No Priors Ep. 76 | With Ramp Co-Founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh

(music plays) Hi, listeners, and welcome to No Priors. Today, we're here with Erik and Karim, the co-founders of Ramp, one of the fastest growing fintech companies of all time. We'll talk about the path to self-driving money, how they make AI and systems thinking fundamental to every part of Ramp, and why using AI in financial services is not as risky as people might think. Welcome Erik and Karim.

Well, today, we're super excited to have Erik and Karim from Ramp joining us, so thank you so much for coming.

Thanks for having us. It's great to see you both.

Yeah. If you could tell us about the origins of Ramp, how y'all got started, what your focus on today, what roles you play at the company.

Ramp, in some ways, is sort of the sequel or taking our last business forward. We, we started about a decade ago at a business called Paribus, uh, back in 2015. I, I would probably reframe it now as a, as an AI agent company. Essentially, what it did is, let's say, you bought something from Amazon, Best Buy, Macy's, whatever. Every store would guarantee you that the next week a TV went on sale, you could get the difference back if you asked. So we built ... It was an email app. We, um, scanned or ... you alluded to this earlier, but I just wanted to confirm that when you say, "The better they got, the more wasteful they would get."

Yeah.

We launched this. Within a year, we had almost a million members and, uh, we had a life-changing offer from Capital One to buy the company. So we were thinking a lot about, first, how do you turn data into savings? Um, uh, we didn't know the first thing about credit cards. We learned it and we saw there was a great large industry, very profitable, but deeply misaligned with customers and people were obsessing over the question of, "How do you get people to spend more money or more points?" And we got very interested in the question of, you know, if you actually listen to people, they don't want points or cashback. They actually want more in their bank account. The best way to do it is not get people to spend but get people to not ... Put differently, like, not spending $100 in the first place is a hundred times better than getting a dollar or 1% back on it. And so we got obsessive. Wow, what if you put Paribus in a card? What if you had, you know, a card and software that was designed to get people to spend less in the first place that seems more aligned with customers, a different way to go to market, and, uh, fundamentally a better product? Um, and so back in March of 2019, we, uh, incorporated the company. Uh, today, we're just shy of five and a half years old. And, um, I, I, I would say a lot of what we're working towards today is, um, you know, this question of can you have, you know, self-driving money in an organization? Um, can you build, um, really the primitives? You know, can ish from one place, issue cards, make payments of all kinds, manage approvals, even automate accounting? Um, but really what we're doing is when you have the right primitives, abstracting away all the tedium of you don't need to add receipts to a transaction. You tap a card, we pull the receipt from your email, and you're done.