this customer asked about pricing three weeks ago, it knows what campaign brought them in, and it knows that customer already contacted support twice this month, and that changes everything for a startup. When you're hiring, new team members can see how you actually sell. When you're fundraising, your data is clean and ready, and when you're scaling, you're building on something designed to grow with you, not rebuilding from scratch. It's the same platform that more than three hundred 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 ninety percent discount exclusively for eligible startups. Visit hubspot.com/startups to learn more. That is hubspot.com/startups.

    2. EGEric Glyman50:31

       I just had this fascinating conversation with Jared Kushner, and he talks about when he's doing these, like he, he, you know, he's negotiating, trying to negotiate these peace agreements. He doesn't start with like, "Okay, let's, like, do, like, the smallest thing, the s-smallest thing we could do." Let's start with the most ideal situation and work backwards from that.

    3. SPSpeaker50:48

       Yeah.

    4. EGEric Glyman50:48

       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."

    5. SPSpeaker50:53

       Yeah.

    6. EGEric Glyman50:54

       My question to you is, like, as Ramp evolves and these new technologies, uh, you're taking advantage of all the, the new latest technology, uh, developments. In your mind then, like what is-- It's not there now, but, 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 is it to you?

23. 51:17 – 54:14

    The Dream Of Being At The Table That Matters

    1. SPSpeaker51:17

       I think that's really well said, right? I'll, I'll just start with, like, who we serve today, right? A lot of our customers are, uh, business owners and finance organizations. And I think, like I, I remember meeting a lot of friends, right, who were studying accounting and finance and, you know, back in college, like I, I remember the, the things you'd hear from them, like the dreams they had is like, you know, "I wanna go be at the table where it matters," right? "I wanna be allocating resources to causes that are important. I wanna help people understand businesses better so they can make better decisions. I wanna create great products. Uh, I wanna do things that are really meaningful." And you go study this kind of craft and trade of, of, of accounting, finance, whatever it may be. And then you are rudely awakened to the reality that's like, "Oh, no, no, you're not doing that. Your job is you're gonna do the expenses. You're gonna go and, like, take the bills, and you're gonna go process them. You're gonna 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 gonna spend, like, eighty, ninety percent 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, uh, moving the payments, but also, like, have the audit trail, know your policy is connected to your, um, your full financial data, so it can know this dollar, did it ge- did it make you money, or was it neutral, or did you waste money by spending on this?

    2. EGEric Glyman52:50

       Then suddenly, all right, the job starts to change from most of your time is looking backwards and very little is actually in the interesting stuff to, like, finally, if you're a business owner or if you're leading the finances of an organization, you can actually spend most of your time on, like, who is 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 resource going forward? And so I think for me, where this turns into and where it gets interesting is your point is like, yes, like it is, it is selling. Like, this rote low-value work is done for you. Uh, yes, you can go and, uh, turn on Ramp, uh, and all of these things. Maybe, maybe you're a small business owner and you have an obsession. Maybe you, you know how to make a great podcast, but you don't care at all, right, as to, like, I don't know how to keep books or pay, you know, vendors at the lowest cost or optimize my working capital, and you can hire Ramp to do that for you and with you, and that's what we're working towards. Like, I, I, I, I share a, a lot of common beliefs with folks like Toby who are trying to make entrepreneurship more accessible to people. I think people should be, uh, put in a position where technology and tools empower them to pursue their actual, like, missions and dreams and purposes, uh, versus getting clogged with all the tedious work that tends to drag, uh, most people down and I think defines most of corporate life today.

24. 54:14 – 55:44

    Why The Labs Are Ramp's Real Competitor

    1. SPSpeaker54:14

       So I think a lot of what we've talked about so far ties to this fact, which is surprising, and I don't know if you, you or you or Karim have talked about this publicly, but who you actually look at as the competitors to Ramp is not the, 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, the labs.

    2. EGEric Glyman54:39

       Yeah.

    3. SPSpeaker54:40

       Can you explain why?

    4. EGEric Glyman54:41

       Yeah. So if you get down to it, there's this question of like what does Ramp sell? And I think early on we were bunched in with a lot of financial service providers and, and I understand that comparison kind of on the face of it. We move funds. We're, we're, we're, we're quite good at it, and people are often coming from legacy tools, and I, I think that these banks at the core, a lot of what financial institutions or folks engaged in the movement of money are selling to their end customers is money, right? They're selling you money. They are selling you rewards, right? A larger rebate on a purchase. They are selling you more working capital. They are selling you a loan, right? Um, they're selling you a higher interest on your accounts, and they compete often based off of price or brand or service or some form of who can convince you they're giving you the most money or 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.

25. 55:44 – 56:27

    Banks Sell Money, Ramp Sells Time

    1. EGEric Glyman55:44

       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, uh, to go and have to tick and tie for every payment, uh, to close your books. Really what we're trying to go do is, is automate and do the work around, uh, the money movement. It is all of the knowledge work and the business process that we are working to automate and help you get more value out of. In some sense, it is a form of knowledge work and intelligence that we are serving, uh, and servicing for you. And I think that labs are in some sense the most comparable provider, uh, of this type of service. I think in some sense it could be, uh, it could

26. 56:27 – 58:47

    When Intelligence Becomes Functionally Free

    1. EGEric Glyman56:27

       be labor, but it also could be, uh, knowledge work done in different ways. And so one, I think it's incredibly exciting. I actually get very energized having, like, great competitors, uh, and having great organizations to compete with. I think iron sharpens iron. I think it forces people to ask deeper questions, to get off their ass, 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, uh, in my life. Like, we've had five quarters in a row of accelerating revenue growth while, uh, you know, doubling the business and doing it on a multibillion-dollar scale, and so that part of it has been incredibly energizing. At the other side of it, uh, you need to think really carefully of, you know, these organizations, and I think humanity is on the exponential. Just a few years ago, we were all shocked, uh, when AI could generate a paragraph that sort of made sense and might have had some typos or things that were weird, but it seemed sort of human. You know, just a few years later, people quibble. You get a hundred-page dossier, uh, and some footnote, uh, is author hallucinated, and I, I, I don't think there's any sign this stuff is slowing down. And if you really internalize of what are the capabilities of some of these organizations, I think it calls into question of if you assume intelligence will be functionally free in some sense, what is unique and how do we make sure we're adding durable and differentiated value compared to these organizations? And so look, it, it's, it's super exciting. I think it leads us to go really deep and ensure that we are providing a different sort of value. I think a lot of how we do that for organizations is by being the layer where money movement is actually occurring. You know, I think in some orgs maybe you can determine two months ago we wasted funds, and with Ramp we're building kind of the, the circulation and connective tissue so you can stop dollars from leaving before they ever go out. And so I think that it tends to feel much more like an operating system in connecting to the movement of funds, but I think they are some of the most exciting competitors for all types of businesses, uh, I think we've ever seen.

    2. SPSpeaker58:19

       I think you put forth a very optimistic case for entrepreneurs. This was awesome. Thanks for taking the time to do it.

    3. EGEric Glyman58:24

       Thanks a lot, David.

    4. SPSpeaker58:27

       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 four hundred 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. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 58:49