George Bonaci, VP of Growth @Ramp: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever |E1264

(upbeat music plays) I think the way that you find alpha is either by doing things that no one else knows about. I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work. I think a good leader needs to know how to do everyone on their team's job, but poorly. And I think the poorly part's important. I would always skew more junior. I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business, is far more important.

Ready to go? (upbeat music plays) George, I'm so excited for this, dude. Ramp is one of my favorite companies to feature. I've heard so many great things about you. So thank you so much for joining me today.

No, thank you so much for having me.

Now, listen, as we just said, I know a show is gonna be great when I actually have to do very little work because you give me such great suggestions. You said to me before, "Growth is just science, and most marketers are bad at science." I was always terrible at science, so, you know, it doesn't bode well for me. What did you mean by that statement?

The goal of growth is to figure out how to grow the business, and usually, like early on, that's very top-of-funnel focus. How do you figure out how to get more leads? How do you figure out a channel that works and is repeatable and has, uh, predictable outputs given some inputs? And the honest answer is, like no one really knows. Every business is different. So even if you understand from past experience something that's worked, usually just taking, like that one playbook or that one tactic and copy and pasting it to a new company, like generally doesn't work. And I think that's, uh, the tendency of, of a lot of marketers. So, when I say that like growth is mostly just science, I mean that you kind of have to come in with a blank slate, form a hypothesis, and then run a bunch of experiments. And you'll be surprised about what works, you'll be surprised at what doesn't work, um, but ultimately if you, if you run enough of those experiments, you'll, you'll find something. Uh, and I think that's usually lost on a lot of marketers 'cause they don't think in terms of experiments. They think in terms of like, "What do I know?" And "How can I apply it here?"

Is that because the profile of person that they are that they don't think in that way?

Partially. It's probably partly the profile, but it's also partly just like how you think. Like, I think the type of person that would go and become a chemist like me or an engineer is probably very different than someone that's like, "Hey, I want to become a writer," or "I want to get into comms or PR." Like, very valuable skills, but very, very different from the way in thinking or way of thinking that would make someone successful, like scoping an experiment and thinking about like what my hypothesis is and how I'm gonna measure results. It's just like a different part of your brain. Like, I would be a terrible writer, for example.