Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup ever | Geoff Charles

So when I joined, we were about, you know, 10-ish folks, about eight engineers and in three months we built a competitor to Amex. Six months after that, we built a competitor to, to Expensify, you know, both publicly traded companies. We hit 100 million in annual revenue. I think we were under, at that point, 50 total in the R&D department, less than 40 engineers and three PMs. And then we started expanding into accounts payable. It was three engineers, one designer, one PM, three months, and, and they hit it out of the park and, and, and that product is moving in billions of dollars a year. And I think, you know, the, the recipe for all this is...

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Geoff Charles, who is VP of product at Ramp. This episode is a unique glimpse into a startup and an approach to product that optimizes for moving quickly, thinking from first principles and empowering individual team members. If you're not familiar with Ramp, they are the fastest growing SaaS business in history, getting to over $100 million in annual run rate in two years, which is just wild. And as you'll hear in this episode, they did this with 50 people. In our conversation, Geoff shares how they operationalize a culture of velocity, how they do a lot with few people, how they organize planning, how they define strategy, how they interview product managers and keep a very high bar for talent, plus also avoid burnout in a very fast moving culture, and so much more. My advice is to seriously study how Ramp operates because there's a lot to learn from their success and their approach to product. Enjoy this episode with Geoff Charles after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Ezra, the leading full body cancer screening company. I actually used Ezra earlier this year, unrelated to this podcast, completely on my own dime because my wife did one and loved it, and I was super curious to see if there's anything that I should be paying attention to in my body as I get older. The way it works is you book an appointment, you come in, you put on some very cool silky pajamas that they give you that you get to keep afterwards. You go into an MRI machine for 30 to 45 minutes, and then about a week later you get this detailed report sharing what they found in your body. Luckily, I had what they called an unremarkable screening, which means they didn't find anything cancerous, but they did find some issues in my back, which I'm getting checked out at a physical next month, probably because I spend so much time sitting in front of a computer. Half of all men will have cancer at some point in their lives, as will one third of women. Half of all of them will detect it late. According to the American Cancer Society, early cancer detection has an 80% survival rate compared to less than 20% for late stage cancer. The Ezra team has helped 13% of their customers identify potential cancer early and 50% of them identify other clinically significant issues such as aneurysms, disk herniations, which maybe is what I have, or fatty liver disease. Ezra scans for cancer and 500 other conditions in 13 organs using a full body MRI powered by AI, and just launched the world's only 30 minute full body scan, which is also their most affordable. Their scans are non-invasive and radiation-free and Ezra is offering listeners $150 off their first scan with code Lenny150. Book your scan at ezra.com/lenny. That's ezra.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Coda. You've heard me talk about how Coda is the doc that brings it all together, and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this firsthand because Coda does that for me. I use Coda every day to wrangle my newsletter content calendar, my interview notes for podcasts and to coordinate my sponsors. More recently, I actually wrote a whole post on how Coda's product team operates, and within that post they shared a dozen templates that they use internally to run their product team, including managing the roadmap, their OKR process, getting internal feedback, and essentially their whole product development process is done within Coda. If your team's work is spread out across different documents and spreadsheets and a stack of workflow tools, that's why you need Coda. Coda puts data in one centralized location regardless of format, eliminating roadblocks that can slow your team down. Coda allows your team to operate on the same information and collaborate in one place. Take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Sign up today at coda.io/lenny and get $1,000 starter credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up, and get a startup credit of $1,000. Coda.io/lenny. Geoff, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.